In brief, what are your thoughts or experiences on magick?
A state of mind I’ve been used to for many years.
That it doesn’t come from thin air. It’s in your blood.
It’s a way of looking at interconnectivity.
A responsibility. Yes. It is response ability.
All of these are true. Is there a mechanism by which we can effectively influence other people? Always influence them in accordance with our will?
We call the art of social influence diplomacy. If we accept the definition of diplomacy as the art of social influence, then are people the only things we need to influence? Where do we draw the line between physical activity and social activity?
One may have potency with respect. Oh, indeed. In fact, existence requires potency and persistence requires strength, energy.
Everything we do is physical. Our eyes and muscles react when we first meet someone. Our brains take in the memory, like planting a seed. Well, we plant this seed in more things than just other people’s experience, and the exploration and understanding of this is sorcery.
How many things in reality are without any form of agency? How many things have no influence or impact on anything? How do we know intelligence when we see it? It’s an important question as far as understanding sorcery goes.
Is intelligence the ability to express behavior? If so, does anything exist that lacks behavior? Is intelligence the ability to choose or change behavior? If that is true, then does anything remain unchanging in its behavior without exception? If the definition is unclear, should we determine that there is no such thing as intelligence?
Intelligence can only be measured by a bias so we could deduce there is no such thing as intelligence. Though that would deny experience as we report ourselves to be able to learn and reason.
The practice of sorcery is dependent on the understanding that the world is an intelligent system, and because it is an intelligent system it is subject to influence just as we are.
I don’t believe in freewill. Many do not, but the practice of magick of any kind presupposes the existence of free will. So I will need to use it as a working premise.
When practicing sorcery, what is it that the sorcerer is offering to the universe in order to get control? The sorcerer may not make any offerings. They often instead learn practices that are perhaps similar to stage magick, but with the intended audience being the world itself. Make some part of the world believe it is a certain way, and it begins to act like it. Offerings are really more of a practice taken up by priests.
You are tricking the universe in a way? Yes. It is as subject to being tricked as you are, but there is another side to sorcery. There are various bodies of agreements or laws that any given school of sorcery utilizes in its understanding of the universe and those goals they would seek to pursue through sorcery. So it has both a coercive and a cooperative aspect to it.
In that way it is like science, or lawyering? Sort of like lawyering, a form of cosmic power brokering.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~