The Study of Why Magic Works

Cholita pulled another trick on me.

I can't describe it, and I'm not sure she'd even be aware of it, but in fact she showed me up big time.

And I consoled myself by pondering a back and forth conversation in this very subreddit where I had to admit that when it comes to defining what is "real magic" and what is not, things get very confusing when it comes to witches.

They can turn total obvious nonsense, such as an evil male con artist would sell to others as "Enochian Magick", into the real thing.

Once in a while. So don't anyone get excited unless all you are after is human attention, and thus even a single success is good enough.

That's the Asian model. Where a single accidental success, such as visiting God or Hell, is enough to gain you fame and money and groupies galore. Especially if you dress up funny and find a foreign country in which to sell your make believe, where they're ignorant of the actual doings of your cult type.

Just for example, Daoists are as bad as it gets in Asia. Exploiting women and children, and dominating entire neighborhoods with the kind of religious leadership that ends up causing people to drink cool aide and die for the cult.

It's also remarkably untrue. People read Daoist writings and pretend to be inspired by the truth of them, and yet if you actually learn real magic to the point that you can gaze at the very structure of reality, you realize that Daoism is total nonsense.

There's not a bit of truth in it! The whole thing is designed to appeal to greedy, angry men.

To lure them with the promise of human rewards. Money, fame, respect. All for doing pretty much nothing but repeating the same nonsense that tricked people in the past by providing fake inspiration.

But that's nothing new. A "Rinpoche" is one of the most loathsome con artists in the realms of modern magical systems and religions, and yet commands some kind of strange Hollywood style respect among westerners, even being shown as godlike beings in science fiction fantasy type films such as "The Golden Child".

The west is really stupid when it comes to stuff from the east, to the point that it's common to hear among asian martial art systems, perhaps exotic forms of kung fu, that westerners just can't "get it".

That they're incapable of actually learning that art.

Naturally westerners completely twist that idea around, to make them even more want to pretend to master that unfathomable Asian mysticism. They interpret that claim that westerners can't "get it", to mean that it's so far beyond our primitive scientific minds that you'd have to be REALLY cool to understand it.

So after being clued in by an Asian that the whole kung fu system is total make believe, they interpret it to be the opposite.

Instead of realizing the Asian is telling them that they have this all wrong, and don't see through it the way Asians do, they instead misunderstand to the point that they actually believe that form of Kung Fu contains magic.

In Japan they make a joke about it and say that Westerners can't "smell the air".

It's a fart joke. Westerners are so stupid that even in an elevator, they can't figure out who farted.

It's always very trying to discuss the truth about the horrible extent to which fake Asian magic dominates our western world, and for no good reason, so I'll switch to something we do understand.

TV preachers.

If you live in the USA, you know how evil those guys are.

But in Korea, they don't "get it".

The roles are reversed. Koreans just don't have a good sense of what incredibly bad men TV preachers can be.

They actually believe they're healing people on stage, using the power of Jesus.

And if you try to point out that all the TV preachers want is more donations, they're unphased. They just don't see what's obvious to those who grew up with those monstrous people on TV.

In fact, that's part of the lure for naive Koreans too! They want to get in on that donation action.

We're so brainwashed by pretend magic and religion that we actually believe there's something respectable about "Enlightened Masters". If told they're all con artists, even the highest Zen Master or Dali Lama, we hear something else.

We hear that maybe they're like the religious leader who got seduced by the young woman joining his mega church, and made a single mistake of giving in to her irresistable seductions.

And tell ourselves it's not a regular pattern of abuse.

So what if the Dali Lama french kisses little boys?

It's just a cultural difference!

In our thought process we allow that perhaps these Asian "enlightened" masters have simply made some human mistakes, but otherwise their status as having a higher understanding of reality than we do, is still true.

But it's not!

Unfortunately, for that to become obvious to people they have to be able to directly SEE, into the nature of reality.

That's why our specific magical system is all about "seeing". Which as it occurs, causes reality itself to become fungible. So that there's no mistaking something odd is going on.

And as don Juan tells us from time to time in the books, once you are a seer you don't have to be anything else.

No more rituals, spells, or egotistical "Man of Knowledge" boy scout rules of behavior.

You get to know what's really going on, behind the scenes where reality is actually constructed.

I have to tell you, it's a somewhat perplexing view of things. And CERTAINLY is not even a tiny bit "cozy" or comforting.

We're so screwed up you can't believe it! So very confused about what reality actually is.

In fact, one of the biggest puzzles seers face, namely how is it possible you just walked through a solid wall into another world, and there's no physical consequences in terms of bumps on your forehead or dents in the plasterboard from unknowingly banging against the wall as you stumbled into a dream without realizing it, becomes obvious.

You weren't hurt while walking into a vision playing on a solid wall, because there actually is no solid wall there.

But you have to see that with your own eyes, and not find a big bruise on your forehead in the morning after extreme cases where you literally took a running leap, to pass through that solid wall.

All because a window materialized, and you could see another world on the other side. And feel a real breeze coming into your darkroom.

How is that possible?

When you can finally sustain Silent Knowledge, which is called "seeing" in the early books, the answers to that become obvious.

Except, you can't possibly explain it back home in the western mindset.

I don't want to give any credit to Asian thinking here, because they not only don't understand it also, but don't even know that quandary exists.

Their social programming is much worse than ours. The Japanese actually commit suicide if their social status is "damaged" by some silly failure to complete an ordinary work task.

And the Chinese will take revenge on you big time, if you're a computer engineer and have to point out a serious flaw in a design, as a visiting expert on that technology going to a Chinese country from the USA. What I often do for a living.

