[Help] How Should I Approach Magic in a Scientific World?

[LeChiHao]

Hello everyone!

What do you think about magic? I feel it doesn’t really connect directly to real life. When using it, the results are not clear or fast like scientific techniques, or like the fantasy magic in comics. So how should I approach it? Is it just a set of rigid rules?

Honestly, I don’t even know exactly what I want to say here, because I have complicated feelings about magic. If anyone understands the difficulties I face when trying to approach it, please give me some advice.

 

[StandingByGodot]

The thing is, there's no thing as such as a "scientific technique" when it comes for magic, besides "scientific" aesthetics perhaps. Science it's not about proving things or what's possible necessarily, but about observing and cataloging recurrent phenomenons across "our physical world" in order to facilitate decision making and predictions; but matters of solutions to problems lies in the endevour of engineering, and when it comes to magic, you can reverse engineer its processes and understand how it could work. It also can involve thinking about yourself and your world in relation to that in a different way, which makes conceding of changes more easily.

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,

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and

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posts give some excellent pointers on the matter.

I also struggled at the beginning for a while to understand how all this stuff could even work, and absorbing the idea of a dream-like universe cut trough it completely. Besides, it also involve to recognize that your imagination is the fountainhead of all this stuff, because important part of magic is bringing imagination to life, and exploring perspectives. Think about it: If you entered a lucid dreaming, asserted it as your baseline world, and never came back, what would happen? I would say that the most important part for me was self validating this stuff for myself first, and doing low effort sessions to get the momentum going. Here's some helpful sources which provides great explanations of adopting a philosophical mindset tied in with magic:

• The now inactive
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  forum was what got me into magic at first. It posits the idea of perceiving the world as your own dream-like structure as a basis for your practice.
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  is also another inactive place with great pointers by community, focusing more heavily on the basic philosophical ideas of a purely subjective world.
• Lastly,
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  by metaphysical author John Paolucci is particularly great in providing you the information to confirm by yourself about your true self, and how this realization gives you the conviction necessary to practice magic without the burden of any "external proof" beyond your own knowledge.

Most of this stuff, you would notice, unite philosophy and magic, and are mainly founded on nondualism at the core, but you actually only need to understand the actual "background" of the situation, and then go ahead, which provides the logic behind the ideas, so it makes sense as you go along. Lastly,

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by this guy gives a lot of information, including in creating syncronicities and a template for magickal rituals, as well as further simple explanations of those FAQs that tend to arise when contemplating magic while having the materialistic conditioning debris get in the way. This is at least the stuff that helped me ultimately, so i hope it can also serve someone else along their own paths, providing the remaining information to fill the gaps.

 

[juniperGria]

You would probably quite like Alchemy. I would look into that. And perhaps Aggripas three books of occult philosophy. These would take you down a route slightly less practical and more theory heavy. Aggripas work is good as it explains why you're doing things by teaching you correspondences, and laws of the universe so that you can see how these take effect in the "real world" Perhaps also take a look at the Picatrix. VERY dense and somewhat difficult to read but if you get a good translation and dedicate some time to it you should be fine. A STUNNING explanation of astrological magic and ancient science regarding how the celestial bodies impact our everyday lives

 

[Morell]

Hello everyone!

What do you think about magic? I feel it doesn’t really connect directly to real life. When using it, the results are not clear or fast like scientific techniques, or like the fantasy magic in comics. So how should I approach it? Is it just a set of rigid rules?

Honestly, I don’t even know exactly what I want to say here, because I have complicated feelings about magic. If anyone understands the difficulties I face when trying to approach it, please give me some advice.

Take a different angle: How do people in comics or fantasy world get to understand magic? How much do they know about how it works?

Usually they do not. They barely find what works and go with it without seeking explanation...

 

[Aldebaran]

Hello everyone!

What do you think about magic? I feel it doesn’t really connect directly to real life. When using it, the results are not clear or fast like scientific techniques, or like the fantasy magic in comics. So how should I approach it? Is it just a set of rigid rules?

Honestly, I don’t even know exactly what I want to say here, because I have complicated feelings about magic. If anyone understands the difficulties I face when trying to approach it, please give me some advice.

