-long-
About a year and a half ago I read Post-modern magic by patrick dunn. having been raised, and continuing to live with, fundamentalist christian parents, this was all very, very new to me. i had none of their faith, but the mindset of spiritual warfare from a Christians point of view was unfortunately mine. A lot of the stuff in there seemed interesting and cool, and i started working on it..
Later, I read Book 4 part 1, by uncle crowley. the approach hit me hard. he started from the basic condition of existence, and took what we know and explained how we might know, and do more. I read every piece of crowley that i could get my hands on, which was a lot; it's all practically memorized. i've been reading non-stop since i was three - i can probably recall the exact phrasing of every page of every book on magic i own.
at this point my ambition in life is to enter the A.'.A.'. and become a magus or die trying. i completely absorbed EVERYTHING on qabalistic syncretic magic. i began to work torwards my initiation, with asana.
Magic in theory in practice impressed me a GREAT deal. it's opening section, and especially, "the A.'.A.'. does not intend to imply that any experiences or entities encountered are objectively real, but merely that by doing certain things certain results shall follow." this became a important phrase to me, for the reasons which prompt me to take this current quest.
(note: at this point, My dad found my records, and threatened to kick me out if i practiced any form of meditation whatsoever, period. if it was not for my dog i would have walked out and been homeless while i worked torwards Dhyana. But i love my dog, and she would have come to no good end had i left - she would have pined away from sorrow at my loss had my dad not killed her. this is unacceptable to me.)
I found Liber Null and psychonaut. fucking devoured it with savor. purchased liber kaos. was stunned. at this point, my ideas reached a premature version of their current crystallization.
I Do Not Believe. let me state that. like mulder - i want to believe. but it is for this very reason, for the value with which i hold the possibility of the existence of a medium for what you might call magic, that i must be as utterly ruthless and thorough as possible in my confirmation of certain key facts. i can't leave a single question alone. every doubt must be addressed. i doubt as much as humanly possible now, because that way, whatever i discover, i can choose my direction in the labyrinth of life without any inhibitions or hesitation. anything i don't ask now will water down my resolve and personal integrity in the future.
i need to KNOW, to know as fact, as i know that 1 plus 1 equals 2, that there exists a medium for communication at a distance that the human mind can utilize to perform otherwise impossible tasks.
If there is not, then magic is nothing more then self delusion that can produce effects only through the same means of physical interaction as we all use, but with enhanced effectiveness through extreme psychological practices. magic would be, in this case, the most badass self-help method ever. you get to do drugs, and you are instructed to build and destroy habits by cutting yourself. But i most know the conditions of my existence if i am to operate effectively within it. if there is no Aether, we might call it, then i will still utilize magic, with a wry smile to all the bullshit and a keen eye to all the loot. but.
If there is such a thing, it is worth my life, and all that with it might be done.
Let me discuss myself. Demographics and psych 101 would tell you from what you've already read before i did that i am a white american male between the ages of 17 and 25 from a lower class upbringing. broken home dynamics, probably physically and psychologically abused from a early age. Lots of radical thought; extremely intelligent but did poorly in school. disciplinary problems with peers and authority figures. Told a psychologist in fifth grade i was born to kill. outsider; no friends generally. expelled after using a stapler to do 2500 dollars of damage to school property and holding up classes for hours. dropped out in order to walk to nashville with nothing but a illegal .38 and a guitar to earn money with and the dreams of being like bob dylan. worked shitty jobs for a few years, he probably still is. intended to be a musician and writer and poet as a career from 17-20 or so; now just composes and writes to admire his creations, although is considering writing pop songs to get rich.
My plan is to find out what i can about magic; find out what it can be used for, and use it for all it's worth. I would ideally like to be able to astral project and enter gnosis at will within a year; apply and be accepted for the IOT, and immediately following initiation join the army. the green berets. it is only in extremes that the human spirit can reveal what its truly capable of. it is only in fluid, risky circumstances that magic can be seen working powerfully. i would like to spend my time in the special forces researching various aspects of combat magic, gnosis, neuromancy, and if i kill someone, aspects of death and communication with recently dead/dying from a aetheric point of view. look for a way into millitary remote viewing groups if possible. after i get out, i was thinking of going to federal prison. beating huge thugs up to get solitary isolation in order to practice empty hand magic all day for weeks on end, exteriorization, mind control, possessing others. maybe escape and return as a joke. recruit a cult among the inmates for my own profit, pleasure and power.
but i need to know that it WORKS. i'm going to make my own zener cards and start doing tests.
