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One of the books I’ve been reading lately is Mistakes were Made (but not by me) (affiliate link). It’s been a hard book to read because what it naturally causes a reader to face is how they have justified their own mistakes in order to avoid taking responsibility for them. While I’d like to believe that I do take responsibility for my choices, I’ll admit that reading this book did cause me to examine some of my perceptions and beliefs about situations and recognize how I had justified my own behavior or painted other people in a specific light to justify my choices. Needless to say, it made me squirm a bit.
As I continued reading the book I also considered how such justifications can show up in magical work. While I have written and shared my own failures with magic with a fair amount of candor, I still revisited various workings as a result of reading this book and asked myself if I ever justified why a working failed or succeeded. It was a good exercise to take on, because it required a willingness to put aside whatever justifications I had applied to a situation and ask myself if there was anything else that could have contributed to the situation.
It’s very easy to get caught up in our own narrative about why a situation turned out the way it did. Such a narrative, more often than not, “protects” us in a way. It provides an excuse for why a situation unfolded the way it or why a result didn’t occur the way we thought it ought to. Even when a narrative originates from you in a way where you are taking responsibility, you can still find yourself justifying the situation. Yet no matter how you justify a situation, it can get in the way of what you truly seek to achieve. Justifications become excuses that provide an out of sorts, but don’t enable you to learn from the situation.
My best learning has come from my failures. As hard as it can be to face those failures, what they teach you can also help you become a better person and a magician. When I look at my choices, magical and mundane, and see what brought me to the situations I’ve come to, it helps me understand what I could change, but it also helps me find the positive in those situations. I come away learning something. It may not be an easy lesson…often it isn’t, but the lesson learned nonetheless hones my awareness and magical practice.
Take a look at your own life. How have you used justifications and rationalization to explain situations in your favor? What have you avoided facing as a result? What would you learn if you stripped away those justifications?
I talk a lot about what makes magic work, but I think one of the most important aspects of that is knowing yourself and your weaknesses. It can be very easy to delude yourself and get up in false sense of grandiosity. I’ve certainly been that person at times, and one of the best things that ever happened me to was a humbling realization of how deluded I became, back in 2017 when I was finally forced to see how much I had bought into a perspective that was disrespectful and alienated people in my life. It took me a while to really learn that lesson, but its one I carried with me ever since and its helped me change my magical practice, as well as the way I live my life.
When you recognize your justifications for what they are, you can also see how they contribute to or take away from the quality of your life and your magical practice. We must always be willing to challenge our own narratives and beliefs about situations and ourselves. It’s not easy work to do, but it is necessary work that keeps us grounded and ultimately helps us become better people and magicians.
