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I saw Frozen recently. A Disney princess with ice magic creates castles and monsters and dangerous bolts of ice.
Idle thought: Look at how much that magic diverges from ordinary physics. It’s so powerful.
Except it isn’t powerful. Because anything powerful solves problems that matter.
Building castles from ice? We’re pretty good at building castles and apartments and skyscrapers. Firing dangerous projectiles? We’re pretty good at that, too. And creating monsters? Not actually useful.
You know what is useful? Energy healing a knee in chronic pain, to help people run and exercise and have a better quality of life. Or predicting future events, so you can invest in smart ways. Neither is hollywood-flashy. But both solve problems that are actually worth solving. That’s what power is.
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To be fair, her construction techniques are far superior to ours in terms of cost, and time taken, and I am pretty sure they are far more ecologically friendly.
I’d love to see a film where magick was treated more realistically, and just casually, as part of the background of how things are. Even showing people learning, but in the real way. Now, I know that’s not very visual and therefore cinematic, but I think there could be ways to do it.
Not a direct comparison, but the TK in ‘Looper’ is treated as a boring everyday background thing, even though it leads to a plot point later – magick as something most people have learned to an extent would make for an interesting baseline world for a movie.
Oh, and I think we’re pretty good as a society at creating monsters without Hollywood magic too, historically speaking…
Is there any reason why magick couldn’t do these kinds of things? I don’t mean whether or not it’s practical, but what exactly those limitations there are, why those limitations exist, and if they could be overcome by any means?
After all, in science one does not simply stand content at nature’s pre-existing materials. One creates new materials by understanding the laws of physics, and this has allowed us to create alloys with properties not found in nature, and to create meta-materials. So what are the “rules” which govern magick (like the laws of Physics which govern our everyday lives), and by understanding them how can we do with magick what has otherwise been disregarded as impossible and impractical, so to make these things practical and useful in everyday life?
Excellent questions. That’s the sort of thing I hope we explore someday.
At present, it seems that magick is good at increasing / decreasing the rate of cellular processes, influencing decisions, and perhaps making tiny adjustments to physical objects (weather, manifesting to influence the lottery number). So I focus on those areas.
What could a mature science of magick do? No idea. But I’d love to find out.
Than if we don’t yet know how to use magick to do these things, what could we do to push these boundaries further? What experiments magickal or otherwise would be done to determine the “laws of magick” ? And what sort of magickal acts could be done to test current assumptions of magick?
Or rather, could you create a list of current magickal assumptions (yours and of others), and then test them to see which ones are correct or incorrect? (By asking your readers to test them and give you feedback, for example.) Because science allows peers to verify their findings, in order to help find more accurate results. If an expanded set of “laws of physics” (like a unified theory of everything, like what Einstein was working on before he died) were published today, it would have to peer verified.
So how can modern mages go about finding what these “laws of magick” are? What can we do to test them? And how can we get modern magick at its current state, to one of a more mature science of magick (as you put it) ?
Those are some excellent questions. They are all things I blog about. It sounds like you’ll really enjoy reading some of the back catalog of my blog.
The border or possibility today seems to be the limit of “explainability”, perhaps? All of the things you list (Mike) can be attributed to things other than human intervention, as far as other observers are concerned. Predicting future events is just “luck” etc. It’s as if we are fighting the ‘consensus inertia’. If and when we manage to push over that, it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
Building castles spontaneously might well be difficult, but generating projectiles actually seems like something that could be possible in theory?
There is also the intriguing possibility that if you do manifest a large object, it gets rationalised as always having been there, or is experienced by others as always having been there. When you manifest an object, are you changing the universe such that “this object appears now out of thin air”, or are you changing the universe such that “this object will have come to be here now”. Reporters of ‘reality shifts’ often find others ‘remembered it always having been the new way’, for instance. In other words, if large effects were possible they are perhaps constrained by a ‘consensus consistency rule’, or are apparently retrocausal, or apparently don’t happen at all. Anyway, that’s all conjecture.
Quick question: On the ‘predicting future events’ thing, do you have an idea of how that works, Direct-Magick-wise? What are you tapping into?
On consensus: This seems to be based on the notion that beliefs affect reality. That’s largely discredited, and is intentionally not a part of Direct Magick. In my view, belief is just another way to direct your ethereal muscles. Since the non-mages around you don’t have active ethereal muscles, their beliefs won’t affect your magick.
Rationalizing / shifting memories is an interesting idea, though. Would people mis-remember what happened to align it with their expectations of how the world works? That seems quite plausible, actually.
Predicting future events uses the same ethereal software as manifesting and psychic intuitions. As for how that works, I have some notions, but no solid answers. See these articles: https://magickofthought.com/tag/manifesting/
With some notable exceptions… ;-)
http://www.silverspiral.org/index.php/home/item/151-riddikulus-magick-in-harry-potter
Also interesting: this situable tvtropes list of all the movies/comics/books/etc. where magick are investigated through science and experimentation…
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SufficientlyAnalyzedMagic