Magic is, Finally, Attuned Surrender

the most efficient, beneficial, and beautiful use of magic is what the universe is already doing

Okay, more people are starting to figure out that magic is real, so I want to point out something about it that wasn’t obvious to me for a long time.

In short: the most efficient, beneficial, and beautiful use of magic is what the universe is already doing.

Magic is Simply Reality’s Capacity for Change

I don’t know what magic is and I won’t pretend to have anything more than questions about it, but I do know it’s everywhere and it’s how everything happens. Whatever the universal force is that makes… things… go?; that allows processes to unfold; that makes time and energy interact in ways human minds can barely formulate, let alone try to understand; that makes consciousness an aspect of the universe that changes the universe; that we can glimpse through the direct experience of aliveness and wonder…

Magic is that. I think magic is god, or goddess, or the ground of being, or the tao. We just use the word ‘magic’ to refer to the aspects of it that we can talk to and cultivate and direct in various ways to change the direction of reality’s unfolding.

A lot of magic is just… getting a job and a paycheck so you can make money to make your life more comfortable and raise a family and stuff. That’s a way of harnessing Reality’s unfolding. Other magic is using your words to recruit human energy to a cause you think should have more human energy behind it. Other magic is spilling ox blood on a black stone beneath a full moon and chanting the 71 names of the crossroads goddess to ask for her direction and grace as you navigate a life transition. And some magic is practicing meditation and embodiment deeply until you clear the channels between you and the deep unconscious, giving you access to intuitive knowing that had been blocked before.

All of it’s just… cultivating and directing Reality’s capacity for change. Sometimes in very direct ways, sometimes in non-linear multidimensional ways.

What people *call* magic is simply the collection of the more non-linear and multidimensional attempts to direct Reality’s capacity for change. No one calls it magic when you want an apple & drive down to the store to buy some apples. But if you want to find the love of your life, and you do a series of symbolic rituals and offerings, we definitely call that magic.

Medicine & Magic

There’s a medical analogy here somewhere. I have Hashimoto’s disease — basically, my immune system has decided that my thyroid is foreign tissue; so now my body is trying to destroy my own thyroid.

The usual doctors I went to, their treatment is to give me extra thyroid hormones. That’s the standard. It’s a very simple, direct, brute force approach: “your thyroid is getting eaten away, so it’s making less of its hormones — we’ll just fill in the gaps and give you extra hormones.”

This works fine, kind of (if I get into the nuances, we’ll be here all day). Taking those hormones considerably raises your risk of various cancers, it does nothing about the root causes, and it can be very difficult to dial in the proper amount of the hormones (that dialing-in process can be absolute hell…) but overall, it’s better than having your thyroid out of whack.

What those doctors don’t do is address the root issue: the fact that my immune system is recognizing my thyroid tissue as a threat. Because that task is too hard and complex, and quite frankly western medicine doesn’t actually know almost anything useful about autoimmune diseases right now — a fact I and many others with related conditions have had to learn the hard way, discovering the void of ignorance hiding behind a sea of chatter about different pathways and chemicals and acronyms that all basically add up to a thousand ways to say “we’re not sure what went wrong or how to fix it.”

This type of medicine is analogous to the type of magic that people don’t call magic. The direct and literal connect-the-dots type of magic. Look at the most direct and visible pathways and try to break through them. Want a new car? Save up money, get a loan, exchange money for car. Want a girlfriend? Make yourself look nice, learn a bit of charm, and keep approaching women until something clicks well enough to keep pursuing. Want higher levels of thyroid hormones? Swallow a dose of thyroid hormones.

The other type of magic, the non-linear multi-dimensional magic, is more akin to the other type of medicine, the non-linear multi-dimensional medicine: in my case, Ayurveda.

I started seeing Ayurveda doctors, and even spent a couple months in a hospital in India doing intensive panchakarma treatment. Their concern wasn’t just to raise my thyroid hormone levels. Their focus was looking at the many systems of my body, the symptoms I was experiencing all over (not just the ones directly related to the thyroid), and tying it together into a complex picture of unbalanced processes in my body.

