So Close, But Still So Far

Exotericism is my term for magick demystified. At some point here I am going to be doing some writing on that topic over on substack and adapting some of the material here from Augoeides for a different audience. That audience is made up of people who work with "manifesting" and other New Age techniques that have a lot in common with magical practice. In fact, I would say that they basically are the same thing as what we magicians do, just along more intuitive lines and with less formal structure.

I sometimes describe formally structured magick as a martial art for the mind and by extension psychic abilities. The advantage of a formal structure is that it lends itself to scientific investigation by empirical means, at least up to a point. It is also far more optimized than general intuitive fixing of thoughts. As a practitioner for many years, I am fully capable of shifting probabilities just by fixing a thought on my intent for about 20-30 seconds. While I see measurable results using that method, the probability shifts I can throw are a lot bigger with formal rituals.

I recently came across this video of one of these manifesting teachers talking about Aleister Crowley's Magick: Book Four in the context of the general New Age manifesting model. He gets some of the basic points right, but misses several key things that are essential to performing truly powerful magick. In fact, magical practice offers a remedy for the exact problem that he identifies, and this is a remedy that I know works from personal experience. However, because of some of his initial assumptions, he just does not see it.

New Age manifesting is mostly based on "New Thought," an incorrect model of the universe that presupposes the universe is actually mental and your thoughts deterministically produce your experiences. This idea shows up in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Christian Science, The Kybalion, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, and most recently Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. The problem is that there are all sorts of goofy ramifications of this model that do not bear out in physical reality.

The most obvious problem is that when you cast a probability shift into the physical world, the physical world pushes back. That's because it's really there. It is not some convoluted manifestation of your thinking, at least not as it truly is in and of itself. Our perceptions of reality are subjective, because what we are interacting with from moment to moment is an "illusion" created by our brains integrating sensory information. But that sensory data comes from the physical world, which is separate from our experience of it. We know this because of consistency between observers, object permanence, and so forth.

The way that most "New Thought" teachers get around that is to propose that the resistance and so forth comes from some sort of supercharged version of Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung's unconscious mind. I have read an author seriously argue that if I take a blindfolded person into an unfamiliar room, the reason they can't just walk through the walls is that they "unconsciously know" that the wall is there. This is ridiculous because, first of all, the psychoanalytic unconscious mind is not even a real thing, and second of all because I can easily arrange a sensory deprivation experiment in which subjects will run right into walls whether they perceive them or not.

Christian Science is a little more forgiveable than some of the other versions of "New Thought" because it focused on healing and allopathic medicine at the time was not far removed from "You're got ghosts in your blood, you should do cocaine about it." Homeopathic medicine is from the same period, and was developed for similar reasons. And the placebo effect, the ability of the mind to heal the body up to a point, is so real that every medical trial has to account for it. Still, it goes off the rails when suggesting that regular medical treatment will undo its benefits because that shows a "lack of faith."

Crowley was familiar with Christian Science and offered an insightful critque. The error, according to him, was to replace "God" with "mind," and then attribute to "mind" all the characteristics generally associated with "God" such as omnipotence. This criticism is just as relevant to The Secret as it was in Crowley's time. Most of the current manifestation teachings are based on or derived from Byrnes' work, so it applies to them as well.

And that gets us to the video. What it gets right is that fixing thoughts can accomplish change in your life, for good or for bad. If you fix your thoughts on what you want to attain you can manifest something approaching that intent. But if you fix your thoughts on worry, negativity, and worst case scenarios you can manifest negative things into your life too. The contention, then, is that the more you fix thoughts on your intent the better you will do at manifesting it.

So don't just do a ten minute visualization session, keep your thoughts fixed on your goal or goals throughout your day. Do your best to keep worry, doubt, and negativity at bay because fixing your thoughts in that way can undo potential positive results. The video comes off sounding a little bit like a cross between Crowley and Norman Vincent Peale. In effect, this is a reiteration of a point from Crowley's Liber Librae, which he adapted from an earlier Golden Dawn instruction.

To obtain Magical Power, learn to control thought; admit only those ideas that are in harmony with the end desired, and not every stray and contradictory Idea that presents itself.

Fixed thought is a means to an end. Therefore pay attention to the power of silent thought and meditation. The material act is but the outward expression of thy thought, and therefore hath it been said that “the thought of foolishness is sin.” Thought is the commencement of action, and if a chance thought can produce much effect, what cannot fixed thought do?

That quote could summarize the entire message of the video, and it is good advice. There is a lot of nuance, though, that the "New Thought" model fails to account for. One problem is that the distinction between "fixed thoughts" and "chance thoughts" is entirely collapsed. From this perspective a thought is a thought is a thought. This does not hold up experimentally.

As I mentioned above, to produce a probability shift in the direction of a thought I need it to hold my full attention for 20-25 seconds. Because of course I've timed it, over and over again. A random thought drifting through my mind for a second or two is not enough to produce a paranormal effect. For me even 5-10 seconds is too short. The duration might vary a little between individuals, but it is not instantaneous.

The assertion that worry, doubt, and negativity can produce negative effects is true. I've experienced that myself, though not for a very long time. As a teenager with better-than-average psychic ability raised by parents who were obsessed with ever worst case scenario in the world, I used to worry about things constantly and as a result was an incredibly unlucky person. One of the reasons I tried magick as a teen was to deal with what felt like this constant bad luck.

What I found is the remedy that I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Formal magical practice teaches you to turn on and off the connection between your thoughts and the macrocosmic world. You turn it on when you are deliberately doing magick, but keep it off otherwise. This is hard to explain, but after about a year or so of ceremonial practice and meditation you get to where you can just feel it, and will it one way or the other. It solved the problem with my luck and turned everything around.

With this division in place, I don't need to worry about worrying - which seems to be a real possibility when trying to police your thoughts to the degree recommended by the video. I do try to avoid rumination, worry, and catastrophizing, childhood conditioning notwithstanding. But as a formal magical practitioner I can control when my thoughts are connected and when they are not. I can also amplify my intents using energy work, calling on spirits to assist me, and so forth. Because I practice magick - the full art of it.

Long ago I pointed out that I would never tell a person who was committed to The Secret that it doesn't work. It absolutely can. But if you've tried it and it doesn't work as well as you want, practicing magick will make your results better. Magick goes far beyond the basic idea and takes you into an optimized, fully developed version of imprinting your intents onto the world. This is a truly exoteric assertion - remove the secrecy from magick so that it can be more universally practiced without all the obfuscation, and thereby make all of our lives better.