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On
the Nature of Magic Pt. II
by Youngermoon
Foolshare
This is the second
in a three part series that will be posted
over the next few
months.
Looking Inwards for Acting Outwards
So, one of the first
tasks of the magician is to find their controllers and subvert them, but
what exactly does that mean? First I will present two concepts, Low
Magic and High Magic, as a means of expressing a starting point and
desired endpoint (although it is not really an end). These two
approaches to magic are different, the first of which views the realm
external to the magician as the arena in which magic operates, and the
second which views the internal realm as the magical arena, and
consequently, the external realm as the arena in which the magician
operates. Ethics are an important issue here, not from the point of view
of them being a code of conduct, but by being the very foundation upon
which the magical act succeeds or fails. A tension exists between
moral-being and ethical-being, the resolution of which is the goal of
high magic. Once the magician becomes more experienced with the methods
of high magic, then the magician will become more effective in four
dimensional space-time.
Low Magic typically targets things that are external to the
magician, such as objects or people. From this point of view, the
magician's actions are selfish in nature, seeking to fulfill needs
without personal transformation, and treating the external things as
objects. That is, this form of magic is manipulative in nature, although
it can be performed with either the best or worst of intentions. It's
goals originate within the ego, serve the purposes of the ego, and tend
to amplify the ego rather than shape or transform it. For this reason, I
tend to refer to this as Egotistical Magic. The ego has been shaped,
through its earliest years of development especially, by positive and
negative events, pain and pleasure, awards and punishment, and attention
(positive and negative) from those closest to the individual. The young
ego is subject to rules, and is rewarded and punished accordingly, and
shapes the individual's sense of right and wrong. Pain, inflicted upon
the individual by others, can skew this sense of right and wrong, such
that the pain becomes the focus of the individual's moral development
and forms a lens through which the individual makes moral sense of the
world. Through this lens, the distinction between moral uprightness and
vengefulness is obscured or lost. Morality, defined here as taking
guidance from received rules in dialog with and distorted by personal
experience, provides a poor compass for magical practice.
Through Magic, a person actively tries to affect change in their
lives, by acting indirectly on those things that they cannot directly
control. Through Magic, a person shapes the world in which they
subsequently live in. A magical practitioner should therefore be
cognizant of what the world she or he wants to live in is like, and work
towards it. The danger of using morality, as defined above, as a guide
in magical practice is that there is the risk of the practitioner acting
reactively out of past painful experience. This is undesirable because
in doing so, the practitioner is surrendering control of their world
vision to someone else - that is, he or she is allowing someone who
inflicted pain on them in the past to partially define what that
desirable world is to be, even if this means reproducing and
perpetuating the conflict that caused the pain in the first place. The
practitioner must coddle, nurture and preserve their pain in order to
follow this path, and should the pain fade with time (as it invariably
will), the world that the practitioner created for his- or herself can
become devoid of meaning. In the excesses of Moral-being, an individual
can find these things that control their motivation, the Controllers I
have alluded to before.
The workings of karma should be apparent here. That is, the
qualities that motivate a person's actions then become the qualities of
the world they create for themselves. A person that finds motivation in
personal negativity often finds his/herself immersed in a world of that
same negativity, because it is the world they created for themselves.
Hence the three-fold return. I have been using "pain" as a theme to
illustrate the dangers of practicing Low Magic under the guidance of
Moral-being (i.e., what I would more specifically term Egotistical
Magic), but other motivators would apply as well, such as "pleasure."
That is, a person acting under moral-being alone risks having their
moral world view become nothing more than their emotional needs being
projected into a sense of "right" and "wrong." Although this can lead to
an individual being content in their life, this perspective does little
to inform the individual when his or her actions are actually
counterproductive to the world that individual is trying to create.
I therefore offer the idea of "Ethical-being" as the counterbalance
(but note that I am not saying as a substitute) to the negative
consequences of Moral-being. Ethical-being requires a conscious
adjustment of the ego (not a nullification) such that the excesses of
Moral-being do not knock one off of their path (where I am using "path"
to mean the means of attaining the ideal world, and using it
synonymously with "magical path"). Given that personal pain is one
distortional aspect of Moral-being, it follows that one aspect of
Ethical-being requires an individual to undertake personal healing. This
certainly comes under the heading of "ethics," because it requires the
individual to assume responsibility for their emotional and physical
well-being, as well as for their actions. Indeed, inasmuch as emotions
provide motivation for action, healing is thus directly tied to acting
responsibly. In more general terms, people practice "Ethical-being" when
they assume responsibility for their Pavlovian-conditioned selves, as
opposed to deriving rationale for their actions from within that
Pavlovian self.
The Path then, as I am using it, is simply the direction that
someone is heading into the future. A person may be conscious of the
path they are on or not. A person can change the trajectory of their
path through motivated choice. That is, by committing to the actions
required by their choice and following through. The path then, places
certain requirements on the person that follows it, and these
requirements form the basis for ethics and Ethical-being. Ethics thus
inform and modify Morals, and since Morals are the governing principles
of the Pavlovian-ego, the conditioning of the ego can change. Of course,
a pertinent question arises, of how a person is to know what that ideal
world they want to create is like, and what the requirements of the path
are? Where does the impulse for this quest arise if not in the Pavlovian-self?
