Things Change Because You Notice

Things change because you notice. Do you notice things change? Seems like a straight forward claim and one that can be disproved easily. Maybe, but lets explore this idea anyway. After all, consciousness has never been very easy to pin down.

We all have limited attention. This makes intuitive sense to us and as there are things we finally notice we had not yet noticed. It would seem, though, that we find what we look for and change our -perspective to allow that discovery. What if all beings included the smallest sub-atomic particle to whole galaxies and including us, where conscious and what we all observe determines the direction that the causality of the history of our reality takes. Bit of a mouth full but basically, what if consciousness included the smallest the largest of emergent structures of sufficient complexity and intelligence.

It is still a little technical sounding so put it like this. if most atoms are being s of atom consciousness then they live in a world of chemistry observation and the probabilities of that world is what we observe and manipulate. Think of all the things you might observe as your whole available attention and what you pay attention to as your conscious attention. With in our current attention, possibilities found outside of that attention cannot be entertained without expanding ones attention either through some form of intuition or by some trigger that shifts our attention so as to include that observation. But how much happens not just outside of our notice but maybe because we do not notice.

Better yet, how much happens because we accept a reason for it that may have nothing to do with why but keeps us from keeping it from being manifest. Is it possible that some of the illusions of the greatest modern illusionist are not really illusions. What if, when one of them floats in mid air on the sidewalk; what if the illusion was that you believed it was an illusion. Very little that we call magic and mystical breaks any laws of physics. Most magic and mysticism only measures as too unlikely to consider. What if that is a way in which we limit our experiences in order to increase the predictability of our reality.

Find your kind of magick and begin to explore beyond what you know to be true. It is not easy to explore that which we can not just describe to another to verify in a quantifiable way But over time you can use an iterative feedback to find what view allows you to have the most say in the direction of your life. Don't judge yourself as you change though. You cannot get to your better paradigm  by will alone but by experiencing the expansion of consciousness that journey you to your kind of magick and begin to build a toolbox of spells that actually work for you.

Confidence to do Magick

Most of the Magick we perform goes unnoticed even by ourselves. From the time we are born we have a will without a clue. We do what we observe and we observe what everyone already doing.

What everyone else is doing is following the carefully cultivated habits they have established in many subtle layers over time. The whole process has been automated to minimize our need to control all the aspects of our attention. This automation works so well it can almost run itself. In fact it is easy to forget who we are in the face of such self automation. This process of forgetting oneself to the automation is also called, "the Ego."

But the ego is just the conscious portion. The rest is the id found in the subconscious. No, this is not how that work; this is not how any of this works. The "subconscious" is the conscious of experience while the "waking consciousness" is the consciousness of now. But what is now if it is not experience forming the next subtle layer of the subconscious?

Most realized beings try to get us to bypass the ego in our path of enlightenment because, as Ram Dass has said, in regards to the actual working of the ego, "It's all quite complicated." Indeed, when you realize how fleeting the waking consciousness is, you will begin to grasp the difficulty we have in understanding all if this. As you digest how the experience of the the waking consciousness become the subconscious you will also find yourself face to face with the influence your subconscious has on how your how waking consciousness views reality which dictates how the current experiences will be accumulated by the subconscious. This feedback is the perpetuating habit of your ego and what stands in the way of real change in your life.

Maybe your life changes often but is that real change or is that constant changing the habit of your ego? This process of intelligent feedback is a very important process to study. It is found at the heart of any system that is useful to us from the arts to religion to philosophy to magick to science to programming. However, before any human can study any... ... well anything, that human has to be able to observe what that person wants to study. For the ego, that means developing an observer within that can witness the ego doing the automated ego things.

At first the ego is very resistant for it is your habit to think you are yourself but yourself is your ego which is not you. Here is the thing, once you have observed enough ego to wake up you have a instant problem. You have never taken responsibility to do the things you have always let your ego take care of. If you take responsibility for everything the ego has been doing for you, you will be a completely free being but you will also be responsible for maintaining your own life experiences. This is where confidence enters. If you are into sports then you know that once you have trained your muscles to do something they will perform if you just trust them to do as you have taught them. Your brain is the same way. If you you had the confidence and washed away your ego completely, you would find your brain will do most of the things you relied on the ego to do but without wasting any more personal power than necessary. 

