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A reader having a crisis of faith writes:
How come a renowned Hermetic adept [Franz Bardon] couldn’t manage a willful escape from the prison to save his holy physical self? What went wrong…
And what about the death of Donald Michael Kraig, who wrote a classic on Modern Magick, how could he tolerated those pancreatic cancer cells inhabiting his own body which ultimately led to his death? Why not just blast them off with beaming photons of divine light?
They were just two cases in the history of the occult not to mention the not-so-popular ones. Please, please, please I really need some down-to-earth explanation(s) on this matter. Thank you very much!
There’s a difference between saying magick isn’t real vs magick doesn’t work the way you think it does.
Is biofield healing real? Yes — just look at my case studies, or search for journal articles on it.
Is manifesting real? Yes — See my work on psychic intuitions or Ananael’s case studies with lottery results.
Magick is real. But, dear reader who posed those questions, magick doesn’t work the way you think it does.
Magick creates luck, not impossibilities. It might help you stay out of jail, but once you’re locked up, it won’t teleport you to freedom.
And I now know a great deal about healing techniques for cancer. It’s deeply complex. Could we someday develop healing techniques that, combined with Western medicine, produce good results? I think we can. But we’ll have to figure out those techniques — my unconscious mind doesn’t know them already, and I doubt anyone else’s does either. Until then, when you visualize divine light, your unconscious will say, “I see that you want me to heal this, but I don’t know how to do that. Sorry.”
So, dear reader, you’re actually doing well. You’re noticing events that refute your understanding of the world, which is harder than we realize.
The next step is to give that refutation the correct scope: Magick is real. But it doesn’t work the way you thought. It doesn’t give form to everything we visualize.
And after that, you can start exploring how magick actually operates, which will let you build new techniques that just might, one day, let us do the things you dream of.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Belief, Learning Magick
About Franz Bardon: I was listening to a podcast about him, and supposedly he believed that he had to accept the karma of the incarnation that he had (some stories suggest he was a “walk-in”, but that’s a whole other can of worms). This was why he continued to smoke even after developing considerable skills in Magick, although he supposedly quit for an entire year just to demonstrate that he could do it if he really wanted to. I’d imagine his unwillingness to escape from prison was a similar situation; even if he could have managed to use Magick to escape, he felt that he needed to ‘pay his dues’, as it were.
You also make a good point about the psychological element of Magick; the unconscious is a powerful tool, but it can’t make use of information or abilities that it doesn’t have. This is why I feel like the purely psychological model of Magick would fall out of favor if definite, provable evidence of obtaining otherwise unavailable outside information came up. With things like spirits, it’s possible that the information was imparted in some other prior way (ideas of the collective unconscious, etc.), but not so with new events or techniques.