A tension thus exists between the internal and external, with external
actors capable of both aiding a person on the path or by distorting the
ego's perception. Following a path is ultimately about being true to
oneself, to make that ideal world. The inherent tensions means that
progress on the path requires constant monitoring. Thus, Ethical-being
is not a substitute for Moral-being, but the interplay of the two
throughout an individual's life cause the path to be revealed to him or
her. A person can simply go with this flow, or one can attempt to be
proactive in creating and traveling the path. The latter case I shall
term Magical-being.
Through the practice of Magical-being, the magical practitioner
makes certain future outcomes happen. By committed action, the magician
sets events into motion. These events, then have outcomes. Some of these
events and consequences will carry through to an inevitable conclusion,
some outcomes are less certain due to their dependence on the actions
and reactions of others. Nevertheless, when we decide and commit, we
weave the fabric of space-time.
When we create these inevitabilities through committed action, we
create new places in 4-dimensional space. That is, given that time is
the fourth dimension, then what we know as "time" is simply an
elaboration on what we know as space (3 dimensional). Midnight, January
1st, 1955 in Baltimore is a different location in 4D space than
midnight, January 1st 2005 in Baltimore. The past is a physical location
in 4D space, as is the present and the future. Now this might seem to
imply the idea of fate, that our future already exists as a place in 4D
space-time, but I would assert that future places only exist as
probabilities. As the confluence of people's actions create loci of
certainty, 4D places become physically real. A traveler on a magical
path can create these certainties for themselves through their committed
actions, as described above. When a magical practitioner creates these
future places, there is a physical continuity between the now and that
future place. In addition, and more significantly, the physical body of
the practitioner becomes extended through this physical 4D space.
This extension of the body through extra-dimensional space is what
I term the Spirit Body. Our physical bodies become extended through
four-dimensional space, then the existence of our bodies through these
spaces implies that we are able to perceive these places. The perception
can either be through the standard five senses (which perceive the
three-dimensional aspects of space) or through perception that would be
specific to the fourth dimension. Sensing a future place through the
five senses would be akin to the classic idea of "seeing the future."
Sensing through the fourth dimension can take several forms, including
telepathy, empathy, or intuition to name a few.
Reading Edwin Abbott's Flatland is an easily accessible means of
understanding the fourth dimension in relation to the third, by an
analogy of the understanding the third dimension relative to the second.
Flatland is a 2D universe. Its inhabitants perceive everything from
within the plane in which they exist. If an inhabitant of this universe
were to be circular in shape, then their "skin" would be the perimeter
of the circle, and the innards of their body would be represented by the
area of the circle. Inhabitants of Flatland would only be able to see
each others perimeters (skin) but not their area (innards). A being in
the third dimension, however, would have direct access to the insides of
these 2D beings (in the book, a 3D being actually pokes a 2D being in
the stomach to demonstrate his3d-ness). So, by analogy, the fourth
dimension can be visualized as making things that are physically closed,
open. A fourth dimensional being could see directly into our innards,
for example (this has some important implications for shamanic
practice). That is, through the fourth dimension, things about our
individual selves that we normally consider to be disconnected from
others, due to being internal to our bodies, are actually open and
potentially connected via the fourth dimension. This would include our
minds.
An interesting discussion unfolded on this topic on an alternative
pagan online group, and is archived here. It includes an example how
mind is inherently tied to time (and hence the fourth dimension).
Further discussion of the implications of the fourth dimension on our
perceptions and experience will be discussed in the next essay in this
series (On speculated possibilities at the threshold of my experience).
So it might be more appropriate to say that the purpose of High
Magick is the development of the Spirit Body. So, up to this point I
would say that the Magician's progress would follow these steps:
1. Find one's controllers and subvert them. This involves raising one's
level of consciousness through self-knowledge, and learning what
motivates oneself at a basic, emotionally reactive level.
2. Healing. Addressing the scars that society has left on your psyche.
This is the critical first step in Karma training, as it were. Releasing
the psyche from the values internalized from being kicked around by
society and learning the true values of one's innermost self.
3. Initiating growth of the Spirit Body. Directing one's actions in
accord with the core values (of the Higher Self) and not the reactive
values (of the Lower Self). An on-going learning process that occurs
through dialog between the higher and lower selves. In Moral-being, the
Spirit Body slumbers and future places are simply the result of the
amplification of the reactive Lower Self. With Ethical-being, the Spirit
Body awakens. With Magical-being (the dialog between Ethical- and
Moral-being), the Spirit Body gains consciousness, and future places are
created through the Will.
4. Developing the senses of the Spirit Body. This will be covered more
in the next essay, and is somewhat speculative, owing to my level of
experience. This stage involves extending an individual's consciousness
into extra-dimensional space by developing the senses of the Spirit
Body.
5. Spiritual-Being. With further development of and experience with the
Spirit Body, the practitioner becomes more of a citizen of
extra-dimensional space and consciously interactive with other beings
encountered there. Totally speculative on my part, at this point in
time.
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