My current 'beliefs': Nothing is true, and EVERYTHING YOU, YES YOU READING THIS, BELIEVE IS A MOTHERFUCKING LIE BASED ON WISHFUL AND IMAGINARY AXIOMS. only facts can be verified. Everything is permitted - who is to deny? there may be principles of the universe that allow for consciousness, matter, and causality to interact as a single field. or there may not be. the extent of this connection has not been proven in a public forum by means of scientific review; however, scientific review is not everything. there is an absurd amount of purely anecdotal evidence on hand, but i do not doubt the capability of human stupidity to produce it even with a lack of any 'magical' material on hand. All symbol systems of magic are ultimately idiot clingings to superstitious interpretations of a real phenomenon behind (possibly) magic; even if magic is real it has no inherent meaning. the word 'meaning' implies nothing but bullshit makeup for, 'motivation' which come down to bio-mechanical determinism. free will is a lie. we're all a bunch of hairless monkeys lost in delirium because we can't seem to cope with abstract thought and our environment at the same time. it is possible that these idiot clingings are dying away as we get closer to a method of magic that works on reliable principles; or they are dying away as we invent crazier and crazier ways to continue the delusion as science marches onward and we must reconcile with it - but in the end, the curtain will fall, and there will be nothing.
i am currently drifting. i don't know which way to go because i do not know enough to determine. if i only knew with certainty i was not wasting my time, could finally take the plunge and allow morbid amounts of sheer will and determination to run their course. you need to really understand - if magic, or rather what we CALL magic, works, then i will be that guy. my role models were all people like cyrano de bergerac and tyler durden. if the IOT rejects my application? then i'm walking to their fucking new york temple, and meditating without food or water on the front doorstep until someone at least takes me as an apprentice, i pass out from dehydration, or they get the cops to take me away, in which case i fucking return to what i was doing when they let me go. or maybe they sacrifice me as a joke, who knows. i am dead serious.
my email is 623138@gmail.com. please contact me here or there if you can help, if you have a clue, or answers, or if you just want someone to have nice discussions with. i am posting this message on every occult board i can find, and attending to responses on a daily basis on all of them. if anyone out there is a member of the Pact, i ask you with as much gravity as i can put here,please contact me - i plan on much useful research and contributions contingent of course on the fact/not fact that magic does/does not exist. I know that like most other things, i will be most likely required to do this alone, but i did not want to leave a single resource untapped.
Please help me. Please.
Please help me. Please.
You need to KNOW that Magic is real? I think you already do. But let me explain that the best way I know how.
Your story reminds me of my own, though the details may differ somewhat. Growing up, I loved fantasy games and TV shows. I thought, "how cool would that be if magic was real?". Just for fun, I would pretend that I had magical powers - sure, lots of kids do that, nothing wierd. Except that I started to feel what I was imagining: I could feel something within myself, and I wasn't sure what it was. Maybe my soul? Maybe just my imagination, that instead of just imagining what something looked like, I was imagining what it would feel like, without even thinking about it. But the feeling was so strong, I had to look into it.
So I started doing research, mostly on the internet - most of what I saw was fluffy "love spell" and "money spell" stuff (which I quickly realized was a waste of my time), but every once in a while I stumbled upon something good, and I knew it. I began to research the idea of Chi, and decided that maybe that's what I was feeling. Of course, like you, I was the intelligent kid in school who didn't get very good grades out of boredom. I was smart enough to know that there was a good chance I was just deluding myself. Then, I read Modern Magick by Donald Michael Kraig - my very first real book on the subject. In the very beginning, the author explains what he calls the difference between "reality" and "actuality": take your average, everyday wooden chair. The reality? It's a chair. It's solid. You press your hand against it, and it doesn't pass through - it's a solid, wooden chair. The actuality? It's a collection of molecules that are dense enough and are vibrating strongly enough to have the appearance of being solid, while the molecules themselves have space in between them. Taken to explain magic, the reality is that magic works - you focus your energy, you charge a sigil, perform a ritual, whatever technique you use, it can work. The actuality? Maybe spirits, gods, the astral plane, etc are all very much a part of reality; maybe we're really just just deluding ourselves to cause us to subconsciously make different decisions to cause change where we want it. Because of the subjective nature of magic, it's really hard to say. Whether doing a ritual or channeling energy is in actuality what you are doing doesn't matter - what matters is that magic functions as if it were real.
