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Mordant, my first, simplest, and still most effective bit of results magic had to do with encountering more positive social opportunities. I didn´t think of it as magic at the time; it was a year or two before I discovered the weirdness. It´s very basic and unsophisticated, but I´ve still never gotten material results as significant and as obvious as the ones I get from this. Maybe you´ll find it useful. I hope so.
Disclaimer:
This is long-ish, so feel free to not bother. Also, this does involve concepts borrowed from tabletop RPGs. I know that triggers an immediate gag reflex in lots of posters here, with good reason. To make things worse, I´m a very new poster, so I should probably avoid long posts about things ´lithers hate to read about. But I´m not talking about trying to cast magic missile. I´m not declaring that I´ve cribbed my personal pantheon of gods from "White Wolf Presents Pimply Virgins at Moonrise" and they are just as real as Erzuli and Hathor. I´m just describing a thought I had, inspired by the concept of RPGs, which led to a massive change in my life. Read on if you like.
Once or twice a week, on Friday and/or Saturday in the early evening, my two closest college friends and I would grab a sixer of beers, open some chips & dip, and get together in my dorm to RPG for a couple hours. We´d drink, game, shoot the shit, and then sometime after 10 we´d go out for the night. I´d GM. Any of our female friends hanging around the dorm would shake their heads and promptly leave; we´d glance up briefly, say goodbye, and get back to the dice. Great times.
Anyway, at some point in that year (it was my 2nd year of college), I stopped having fun at night. I´d go out with my buddies, we´d do whatever it was we did, but nothing good ever seemed to happen. To me, that is. I felt like I wasn´t making any new friends, wasn´t meeting any nice girls... just wasn´t having a good time. Each night seemed devoid of that sort of fortuitous opportunity that makes for good memories and stories. One night, standing outside my dorm before embarking on what I was sure would be another worthless foray into the nightlife, I had an idea, and here´s what it was:
In an RPG, the players each control their single character, and the Gamemaster (GM) basically controls the world around them and everyone else in it. If it were a video game, the players would be holding the controllers and the GM would be the computer. That said, take the following situation: you´re the GM. You say something like "you are in a large room with a massive mahogany dining table, a chandelier, portraits of stuffy-looking European aristos on the walls," etc etc. One of the players says, "I check behind the portraits for any hidden passages or containers." Now, you hadn´t put anything behind the portraits when you laid out the scene in your head; they were just to add a little detail and character to the scene. But now you think: well... why not? It´s not inconceivable that there could have been a safe or something behind one of the portraits, and the player does deserve a reward for creative play and for taking the initiative. So, OK. "One of the portraits swings forward on hinges when you examine it. You find a solid-looking grey iron safe with a large, black tumbler lock."
Something interesting just happened here: in the game world, which is your creation and exists at your whim down to the last detail, there was nothing behind the portraits. Now there is a safe behind one of them, and there always has been. The safe did not appear into a previously solid wall when the player decided to look. Rather, because you liked the player’s moxie and smarts in searching, the world is such that the safe has always been there for him to find. The universe is different, all the way back through time, because the player decided that he´d be creative, be proactive, and look for something cool.
My thought was: what if life works that way? You´re convinced that, for example, there´s nothing good out there tonight and nothing fun is going to happen. And nothing does. You decide that you are going to actively look for the good stuff, with a real belief that it will be there to find at least some of the time--otherwise, the GM wouldn´t be doing a good job of running an interesting game, would he? And the opportunities are there and always have been... even some that weren´t there before, if you see what I mean. Reward for good play. I decided to start thinking of the universe (or God, or whatever) as a GM and operate on the belief that, if I impressed him with good play—didn’t leave unexplored plotlines he’d obviously worked hard on and wanted me to pursue, improvised, enthusiastically sought out experiences and adventures—the universe would be such that I’d be rewarded and encouraged. A very roundabout version of “heaven helps those that help themselves” as formulated by Schrödinger and Comic Book Guy.
My social outings and the general plotline of my life got interesting very quickly. There was also very little time to think of this as merely a psychological engine-revver to build a positive mindset, because almost immediately things began happening which simply couldn’t be explained by a change in attitude alone. Unless our subconscious minds are supercomputer synchronicity arrangers, able to wield the butterfly effect like a scalpel, something beyond myself was taking a hand.
Seriously, try this. Think of the universe as a guy trying to run a quality gaming session. It´s not a one-man job, however, and the GM relies on the players to step up if the session´s going to be good. He appreciates it when you do, and if impressed by good ideas and good efforts, he´ll ensure that your efforts are often fruitful. Go out into the world optimistic and smiling-- you´re looking for good times and cool people, and the universe is going to hook you up. I dunno, maybe it only works because the analogy is evocative for me as a gamer, and so it’s a useful tool for focusing my will and “imprinting” the universe to act in a certain way. Worth a shot. |
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