A lot of it made no sense to me. My ear started hurting, and she told me to stop eating sweet potato. I had such intense brain fog that it basically amounted to dementia, and she told me to eat only rice porridge for a couple days, do some calf raises, and listen to music I loved. I was stressed about a recent heartbreak, and she told me to eat more pomegranate and take a medicine that was a mixture of a dozen herbs I’d never heard of.

And of course, it worked. Over and over again, problems that my other doctors has just shrugged at and said “that’s your life now, get used to it,” Ayurveda managed to clear up in a couple months with some precisely-directed non-linear interventions.

The way my doc explained it, what we were doing wasn’t brute-forcing any specific pathways or problems — but using mixtures of different herbs, foods, activities, mental states and the like to gently nudge the unbalanced currents of my body back into balance, nudging first from this direction, then this one, then another. Nudging along many dimensions at once, allowing the body to bring itself back into balance.

This is more or less what magic magic is doing — and why it so often doesn’t work.

(I feel like I’m getting off track from the original focus I stated at the top, but I promise I’m still building towards it — I’m just, er, nudging you towards my conclusion along a couple dimensions at once.)

Why Magic Doesn’t Work (It’s Cuz You Suck At It, You Left-Hemisphere Captured Dingoes)

Depending on what segment of my audience you’re from, the above section on magic being like ayurveda may have been either a “oh nice” lightbulb moment for you, or a “no duh they’re alike, they’re both claptrap” moment for you.

A lot of why magic doesn’t work (when it doesn’t work) comes down to this latter attitude, in a couple ways.

Sometimes, people have this attitude, and they just… never try it. They look at how magic/manifestation/ritual/whatever is supposed to work, they can’t rationally see how it could work — how such an input could possibly affect such an output — and that’s enough of a stop sign for them. Why bother putting in the energy?

Or, they might come to try out magic, but bring the “western medicine”-type view to it. The “take two pills and call me next week” view. The “press a button and a thing either happens or doesn’t” view. They pick up a manual, chant a few words, draw a sigil, bury a seashell in the roots of a tree and decide to sit back and wait for their wished-for lover to come knock on their door.

What’s missing here is a holistic, ayurvedic, right hemispheric, magic approach to the thing.

In my view, magic shapes consciousness, and consciousness shapes reality (I actually happen to think reality is consciousness in certain ways, but you don’t have to entertain that idea for this to be relevant).

The collective unconscious and the individual unconscious, neither of them operates on our familiar verbal language. They operate on the language of image, sensation, impression, repetition, action, and worldview. We can shape the whole way reality unfolds around us by adjusting our unconscious expectations and unconscious libidos, using this language.

This doesn’t happen from pressing a button, from drawing a sigil, from doing a couple of chants one night under a full moon. It happens by approaching it from a multi-dimensional stance. It happens by cultivating deep sensitivity to how reality feels, how your body feels, how the space around you feels. What qualities are present. What resonates with those qualities, what shifts those qualities. And navigating all that like a motherfucker. Being an unapologetic wayfinder of the frequencies of existence you move among. Sailing across the wave-wracked surface of the gods with a grin on your face and a rope in your hand.

In practical terms, that might look like a lot of things, some of them manifestly mundane, others hopelessly weird and seemingly disconnected. Let’s go back to the old classic, love magic, bringing a new lover into your life. Yes, that’s going to mean some glamour magic — which is less about rubbing newts in your hair than it is about honing in on what makes you feel magnetic. Attune to your wardrobe, to the pitch and yaw of your voice when you’re most comfortable in your own skin, when you’re most alive to your own whim. Notice that the lover you’re looking for, when you feel him in your heart, there’s a texture to him, something smooth and strong and yielding, like willow wood. So get yourself a chunk of willow wood and start to carve it, to shape it. Sing love songs while you whittle. Carve hearts into a willow tree. Wake up in the middle of the night with an urge to talk to the moon — walk outside and tell her all about what you want, what you’re trying to do, what steps you’re taking. Tell the moon all about how a guy was chatting you up the other day — he was cute, charming, felt objectively like a good choice — and you turned him down, because your gut felt something was off, and you felt like you needed to keep your life open for who you’re really looking for. Every morning, wake up, make your coffee, and handle your little willow-wood carving. Tune into your longing for someone to share your life with. Feel it in your chest, in the room around you. Notice if it says anything, if it draws you anywhere.

