I Decided to Learn About Magic, Real Magic
Here are some interesting things that I’ve gotten so far…
Is Magic real? I’m not talking about well-crafted card tricks that require practiced slide of hand. The type of magic that the magicians themselves call “tricks” or “illusions,” I’m talking about real magic. The manipulation of hidden power to alter outcomes, create staggering coincidences and give one person power over another, is it real?
As a student of… well… anything and everything that interests me, I’ll tell you this. When you start to look into it, it’s quite compelling. The more I study magic, simply from the point of curiosity the more I feel this magnetic draw to try it. So…is it real? Let’s dip into that first and then I’ll share some surprising things that I’ve learned, so far, about practicing real magic.
Placebo Effects and the Law of Attraction
Dean Radin is a parapsychologist who has applied the scientific method to magical and spiritual practices. He’s written several books on these topics as well as other metaphysical subjects including a book titled Real Magic and if you ask this guy, yes, magic is quite real and can be tested, measured and documented just like any other type of science. He’s also quite vocal about how the scientific community refuses to look at these studies because of their own inherent and systematic bias but human fallibility and inherent bias is a topic for another day. Dean makes the claim that all methods are sound and that he’s strictly followed them. He knows his methods have to be flawless if he wants to be taken seriously and yet denial letter after denial letter shows up.
What are we supposed to make of the placebo effect, for example? This is one strange phenomenon that has been documented at length for more than two centuries with documented cases showing up in American history as early as the late 1700’s. Snake oil salesmen would show up with a stick, claiming that it had magical healing properties and demonstrating what appeared to be real healing only later to have it revealed that they were just using a regular stick. The people got better simply because they believed that they would.
The placebo effect is so formally recognized by modern science that pharmaceutical companies have an adversarial relationship with it. They hate the placebo effect because it outperforms many of their drugs. When they run trials on their new mood stabilizers, for example, they have to have the drug outperform the placebos before they can roll them out or it’s back to the drawing board. The truth is that some people just feel much better when they’ve taken a sugar pill than the actual drug and it’s because they believe it’s going to make them feel better. This mysterious and unexplained phenomenon is more than real and formal scientists admit it even though they can’t explain it.
What about the law of attraction? The LOA is so popular that droves and droves of people believe that if they think and believe hard enough, they will attract enormous wealth. Napoleon Hill wrote his book, Think and grow rich which was first published in 1937 and he’s not the only one that asserts that your mental focus will simply manifest whatever it is that you’re focused on. People swear by this method and not just poor schmucks who get bogged down in wishful thinking or maladaptive daydreaming. Rich and successful people like Jack Canfield who helped write the Chicken Soup for the Soul series swears by the LOA. So what about it? Is this magic? Why do so many people claim these methods produce results?
If you ask me, there’s enough compelling evidence that suggests that real magic might actually work so here are some interesting tidbits that I’ve learned so far
The power is in you — This might be the most surprising thing that people don’t realize about real magic. The ability to manipulate reality isn’t found in certain items or objects so much as they are found within ourselves and is often dependent on our ability to create focus, strong emotion and hold it.
Harry Potter is just one example that depicts magic as coming from magical items such as books or wands when most of the time, these are just tools and techniques to improve the individual’s focus. Magical items mostly just seem to be items and little more but they almost create a placebo type of effect in which the individual increases the strength of their focus, emotion and belief because of the items, the methods or whatever the case might be. While there are apparently lots of different schools of thought, methods, techniques and approaches to do magic it’s all just intended to help the practitioner create focus. From what I’ve learned, practitioners needs to learn to create control over their mental processes. When they’re able to do that, they’re able to focus their thoughts, their emotions and all that they are on one thing and that’s when the magic is supposed to happen.
Based on what I can tell, the actual practice doesn’t matter whether it’s witchcraft, occult methods, chaos magic or ritual magic, the intention is the same. To give the practitioner focus and the power spurts from that focus. This idea of focus is consistent with the LOA, as a side note. LOA practitioners create focus, they will use different methods like vision boards or scripting but honestly, it’s kind of just another method of practicing magic.
This power isn’t dark or evil unless you use it that way — See, power is generally neutral. It’s amoral, which means that it’s neither moral nor immoral. Think of fire, for example. Fire isn’t good or evil. It just is. It doesn’t have an agenda. It’s just energy and power that can either be used to do good things or destructive things. A lot of things are like that but human beings have a tendency to demonize things. Teenagers might go out by some eggs and toilet paper and use them to vandalize a house but that doesn’t mean that eggs and toilet paper are bad and evil, it just means that some kids used them for something other than their intended purpose.
Magic is kind of this way, it would seem. It’s neither good nor bad by itself. It’s just energy or power. It’s the practitioner that chooses what it’s used for to make this determination. As best as I can tell the dark arts or black magic is bad or evil because it’s used to harm or control others. In my own spiritual practices, I’ve realized that evil always comes in the form of harming or controlling others. Destroying the free will of another for our own purposes is always going to have some negative consequences. Controlling others and harming their free will is the path of evil.
I also believe that magical practices have been demonized and painted in a bad light because they have a history of empowering individuals and there have been many groups over the centuries who are directly interested in people not being empowered and so fear was used to paint these practices in a negative light. People were taught to be afraid and fear is a very powerful tool. I’ve been quite interested in some of these practices with magic as long as they claim to make me stronger and more empowered and I run like hell if anything talks about using anything as a means to influence, manipulate, harm or control others. That’s the path of evil.
Magic requires practice — Let’s say that you decide today that you’re going to try and cast some kind of spell which as I’ve already talked about is a method of harnessing power already resting within you and you’ve never done it before. There’s no way it’s going to work because you’ve never done it before. Okay, maybe it works, maybe you’re a natural, it probably does exist but I’m talking about most people here.
I’ve realized that these methods are just like anything else. They require practice. Meditation is this way. You have to practice it to be able to do it with any kind of effectiveness. You have to do it a lot before you become good at it. You might try an easy method for magic and it’s probably not going to work because it requires practice. Again, they say this about the LOA, you have to be a practitioner, you have to actively participate in it. You can’t just sit down once and think about what you want and have it show up, it doesn’t work that way.
You have to really know what you want - I’ve realized that this is much harder than you might think. You have to really know what you want. There have been many times when I thought I knew what I wanted and it just kind of crumbled, I couldn’t hold it in my mind and with my heart. I realized that maybe a part of me wanted it but not the whole of me wanted it and so it crumbled. More times than not, it crumbled because I wanted those things because I was told that’s what I should want.
Currently, as I write this, the focus of my meditation practice has been to go deep into my consciousness and ask my true self what I really want. I’m definitely getting closer, I’m hot on the trail but it’s hard for me to sit down and focus on what I want because I’m still not sure I know what I want and I’m convinced that I’m not going to get any real results until I’m 100% certain that I know what I want. For now, I’m just settling on things like being happy, connected and fulfilled. I also want to be deeply in love again. For now, I’m keeping it simple.
You know you often feel conflicted, confused, uncertain and the like? Most people don’t even know who they truly are let alone what they truly want. If you’re conflicted, confused or even lacking a consistent or solid sense of self then I’m pretty sure you’re going to struggle to get anything to stick. This is certainly true for the magical law of attraction. Practicing is also going to mean learning to be able to put all that you are into something.
I’m still learning — I’m not pro, I’m just learning but as I’ve been learning and had these realizations I’m quite certain that other teachers don’t mention these things. Maybe to them, it’s just obvious? Or maybe I’m wrong altogether. All in all, you have to admit, it’s pretty cool and interesting even if it’s all potentially bullshit.
