A Disbelieve based Paradigm

[Moon1ight]

Recently, someone asked about what to do when one has troubles believing in magic. Wesley Asuwish (I asked if he is okay with putting his name online ;) ) gave the answer to "Adopt a disbelief based paradigm". I asked to elaborate and he gave some interesting advice, which I didn't want to get lost in FB, so here comes:


"Okay, belief in magic isn't required to have intent, obviously. Most people don't believe in magick, and have plenty of intentions. So that part's not a problem.
Belief isn't required to do magick. People do shit they don't believe in all the time. We avoid stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, even though we know it's not going to cause our mothers to fracture their spines. We knock on wood when we say something uncertain. One of the largest cultural practices in America is about gaslighting small children into believing that a fat man in a red suit is going to hop on a sled pulled by flying reindeer and deliver them gifts while they're asleep. Almost no adults believe in Santa Claus, but that doesn't keep them from putting on silly hats and singing carols and getting trashed at company Christmas parties.

All my personal experiments have shown that, contrary to popular belief, magic doesn't give a shit what you believe. Sigils work if you follow the process - Intention, Obfuscation, Gnosis, Forget. It doesn't matter if you expect it to actually work or not.

Some of my most shockingly effective spells were done because I was bored, and cast something that I knew had no chance in hell of actually working just for shits and giggles. Then it worked. Plenty of spells that I was SURE would work failed miserably - in fact, oftentimes they failed more often, since I'd get overfocused and obsessed and fail over lust for results.

Who cares if magic is real? It's FUN. You can draw some squiggles on a sidewalk and scare the Christians. You can invoke Dionysus and pretend your drunken revelry is way more sophisticated than it probably is. You can make cool art and share it with people. You can make friends and do weird shit in graveyards at midnight. You can paint your girlfriend with cool designs and have kinky sex while pretending to be gods. You can wear cool robes or a leather jacket covered in sigils and act all mysterious and convince people you have psychic powers by making some bullshit interpretation of a bunch of cards you arbitrarily drew from a tarot deck.

You don't have to believe for any of this shit to work. Bullshit magick is just as effective as any other kind of magick.

This is a really effective paradigm. Encourages skepticism and critical thinking, encourages experimentation (cause, like, why not try doing a group ritual to give the president genital warts?) works great for defense (most attach techniques rely heavily on the power of suggestion), protects you against the effects of mageitis (harder to get full of yourself when you know you don't ACTUALLY have magic powers), and naturally contributes to the sigil process (Intention, Obfuscation, Gnosis, Forget - Why not, Who knows, Let's have some fun, and Who cares).

The only downside is that you will be a walking paradox. Which is kind of fun. Doing magic that you know works great because you know it isn't gonna work because you want to do it anyway. Naturally aligned with Discordian paradigms, since it's all chaos that's open to arbitrary interpretation and you're prohibited from believing anything you read anyway.

Oh, another big plus - rejecting any possibility of magical effects by default isn't just a useful banishment, it also greatly helps to improve your ability to analyze your effectiveness. Lots of people that believe end up convincing themselves that their magick is TOTALLY WORKING, but it just didn't work this time because there was some psychic interference in the area, or the planets were misaligned, or it's not the will of the gods or something. In a disbelief paradigm, you don't believe anything works unless you're presented with very obvious, overwhelming, undeniable objective evidence. As such, you're less likely to spend time fucking around with ineffective or unreliable techniques that you determine to just be placebo effect or whatever, and the few techniques that you DO actually sorta believe in, maybe, are the ones that you tend to gravitate to.

A lot of people are really held back in their magick because they're unable to accept the fact that the magick they're using isn't working for shit. Instead of saying "Meh, whatever, I figured that wouldn't work anyway" they end up making a bunch of excuses as to why it didn't work THIS time, and then keep doing it without taking any steps to change or improve their techniques."

That's it :) This might help someone. Thanks a lot to Wesley  8)

[JayONI]

I do like this methodology, aberhamic faiths are perhaps the biggest users already of bullshit magick they even are so big currently they have their own chaotic state of existence going for them.

Have you considered that it is not all about bullshit and not bullshit but rather it boils down into the faith that you have in it, which is why even if you have to feed into something that is not yet created you can fuel it with you faith in it to work. And by faith I don't just mean any religion or god (but it could be for you), how much can you project that faith onto your own being without limitation from yourself?