Science was once a method. It has become a priesthood.
What is presented today as “science” is rarely the open-ended process of inquiry it pretends to be. It is a sanctioned narrative, administered by credentialed intermediaries whose authority is protected not by evidence, but by taboo. The lab coat has replaced the robe, the journal has replaced scripture, and consensus has replaced truth. One no longer asks whether something is correct—only whether it has been approved.

Magick and Science have no need to be compatible. Science stands like an ostrich in open ground with their head in a hole saying 'I cant prove this so it does not exist'. Magick is the landscape. It is what is when you take your head out of the hole and stop listening to the echo chamber of the masses.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

IMO, the simplest way of looking at magic from an objective point of view is using intent to engineer coincidences, or, how to be lucky on purpose.

Everything else is the model that you use to implement this, and it's worth pointing out that magical systems can be massively contradictory of each other, and still achieve the same amount of success.

I went even further, and attempted to author a truly scientific explanation of magic. As you can see from, for example, @Aldebaran 's post above, this is not a popular idea

You should investigate different magical systems and see which one appeals to you most. You could also do a lot worse than buy Alan Moore & Steve Moore's 'The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic', but just remember that Moore's system is not the only one

 

[Durward]

If the science aspect interests you, there are a lot of successful studies and reports on distant intent, healing, mind reading / telepathy, psychokinesis / telekinesis, astral projection, lucid dreaming, near death experiences, out of body experiences, and more.
There is a huge difference between what people blindly believe in, and what is real or what can actually be done.

My favorite thing to say is: Prove it.

Try not to confuse the mental health issues of the popularity crowds, the fake beliefs of many religions, and the delusions of many authors, with reality or actual magic.

Some practitioners are wishful thinkers and have severe ego issues. Living in a fake Harry Pothead world and making claims doesn't give them any powers, and most of them can't manage to escape from the wet paper bag that is their life.

So, you simply approach all of this with a healthy amount of skepticism and keep it real, while learning about all the brain scans and tests that have been done for a very long time, and that mainstream science is bent on covering up.

You never have to accept the word of someone else, or the writings of someone who likely had untreated syphilis. There is a lot of garbage and disagreement on all subjects.

You can just surrender your common sense and critical thinking and dive in, trying things out blindly, or you look for the people who actually can do things and read what they wrote or what others say about them. There are the "can do's" and the "wish I could fantasy minded"...
You might be surprised at the 'Can Do' crowd, and how much they don't even know about what they do.

The bottom line for me is, there are skilled people who can, and that doesn't mean that others can even learn to do what they do. Energetic configurations, brain neural networks, and many other things decide what people can and can't do, not what they choose to practice.
Not everyone is meant to be a practitioner. It is up to people to find their own skill set.

 

[AlfrunGrima]

What do you think about magic? I feel it doesn’t really connect directly to real life. When using it, the results are not clear or fast like scientific techniques, or like the fantasy magic in comics. So how should I approach it? Is it just a set of rigid rules?

Magic is connecting directly to life, but not so measurable like in science because a lot effects are present in the unconcious and/or in other planes. Magic weaves, in most cases, a web of connections instead of direct causation. (Although, magic can often enough take a direct and less expected route, the path of the lowest resitance) For most people it is helpful to keep a diary about not only their magic actions, but also about the things that happen in life, about the feelings, the people you meet, the conversations you had, the things that you've read and that you find highly inspirationable or remarkable. After doing that for a time, you wil see that magic can act very directly but very different from what you expected. Why is this? Record keeping opens up the mind for possibilities that one did not expect or see before. It gives one the opportunity to discover if the internal personal story, belief and behaviour are matching with the desired outcomes. Without records some connections get lost because you are less in observational mode. In the beginning you will see connections when there aren't and the other way around. That's part of mind training, part of learning to observe from out of other states of mind. In some people this develops fast because they are more skilled in seeing the world around them from an alpha state instead of the normal beta state. This change their filters, their field, their ecperiences, and their personal myth. Record keeping and observing is IMHO a magic and highly valuable act. Record keeping is an artform itself.

