This is the challenge: Write down everything you know about magic, in 5 minutes!
The clock is ticking.
Ok, first up.
Elements fire water air earth, symbols and mythology. Spirits. Power of will, finding direction and purpose. Invocation and evocation. Damn, I should explain all these. Umm... dreams, subconsious mind, control. Achieve, success. Fantasy as an aid, damn there the time went up.
But I am known to be terribly slow, lol.
I didn't explain a thing in that time. Now it's your turn.
-thief
I don't need five min. Magick is the use of emotive-thought will via trance states to effect change in the world, in the self through techniques that are meant to access the unconscious and keep the conscious mind from hampering desire-intention. Magick takes many forms and rituals that allow one to turn themselves into their desires, that is shit into gold. Magick allow one to see beyond what is know as flat sight, and can use mediation or drugs or other techniques to achieve desired results. Magick is an art, an art of as i will so mote it be. Magick is Lacanian Psychoanalysis meets chaos and difference... magick is and you are. the end
set the timer go, Everything I know about magick isn't as important as what I know about applying it.
First off meditation, the ability to still the body and mind to points of clarity. Exploring layers of consciousness through this and thereby increasing awareness. Critical self analysis, taking things apart and rearranging ideas in order to make more functional ideas. Will, testing the will in various methods, meditation, physical exercise, diet, media interaction, social interaction, pushing the boundaries of comfort while also maintaining awareness and control. Mindfulness. Dream control. Getting a control after some large accomplishments have been made, finding someone who not only doesn't believe you can do the things you claim but doesn't believe in magick. Create verifiable workings to get them to acknowledge that you have indeed done something they can't explain. Learning how malleable the personality is by exploring the world of ideas. Reaching, learning and growing at every opportunity and attempting to expand the mind beyond itself. Shit, times up.
Oh, i don't know...write down everything I know about magic in 5 minutes?
How about "No."
I'm being dead serious, not snarky. One of the main problems modern society has it that it insists on taking everything worth knowing, rounding off all the edges, file off all the fuzzy bits, hammer down all the lumps, smooth out all the rough patches, paint the whole thing bright red, and say "This is it!"
Well. Not to brag, but....If I count my first tentative forays into the occult at the tender age of 14 when I first tried to make my own ouija board to talk to my Dear Old Dead Old Dad as the beginning of my studies....That means I've been learnin' mahself up on this here voodoo hoodoo business for 28 years.
That's a long god-damn time, and I'll be jiminy fucked if I'm going to compress all of that down into a teeny tiny candy-coated pill.
I ain't no pop-song on the radio, son. I'm a whole symphony. I'm a long-haul with a deep pump, not a five-minute chump.
so anyone who does this is a five minute chump? You basically just posted about how cool you are and how stupid this exercise is while contributing nothing. Good job bro.
I have to agree with Doktor Hellfire's point. I've been pursuing the magical path for 18 years now. It's been a deeply transformative experience that I couldn't sum up in a few sentences. Magic takes time, a lot of time, and this 5min exercise is rather ironic, or at least a misrepresentation of what magic really is.
So you're saying that you can't sit down with a timer and think of whats most important to you to summarize in five minutes? I've been doing magick, effectively, for 17 years too. That has no bearing on this thread. OP posted a challenge, an exercise. It's not like he stated this is how things should be done all the time.
I did the excercise twice. I deleted everything. Then I deleted everything again. That's how I came to agree with Doktor Hellfire.
What I had written down felt like trivial brainstorming. I deleted because it didn't feel right at all, like I had left out so much. What I had written down the second time was completely different yet felt just as incomplete. Both times I was rehashing a lot of stuff from memory. I could talk about magic for hours and never really come to the core of it except for some bland metaphor or overused Crowley quotes, or other bleak clichés.
There are situations in real life where you do, in fact, have only 5min or less to react - even magically. This is a matter of urgency within a specific context. I believe that the 5min excercise removes us from what magic really is all about.
It's a fun brainstorming excercise, a fun creative writing excercise, but it's about form rather than content.
What I am getting at instead of posting why you think its futile, why not mutate the exercise. Like I felt it more important to list potential practices in five minutes and make it an exercise to see what I really find important. I felt like it was missing a ton of explanation as well. I think more than anything it shows where your priorities lie when you have to think as fast as possible.
Also isn't magick also about challenging absolute thoughts, so if you feel something is wrong maybe you should find a way to make it right?
