Magical Capability VS Success

Strategic Sorcery has in the past been accused of melding the worlds of self-help with magic. A charge to which I whole-heartedly and gleefully plead GUILTY!

This morning my friend and fellow author B.J. Swain posted about how having your life in order can be a good goal, but it is not a metric for magical capability.  If you are on FB you can read his post here.

He is right. The annals of magic and witchcraft are filled with examples of dysfunctional people, unhappy people, crazy people. poor people, who nonetheless showed a lot of magical capability. Austin Osmon Spare comes up as a prime example.

So, while I agree with BJ on the matter of capability, I think its important to differentiate between Capability and Success.

It is entirely possible for someone to have incredible talents in any field, yet not apply them in a way that would make them successful in that field by any measure. I don’t spend a lot of time judging others, but for myself, if I set a reasonable parameter of what success means, and I don’t come anywhere close to that, it means that my magical capabilities are being applied poorly.

Capability, is not all that impressive to me. I was a “Talented and Gifted” kid in school who got abyssmal grades, and you know what? My talents and gifts were bullshit next to the kid with half my IQ but twice my discipline and perseverance. My life got RADICALLY BETTER when I stopped reassuring myself about how smart I and magically gifted I was and started challenging myself to reflect that skillfully to achieve the things I really wanted. That decision was the basis for Strategic Sorcery.

Nothing is more boring than the Grand Magister Templi who has bad relationships, lives in squalor, and generally is a miserable old sod.

And yes, Spare included.

His art and some of his writings are amazing. In that he was an absolute success. I worry though when people romanticize his dysfunction. Like the legions of wanna-be Beat writers that followed Burroughs and Kerouac:  the heroin addictions and stream-of-consciousness writing gets emulated, but little of the innate talent shines through.

Strategic Sorcery, if its about anything, is about aiming the magic you are probably already good at, in a way that you will succeed at things that matter to you. What that looks like is different for everyone.

What you accept and what you challenge about your self and your situation is up to you to decide. What it looks like to you may be completely different than what it looks like to me. Only the individual knows whether they are accepting a level of dysfunction that they really can’t help, or simply wallowing in a status quo that they could improve with a little effort.

I have been that guy, and I know a lot of other people that are that guy too.