The "M" Word

The “M” Word

I’ve mentioned Magic a lot in these past blog posts and even in the item descriptions in my store. We all have our own vague idea of what magic is. I want to discuss it a little, and clear up any misconceptions people might hold.

We’ll start with where any aspiring magician usually starts: Oneself. When learning how to do ceremony, if you want to start creating change, the best start (both easiest and beneficial to the learning process) would be to work change in your actions or thought processes.

This leads me to a first part of my definition: Magic is shaping consciousness in accordance to will. Your consciousness is the easiest consciousness to affect. You are, after all, the one experiencing it and being influenced by all your subconscious ticks.

As one deepens in their practice, they develop a better connection to their subconscious. They learn ways to communicate with it. How does one communicate on a subconscious level? Symbols and imagery! Smells! Sounds! Through mediation and working with a set of symbols, you teach yourself how to communicate with that “hidden self” of your subconscious. Ritual and ceremony are powerful tools to do just that. So is shamanic journeying (a term I will explore in an upcoming blog post).

This leads into an interesting article I read (linked HERE). It discussed how different tests have shown that patients who knowingly receive a placebo can still experience the placebo effect. One of the patients suffered from IBS for years. She was given a sugar pill that the folks running the test explained was a sugar pill. It still helped her have a drastic change in health for the better. The improvements stop when she stopped taking the sugar pills.

The article suggests that this could be expectation and conditioning. I would like to suggest that they are, in a way, correct, but with different language. Pills serve as imagery for medicine. We learn from a young age that they are what medicine, what feeling better looks like. Taking that “medicine” signals to our subconscious that we want to get better, that we will get better. The Subconscious works with our body to make it work.

This is also known as magic.

I would like to suggest another definition of magic: The controlled use of the Placebo Effect. Before we continue in this train of thought, I believe that one can easily get hung up on the idea that saying magic is connected to the Placebo Effect is the same as saying it’s fake. That’s not what I’m implying. I’m saying that looking at the Placebo Effect as nothing, as fake, is a logical misstep. Yes, the medicine given as a placebo does not contain the constituents of the intended medicine, so the medicine is not real. In a sense, when one makes an amulet of prosperity, the amulet is not the work you have to do to accrue wealth. Yet, it helps you be aware of, as well as generally find situations to make that money. Same with the placebo. It accesses a different way to heal that has nothing to do with the chemical constituents of the intended medicine.

What if we figured out a way to access this effect? What if we could use placebos as a way to talk to your subconscious and have it effect your body in a benevolent way? This is the beginning of magic.

Note I said beginning. There is so much more. There are “vital energies” that we interact with every day that help shape our actions and world. There are ways to branch out and affect the consciousnesses of others (human and otherwise). There are other disembodied consciousnesses to interact with (that will be a fun and philosophical discussion). There is information to access that would otherwise be inaccessible.

In all of these definitions, never do I mention the breaking of known laws of physics. That is not magic. That is science fiction and fantasy… at least, as far as I know. Indeed, magic works more through unlikely coincidence. This leads me to another fun definition of magic I believe I first read in some works by John Michael Greer: Magic is the art of coincidence.

We’ll continue this discussion next week, getting into consciousness, energy, and Reiki. If you have any questions, or anything that you’d like to add, please, feel free to comment. I’d love to hear from you and learn more about how you define magic.

Thanks for reading.

Until next week….

- The Green Mountain Mage