Magic is less predictable. I suspect for a little bit that the low predictability is the thing that bothers you. You get more predictable results if you are doing it more often, if you keep records and if you work with a system that fits you. The latter is a matter of experimentation and can be quite fun! Nothing wrong with it if you have trying systems as a hobby, nothing wrong with seeing it as a hobby in the first place and not being bloody serious. For a lot practitioners it becomes or it is much more than this, which is beautiful and gives a lot of richness to their life. If you would open a topic about how magic over time enriched their life, you will read really beautiful stories. I think such stories can be a real inspiration and I hope we all can inspire each other. Inspiration is at help always because magic is an artform.

Magic and science are two separate currents with each a different kind of communication. We are so used that only the things you can literally count or the things where you have picture of, are true. But magic is true in another way. There are however good books about the science behind magic. Think of Dean Radin, think of @Robert Ramsay and think of the body of information that Jung gave us. The journal of @aviaf gives a lot of insight in the latter, that is a really good read to start with.

I hope my thoughts about this are adding things that being worth, I wish you good luck with it.

 

[StandingByGodot]

How do people in comics or fantasy world get to understand magic? How much do they know about how it works?

Really good way to see it, because this is what you would do anyway. Even if you read a "scientific" book of magic with procedures and explanations, it would still be "fiction" in a sense; You're not experiencing anything, and you do not know directly if what they're saying it's true, because it's after you go ahead and do it that you actually change perspective and see what happens for yourself. There's no structural difference between, say for example, a novel, and a book of the thelema, because despite being different content and subjects, it still just text, a bunch of laid out ideas; it's what you use those ideas for what matters ultimately.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

There are however good books about the science behind magic. Think of Dean Radin, think of @Robert Ramsay and think of the body of information that Jung gave us. The journal of @aviaf gives a lot of insight in the latter, that is a really good read to start with.

Well I am flattered to be mentioned in such lustrous company!

And, yes, at its heart, magic is about experience, and like many experiences, it cannot be adequately described. Experiences need to be experienced
And you will know it when it happens

 

[Durward]

How do people in comics or fantasy world get to understand magic? How much do they know about how it works?

Lol, yes... I was a big fan of Doctor Strange, Dreamweaver, and other fantasy stories, and I liked mythology of all kinds.
I did interest myself in that comic book question.

The character of Dr. Strange was inspired by the radio show Chandu the Magician, a popular 1930s show about a man who traveled to India and learned white magic.

The character was also influenced by existing magic-based characters such as Mandrake the Magician. The "College of Magic" (Tibet): In the comic's lore, Mandrake studied for years in a 4,000-year-old school of magic located in the Himalayan mountains. This institution trained philosophers and magicians in the mastery of "the greatest power in the universe," which the strip defined as the human mind.

Thus the parallels with real practices and studies.

Stan Lee and Steve Ditko also used certain books about Tibetan mysticism, such as Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye (1956).
Ditko took inspiration for the "Eye of Agamotto" from the "Eyes of Buddha" symbol found in Nepal.
The comics often referenced or were inspired by real, historical magical grimoires, including the Key of Solomon.
In the 1970s, writer Steve Englehart took over the series and was an enthusiastic student of mysticism and Magick, bringing in deeper references to Lovecraftian horror and occult philosophy.

Post automatically merged: Tuesday at 4:34 PM

And yes, I realize that

Lobsang Rampa (1910–1981) was the pseudonym of Cyril Henry Hoskin, an English plumber’s son from Devon who achieved worldwide fame as the supposed author of The Third Eye (1956), a bestseller describing life as a Tibetan lama. While claiming to be a Tibetan monk possessed by a spirit, investigations revealed he had never visited Tibet...

 

[Keldan]

Magick is great to me, and it connects directly to real life. Results can come quickly, within 1-4 days or take longer when it’s something more complicated. I don’t experience magick as a set of rigid rules, to me it’s more like a craft you develop through practice. That said, other systems, traditions, and frameworks do come with their own rules especially if you choose to work within them.

The difficulties someone new to magick are facing is that everything is intangible. If you haven’t yet developed the ability to see, feel, hear, or any other abilities that make you perceive what’s normally invisible become more tangible and visible, it’s going to be hard. And it’s hard to tell whether something is working, what it’s doing, how it works, or even if anything happened at all.

