From: markk@cypress.West.Sun.COM (Mark Allen Kampe)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Keeping Silence
Date: 7 Jan 93 16:17:47 GMT
Reply-To: markk@cypress.West.Sun.COM
Organization: SunSoft South
NNTP-Posting-Host: sagredo.west.sun.com

In article 1@cs.cmu.edu, drake+@cs.cmu.edu (Drake) writes:
> You seem to miss the point entirely, which may very well have been your
> intention.
> 
> Tell me, how do your students "solve new and difficult problems in good
> fashion?"  They produce running code.  Out in the real world, people
> produce running code or get fired.  Code that does not run solves no
> problems, save the trivial ones of "what do we do with all of this memory
> that we aren't using?" or "how can we waste time and money?"

I do not believe I am missing the point.  Programming and Magick are complex
skills, and the end result (running programs and effective rituals) cannot
be taught directly.  Instead, you teach the elements that go into making a
running program or an effective ritual.  I thought I made this point clear,
but obviously I did not.

I am in the real world, and have been for almost twenty years.  I have
personally written over a quarter million lines of commercial code (mostly
OS) and I understand the importance of good running code.  I did not say 
that running code was not important.  I said it was not what I looked for 
in, or discussed with students.  You cannot directly teach someone to produce
working code.  Instead you teach them the techniques that will enable them
to produce working code.  The analogy with magick is a good one.  You cannot
"give someone a working ritual".  You can, however, train them to be able
to perform valuable rituals.

  
> The major difficulty that I see in magic is that nobody has any clear idea
> of the things you need to get right for the "program to run" ARE. 

I disagree.  People have understood how to make a mage for at least three
thousand years.  You train their perceptions, their will, and their mental
and spiritual discipline.  When they have learned to see in new ways, and
their minds serve their wills, they are prepared to explore the realms behind
the veil.  If they have not trained their perceptions or disciplined their
minds, there is no point in trying to explore other realities - for they
will not be seen, or the journey may exact a great toll on the traveler.

You seem to think that ritual and ritual results are the goal.  Some of us
(at least one anyway :-) think that the goal is not rituals and results but
personal transformation.  More effective rituals is one of the side effects
of that transformation (and probably not one of the more important ones).

The power is not in the rituals, but in the magus who performs them.  The
ritual is nothing.  The magus is everything.  To focus on the ritual is to
miss the point entirely.  If you listened to "Brown Sugar" and sang along with
it for a few years, do you think that you could take Mick Jaggers place on
stage?  If you practiced carving Pieta's for thirty years would you then be
Michelangelo?  Trying to emulate the results of a master is not the path to
mastery.  Studying the technique, the range and the soul of masters may help
you to find inspiration, but mastery must come from within.  It is so with
Magick.

> So far
> it's been a hit-and-miss operation with every magician either starting from
> scratch or buying the party line as to "the Truth."

I disagree.  Most mages receive initiation from various places and then go
forward on their own, to explore their own paths.  Certainly that is what
the more successful ones have done.  The power is not in the lesson but in
the individual.  The lesson merely seeks to educe it from within the individual.

The path is secondary.  It is the traveling that teaches us.  Setting out on 
your own is not a condemnation of your initiations - it is what your 
initiations prepared you for.

 
Newsgroups: alt.magick