Magick

What is it ?

When people think of magic, the first thing they imagine is probably Harry Potter and being able to throw fireballs from their hands. Magick is not that, it is an ancient discipline that has been practiced for thousands of years by many cultures around the world.
In short, magick is a method to learn to control your attention and direct it towards which goals you want to achieve. Some traditions believe magick allows you to change external reality. Whether it actually does, is not important, it will definitely feel this way at some points of the journey. What matters is that magick will help you reorganize yourself so that you are more coherent. A little analogy: Your brain is like a chariot with several horses, in normal life most of the horses are all running around in different directions. Maybe some of the time, their disorganized movement moves you towards where you want to go, however, most of the time the horses are just tiring themselves and not moving much towards your goal. You attention works much the same way. Magick is then a system that teaches you: to learn to focus your attention so that it is all concetrated in one point and second to direct this focused attention towards whatever matters to you. Finally, through magick you will also learn to listen to yourself, which will help you understand what it is that really motivates you in life and thus be able to choose an apropiate direction in life. Finally, with magick is you will become aware of how your brain works and how to influence the inner workings to your advantage. You learn how to read the "code" of your mind so that you can use it and eventually change it.
To sumarize, magic is about all about changing your internal world. Learning to focus and direct your attention through discipline. It is also about self knowledge and understanding of yourself and your porpuse. As you practice magick you will stop wasting your energy in things that do not help you reach your goals, and instead use that freed energy into the things that help you.
Magick is not a fringe topic and successful people use magick techniques without realizing. From business executives, artists and high performing athletes, the underlying methods are the same. And there are scientific studies that show the importance of visualization and intention focus.

So how do we actually do magic ?

There are two main steps that you need to do magic. We can separate the process in two main stages that will repeat themselves. The steps can be best sumarized by: solva et coagula. Which is the alchemical process.

Solve

The first step is you dissolve yourself and decondition yourself.
To achieve this, meditation is used. Meditation helps achieve this by first withdrawing yourself from the world, which allows you to listen more properly to yourself. To learn what you actually want. To step away from the noise of the outside world and instead hear the subtle voices inside of you. Being away from the influence of others and their expectations. It will allow help you realize the things that influence who you are , we didnt choose the society we live in or the family and they all have influence in the way we live our life. You will notice the thought patterns that you have and by introspection also the behavior patterns that govern who you are and how you react to the world around you. From all of this you will learn what is actually important to you. This last point is particularlyt important since you dont want to become succesful just to realize that you are not the person that you wanted to be and you just followed the things that others wanted you to become. So be wary on this point and always make sure that your definition of success is internal.
The second thing that meditation achieves is that it will allow you to work on improving your attention and focusing it.You attention will pass from being a lamp to being a laser. Once you have learned what matters to you, this step allows you to actually take control of you attention to focus on it.

Coagula

The second step is coagula, the reformulation of the new self. This is not about leaving your old self behind completely. Its about choosing which parts of yourself you want to keep and more generally trying to answer the question of who you want to be and who you want to become. You have to do an inventory of the things that you learned about yourself. The point is to stop reacting to outside stimulus and start choosing how you want to act. Some of the negative patterns that you will notice about yourself are there for a reason -maybe they helped face complicated situations in your childhood-, but those same patterns meant to protect you, in a different environment, coulb be hindering your growth.
Once you are able to meditate and focus your attention, then you will want to start making sigils or ritual magic. Because the subconcious works in symbolic language, the use of sigils and rituals will allow you to communicate with your subconcious. With sigils you are able to implant new ideas into your brain. How ? You meditate on your sigils. Another option is to focus your attention while doing rituals with a particular intent. By either of these methods, you will be able to implant your subconcious with whatever ideas help you generate the necessary change in yourself. Alternatively, you can try to use visualisation to imagine the outcome you want to achieve, which is the working principle behind the law of attraction. There is a dedicated page that will go into some of these mehtods.