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Cashing Your Reality Check

  
 
EvskiG
17:28 / 08.10.03
Seems to me that magic easily lends itself to self-delusion:

"I really lit up the astral plane with that invoking ritual."

"I really COULD do a quick ritual to get a cab on this rainy day, but that's an inappropriate use of magick, so I'll walk home."

"I made that sigil to get laid, and the next day I met a really cool woman at a bar. She left with her friends. I didn't get her number, and I haven't seen her since, but that shows the sigil worked, right?"

"I screwed up the banishing ritual, and the next day 9/11 happened. Figures."

"This talisman keeps the tigers away. Works perfectly."

So how do you know when your magic works, and when you're simply deluding yourself?

Personally, before any working I think: what result would, viewed after the fact, convince me that this working had been successful? After the working is over and I’ve accomplished my goal (IF I accomplish my goal), I look back and think: if I had been told before doing the working that I would end up with this result, would I have considered it successful?

If I do a working to get a cab on a busy day, the proof of success is getting a cab. If I do a working to help a friend find a job, the proof of success is that friend getting a job. It's unclear to what extent, if any, I should take account of near-misses (for example, a friend getting an interview but not getting the job.)

Of course, it may be difficult or impossible to filter out the (arguably) non-magical effort directed toward my goal – for example, giving my friend a copy of the want ads every day. It's also difficult or impossible to account for the vagaries of fate or coincidence (after all, my friend could have found a job anyway, even if I hadn't done the ritual).

So how do others avoid self-delusion? Any thoughts?
 
 
MrCoffeeBean
18:03 / 08.10.03
this is sort of the stuff i was writing in my topic. Magick is both doing the ritual and giving youre friend the want ad. It doesnt matter wich was the thing that gave him the job, getting th ejob or comming to a interwiev was the important thing.

Most of the time one will not know if ones magic did work. But it will make one feel better and stronger. And its lots of fun. It will make you see things in another, hopefully, new way. Isnt that good enough?
 
 
FinderWolf
18:07 / 08.10.03
This is a good point. Recently I've had a few things that came half-true from hypersigils I wrote (certain specific elements from the stories have showed up in my life but not fulfilled all the way as in the stories)...I think you need to keep a level head about you as you examine each individual situation & spell - use equal parts reason/intellect and faith/intuition. It's a hard line to walk but I believe you can walk it.
 
 
Papess
18:13 / 08.10.03
Magick, like anything else, lends itself to the delusions of those who work it. In all the years this board has been up and the Magick forum here, this question has been asked and I do not think there has ever been a conclusive answer.

Magick only works as well as your personal ability to over-ride reality. Reality seems to only work when one overrides magick and excepts that there is nothing more than "wysiwyg"

Ideally, one shouldn't really take credit magickally and if you do wish to take credit for something, be prepared for leers and geers, even from peers. Magick cannot be proven to work with our current scales of measure in this reality. You can only measure magick with more magick, ie: a tarot reading, remote-viewing, etc.... One does not talk about magickal accomplishments because it can never be proven in a satisfactory manner to the reasoning mind. Personally, I talk about mine, but only with those who I know can understand and relate to my magickal schisms - those whom I trust to know my own insanity.

Reality though, is only "real" by label, and as a matter of matter - (because it is materialized). One cannot deny the truth that there are many realities (holographic universe model) that although they are not brought to conclusion in this plane, have indeed become reality elsewhere. Thia is validation for magickal workings enough.

Magick encompasses "realities" - not one reality.
 
 
Papess
18:15 / 08.10.03
"And its lots of fun. It will make you see things in another, hopefully, new way. Isnt that good enough? "

Cheers Mr. Coffeebean!
 
 
Perfect Tommy
05:12 / 09.10.03
Don't sell partial successes short—that goes for magick and mundane life. For example, if you always wanted to act, and you finally screwed up your courage and went to an audition, but didn't get the part, should you count the experience as a failure, or celebrate that you got up the nerve and are more likely to do it again?

This might sound a little odd, but, I think it can actually be helpful to "delude yourself" (so long as you avoid delusions of grandeur that turn you into a right twat). See, I've always had trouble turning my brain off and letting intuition work for me. If I started to have some sort of 'magickal insight', I'd write it off, because I knew I was just making stuff up. But what I began to do is, even if I had the sense of consciously making stuff up, I called it a magickal insight. When the first thing that came to mind seemed silly, I still tried to go with it. So now, I'm finding it much easier to take seriously my first thoughts and my intuition, 'cause I haven't scared those signals out of the light.

Is that making any sense? I love the question but I'm not sure I'm doing it justice...
 
