From: lyn@conquest.ksu.ksu.edu (Myself)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Is Magick worth the effort??
Date: 18 Aug 1992 12:54:38 -0500
Organization: Kansas State University
NNTP-Posting-Host: conquest.ksu.ksu.edu

grimoire@byron.u.washington.edu (John Greer) writes:

>ba@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (B.A. Davis-Howe) writes:

>>this.  If there is anyone out there who started studying any form of magic
>>before experiencing any sort of phenomena, please tell us about it.  I would

>Um.  Well.  (An uncertain hand rises.)
>My own involvement with magic began in a way I don't normally admit to.  As
>a child of about 10, I ran into J.R.R. Tolkien's books, fell in, and didn't
>emerge for the better part of a decade.  Ever met the kind of teenage 
>mutant Tolkien fan who can write fluent Elvish and knows the kings of
>Gondor backwards and forwards?  Yeah.  In my own defense, it was one of 
>the few resources available to a bookworm with no social skills who wanted,
>oddly enough, to survive a suburban public school childhood.

>So I wanted Middle Earth.  _Bad_.

>When I was about 15, I ran across a cheap paperback edition of King and
>Skinner's _Techniques of High Magic_.  It wasn't Middle Earth, but it
>was close enough;  I started in on the practices (your basic neo-
>Golden Dawn things, the Pentagram ritual, the Middle Pillar exercise,
>and so on) and tried to find anything else on the subject.  One thing
>led to another; a decade and a half later, I'm still working in more or
>less the same tradition.

>Now the curious thing is that I don't remember ever having anything
>remotely resembling a "psychic" or "magical" experience before I got
>started with the work...or for that matter for some years thereafter.  To
>a great extent, what I was doing was motivated by what Tom Sawyer would
>call "faith": "believin' what you know ain't so".  I wanted magic to be
>real so much that I was able to overlook the fact that I didn't think it
>was.            

>It's been suggested to me that my lack of belief is the reason why I didn't
>experience any phenomena until I'd been working at this for a good couple
>of years.  It's also been suggested to me that it simply took me that long
>to pull the wool over my own eyes.  As I'm not particularly invested in
>either the presence or absence of "objective" (whatever that means) effects
>to magical work, I prefer to leave the whole point as moot.

>Anyway, that's my experience.  A totally unscientific sampling of 
>conversations I've had with other magicians leads me to think that it
>may be far from unique.  Comments?

Well, about 4-5(?) months back we had a big discussion on whether science and 
magick were compatible/related/the same/whatever.... And one of the ideas that
I related to the rest of the group was from Richard Back's _Illusions_. It 
does not really matter that much whether there is such a thing as magick, or
whether you can actually create a certain effect by power of will alone, 
because if you Really Believe, it will become a part of your perceptions of
the universe (whatever that is...), and, as such, it will cause you to do the
things which are necessary to create the illusion or actuallity (whichever is
appropriate) of that event occuring. In the end, it does not matter whether
something is truly possible, because if you keep trying to make it happen, 
it, or something indistinguishable from it (yo you), will happen, because you
will cause it to happen. If this is confusing, or if anyone want's more of a
discussion of it, please e-mail me.


D
either it or something indistinguishable (to you)
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