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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.
In 1991, I started noticing energy in myself and other people, in the trees by my house and the ocean my family would sometimes visit. A friend had been talking about magick, and looking back, I can’t say whether I was actually feeling energy or just overthinking those conversations, but at the time, it was real, and fascinating, and mysterious. I explored energy every day. I was 11.
By my teens, I wanted to know how magick worked, and more than that, why it worked:
- Why do different systems of magick, each with different techniques based on different ideas of how magick works, produce such similar results?
- When you manifest a job or a lover or some other bit of luck, and something makes events go your way, how does it know which events to influence?
- How does energy affect living cells? Research suggests it can reduce pain — if that’s correct, how does it work, and how can we use the same underlying mechanism to develop healing techniques for people with a variety of health problems?
Living in an atheist household in the early days of AOL, I wasn’t able to research Hermetics, Chaos Magick, or other established styles. If I’d had any sense, I would have found an occult shop in a nearby city. Instead, I explored on my own.
My first ideas were the same ridiculous what-ifs that everyone dreams up when they first encounter magick. But I didn’t have any rituals, because I didn’t have any books, so I had to use those what-ifs to develop healing, shielding, and everything else. The ideas that lead to useful techniques, I kept. The one that didn’t, I discarded. Two decades later, this real-world testing has forced me to develop a useful system of magick.
I call that system direct magick. It’s about understanding how everything works under the hood, so you can skip the rituals and visualizations, and work directly on the engine. It’s effective, and fast, and precise, but more importantly (for me, at least), I love understanding why my magick works.
This book is a self-initiation into direct magick. It’s written for experienced mages who want to explore how and why magick works, or who would explore if they had a rough path laid out. This book will help you find that path.
This book is also for anyone who wants to learn magick without rituals. It has everything you need to get started, even if you’ve never practiced magick before.
And that friend, who started my interest in magick? He was probably over-excited about fantasy novels he read — we simply got lucky that his books drew from actual occultism, or at least actual occult concepts that had seeped into popular culture. By our teens, he’d moved on to other hobbies, and we lost touch after high school. But I like to think that, wherever he is, he sometimes notices energy, and wonders how it works.
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