On and on and on. Magic follows the currents of your life and bends them, moves them, non-linearly and multi-dimensionally nudges them such that your life energy (and, at least in my view) the world’s energy flows all start to move into closer alignment to what you’re looking for.

As with ayurveda or other multi-dimensional medical systems (though to a lesser degree, usually) you’re probably going to need expertise and guidance for a lot of this, both when starting out and when undergoing more acute or complex periods. But once you’ve gotten attuned to how things feel, what works, what doesn’t — once you’ve built the basic muscle memory of embodied intuition, a lot of this becomes very manageable on your own.

And more than that, when you start really paying attention, there’s very little to actually do.

Wizards are Lazy (This is a Compliment)

There’s a trope in a lot of fantasy stories, something like “the do-nothing wizard.”

These wizards are often the wisest and most powerful in the land, absolutely legendary. And the other characters are often incredibly disappointed to meet them and find that their advice mostly amounts to “pay close attention to the world, but please don’t do anything.”

The mentor in A Wizard of Earthsea is like this, if I remember correctly. He takes in the main character to train him, and then mostly teaches him about the balance and equilibrium of the universe, and how we ought not disturb it.

In The Poppy War, our main character’s primary mentor is much the same. She impatiently waits through his many lessons about balance and order and pure knowledge of the workings of the magical universe… because she’s waiting for him to give her permission and training to exploit that knowledge for personal gain and prowess in war. Her mentor is horrified and disappointed every time she brings this up.

I think The Kingkiller Chronicles does this too. One of the school’s professors is a batty madman who wanders campus, not teaching much of anything to anyone, but he seems to be casually more powerful than just about anyone, in the few times when we see him use his power. But mostly, he just watches the rhythms of the universe. I don’t remember if or how much this is explicit, but I got the sense that his ethos is against using magic for personal ends.

I increasingly see really good reason for this trope, and it gets surprisingly complex, but a lot of it comes down to what I said up at the start.

It’s not that there’s some hippie dippie, nature is beautiful, praise mother Gaia and leave her pristine kind of ethical white knight thing going on. It’s not a high and mighty purity thing.

It’s just that once a couple of things click into place, it makes no sense to do most of the stuff we’d recognize as magic.

Because, again, the most efficient, beneficial, and beautiful use of magic is what the universe is already doing.

The Body is Magic, Magic is a Body

Just as the most efficient and beneficial and beautiful state of health is what the body naturally tends itself towards. The body wants to be healthy, strong, lithe, intelligent. And if you attune yourself carefully to those desires of the body, you’re increasingly able to keep that equilibrium, to sense when it’s tilting one way or another and fix it. You’re able to sense when something is off before it goes too far, and you can take steps to nudge it back into good, sustainable functioning.

This is… pretty much what magic is for too. You attune yourself to Reality — or, y’know, your corner of it — and you sense where there’s imbalance, where things need or want to be corrected, where they need or want to go in a certain direction. And you do it, in whatever strange, nudging ways feel most alive and natural to you.

Which is where we run into problems. Where humans always run into problems, increasingly over the past decades and centuries.

Because the whole system we’re embedded in has gotten unbalanced and deranged. We so rarely, if ever, get a taste of balanced functioning, so we have only intuitive ancestral blood memory to navigate by when trying to get back to it. Everyone is disembodied, numbed, cut off from their own direct sensing — so even if we did know what balance was supposed to feel like, almost no one could actually feel the qualities of the imbalance, let alone navigate from there.

Modern western diets are a pretty good microcosm of this. People constantly crave foods that unbalance them. They ignore foods that are balancing. Our instincts and desires can’t be trusted.

After about 6 months of a fairly strict ayurvedic diet, I was released to eat mostly whatever I wanted. What I found, pretty quickly, was that a lot of the foods I’d wanted before just didn’t sound good anymore. I’d always been a life-long chocolate fiend — now chocolate felt barely worth considering. Pizza felt sickeningly rich to think about. Most of the center aisles at the grocery store gave me a visceral sense of “none of this stuff is fit for human consumption, how is this 2/3 of the store?”