Three times revenge is what the Chinese will take, before they back off.

Just for example, a Chinese man once designed an IR light source ring for a camera lens, which could be used to see in the dark invisibly. It was just a ring of LEDs on a round circuit board with a hole in it.

But the leds kept burning out, even threatening to burst into flames and burn down the building.

A rather serious design flaw.

It boiled down to the selection of 2 tiny "resistor" components, and was easily resolved by reading the data sheet for the parts being used.

A simple mistake. Just change two resistor values.

But for pointing that out, I got attacked 3 times by the engineer who had made that mistake.

In the west, that would simply be an "Ooops... My bad. I suppose you really do have to read the manual."

But not in a Chinese country. That was a declaration of war!

So please, don't misunderstand. There's nothing respectable about ANY other foreign country's understanding of reality.

The entire world is completely confused, by the "glitter" of the real.

Which you get to see directly, with your own eyes, through "seeing".

Where you can literally use your palm to explore how "space" is created from the emanations.

But couldn't for the life of you, explain what that means to anyone else.

THAT is the nature of reality. It's impossible to either describe, or explain. And yet, you can see clearly at times how it works.

Oddly, people are inspired by Daoist writings which do nothing but "explain" some imaginary version of reality, where you get to pretend to be superior just by trying to understand the words they wrote.

People obsessed with such writings are completely hopeless, because in fact they're just like the Korean person who can't see through TV preachers, because in fact that Korean person wants the same thing the preachers do.

To be the guy standing on the stage "healing people" in exchange for donations from a huge audience.

Things are very very screwed up in the world of magic and religion.

And yet, witches break all the rules from time to time. And make "crap magic" actually work.

To produce what they want. Which doesn't always make sense, or even seem important to me.

Except that, they can make nonsense actually produce real magic.

But so can chanting Buddhist monks, all huddled on pads on the floor to worship a "master" sitting on his own Buddha throne looking down at them, declaring his egolessness in lectures. He resides over the ceremony, and in fact when visitors come to that temple and sit with the chanting monks, many find that the whole thing does in fact "work".

Maybe sitting there with their eyes closed during the chanting, they have a vision of "The golden Buddha".

Or if you prefer, Jesus comes to the praying man and tells him, "It's ok to be gay. Come, lay with me! You're forgiven."

Who could deny that's a magical moment?

Sometimes, magic simply works. Even if it's totally bogus, and born of nothing but greed and sociopathic behavior.

How can that be?

It's how reality works! There actually isn't any.

It's all built out of where your awareness focuses, causing related tiny bits of information to also glow, until the sum total of all of the emanations "humming" with feelings creates the illusion of a real world in which you are living.

To make things even stranger, each new reality comes with a complete "history".

How long you lived there, what you do, who is your beautiful wife, and here is your beautiful car.

You get the whole Del Taco "Fiesta Pack" when you assemble a new reality.

The idea that it's just an aberration, even if real, and you're still "you" somewhere in space and time, is a confusion.

Thus exploring "cyclic beings" using sorcery is somewhat dangerous because there's always the possibility you'll forget where you came from. Fall for the shiny new Fiesta Pack and forget it's not real.

Carlos was even afraid to pick up a newspaper and read it, in an alien world. After Carol Tiggs reminded him.

You can explore that in sleeping dreaming where you get the idea it's just a dream and you ought to look at your hands, but what's going on is just too real to interrupt. So you toy with continuing to "rescue" some odd kitten you found, not wanting to just drop the whole thing, look at your hands, and get to work.

We are all VERY confused about what's actually going on.

But there's hope. And it's nice to know that in the end, "seeing" saved the day for the new seers.

They gazed past all the confusion of reality, and looked to understand WHY magic sometimes works, and why other times it doesn't.

Why can some witches use the most delusional of magic, but produce astonishing results?

Why are some prayers answered?

Why can chanting Buddhist monks led by a seriously bad guy "master", actually cause a visitor to have a divine vision just by being in the room?

I'd even add, why can our practitioners break the laws of physics from time to time?

And that right there, is our sorcery!

It's about the why, not the what.

It's not about fame, or money, or groupie sex.

It's about why magic even occurs at all, in a world which seems so solid and real.

If magic exists for real, then what we understand about reality has to be incomplete.

Unfortunately our inclination is to figure you just need to "add something" to your understanding.

And then you can exploit that addition, to get the fame and money you deserve as a magic man.

But that fails to explain why you can violate the laws of physics in the process of practicing your magic.

A witchcraft induced magical success, such as receiving that check in the mail you so badly needed to pay rent, is entirely different from levitating off the floor by 2 feet.

That's a "causality violation". Seemingly an entirely different topic.

And yet it's not. It's the very thing sorcery studies.

HOW reality comes to be.

HOW individual magical events can take place.

It is in fact a single topic.

And how to repeat it reliably, is what the new seers are all about.

Not about "how to get more stuff" that way.

Just about "how that's even possible".

And it comes down to what we always forget.

Sorcery is all about "the mastery of intent".

About mastering the ability to manipulate how reality is formed in the first place.

Once you start to see that, a witchcraft success story is no different than ridiculous Buddhist monk chanting causing actual visions to form in the minds of visitors.

Magic can happen anywhere. By any method.

Because in fact, reality isn't as real as we've been forced to believe.

And unless you are an attention seeker, a random success producing magic, from time to time, isn't good enough.

You want to understand the process. Of why magic works sometimes, and why it doesn't others.

Without having to pick up obviously false religious delusions in the process.