GOD a dit:
Magic doesnt exist . If you claim it does exist prove it .
I appreciate your point of view since I sometimes fall back into it myself. It's worth considering the parallel between people who've no experience of psychelelics if you told them about a trip, or if they'd only taken very low doses to watch TV or have a giggle. You start talking about your experiences of the death of the ego and amazing realizations it brought you to about your life and they are going to assume it's a nervous breakdown or something. Even worse if you start sounding like you actually put any stock in some of the more amazing visuals or funny ideas that come to us in those states. In that scenario your rational everyday mind in its standard operating state and your experiences and intuition can often end up fighting themselves regardless of your level of experience. All we can really agree on is reality is a lot more malleable from a personal point of view and there's a LOT we don't know.
Now take that kind of mindset and look at the different forms of magick. I think the important thing about this century's magickal advances have been that a lot of them see people with an understanding of the scientific procedures attempting to use them in conjunction with their magickal experiments. Instead of looking back on a demon or sigil as the metaphor it would be for modern people the practitioner is re-integrating his experiences and trying to make sense of them in light of what he knows about breakthroughs in science or even just improvement of the way his own life is going.
I don't have a lot of experience with ceremonial/ritual magick despite my level of curiosity, most likely because it requires a lot of day to day work to advance from what I've seen and maybe I'm not ready just yet. That said I've done a few experiments recommended by some chaos magickians and I can't say I'm 100% sure none of them work, I might be down to 99% and then there are those times where I think about the 1%.
From my point of view the reason I have an intuition magick probably IS real in some sense goes like this:
When one looks into practically all kinds of magick I've seen then if one is fairly cultured they might notice a lot of similarities between different paths or even between things which are psuedo-science and magick, and even in some cases things which are now creeping into science. The biggest problem I've always had with ceremonial magick was that I couldn't see how saying X and Y and doing Z would ever make me see something which wasn't there or communicate with some kind of non-self entity...or even for that matter a part of myself seperated from myself momentarily. Thing is for a lot of these paths launching right into these spells isn't the first step, that almost seems like trying to perform a parachute jump without getting in a plane and going up in the air, you're doing the right moves you were told to perform but you're already at the baseline.
When I look into magick it seems as though the first thing one does is spend a lot of time learning mental exercises and breathing techniques. Some modern paths try and make these as secular as possible but a number of the older traditions will basically just straight up start teaching you forms of yoga. Yoga of course carries more weight than just letting you balance upside down on a mat next to that lovely looking single mother at your local gym. Rather there seems to be an emphasis placed on the mental aspect too, you perform techniques which develop your mental approach. This is where I have found science and rationality connecting with magick, though not always in agreement.
When one masters or begins to master yogic breathing techniques there are reports of sounds heard within one's head or perhaps lights seen or sensations on the skin. For the advanced there are experiences like the rising of the kundalini energy which can be life-changing from what I've read. When you do some research into the scientific, purely rational theories on meditation you find some very interesting results. Brain scans of people in types of deep meditation show things like their brain activity shifting away the parts of the brain which control the ego and the areas which control our innate understanding of the boundaries between ourselves and the world. For example I read one study where some of the meditators had similar brain scan patterns to people who had suffered brain damage and their brains no longer worked properly in some of these areas, as a result the brain damaged people had difficulty sitting down in a chair in front of them or felt like they were in direct contact with God.
I think it seems reasonable to follow a working model that magick is part changing the consciousness with breath control (something Eastern religions have poured thousands of years into), mediation to constrict/expand/alter the boundaries of the mind and then perhaps some self-hypnosis thrown in. That lets me understand more why even some of the 'greatest' magickians in history seem to spend the latter halves of their lives tossing and turning over whether or not the entities they contact are EXTERNAL to themselves or INTERNAL.
Advances in NLP and hypnosis show there is a lot of wierd stuff going on there but also that results can be achieved by certain ends we didn't previously understand.
Again I'm no expert on any of these fronts, I've just come to a mental state where I try and use models to understand different things instead of believing one way or the other. Sorry if this came off as a lecture, part of the problem with the way I live my life I guess is that I never discuss these kinds of topics with day to day people and so when I get a chance to upload my thoughts like this I might go into too much detail. Hopefully I gave someone some food for thought though as I know I spend a lot of my own time reflecting on these kinds of 'unsolvable problems'
