WHOLE MAGIC: Perception vs Projection

Every interaction you have ever had with any person, place, or thing was a combination of accurate perception of actual events and your own mental projection. Your memory of that moment is just that: YOUR memory. If you go back and look at it with others who were there you will see how different it was perceived by others. Want to watch something that will scare the pants off you? Watch “How Reliable Is Your Memory” by Elizabeth Loftus. You do not have any experiences outside of the tool you use to process those experiences, your own mind.

What does this have to do with magic? Well, if your mundane interactions are a combination of your perception of actual events and your mental projection – than how much MORE susceptible to mental projection are interactions with spirits, gods, and other subtle beings?

Perception vs Projection

I hear people talk about their experiences with gods and spirits in very absolute terms. “This is what God X told me to do!” is all too often the justification for shady behavior, sketchy claims, and “history”. Just yesterday in fact I was informed that I must not know much about Hekate because she rules over the part of hell that punishes rapists. Where does this claim from? Apparently, their ass  personal gnosis. I am ALL FOR personal Gnosis, but we need to separate it from historical fact, and not just accept it as holy writ.

On the other hand there are people who are so afraid of engaging in fantasy that even when the spirit is appearing in visions at the ritual, in dreams at night, in omens throughout the day, and spelling messages in their Alpha-bits over breakfast, they STILL can’t accept it. “Maybe I am just fantasizing” they say ” but Agaliarept told me to sell all my bitcoin, and three days later it tanked…. but I am probably just imagining it”. Uh. No, and even if it was your fantasy, if it stays that wierdly specific and helpful do you care?

If we are to get anywhere in magic, we need to embrace the potential, and the limits, of projection and perception.

Whole Magic

Students in the  Black School and Sorcery of Hekate are probably sick of me prattling on about the Perception/Projection Ratio, but it’s a really friggin important concept if you are gonna go about living a life with spirits in it. Lose sight of how much you are projecting on to the communication and you start to build a prison of mirrors. If the spirits you speak to seem to always agree with what you want to do, always seem to affirm your awesomeness, but never give any kind of new information that is verifiable then you probably are already living in a mirror prison – its very comforting to have your spiritual life reflect whatever you think and believe at the moment, but its a guarantee of stagnation. The Astral Plane has been described as mirror-like for a reason.

This is one reason that I keep hammering meditation. If you know your own mind intimately, it’s a lot easier to tell when something is you and not you. And yes, I know that evoked spirits often can be heard with the ear,  that is how I most often hear spirits that I have deliberately evoked as well, but until you are ready to call a news crew and univesity lab to record the spirit and verify it for the world – I don’t want to hear how your psyche has nothing to do with it.

There are other methods to increase perception and limit projection, but they all involve work and intense self-skepticism/evaluation. The real test of any communication is how it answers the following questions:

1. Is the information actionable?
2. Does it tell me something I didn’t kn0w?
3. Is it testable?
4. Does it come accompanied by non-spiritual signs?

If it doesn’t fit at least two of the above, you don’t have to reject it, but you should probably just acknowledge it and move on. “Well, that happened” is the attitude I use when these things happen, and yes they happen to me as well.

Sorcerous Synergy

If we want to be great at Sorcery, reducing projection and increasing perception is not the only task at hand. Getting GOOD at projection is just as valuable. Beyond evocation where, if you are successful, the spirit should be talking to you more or less like a person, Gods and spirits can manifest and communicate in a range of modes. There are fully mystical experiences, that leave your very sense of reality shaken to the core. There are symbolic visions that require interpretation. There are dreams, and omens, and fragments of words that stick in the brain. When you have an ongoing practice focused on a particular god or spirit, you will likely receive all of the above. Such was the case with Hekate over the last 18 years, and Saint Cyprian over the last 12. In these cases it was not just the perception that was important, but what I was able to project based on those perceptions.

In these cases perception is like the source of light, and your projection is like its rays. Mystical experience gets examined and reverse engineered into meditations. Those nagging words get played with and turned into chants. Dreams and short instructions get woven into rituals. Then all this that you have ‘projected‘ gets tested and sent back to the spirits for more info. I think sometimes when people describe a practice that was revealed to them it sometimes gives the impression that they just wrote down what a god or spirit told them when that’s not the case. At least it’s not the case in my work.

Here’s to improving perception and lowering mental projections when communicating  with the spirits.

Here’s to representing those spirits well in whatever we project into the world.

Here’s to not believing every brain fart we have is an infallible message from God.