 
Vadrice
05:53 / 09.10.03
Well, if you're constantly wondering if it worked, if it's going to work, what has worked and what hasn't... well, those are all very rational questions.
I've been asked them, I've asked them, I've read people asking them, and quite honestly, I'm tired of them.

Magic isn't rational. That's the whole point- it's the irrational effecting the rational. I often think that rituals are merely about to distract us from this fact.
"Oh. Well. It doesn't make any bloody sense that lighting all these candles and humming to myself and spilling things and making up gods until things go all fuzzy and druggy clear changes the world under my feet in the way I knew it would because of all this rot, but I'm to busy DOING all these silly things to think about that."

Even to really think at all, during the fact.

I'm tired of this question. If it were answered to my satisfaction, it wouldn't be magick. It would be a process, like breathing. Understandable.
It would need a different name.

I like it's name.
I say leave it be.

If you want to study it... well... that's fine and all, but study. Don't try and skip all the steps in between and go straight to the end of all of this bloody thinking and such.

"So... how do we know it works?"

Only way to answer that is to answer exactly how it works.
That answer ain't free. I'm still paying for it, and no one's given it to me yet.
 
 
illmatic
07:53 / 09.10.03
I have no time to reply today really so forgive me for not reading all this properly. I think PT and alla y'all have made some excellent points above about partial sucess, subjectivity and the like but I've just gotta disagree with the implication that "oh it doesn't really work" (my apolgies if I'm putting words in people's mouths). Well, in my experience it does, and occasionally the realness of that experience is as self-evident as being hit by a bus. It might happen less than we think, it certainly happens for me less than I thought it would when I started all this stuff. I personally don't find such experiences at my beck and call, like all I've got to do is toss off a sigil and the universe bends over, but sometimes, I go, yeah, that's it.

Pretty much all of these experiences I judge as real because they often come from somewhere outside my ego - ie they weren't what I expected or anticipated, don't fit with my preconceptions etc - but they're real nonetheless, powerfully so.

This is not to say I don't think/wonder if I'm playfully deluding myself sometimes. As long as I don't turn into a huge egocentric wanker who thinks he's controlling the multiverse, who cares?
 
 
Quantum
08:44 / 09.10.03
Three things- first, most magicians have had experiences that convince them magic works (at least sometimes) that couldn't be self delusion.
Second, consider what the situation would be if we were deluding ourselves into thinking magic is real. We'd be attributing things to magic that were explicable by other means- and that's what we do now.
Third, there are people who delude themselves, and you can tell the difference between them and 'genuine' magicians.

It seems to me we delude ourselves into thinking lots of things are objectively real that aren't. Everything, IMO.
 
 
Rev. Wright
09:03 / 09.10.03
Me deluded?

Most certainly!


I am currently experiencing an internal realisation of my actualisation of non-duality, which has forced me into a polemic on my sexuality. One or the other, one or the other, or as I am coming to terms with both. To get this back onto thread, this situation was brought forward in my awareness by a heavy dose of mushrooms. On my intense and some what challenging trip Magick was present as a possible crutch to deny my homosexuality.
It has taken further investigation and discussion for me to begin to end this dichotomy and continue on my path of non-duality.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:17 / 09.10.03
Yeesh. Yeah, delusion is sort of an occupational hazard for the magickally inclined. One reason that I tend to work solo is that I have a real problem with people judging me on my appearence, getting themselves spooked, and deciding that their neurotic overreactions are in fact psychic messages. I've been accused of psychic attack, psychic vampirism (groan ), and of having picked up a malevolent entity from a group working-- even though at the time I'd never been involved in any group workings.

In any sphere of life it's all too easy to attribute good results to one's own abilities. Magick is particularly bad for this because it tends to deal with things that you can't easily assess in an objective way.

I try to be as objective as I possibly can, taking detailed notes of any workings and keeping up-to-date journals of both my magickal and mundane life. This helps to keep any wishful thinking in check. To be scrupulously honest, my results tend to be a touch lacklustre; the spells work, yes, but only in a very limited, literal sort of way. (This is almost certainly down to the fact that I'm bone bastard idle and don't do half the work I should.) Even so, I've seen enough good solid results to convince me that yes, magick works.

On some level, I don't care if the whole thing is a figment of my imagination. The psychological impact alone is well worth the effort.
 
 
Vadrice
13:50 / 09.10.03
eloquent, Carnie.
 
 
Quantum
14:31 / 09.10.03
It's unclear to what extent, if any, I should take account of near-misses
I consider near misses as just that- near misses. Sometimes magic works and sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it nearly works but doesn't quite accomplish the job.

It's often difficult to work out why something didn't work, but that's not the point- just because something doesn't work every time doesn't mean it doesn't work.
I get the opposite effect to that described at the top of the thread, rather than thinking 'Ooh I lit up astral space' I think 'Ooh, I hope that works'. Maybe I'm deluding myself that magic is less effective than it actually is.
 
 
gravitybitch
14:47 / 09.10.03
Yes, magick is real. Yes, magick depends heavily on mindset; not just yours but of those around you as well...