Quote from: Vortex7 on September 25, 2014, 09:46:19 AM
so anyone who does this is a five minute chump? You basically just posted about how cool you are and how stupid this exercise is while contributing nothing. Good job bro.
Why yes.
Yes, I did.
:-D
I like this idea, so I'm going to go for it.
Ghosts prefer fresh Coffee, and that fay-folk like red balloons. I know that every doorway is a gateway, animals are messengers, I know that red strings tie our fates together, and that demons are pretty much just lazy spiritual assholes without a job. Wishing wells grant more then wishes, never trust a man in a suit. Everything has a resonance, and If you can tell them apart, you can track almost anything like a bloodhound. Oh, and before my time runs out the most important point. YOU DON"T DO MAGIC..IT DOES YOU.
I originally thought (and told the op of this post, when they presented this challenge) that a soundbite wouldn't be helpful, and i forget what they said to get me to just go for it (and i am not looking back in the chat logs to find out) but i think i said, why not - fuck it, cause its not like Definitive or something, i think that is what the challenger said... anyway, yeah we totally understand (and so does the person who gave out the challenge)this whole Noam Chomskyesque made for tv-media-commercials reduction of language and thereby thought... butter-but w/e we did find the exercise interesting, even more interesting though is peoples reactions too it. We think there is a good point about the having to think and put forth idea-feelings about a topic in a limited time, as already stated - we are agreeing -- as well as understand the undesirability of reduction of thought/practice w/e to a soundbite.
I find things. I find people. Methods, loopholes, and the importance of nonsense. I find the links between.
In this exercise I find importance because sometimes you only get five minutes to convey very important things to another person.
When we find someone who is important - who we connect with, who has some bit of essential information for us or for whom we have that bit - we don't always have the time we might wish for to accomplish great information exchanges.
Sometimes we get years to learn from one another.
Sometimes we get an evening.
Sometimes we get five minutes.
Slow clap for resal, highly enjoyed that response. ^
To me, the gist of magic, and the lesson i wish to perpetuate here is that magic is a bridging of this and that, reality and fiction in such a way as to sound linear like a story, almost to fool our rational selves into manifesting the magic.
yet the deeper you go, the less you scrutinize, the more it just *is*. The story no longer needs to be linear, and takes on dream like time, not unlike Aboriginal "Dream-Time". To me this is magic, being a co-creator of the universe, scripting your story from the fabric of the mystery itself, weaving space fabric realities into 4 dimensional thoughtforms.
youknow what i'm saying.
Attention is your most precious resource.
We only have a limited supply of attention
Most of our attention is eaten up by egotistical concerns, leaving little to nothing available for magical work.
You have to work with what you have, and mine the ego for more, not to make yourself a better person, but because that's the only place to free up more attention.
Attention flows naturally along associations we form between concepts.
These associations converge into nexus points (arcehtypes)
These associations are not absolute, and can be changed and engineered (with repetition, emotional reinforcement, and novelty)
All components of magic are there only to help focus your attention, inference points.
aaaaaaaaannnnnd Time!
Got most of it out.
I see the point Hellfire is making, but I don't mind trying to do this anyways. I mean, if someone asked you about magic, I highly doubt the casual person would be interested in hearing a two hour treatise on what magic is to you, and what you know about it. It makes sense to distill your knowledge to an explainable point where you can elaborate on further topics if asked about it, while keeping a to the point explanation that won't be so long as to encumber the people reading it. So fuck it, I'll give it a shot, timer on past here.
Touch the space between. Magic is going to mean something different for everyone, and that's great. But the deepest experiences I have had are often that of letting go of the sense of me in the smaller way of looking at who I am, and melting into the experience. It's hard to explain, and definitely something aided by hallucinogens, but by no means the only route of access. But there is this place where the boundaries fall apart, you see the impermanence of reality, and how amazing it is that anything truly exists at all. To be struck by the mystery, with wonder or terror, and come out the other side after observing it. To melt into the void of experience, where all forms of experience are so, and navigation is done by thought. Explore the inner spaces. Meditate, Dream, Travel, Seek, Read, Discuss. All of these are means of understanding ourselves, and in doing so we seek an understanding of our relation to the sensorium of experience we are submitted to. By knowing ourselves, and seeking experiences that break typical routine, or even defy explanation is the vein of magic to me. Practice is important, but if I didn't get to the deeper understanding of myself, I would still have doubt foiling my works to this day.
See, that wasn't so bad. Maybe not as concise as I'd like, but good enough for five minutes.