Magic is a lot like this, including the fact that most people are chaotic and unbalanced about it — but that it is possible to rebalance yourself, bit by bit, domain by domain.

Balancing Magic

Diving in to magic and ritual in order to pursue goals of the ego is… well it’s where basically everyone starts. It’s also pretty weak and misguided magic.

Gah there’s more nuance here than I can actually express. It’s fine, I’ll be clumsy.

All of the things we really want — all the things that consciousness really wants, deep down at the foundations and roots of all of us — all of these things like joy, peace, connection, love for all beings, a world that nurtures everyone, a world where we all feel that we belong, that we are worthwhile, that we are powerful contributors to a shared vision and unfolding — all of these things are what the free flow of magic is already doing — these are already what Reality’s capacity for change is oriented towards.

In other words, and to repeat myself again, the most efficient, beneficial, and beautiful use of magic is what the universe is already doing.

And — this is a key point here — I’m not saying that we just have to sit back and do nothing, that using any magic can or will fuck up the fabric of creation, or wreck your soul, or anything like that.

One of the ways that Reality works its beautiful, powerful magic is through us. I still can’t remember where I heard this phrase, but it’s stuck with me: “God’s will is done — and we’re the ones who do it.” Same idea. Reality does its magic, and it does it through us.

It’s the same way that a well-balanced body feeds itself — which it does through a well-attuned ego. We receive messages, cravings, desires, and intuitions from the body, and we eat in accordance with them.

So much of the work of magic is getting yourself attuned and balanced enough that you can receive the messages, cravings, desires, and intuitions of Reality, and live in accordance with them. This is harder than it seems. Most of our desires and intuitions starting out are the equivalent of sugar cravings and processed salty snack cravings and urges to sit around all day and watch sitcoms.

When we do that kind of magic, when we do ego-magic, magic driven by convenience and craving and control, we’re mostly just taking energy away from the things we really want (love, connection, meaning, etc) to give it to the things our ego craves at the moment (money! sex! a high-status lover to be my high-status proof of worthiness!).

Oh wait, I’m talking about finite & infinite ambition again, aren’t I? Okay, I guess this is finite and infinite magic.

You can either do ego-magic (finite) that’s aimed at recruiting Reality’s capacity for change towards changes that you want at the moment, not knowing if that want comes from a place of balance or a place of chaos, because you’re not attuned to your body, your emotions, your imaginal currents, the world around you,,

Or you can Non-Do reality-magic (infinite) that’s a surrender to the way Reality’s capacity for change wants to move through you — which is already far more powerful and intelligent and effective than anything you could consciously plan or execute. All you have to do is attune yourself, and trust what you’re attuned to.

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I never know how far afield I’m going to wander in these In•Star rants. Did I hit my main points? I think I did. I’m pretty sure.

One summary would be that the universe is a hundred-billion-year-long sentient magic spell aimed at the benefit of ALL, and you can either attune yourself to your place in it or try to siphon some off its energy to claw after your clenched little ego desires — and it’s not always going to be clear which is which. (Sometimes the universe really does want you to have a bunch of sex and make a bunch of money! But it’s very easy to trick yourself.)

And also, that life and magic and poetry and ayurveda and a bunch of other things all work best by attuned, multidimensional nudging approaches — only in very specialized cases are the linear connect-the-dots approaches actually the best move. (And usually, those are cases where too many other things have already gone wrong and you just need to short-circuit the whole situation.)

That should be about it. I think I’m done now.

Oh, also, I know some of you want to attune and multidimensionally nudge your Unconscious towards the desires and values that Reality is running through you like an electrical current — and I’ve started doing 1-on-1 work based on exactly that. You can find current details here, and hopefully I’ll have more on my website soon, after I’ve done a few more test runs with early clients.

I’m also doing longer-term and deeper-dive ritual-crafting work. I’ll only take 2 or 3 clients per year for this — it’s a real investment of time, focus, and energy for me, and will require a real investment from you as well, on all counts. If you’re interested, message me and we’ll see if it’s a fit.

Aside from that — have a magical day y’all.

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