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[Part One | Part Two]

If you’ve ever planned for the future, you’ve practiced a form of magic. Wait a minute, you say. That’s not magic.

Sure it is. You have an intention or goal, and you imagine it, seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting it in ways that seem so ordinary and commonplace we mostly pay no attention to the marvel of what we’re doing. Only when we find ourselves saying “But it didn’t turn out like I thought it would!” do we encounter a mismatch between the picture we painted and carried around with us, and the reality as it finally manifested. Obviously we held a pattern, image, blueprint, plan, etc. in our awareness. It took a few side-roads on the way to appearing here, where we can see and interact with it. No matter. More than before. Do it differently. Revise, modify, experiment.

I may be a visual person, or an auditory or a kinesthetic one, or some other kind of perceiver and manifester, by predilection and experience, that doesn’t have a ready label. Further, the event I manifested may or may not match what I expected or hoped, but it did manifest — as it never would have, if I hadn’t set it in motion in the first place. “As above, so below” — in this case, the above was my plan, and the below was the physical form it took. Schools that could teach us how to get better at this ability instead teach almost everything else but that. Often that’s because the teachers themselves have had the ability taught right out of ’em.

Plenty of folks would like to deny us recognition and use of this basic ability altogether, because it’s the key to freedoms and joys of many kinds, and so it cuts into their power plays. Our politicians insist that only they can fix what’s ailing the town, province or planet, our partners insist they’re essential to our happiness (or we are, to theirs). Priests, pastors and imams would prefer we not discover how independent of them we actually can be, so the ability gets labeled evil, sinful, diabolical, dangerous, forbidden, and any other convenient and manipulative name, even though every one of us alive uses it daily in its simplest forms. But the more advanced levels in particular, the ones that grant larger abilities to change and grow, are naturally more dangerous to the stable order of things, and to those who ardently desire to profit from “the way things are”.

That’s one reason fear is such a popular tool for control, and so widespread today. Keep people ignorant and afraid, keep them from using or even knowing the potentials of their own ability, keep them dependent on a big mommy or daddy for a pitiful, reduced version of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and you’re halfway home to power — of a sort.

Cover up the push into ignorance and dependency with a skillful blend of threats and promises, of magicking up a useful opponent to take the fall, the blame, the consequences of the fear you’ve sown in people’s hearts and minds — and there are so many opponents ready to hand — to distract people from what you’re doing to them, and you’re home free.

If you can attack the very freedom you’re taking away as the cause of the troubles the people face, you’ve graduated to “excellent dictator” status. Congratulations! You’ve mastered one form of debased magic, depriving other people of their birthright. No need to argue whether it’s successful — just look at today’s headlines.

If such low and often negative magic can accomplish so much, what of more positive varieties?

Experiment with learning more about your animal familiar — an ancient and worldwide practice. Animal guardians and teachers abound in myth, legend and folktale for good reason. Many of us know instinctively why we keep pets, and every year we learn more about the health benefits and remarkable abilities domesticated animals bring into our lives. The tarot Fool sets out on the long journey toward wisdom already accompanied by an animal. Who are your companions and what can they teach you?

Formal study and practice of traditional magic may not be for you, temperamentally or practically. But if you decorate your living space with harmonious colors, bringing in plants and pictures that uplift you and establish an oasis of harmony and balance, you’ve magicked your dwelling to aid you in daily life. Or look at your musical tastes and contemplate the harmonics of sound that feed and nourish you. Investigate the effects and use of song, chant, rhythm, pitch, etc. Drums, bells, musical instruments of many kinds can assist you in sound magic. Again, many religious and spiritual traditions speak to the power of the word, voice, sound of creation, music of the spheres, names of gods and angels, etc. Long human wisdom testifies to the potency of sound magic.

Mary K Greer / https://marykgreer.com/about/

Dream work can help put us in touch with levels of experience and consciousness beyond the daily news awareness that can seem like all there is. Plenty of resources exist for studying dreams, recording them, analyzing them, and learning from what they have to teach us. And inspire us. Work on anything that asks you for creativity, and if you focus long enough, the work will follow you into dream. Write, and your characters will begin to talk to you. Paint seriously, and you’ll eventually see patterns, colors, worlds of beauty inwardly nearly impossible to render with earth tones and hues. Garden, and you may be led to plantings and pairings you hadn’t anticipated, or to resources to help you and your plants flourish. Many gardeners know how restorative the work can be. And so with many professions and occupations. It’s hard in fact to think of one that lies outside the purview of dream power and exploration.

Rachel Pollack

The Tarot is a course of magical (and life) instruction all by itself. Find a good overview or book of practical exercises. Two texts I can recommend from long work with them are 78 Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack and 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card by Mary Greer. They pair well together, these masterworks by acknowledged masters of the Tarot, complementing each other’s perspectives. When I just checked a few minutes ago, both were available used for $8 or less. Rachel Pollack’s pocket admonition: “To learn to play seriously is one of the great secrets of spiritual exploration”.

Another excellent and quite painless way to acquire a set of vantage points for a magical understanding is to immerse yourself in fantasy and mythology, while practicing visualizations and ritual work with the archetypes present in the latter in particular. Fantasy propels us into alternate realities through the written word, already a magical act. Add the further dimensions that film affords, combining sound and color and embodiment by (usually) skilled actors, and you expand the experience into one quite close to ritual. It’s no surprise that the magical and visionary arts have enjoyed a resurgence in the last century, when we have such preliminary training on hand in these popular forms.

To sum up, then, magic is our birthright, something we practice already, and can explore and refine, like any talent. We shift states of consciousness every day, and what we can’t do in one state, we can often do easily in another. The methods and techniques for shifting, because they bring us to face locks on consciousness, as the previous post indicated, allow us to begin to circumvent, break down or dissolve these impediments.

Then we begin to discover that there are many worlds, and at the same time we discover how to gain access to them, since we intermittently inhabit them already, in moments of heightened experience, in grief, joy, love, exaltation, intense focus and creativity. Each of us is and has a doorway, eventually multiple ones, that we can activate to explore and grow and delight in. And it is there that we meet and shape and begin to fulfill our destinies.

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