You can approach magick in a scientific way, but the difference is that you need a really solid understanding of the practice to use it in this way. In another thread, a forum member and I shared that we ran magick based experiments related to scientific fields and got good results. So yes, instead of relying on machines in those specific scientific areas, we used magick.

 

[Durward]

attempted to author a truly scientific explanation of magic.

Which of your works is this? Did you publish it?

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Which of your works is this? Did you publish it?

yes, but I'm not allowed to advertise on the forum.

 

[Morell]

Lol, yes... I was a big fan of Doctor Strange, Dreamweaver, and other fantasy stories, and I liked mythology of all kinds.
I did interest myself in that comic book question.

Thus the parallels with real practices and studies.

I learned about Dr. Strange through MCU, but I loved the movie. The contrast of a well educated doctor and materialist scientist going to occult school wanting to learn magic was quite well handled, honestly. The change of thinking that had to happen was somehow described there, I would say to acceptable degree, because these internal changes are internal, invisible, so there is no easy way to portray them.

I could actually recommend fantasy stories like that for reprograming mind for magic potential. Movies are especially good for it. Our internal animal (subconscious mind) doesn't understand that movie is not real and as it sees magic to work, it becomes way more ready to accept it to work.

 

[LeChiHao]

If the science aspect interests you, there are a lot of successful studies and reports on distant intent, healing, mind reading / telepathy, psychokinesis / telekinesis, astral projection, lucid dreaming, near death experiences, out of body experiences, and more.
There is a huge difference between what people blindly believe in, and what is real or what can actually be done.

My favorite thing to say is: Prove it.

Try not to confuse the mental health issues of the popularity crowds, the fake beliefs of many religions, and the delusions of many authors, with reality or actual magic.

Some practitioners are wishful thinkers and have severe ego issues. Living in a fake Harry Pothead world and making claims doesn't give them any powers, and most of them can't manage to escape from the wet paper bag that is their life.

So, you simply approach all of this with a healthy amount of skepticism and keep it real, while learning about all the brain scans and tests that have been done for a very long time, and that mainstream science is bent on covering up.

You never have to accept the word of someone else, or the writings of someone who likely had untreated syphilis. There is a lot of garbage and disagreement on all subjects.

You can just surrender your common sense and critical thinking and dive in, trying things out blindly, or you look for the people who actually can do things and read what they wrote or what others say about them. There are the "can do's" and the "wish I could fantasy minded"...
You might be surprised at the 'Can Do' crowd, and how much they don't even know about what they do.

The bottom line for me is, there are skilled people who can, and that doesn't mean that others can even learn to do what they do. Energetic configurations, brain neural networks, and many other things decide what people can and can't do, not what they choose to practice.
Not everyone is meant to be a practitioner. It is up to people to find their own skill set.

Do you mean that not many people can really use magic, because magic is only used by those who are lucky, and many people who are not lucky just deceive themselves with their ‘fake magic’? So, saying that I am a man who wants to use magic to improve your life is wrong, because I am not a man who is lucky!

 

[StandingByGodot]

Do you mean that not many people can really use magic, because magic is only used by those who are lucky, and many people who are not lucky just deceive themselves with their ‘fake magic’?

No? How does this even work? What is "fake magic"? If it can produce essentially the same outcome, how do you distinguish between the two? What's your definition of magic? The only requirement to do magic (or to do anything, period) it's to be aware. Can you point me to someone who doesn't have an awareness? No? =) Then everyone and their grandmas can do it, including you! Hooray!

So, saying that I am a man who wants to use magic to improve your life is wrong, because I am not a man who is lucky!

But what is 'luck'? If Magic, being a subjective phenomenon (not that it's "fake" or make believe, but that the changes only concern to what's within our awareness/our experience) and a personal art that one's develop to alter outcomes, then how the concept of "luck" play on all this? If your current experience it's of someone that it's "unlucky", and then you do a ritual to be "lucky" (changing state), then what does that tell you about any seemingly random events?