I grew up with a surprisingly good sense of what was likely to happen - not just starting to hum a song and then turning on the radio to find it being aired right then, but having a sense of knowing what group I was going to end up in in classes, guessing numbers, being able to read people really well, and in general being really hard to surprise.

This continued through high school and college (was exceedingly helpful in dating!)... then I fell in love with an engineer who was completely freaked out by it all. We got married, and those abilities more or less faded (although the radio thing never really went away). (I think the thing that did it was the time that we were driving somewhere, and he turned to say something to me just in time to catch the last bit of me turning to him to give him my full attention...)

Six years later, I divorced him and all those abilities came roaring back. (A friend and I were going to watch a couple of movies, and we had some disagreement as to what to watch first, so he hid them behind his back and told me to pick one... I was kind of annoyed, and just snapped, "The one on top." His look of shock that I hadn't answered the traditional "left or right" was abolutely priceless, and the movie on top was the one I hadn't seen before.) Nowadays, I'm pretty good at finding parking in San Francisco (no mean feat!) although I can't manifest parking in North Beach.

My general take on magick is that things in this reality have a tendancy to happen in in a particular way. You can do divination and find out what the odds are of things ending up in a particular end result, and you can work magick and tilt the odds in your favor to some degree. Divination is useful in that it can give you insight into how much effort you might need to expend to get close to the results you want - whether the circumstances as they exist now need a little nudge or a really huge push to end up in the shape you want. Partial successes may be the Universe's way of saying, "This is as close as you can get for your starting situation and that amount of push. Make of it what you will..."

I'm pretty happy with the on-the-fly divination skills I have, and don't do much ritual to push at the Universe.
 
 
Perfect Tommy
20:59 / 11.10.03
I think PT and alla y'all have made some excellent points above about partial sucess, subjectivity and the like but I've just gotta disagree with the implication that "oh it doesn't really work" (my apolgies if I'm putting words in people's mouths). Well, in my experience it does, and occasionally the realness of that experience is as self-evident as being hit by a bus.

Total agreement there. There are certain things that have happened that could have been written off as coincidence that I chose to call 'partial successes' instead to keep my belief and intuition well lubricated. But I'm not saying there haven't been other effects that were subtle as a shotgun blast. To an extent, I think that starting off in a mood in which you're willing to delude yourself, consciously make things up, believe whatever mad thing your intuition says and so on, can prepare you for what is to come—blatant acausality in accordance with will, complete with f/x.
 
 
Papess
09:37 / 12.10.03
"...blatant acausality in accordance with will, complete with f/x." ~PT

Yes well, if you check all your sources, ie: tarot/runes/omens and agreements/dreaming/etc...and everything starts matching up, you very well could be onto something...a pulling together of the lines of the world passing through your willed magickal action/intent...
 
 
penitentvandal
17:35 / 12.10.03
Dammit, man, did you have to go and tell everyone about that banishing ritual I fucked up before 9/11? I'm still fucking sensitive about that, man! I'm in fucking therapy for it! You bastards!

Seriously, though, of course we're all deluding ourselves. Read that sentence again: we're. ALL. Deluding. Ourselves. Even the non-magicians.

The difference is that those of us who rock the m-thing are capable of controlling, changing, and generally fucking about with our delusions in order to change ourselves, our realities, our societies, and basically just have a laugh. And that, to me, is the basic difference between a Mighty Magus and a Deluded One: posession not of the Only Real Necronomicon, the Amulet of Thoth, or the Spear of Destiny, but of a Sense of Humour. I question my sanity on a regular basis, but the basic fact is that even if it is all lies, my life since adopting the 'delusion' of 'being' a 'magician' has been a lot more fun and interesting than the life I used to have as a cripplingly shy, bulimic catholic bookworm. To paraphrase the Mighty McGowan, I am literally bigger than I was, and I have been to fookin' New York (as well as Paris, London, Tiphareth, Da'ath and really weird places like Hastings and Dewsbury), so does it matter? I don't think so.

But then, I could just be Deluded...
 
 
eye landed
06:29 / 14.10.03
I'm still having trouble hallucinating.
 
 
MrCoffeeBean
20:36 / 14.10.03
Whats wrong with deluting youreself? Isnt that what magick as all about? deluting youreself and the rest of the planet?

Change trough deluting...
 
 
Rage
00:54 / 15.10.03
Hey now. We all caused 9/11 together, ok?

I think I mentioned somewhere that delusions are visions of realities not yet activated. This very much applies here.
 
  
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