Theories of Magic: Magical Gravity

Posted by: Thexalon 7 years, 9 months ago

To recap what we've covered so far: Reality is not proveably mechanistic, that is responding only to physically perceivable changes. It seems to respond to perception of reality. Those perceptions can then be changed by changing a person's belief about what they perceive, and this is the task of magic. Some beliefs are harder to maintain then others.

The next stage of our exploration is about what the range of difficulties of belief does to affect our magic, and how to turn that into a process for effectively transforming our beliefs and by extension the universe as a whole. To do this, we are now straying from the established literature on the subject into some new (to the best of this author's knowledge) concepts.

Magical Gravity

The concept of magical gravity (invented by this post, as best as I can tell) comes out of the question of a difficulty of belief. If some ideas are harder to believe than others, then it naturally follows that those harder-to-believe ideas will require more mental energy. And mental energy requires physical support, such as a full belly and a good nights' sleep. Thus, just as a body slowly becomes exhausted from work or athletic exertion, so must the mind eventually retreat to a lower-energy state. And this creates the gravitational effect: You can fight it by taking good care of yourself, but eventually your mind must rest.

This, at first glance, makes magic impossibly ineffective: If you engage in some magic, and push your mind to a new difficult-to-beleve state where some desirable effect is part of the universe (e.g. the cancer gets better), but eventually you tire out and fall back to easier beliefs, then the effect of your magic disappears, and it will be just like you hadn't bothered. And indeed, an inexperienced magician starting from a belief of deterministic scientific atheism will likely encounter this problem if they try to engage in magic, confirm their atheism, and conclude that magic is impossible.

But in this problem lies the solution. The goal is to go from your mundane existence with easily-maintained beliefs, to a difficult mental state where beliefs are confusing and in flux, and then push yourself to the point where, when you fall back to a lower-energy mental state, you have a different set of easily-maintained beliefs. In other words, we start from easy consistency, push ourselves to the point where we're dealing with contradictory beliefs and challenges to what we know, and ensure that the challenges to what we used to know are victorious in convincing ourselves of the change, then move to a new easy consistency.

Climbing Over the Hump

This process of moving from easy consistency to a very challenging inconsistency to a new easy consistency creates a basic design for magical rituals:

Preparation: You will be most effective if your body and mind are rested and comfortable, if you feel safe and calm and completely relaxed, that gives you the energy you will need to use to get to and stay in an inconsistent mental state for a while.
Leave Reality Behind: In this step, you intentionally loosen your ideas about what is real. You need to have your mind in a place that is divorced from everyday reality, where seemingly unreal experiences can happen. Sometimes this can happen solely inside the mind (via practices such as meditation), but there are also common physical actions like entering a special location such as a temple or magic library that can help separate yourself from the mundane former reality.
Declare Your Purpose: In this step, you begin to challenge the beliefs your now-malleable mind has about how the universe will end up working. In other words, you are choosing the direction you are going to move, which of the many ridges around you are what you will choose to climb.
Raising Energy: In this step, you actually do the hard work of pushing your mind to truly get to the difficult, sometimes confusing situation where both your new beliefs and the beliefs you used to have exist simultaneously in your mind. There are many techniques employed for this - chants, dances, repetitive actions that can grow in force and power the longer you do them. This is often the slowest, most difficult part, of the ritual.
Climax: At this point, your mind has reached the level of energy needed to overcome this particular hurdle, and your new beliefs are now firmly in your mind as a real possibility for how the universe works. This is the point where you have a choice as to whether to continue with your ritual towards a new set of perceptions and beliefs, or return to the world as it was before.
Release The Old: Assuming you choose to continue heading towards the new set of beliefs, you now have to let go of what you believed before that contradicts what you are going to believe in the future. Your new belief system, solidified in your mind in the last few steps, can thus take over without interference from the previous belief system.
Come Down Transformed: You have now adopted the new set of beliefs, and those new set of beliefs no longer face a challenge. This step is usually relatively easy to manage, because you are moving from the difficult complex contradictions to easy simple consistency, even though this is a consistency that was not your previous experience.
Return To New Reality: Now, instead of trying to make reality malleable, you are trying to make the new reality concrete again. You leave the special place where the unreal becomes real, and instead get back to experiencing the real again. The key, though, is that what is real is a bit different from what was real when you left.
Recovery: Your mind and quite possibly your body is probably tired from the work it has had to do, so it is now imperative to rest. A nice meal, a warm hug, a relaxing bath, a conversation with a friend, these all help put your body and mind back at ease.

If you examine rituals from a wide variety of traditions, you will see exactly this kind of structure at work. Often the preparation and recovery seem to happen outside of the ritual itself, so they are left out of the script so to speak, but both are typically present unofficially nonetheless (for example, most religious groups have sharing of food or drink immediately following a service or ritual). Note too that this outline is independent of any specific cultural references: different people in different subcultures will use different symbols and words to make this kind of transformation possible.

Also notice that this is often related to religion, but is not exactly the same thing. Religion can and frequently does supply the symbols and ideas that surround these kinds of transformations, because those are extremely meaningful to the magician and specifically offer up a way of thinking divorced from directly experienced reality. That said, this discussion intentionally makes no comment about the reality or unreality of the figures or beings referenced as part of a specific working: It could be that this is all being done in your own head, or it could be that your actions are influencing some being that is responsible for managing the behind-the-scenes slight nudges to the universe we discussed back in Part I. This question does not matter terribly much for our general theoretical purpose: If it works, it works, regardless of why.

So Now What?

Once you can make these sorts of transitions, you are set free from your current understanding of reality and can make intentional changes towards a new reality that fits with the life you wish to lead. We will be exploring the path from here to there in a larger scale in the next article.

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