I suggest seeing magic as something volitional (of choice, to will, selection, adopt, assert, intent, to decide, to control destiny) rather than something uncertain, which is not ("karma", subconscious, "luck", etc; we don't actually experience those things, we just re-contextualize situations as such, which reinforce their occurrence in our lives).

At the beginning it can be certainly underwhelming at first, so if you're open to suggestions to get you started at once... Read

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(for background), and do at least one of

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exercises for a while to get you into practice and test the waters, and then go from there. Really, from your current perspective you may not understand how it could be possible, and that's why you get the context of who you truly are, and then get to action. Otherwise, with no practice, you're just recycling thoughts of your present perspective, "thinking about what could happen" will do nothing, it's getting the matters settled and doing it that makes the difference.

Aside - There's nothing wrong with improving your life with magic, don't be silly. In fact, that's actually the point, isn't it? Would you get in some endevour that won't produce an experience you would like to have? Treat this as you treat living your day to day, really. Bat it out of the park, go wild! Have fun! Magic it's there to shape your world at your liking, and nobody could stop you (unless you agree to it, of course). Explore, because that's essentially what you're doing: Exploring your own mind. It's a great opportunity to actually see life as it's trully is, to see the fact and decide for yourself.

 

[Durward]

Do you mean that not many people can really use magic, because magic is only used by those who are lucky, and many people who are not lucky just deceive themselves with their ‘fake magic’? So, saying that I am a man who wants to use magic to improve your life is wrong, because I am not a man who is lucky!

I wouldn't call it luck, but you never know if luck is actually a type of energy or configuration, or even destiny, so I suppose it could be included.
What I am saying, is that certain people are skilled because have the correct NATURAL configuration of energies to be able to perform or to transfer what they want to do into reality.
Compare it to long distance runners, not everyone can do it, but many people can train long and hard enough to do it, and some people can do it without training so hard, they are naturals or skilled people.
If you were born with bad knees, you will never accomplish the long distance running, but you might be capable of other things, or skilled at other things. So you have to figure out what you can and can't do, and how you want to approach training your own type of skill.

 

[Swampdweller900]

The problem is your premise. Science doesn't know how consciousness or the placebo effect work, either. But they seem to be repeatable under certain conditions. But we genuinely don't know exactly why some things make people lose consciousness and not others.

Does that invalidate study of those things? Of course not. Science is a process. It's not a collection of settled fact.

Magic is poorly studied, often due to bias on the part of people who study it rarely, and only to "debunk" it, starting with a bias against it. Plenty of studies have happened that prove psi abilities not only exist, but that their effects are statistically significant and repeatable - if you believe in them. That last part is usually the critical factor that scientists neglect when replicating studies, then get null results and claim they did the experiment right (to other people also looking to "debunk" something and ignoring the obvious error) and it's just one more example of bias and subjectivity on the part of scientists.

I can debunk the sun is real by doing experiments meant to observe the sun at midnight every night. Doesn't mean it's correct, it means I have a bias that prevents me from doing the study in a way that is how an expert in the field of knowing how the sun works would also tell me is going to yield observations.

Magic, which is the power of intent to shape our world and experience in it, is very much real. And you don't need to call it magic to see the effects. But not knowing the method by which some people focus and use their intent, science only searches for slight of hand or charlatanism because that's the only thing they know how to observe.

Did you know that 100 scientists signed a scathing letter about the Theory of Relatively, demanding that Einstein retract such a clearly preposterous piece of fantasy? That's the scientific consensus for you - human emotion and subjectivity. They were all prominent researchers who were wrong AF. There's a lit review from which you can start.

 

[h4rrow]

Do you mean that not many people can really use magic, because magic is only used by those who are lucky, and many people who are not lucky just deceive themselves with their ‘fake magic’? So, saying that I am a man who wants to use magic to improve your life is wrong, because I am not a man who is lucky!

Actually I think there's an awesome truth in here: magic is only used by those who are lucky.

So, yes, if you use magic and aren't lucky there's probably an amount of 'fake' going on (or the practitioner really appreciates struggle?)—likewise, using magic would necessarily mean becoming 'a man who is lucky'. Moreover, magic would be finding out that such a thing is possible at all.