Magick of Thought

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Yesterday was my final day of hard consulting — sorry for skipping the post, by the way. This coming week is tourism in Australia: An open-range zoo, an aquarium, some museums, and so on. Then two more consulting days to cross the t’s and dot the i’s, and back home on August 30.

A few observations after this month of consulting:

I still practiced a ton of manifesting, and did some healing sessions and other useful effects I already knew, but did very little to develop new techniques. When you’re short on time, the useful techniques get practiced, and the not-yet-useful ones don’t.

And yet, I did develop the enlightenment technique with that spirit. So, research wasn’t at a standstill, just much slower, done mostly on train rides, rather than in focused hour-long sessions. I could assist with research, but not drive my own.

Same for writing: I wrote a post almost every day, but made roughly zero progress on my book.

I did not find a magick community here. Not that I looked that hard. I did run into one chaos magician and one freemason, so there is some stuff in Melbourne if you want to look for it. But nothing that got me terribly excited.

But I did make a lot of awesome friends in Melbourne. Circus performers, artists, and otherwise really interesting people. Didn’t tell most of them about magick, though. I don’t want to present it as a religion, but I don’t have the right demonstrations yet to present it as a science. Maybe next year.

Yesterday,  after the final bit of consulting, I was pretty exhausted. But today, after napping a few extra hours, I feel recharged, and ready to develop some new magick. I think this month made a nice change of pace, a good way to take a vacation from magick without feeling guilty for wasting the time.

And I have a career recommendation for aspiring mages: Freelance work. When you have a gig, you can take a break from your magick work, and when you don’t have a gig, you can do full-time magick. It works quite well.

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

How do you deal with magick that might harm others? I asked Ona this question recently, and she turned around and asked it back to me.

There are a lot of things I could talk about. I could discuss intentionally harmful (curses) vs incidentally harmful (I got the job, someone else didn’t) vs accidentally harmful (I got the job, but in the end, the job didn’t suit me). I could show you how I phrase requests to avoid accidents (see this post for some tips). I could even discuss ethics of curses, and why I treat curses like physical violence — if I’d punch someone, I’ll curse them, but if it’s too petty for blows, it’s too petty for curses.

I discuss those topics in this comment, posted today (June 5 2012).

But there’s something on my mind lately: Magick for hire. Someone hires you to do magick to help them get a job, and that incidentally harms the other job-seekers. And since I do some magick for hire, it’s been on my mind.

Note: This post is exploring my own personal ethics. I’m not trying to tell other pro-mages how to live, just trying to decide what I’d like to do for myself. I’m going to explore feelings and turn up contradictions in my own thinking, which is the first step to resolving them. I don’t have an answer in mind yet.

Magick Should Be Earned

I have a feeling that magick should be earned. That it’s OK for a mage to do whatever magick they want (within reason — don’t be malicious, but incidental harm, on the same level as writing a great resume or wearing good clothes, is fine). That if your luck translates into someone else’s unluck, well, that’s their fault for not learning magick, just like it’s their fault for not hiring a professional resume editor. But I feel uneasy doing magick for a stranger for money.

Part of it is that I know the spirits who made the ethereal software I use. I train with them. And they made that software to teach people to do magick. That’s the deal: You learn enough to do X, and you can do X. That’s part of the incentive to learn. And it feels disrespectful to then sell those skills to people who won’t ever learn any magick.

I wonder what happens if there’s too much manifesting. Like, maybe a few thousand people doing manifesting is OK, but a few million people makes it all less effective, or messes something up in some way. I don’t know the algorithms behind the software, but I bet I could ask my trainers and find out if there’s a thing as “too much manifesting.”

Those two feel like the meat of it. I say “feel like” because this is the first time I’ve expressed any of this consciously, and it’s hard to tell if there are other aspects that make me uncomfortable, too. But let’s address them, then see if there’s other resistance.

Talking with My Trainers

I called the spirits that teach me — the ones that made the ethereal software. And I asked them about those concerns. The salient points:

• We trust you to only do non-harmful things. Doing any basic manifesting, or really any energy healing, would be non-harmful.
• If you’re really worried, key the manifesting to just guide the person to make good decisions. I can’t see any harm in that.
• Don’t worry about the idea that the person receiving energy healing should be learning magick. You’ll be learning magick. And if we can help you meet your human needs for money and food and whatnot, we’re glad to do it.

Seems I was worried over nothing. And I wonder how common this is: That you’re unconsciously uncomfortable about something, but once you make the concern conscious and do some digging, it turns out to be nothing to worry about. If you have experiences like this, please share.