How We Manifested a New Life

Let’s make something very clear at the outset. Magick is complicated, tricky, and more of an art-form than a science. It requires a certain “way of being” that is difficult for many practitioners to uncover — simply because we live our daily lives in non-magickal ways.

Peter Carroll, writer of the classic chaos magick book Liber Kaos, once described the early stages of the magical journey as re-learning “how to play.” When a child plays, they become involved in the story they generate purely from within their imaginal space, and act it out with toys, figurines, imaginary friends, or natural elements. To the child who plays the act of play is psychic, but also REAL.

Anyone with a childhood imaginary friend can attest to the reality of that imaginary friend. We know the comfort provided by a stuffed animal, the actions of a plastic Batman toy saving Robin from the Joker, and the adventures that span backyards are no less “real” to the child than the mundane of chores, early schooling, or the actions of parents. The consequences of play: exploration, building, relationships, problem solving, impact the real world directly and obviously within the scope of the childhood mind. And, we all know at least one adult who quietly confides that their child spoke of the person living in the house who wasn’t there, a visitation from a deceased grandparent, or seemed to know something that could only have been uncovered via psychic means. Perhaps you have a story of your own?

Kat and I often get questions from adults who have long left the idea of play behind, who wonder why they can’t manifest their goals, or why their magick seems so spotty. One of our first suggestions is relearning to play. When we re-learn to play, we learn to think again.

We learn to think: again.

One of the foremost problems with “modern life” or the current education system, is that it does not teach us about who we truly are. Modern “western” education approaches the mind as a blank slate that can be filled with information, orders of operation, and “thinking sets” that are available for recall at almost anytime. This sort of machine thinking presents the mind and body as little more than complex biological machines, ready for optimization and debugging as soon as we discover the technology and processes necessary to do so. Unfortunately, reality is not a “machine.” Reality is not a “computer” or even a “computer simulation”.

Reality is far stranger.

The reason that so many feel as though we MIGHT be living in a simulation, is because the rules of a machine universe consistently and continually fall apart under scrutiny, not because the reality doesn’t exist… but because materialism is shit at describing the universe.

Imagine if you went to your auto-mechanic for your yearly medical physical, and the mechanic explained that the reason you haven’t been sleeping so well lately is because your radiator fluid needs to be changed. “But,” you protest, “I don’t think I need radiator fluid… in fact, I don’t believe that I even have a radiator.”

After a brief pause, your mechanic looks at you as if YOU are crazy, and says “well, you’re 30 years old, and every 50k miles or every 20 years (whichever comes first), radiator fluid must be changed.” And then, with a smug look, pulls out the owners manual to a 2013 Honda Civic and points to the data.

“I really don’t think I am a Honda Civic though…” you say, a little worried.

“Ah, well that’s because…” the mechanic says tapping his temple, “you are actually just a simulation.”

The mechanic is RIGHT about the car needing fluid changes at regular intervals. The problem is that when confronted with the fact that they are quite obviously mapping the right data onto the wrong object of focus, rather than simply admit that trying to heal human beings using the specs and measurements of an automobile is obviously incorrect, the mechanic declares that the person doesn’t even exist at all.

This way of thinking is precisely why so many folks getting into magick can’t seem to make it do anything for them.

It’s why we struggle in everyday life.

It’s why so many of our clients say “I’m really bad” or “I could never do x or y”.

It’s why your parents keep telling you to settle for the “safe” career path… even though they played by all the “rules” and still won’t ever be able to retire.

Magickal work uses a different tool-kit than materialism, but it also recognizes different systems. Thinking magickally allows us to get outside of ourselves, the narratives around the self, and break down limiting beliefs, barriers, and increase favorable probabilistic outcomes. In order to do this effectively, magickal systems rely on a myriad of correspondences, influencing factors, charts, tables, subconscious work, pageantry and communicative tools which exceed the grasp of hyper-consumable books on magick to be found at your local bookstore. For many, this path is too difficult to piece together at the outset, or requires too much work to offer immediately powerful results… and so, after a handful of semi-successful workings newcomers either lose interest or dismiss magick as too scattershot to deliver dependable results.

Those who chose to remain in the craft, despite their lack of success in working magick, decide that magick is simply an identity, and start declaring that they are “POWERFUL WITCHES” of some type or another… who unfortunately have nothing to show for all their power but a Rennfaire wardrobe and some Instagram drama.

The few who are able to explore the deepest reaches of a magickal world, and slowly/painfully unpack layers of thoughts which were never their own… eventually find that reality is far stranger and more mutable than they were ever led to believe.

They discover that the magick itself — might not matter. Rather, the ways in which magick teaches us to think, changes everything.

Kat and I find that manifesting (a term that frustrates me for other reasons best described in our next Substack) is easiest when we see our goals as something we are simply “recovering”… because we are!

We are just recovering ways of thinking that our ancestors shared. We are recovering the ways of thinking that we had as children, when the world was big and everything was possible. The best news about that re-discovery is that anyone can do it!

When you rediscover that your dreams are sacred remembrances of things that should have been and always were… achieving them is far far easier. And yes, tools like ritual, divination, energy work, etc. are profoundly helpful when we seek to rediscover ourselves after decades of learning the wrong stuff.

Nothing is out of your reach. You only believe that you can’t reach it because people, even people who love you, have told you that you’re too short.