I trained as a magician and I don’t mean someone who through trickery and sleight of hand fools an audience. I really do mean that I studied magic. Before you start thinking Hogwarts and Harry Potter, a modern school of magic is more than likely operating on a tight budget and using volunteers who supervise students on a correspondence course. That’s how it worked for me anyway.
For around 6-years, I meditated daily along a variety of themes, topics and visualizations while reading weekly lessons, maintaining a daily diary and reading selected books from a very long reading list. The daily meditation has more or less continued unabated since then. Let me tell you that it is tough work. There are times when it is simply inconvenient to meditate or that you do not feel remotely like meditating. There are times when you sit there for 20 minutes and nothing, nothing at all, seems to be working or happening. There are times when it simply seems like a complete waste of time.
If studying magic isn’t like Hogwarts then let me also tell you the magic is nothing like Harry Potter either. Nor is magic anything much like the movies you may have seen. In fact, the word occult, while one that causes born again Christians amongst others, to give you a very wide berth indeed, only means hidden. The modern connotations behind that word have been placed there by Hollywood and Hammer House of Horror movies mainly. Magic is simply really about you. It is about knowing yourself – that is your true self; stripped away of ego.
When and if you get to the stage that you can work real magic – physical magic – such as making it rain or creating fire or whatnot, if you have done it right, you simply won’t want to anyway. Once the ego has gone why would you wish to create fire or impress people or gain wealth and power? It is a truism that all the best magicians I have ever met don’t have two cents to rub together but their eyes gleam with the joy of life and they are rock solid dependable people.
I did learn a thing or two about how magic works and how it involves imagination. I spend quite a lot of time imagining my books selling – something all wanna be authors most likely do – and am still waiting for the results of that particular initiative. I have however positively impacted my life. The very fact that I have published 12 books with books 13 and 14 both in the works is as much about my time learning to be a magician as anything else.
You see, studying magic taught me a lot about how we create a reality for ourselves. Actually, we create a prison of fears, unconscious motivations, inherited beliefs, other people’s expectations, societies’ expectations and so much more. Learning about yourself, though it may take a lifetime or more, helps you to start to recognize that the only limiting factor in your life is in fact you and your expectations.
I don’t want you to go away from reading this thinking that magic is simply positive thinking or even worse – the cosmic ordering system pushed by The Secret and other such books. However, there is a lot of self-psychology, positive thinking and oodles of imagination and visualization involved in magic. There are also a number of systems and approaches that have been proven to help us make sense of it all and ritual is also an important aspect of the subject matter.
If you are interested in learning a little of what constitutes magic well, many of my books deal with the subject of course. My very first book, Inner Journeys (Thoth, 2005) is actually an autobiographical account of taking that first course with the school concerned – The Servants of the Light. My Roundfire novel – The Last Observer - actually weaves in very real magical techniques and ritual to the story as I wanted it to serve as fiction but also as a source for those who were seeking information too much like Dion Fortune did when she published books like Moon Magic, for example.
Magic is real and we are all magicians constantly creating our realities. Studying magic is in reality a study of ourselves as much as anything else and in doing this we recognize and break down the bits of us that are not really us. The bits we were burdened with by our upbringing or the bits we have learned in order to conform. The last thing a magician does is conform. The magician celebrates nonconformity and being as true to our real selves as we can.
At least – that is partially what I learned at a school of magic.
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