The book changed me; instead of being worried that I was just being delusional, I decided that I was going to work on the assumption that it was, and leave myself open to the possibility that I was wrong - and even look for signs that I was. I began practicing channeling energy, the only thing that I really knew how to do (and even that I learned on accident). With a little help from the internet, I learned how to pull energy in from around me, and push it back out and into other people or objects, or just into the air. It felt good... but I still had my doubts.
Unfortunately, magic really is like The Matrix; you can't truly understand it just by being told what it's like, you have to see it, feel it for yourself. One day I was being a nerd at high school, as I usually did, and was reading a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook, when one of the older kids approached me, and asked if I knew any real magic. I look at him sideways; he caught me off-guard, and I wasn't very confident talking to people I didn't know. Somehow, I managed to blurt out something to the effect of "no, but... what do you mean?" and he just smiled and started to walk away. Over the next couple weeks, I managed to hang around him for a few days, and tried to pull energy from him, but didn't get anything unusual. But I knew he saw me doing it, and on one attempt he looked at me and grinned. Suddenly I felt a rush of energy unlike anything I'd ever felt before; it was kind of like a combination of having the wind knocked out of you and getting suddenly thrown into a cold pool. I felt like I had just run myself exhausted, and I had to grip the seat of my chair to keep from falling over. I had asked him what he did, and he just replied that he lowered his defenses. I began talking to him more after that.
He had a lot of strange and... lets say "colorful" stories that he told me, most of which I still believe to have been exaggerated if not made up completely. But I knew what I had felt - THAT was real, I knew it. He left at the end of that year and I never saw him again, but that one man was the entire reason I knew that magic was real, at least on some level.
I admire your determination to find the truth. Maybe that's really why you remind me of myself. Hold on to that, let that be your motivation. Don't stop until you reach a definite conclusion - and after that, who knows?
Try it. Practice it. See what you can do. Start small; don't worry about whether you're deluding yourself, just work on the assumption that it's real and it works (believe me, I know how hard that can be). Any rituals or spells that you perform for the first few years will likely have little or no observable effect - you have to accept this. After all, you're not only trying to learn to do something that most people simply can't inherently do, you're trying to teach yourself. At some point, you'll have an experience that will subjectively prove, to yourself, that magic is real.
I wish I had something easier, something more concrete to show you. Unfortunately, I can't create light from my hands, or cause objects to move without touching them, or accurately predict specifics about the future, nor do I know anyone who can do these things. But I'm still learning, so maybe some day, others won't have to work so hard just to see if magic is real. Maybe some day, people will be able to just take a trip down to their local Arcane University and see the teachers there show their students how to light candles from across the room. Maybe some day magical healing will go hand-in-hand with modern medicine.
Then again, maybe not. Who knows?
Your story reminds me of my own, though the details may differ somewhat. Growing up, I loved fantasy games and TV shows. I thought, "how cool would that be if magic was real?". Just for fun, I would pretend that I had magical powers - sure, lots of kids do that, nothing wierd. Except that I started to feel what I was imagining: I could feel something within myself, and I wasn't sure what it was. Maybe my soul? Maybe just my imagination, that instead of just imagining what something looked like, I was imagining what it would feel like, without even thinking about it. But the feeling was so strong, I had to look into it.
