aecass (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} aecass) wrote,@ 2004-03-14 16:56:00 |
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Facts are only information you trust enough to believe in
| ... which has nothing whatsoever to do with this post - or at least I don't think so. Someone asked me a few days ago if I could outline the steps that make magic work better, and after I giggled a lot, I did come up with a couple of rules of thumb. The problem is that when you want something to happen, you have no idea who else may be working for or against circumstances that would help it happen, so you really never know who did what. Given that, "rules" can't ever really be tested, and you really can never know what happened. Still, there are a couple of good rules of thumb that seem to apply generally. First is that you need to be going after something you want personally, that you have an emotional attachment to getting. If what you want is something "selfless", then you need to expect some kind of peripheral reward for going after it - the approval of your group, your better chances of making it into Heaven, something that you believe will happen if you work at it. Magic is the application of will and desire, and if you do not personally desire either the thing you are after or the perceived consequences, nothing much is going to happen. Second, and harder to manage, is to get yourself to the point where you realize you actually don't know what is going to happen, or how it will work. This is because the more constraints you put on how a thing happens, the less likely there are to be circumstances which can be tweaked to make it happen. As usually happens, the person asking wasn't happy with those answers, because they offer little control, and little opportunity to think of yourself as charitable. The question becomes whether you want to keep your self image or actually do the work. |