When you trust your existence to do what it needs to do for you to experience what you wish, you will find it easy to know what to do to participate in manifesting those desires into experiences. This is not the confidence of pride for that is of the ego. Rather, in this situation we are talking about something that replaces pride. Having confidence that the elements of your life will do what they need to do and you will know what you need to do to participate also goes by another name: Faith.

Faith is a very misunderstood action but like attention, it is a topic for another post.

Thank you for reading,

Thomas Southern

Find time to explore your kind of magic.

Spells That Actually Work

Spells that actually work! Don't believe in magic? Hmmm, maybe I can definition you into belief. My life, from the earliest memories, has been primarily about understanding the nature of this existence in which we find ourselves. To this end I have had to cultivate an open mind.

This is not the academic highly opinionated open mindedness nor the spiritual quite non-committal open mindedness and especially not the tin-hat open mindedness but a ever more aggressively testing boundaries and assumptions while being firmly kind and compassionate as I go through life open mindedness. As a teen I choose to make time to explore all models of reality I could find whether it be philosophical, religious, spiritual, economic, and a few views that defy classification. Around my mid twenties I began to get a handle on the commonalities that all views have and began to share with those around me what I noticed. At this time I began to notice that there are understandings in universe that I call treasures that allow us to affect our lives but are not understandable through reason. To those who love reason these treasures do not exist but even most who are adherent to reason do use a treasure or two without even realizing it.

Sometimes you will be talking with someone and you will refer to some idea or concept clear to you and your buddy will ask you what you are referring to. You will describe it  for a while surprised how it seems to elude a precise definition but then your buddy says something to the effect of, "Oh, yeah, ok. Go ahead." What has actually happened is that you can see something real but outside reason and you take it for granted. You cannot pin it down when you talk about it but if you keep focus on it as you attempt to describe it, your buddy is likely to create their own window out of reason to see what you are seeing. When they do, they acknowledge it and ask you to continue so they can also take it for granted as well. Even if you do not believe these kinds of definitions are real, they really affect the way we reason and thus the choices we make so they do effect our lives directly. 

The use of the word "affect" was quite intentional. The view that keeps arising is that there is an affectual reality that directs the randomness of the casual reality. We experience this randomness in many ways including the randomness in our brains for randomness is another word for information. And so I was that I kept finding myself face to face with Entropy, Chaos and Information theory. For this reason I will refer to what people do that has affect on the effect they experience to have "a kind of magic." This can be any kind of magic from dance to programming; wishing to bitching; worry to loving; kindness to assholeness; and so on. 

So to be more specific, I am a Taoist and a Programmer. I committed to Christ before most get anything that resembles pressure to do so but refused to judge any other beliefs. So after I found myself a Taoist (a result of committing to understanding how "Sun Tzu's Art of War" could help me resolve conflict in my life when I was a teen) an Atheist made the claim that you can only be an Atheist or a Theist. Well, tell a Taoist this and the Taoist sees a new duality to explore. What is, that which Theist and Atheist make a duality. And so I explore each so I may understand what treasure can be found between them yet beyond their middle. Considering the nature of the conflict between these two, the underlying truth should prove to be a powerful treasure.

Treasures are not always easy to share for the other must be able to inflate from your words their own window to see the treasure for themselves. The fact that these treasures can be so hard to share is one reason many deny the reality of these treasures. However the reason these treasures are hard to pass on to others has to do with one very powerful treasure known as Attention. These treasures are the mysteries of the universe and understanding the mysteries of the universe starts with understanding the mystery of attention. However, Attention is a mystery for another blog.

There are many things we do that affect the course of our life experience. Any one of these, whether you acknowledge those things you do or not, are "Spells That Actually Work."

Thank you for reading,

Thomas Southern

Find time to explore your kind of magic.