So I started doing research, mostly on the internet - most of what I saw was fluffy "love spell" and "money spell" stuff (which I quickly realized was a waste of my time), but every once in a while I stumbled upon something good, and I knew it. I began to research the idea of Chi, and decided that maybe that's what I was feeling. Of course, like you, I was the intelligent kid in school who didn't get very good grades out of boredom. I was smart enough to know that there was a good chance I was just deluding myself. Then, I read Modern Magick by Donald Michael Kraig - my very first real book on the subject. In the very beginning, the author explains what he calls the difference between "reality" and "actuality": take your average, everyday wooden chair. The reality? It's a chair. It's solid. You press your hand against it, and it doesn't pass through - it's a solid, wooden chair. The actuality? It's a collection of molecules that are dense enough and are vibrating strongly enough to have the appearance of being solid, while the molecules themselves have space in between them. Taken to explain magic, the reality is that magic works - you focus your energy, you charge a sigil, perform a ritual, whatever technique you use, it can work. The actuality? Maybe spirits, gods, the astral plane, etc are all very much a part of reality; maybe we're really just just deluding ourselves to cause us to subconsciously make different decisions to cause change where we want it. Because of the subjective nature of magic, it's really hard to say. Whether doing a ritual or channeling energy is in actuality what you are doing doesn't matter - what matters is that magic functions as if it were real.
The book changed me; instead of being worried that I was just being delusional, I decided that I was going to work on the assumption that it was, and leave myself open to the possibility that I was wrong - and even look for signs that I was. I began practicing channeling energy, the only thing that I really knew how to do (and even that I learned on accident). With a little help from the internet, I learned how to pull energy in from around me, and push it back out and into other people or objects, or just into the air. It felt good... but I still had my doubts.
Unfortunately, magic really is like The Matrix; you can't truly understand it just by being told what it's like, you have to see it, feel it for yourself. One day I was being a nerd at high school, as I usually did, and was reading a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook, when one of the older kids approached me, and asked if I knew any real magic. I look at him sideways; he caught me off-guard, and I wasn't very confident talking to people I didn't know. Somehow, I managed to blurt out something to the effect of "no, but... what do you mean?" and he just smiled and started to walk away. Over the next couple weeks, I managed to hang around him for a few days, and tried to pull energy from him, but didn't get anything unusual. But I knew he saw me doing it, and on one attempt he looked at me and grinned. Suddenly I felt a rush of energy unlike anything I'd ever felt before; it was kind of like a combination of having the wind knocked out of you and getting suddenly thrown into a cold pool. I felt like I had just run myself exhausted, and I had to grip the seat of my chair to keep from falling over. I had asked him what he did, and he just replied that he lowered his defenses. I began talking to him more after that.
He had a lot of strange and... lets say "colorful" stories that he told me, most of which I still believe to have been exaggerated if not made up completely. But I knew what I had felt - THAT was real, I knew it. He left at the end of that year and I never saw him again, but that one man was the entire reason I knew that magic was real, at least on some level.
I admire your determination to find the truth. Maybe that's really why you remind me of myself. Hold on to that, let that be your motivation. Don't stop until you reach a definite conclusion - and after that, who knows?
Try it. Practice it. See what you can do. Start small; don't worry about whether you're deluding yourself, just work on the assumption that it's real and it works (believe me, I know how hard that can be). Any rituals or spells that you perform for the first few years will likely have little or no observable effect - you have to accept this. After all, you're not only trying to learn to do something that most people simply can't inherently do, you're trying to teach yourself. At some point, you'll have an experience that will subjectively prove, to yourself, that magic is real.
I wish I had something easier, something more concrete to show you. Unfortunately, I can't create light from my hands, or cause objects to move without touching them, or accurately predict specifics about the future, nor do I know anyone who can do these things. But I'm still learning, so maybe some day, others won't have to work so hard just to see if magic is real. Maybe some day, people will be able to just take a trip down to their local Arcane University and see the teachers there show their students how to light candles from across the room. Maybe some day magical healing will go hand-in-hand with modern medicine.
Then again, maybe not. Who knows?
A difference that makes no difference, is no difference.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hail Eris!
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hail Eris!
Please help me. Please.
Thanks for the wonderful post Aliga, always interesting to hear people's personal stories.
As for OP, I've seen the EXACT same post on another forum, and replied to it, with links and everything, AND I emailed him as well on the given gmail address to make sure he gets it. So far no reply.
So I expect it'll be a while until we hear from OP again, if ever
As for OP, I've seen the EXACT same post on another forum, and replied to it, with links and everything, AND I emailed him as well on the given gmail address to make sure he gets it. So far no reply.
So I expect it'll be a while until we hear from OP again, if ever