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The Secret of Magic quite often astounds:
There isn't a Secret! Just look all around.
Summary:
Magic is simply the act of creating change through the application
of a force directed by will. The primary difference between
Magic and Technology is that Magic is not yet understood by science.
There is nothing about magic that you can not discover on your
own through careful observation of the world around you. The "secrets"
of secret societies and rituals are simply a group's collection
of techniques that they use in ritual. The natural forces that are
used are available to anyone who seeks them, and anyone can learn
them by observation and practice.
Lecture:
The term Magic inspires the complete range of emotional responses:
power, fear, awe, confusion, disbelief, freedom and more. People
think of wizened wizards with long beards and pointy hats or shadowy
figures in dark dungeons cackling around a big smoking cauldron.
That's "Hollywood magic".
"Real magic" is the use of natural forces, such as mental
willpower, emotional energy, elemental energy or other natural forces
to change the world around you.
It is more subtle than "Hollywood magic" in that you
shouldn't expect to see lightening bolts shooting out of your fingertips,
but as you develop power and control over the power, it may feel
like they are.
Secrets Everywhere
The fundamental lessons of magic for centuries have been closely
guarded by groups and families that had learned how to control natural
forces over generations. These were kept secret for a variety of
reasons: to keep the "power" limited to within their group,
to protect a family's traditions and lineage, and to "protect
the world from itself" in the fear that if "ordinary people"
knew how to magic they could use it for ill.
However, for the last half-century numerous books have been published
which made public the closely guarded secrets of Witchcraft, Druidism,
Quabbalism, the Golden Dawn, Free Masonry, and many other mystical
traditions.
What used to be inaccessable secrets for most of the world can
now be obtained at a whim in most any bookstore.
Even without this knowledge, much of what is considered magic can
be discovered on your own by observing yourself and your environment.
By being very aware of the feelings of energy in your body, how
they relate to emotional states, how you can control the energy
with your thoughts and practicing working with the energies, you
can effectively work magic without any formal training at all.
Everything you need is available, it's just up to you to decide
to learn it and put in the work needed to sense the energies and
learn to control them.
The Science of Magic
The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark wrote:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic.
I'll turn his quote around for the purposes of this discussion
and say
Any insufficiently understood technology is considered magic.
Magic is simply the term for any science that we haven't figured
out yet. Take almost any modern device and take it back in time
one hundred years and it would be called Magic.
Before electricity was understood by science and mastered, it would
have been considered magic for someone to harness it power and use
it to make a change.
To have a "magician" of old take a piece of zinc, a lemon,
and a strand of copper wire and apply it to a persons' body and
help it heal would be truly mystical to everyone back then, and
quite likely would have gotten them in trouble with the dominant
church at the time for working with dark forces.
However, in modern terms, he simply created a small battery and
used it for mild electrotherapy.
Lab:
- Name five technologies we use everyday that would have been
considered "magic" 100 years ago.
- Think of how something "magical" in the past is now
understood technologically (like the lemon battery example)
- Have you ever felt your body's natural energies. What was happening
that made you notice it?
- What "secrets" of the past do you know. How did you
learn them?
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