Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash
Lately I’ve had a few other magicians express doubts about their magical work and when they tell me they feel doubt they feel as if expressing that doubt is somehow bad and makes them less of a magician. I actually find it to be refreshing and see it as a good thing to express and feel. Having some doubt is healthy and is what keeps us grounded when it comes to magic and life. The danger of not entertaining some doubts is that you can make assumptions about your magical work that you aren’t verifying. Doubt is what helps us do our due diligence and check against what we’re doing and how its aligning with the experiences we’re having.
I find that where a magician can start making assumptions is when they don’t entertain any doubt. Certainly I have sometimes made assumptions instead of critically questioning what I was experiencing. A good example of this would be when a situation seems to resolve in your favor, with everything lining up the way you would expect it to when you’ve done a magical working…but you haven’t done a magical working.
It’s tempting at that point to say well the magic must be looking out for me, or maybe I’ll do something a little further down the line and that’s why this situation is resolving the way it usually does when I’ve done magic. It’s tempting to buy your own press release.
But that’s the moment when you need doubt the most. That’s when you need to consider that maybe all of this is just a coincidence or that no magic was needed. What doubt allows us to do is critically question our experiences and hold them up against what we’ve done or not done. It enables us to question our experiences and learn from them, while also refining our spiritual work.
I use doubt in my own magical work to look at what I’ve done magically and mundanely and how it lines up with the experiences I’m having. If I do a magical working and I’m getting the desired result, I ask myself what about the magical working set that desire up so it could manifest. Then I start looking at everything that happened around the result. Did the magical working set up the alignment of possibility with reality or not?
This process is especially useful when you haven’t done a magical working and a desired result seems to be happening. The simple truth is that people get blinded by desire. We see what we want to see and from that we make assumptions about what has happened or not happened. And so we start saying things like well the magic must have made that happen, that it must have responded to our desire on a subtle level and just made things happen.
Not likely.
Unless you are purposely undertaking some type of action where you can see a causal relationship of some type, don’t make the assumption that magic is looking out for you. You’re assigning agency where there is none and at some point you will fall flat on your face when you realize you made an assumption instead of taking the time to verify.
Remember there is the rare occasion where something happens simply because it happened…and if you haven’t done anything on your end and yet a desired result falls into your lap, well congratulate yourself, enjoy it, but don’t assign agency where there is none. Use your critical thinking and doubt to recognize that unless you’ve taken action on your end, nothing happened beyond the fact that a desired result just happened to fall into your lap.
Magic doesn’t just happen. You work with magic, you take specific actions, and you apply it to manifest a result. If you haven’t done anything along those lines, don’t make an assumption. And if you have done something along those lines, then look at what you’ve done through the lens of critical thinking and doubt so that you can verify that what you’ve done has helped you manifest your desired result. By doing that you will actually build confidence in yourself and your magical work.
