Magic: Why We Get In, and What We Get Out.
Why did you get into magic?
In talking about Pain as fuel for magic, V Jonathan Facile said “personally I suspect that anyone that’s fine with their reality isn’t going to be particularly motivated to dedicate hours daily to practice, a ton of income and other things to maintain the just fine reality, but maybe that’s just me…”
I thought about this today. I was certainly not fine with my reality when I started magic, but I honestly can’t say that was what drove me to magic. The things that made my 15 year old brain unhappy would have all been solved better and faster using methods OTHER than magic. I had some experiences as a child that I could not explain. That was enough to spark my interest. Once I took that first step though, magic was its own reward. I was fascinated by it. I suppose it’s no different than people who get grabbed by music, or art, or medicine, or business. It is the thing that grabbed me and never let go.
It’s a hole in my being that only gets filled only by magic.
Other people get involved in magic for other reasons. I have met people who get into magic to fix their reality as Jonathan suggests above. I also know people who got into magic simply because someone they were dating was into it. Some do it for the escapism. Some do it for the curiosity. Some do it to hear the spirits. Some do it to make them the spirits STFU.
Whatever first sparks your interest, if you’re like me, once magic hooks you it becomes more than something you do. It becomes your way of relating to the world.
Why we get in to magic, can be different than what we get out of it.
12 Years ago I decided I needed to get more out of magic than what I was getting. Having that magic-shaped hole filled was not enough. The reasons I got in were no longer good enough reasons to stay in. At least not with the level of dedication I had been giving it. I asked for more.
By this time I had over 20 years of experience with it, so I looked back over my life and thought about the things that worked and the things that didn’t. I took the pile of things that worked and separated those experiences into the things that really mattered and the things that didn’t.
For example a spell that yielded me a temp job to pay the rent technically worked, but was not exactly something that mattered a ton in the long run. The ones that did matter turned out to be either purposeful deep dives to change something about my identity, long-term exposure to a spirit, or some combination thereof.
I looked at the way I wanted my life to be and used them to do my MACRO-Enchantments. Those smaller things that worked here and there for this and that, I still kept in the toolbox. I tied them to the macro-enchantments and they became the MICRO-enchantments that kept things running smoothly.
12 years later my life looks like I wanted it to look, and I am deciding again on my next phase of “How I want Life to Look”. Not because my life is painful or unsatisfactory but once you answer the question: can I break out of the cycles I was stuck in, the next question is: How far can I go?
Just like not everyone gets into magic for the same reasons, I don’t think everyone will want to get the same things out of it either. The reason I wrote this is to simply ask you to answer these two questions for yourself:
Do I want to get something more out of magic than what I got into it for?