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What is Magic
Feb. 6th, 2021 10:14 pmIn the weekly Magic Monday posts on John Michael Greer's dreamwidth people often use the acronym TSW: This Shit Works! to describe the moment in which a new practitioner of magic suddenly experiences an event so obviously supernatural that they drop their wand in fright, 'Good heavens, I'm not just larping, this shit works!'
Me, I'm stilllarping a beginner. I can't say that I really understand what magic is, or even if it is. Same goes for God. But I'm open to learning.
So here's a post that I hope to come back to in a year or two. I'll cringe at my ignorance and say, 'Good gracious, what a fool I was, this is all wrong.'
So here I am: Dion Fortune said: I define magic as the art of causing changes to take place in consciousness in accordance with will. And Lionel Snell re-arranged all my categories by pointing out that this means advertising is a form of magic. If your a/b testing shows that a certain colour on your website drives up sales by 40% then you've performed magic. It's not exactly supernatural, but it's a good hard example of changing consciousness in accordance with will - in this case it's other people's consciousness and your will, and the ethics of that are up for debate.
I'm still fuzzy about how performing magic rituals in your bedroom actually makes real world changes out there - but it's easy to see how it can make real world changes in here, which is to say, I can understand magic as a sort of psychology and magical practise as a sort of combination self-therapy and spirituality. How 'real' it is, I don't know. I don't think I'd do very well in a philosophy debate where I had to begin with a definition of real.
I do know that years of reading sound scientifically based self-help books have not really assisted me in becoming a better person, and I'm hoping that with an older, time-tested practise I might do better. And hey, if I don't, at least magic has a superior aesthetic and has introduced me to some nice incense.
Me, I'm still
So here's a post that I hope to come back to in a year or two. I'll cringe at my ignorance and say, 'Good gracious, what a fool I was, this is all wrong.'
So here I am: Dion Fortune said: I define magic as the art of causing changes to take place in consciousness in accordance with will. And Lionel Snell re-arranged all my categories by pointing out that this means advertising is a form of magic. If your a/b testing shows that a certain colour on your website drives up sales by 40% then you've performed magic. It's not exactly supernatural, but it's a good hard example of changing consciousness in accordance with will - in this case it's other people's consciousness and your will, and the ethics of that are up for debate.
I'm still fuzzy about how performing magic rituals in your bedroom actually makes real world changes out there - but it's easy to see how it can make real world changes in here, which is to say, I can understand magic as a sort of psychology and magical practise as a sort of combination self-therapy and spirituality. How 'real' it is, I don't know. I don't think I'd do very well in a philosophy debate where I had to begin with a definition of real.
I do know that years of reading sound scientifically based self-help books have not really assisted me in becoming a better person, and I'm hoping that with an older, time-tested practise I might do better. And hey, if I don't, at least magic has a superior aesthetic and has introduced me to some nice incense.
