In Pursuit of Majik | Miscellaneous | Forums

Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:

I'm not entirely sure I understand the question.  When you say “the best way to study magic”, what kinds of things are you thinking of as options?  Like, studying the subject out of books vs getting a teacher, or something else?

Well, to clarify, I guess that by “best” I mean: most effective, least time-consuming. This isn’t out of laziness but rather practicality. What if someone who had basically mastered the fundamentals had to find some way to keep learning and practicing without the help of a teacher? This will most likely be my situation throughout the next 4+ years while I’m at uni. I’m excited about it, but it looks like it’s going to make it difficult to really study magic in depth. Small town, roommates, no covens that I know of (though I’d need to research that), homework, extracurriculars, and you get the idea. I just don’t want to have to put magic on hold for that long, if I can find any way to manage it. But I also have to consider burn-out, and whether I’ll really be up to cracking another book in my free time. 🙁

Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:

Hmm… that's a good question.  One I'm not sure I have a good answer for, really.  For me, I've mainly stuck with the book route, and trading information with other practitioners online.  I read obsessively anyway, and I like discussing stuff like this online, so that works for me.  I'm also not big on the way magic is taught in most face-to-face situations these days.  Anything but the most basic stuff generally requires you to join organizations that are big on oaths of secrecy.  I'm personally not a fan of those, not least because it's difficult to really evaluate a group that keeps their practices secret prior to joining it.

I’ve read that secrecy is maintained to prevent the information from falling into the wrong hands, and I can respect their decision to keep certain things private. I don’t know that I like the assertion that a magical education is a privilege rather than a right, but if I have to bite the bullet and take oaths of secrecy to learn, I’ll do it, and I’ll keep my oaths. The reason I like the idea of working in a group is that it raises more power and helps to prevent “it’s-me-against-the-world” syndrome, which can creep up during solitary practice. It’s more exciting and more social. But that’s just me.

Hell, even the basic stuff is often treated as Great Secret Mysteries.  Take Reiki as an example; in Western Reiki the Reiki Symbols were considered secret and sacred, not to be shared unless you'd been attuned (and with the attached caveat that attunements must always be charged for, at set monetary levels.)  But after digging into the origins of Reiki, it turns out that Usui's original system didn't include any symbols or the attunement ritual.  He added the symbols later as training wheels, with the intent that one use them to learn the feel of a particular “frequency” of energy and stop using them as you grow more experienced with identifying that energy on your own.

So that’s why the symbols feel contrived…

So I stick with studying books on magical subjects, preferably from a wide array of different traditions.  I like finding the areas they overlap; generally those are the practices that I've found to be most reliable, the ones that have support from different magical traditions around the world.  I also like to dig back into the history of magic; there's an awful lot being discussed by modern magicians as if it were cutting-edge that really dates back to much older works of ceremonial magic.

Which books do you recommend? I tend to be intense about studying the history of my obsessions interests. 🙂

And even with all that, and hanging out with magical-geek friends IRL, and attending the odd local workshop, meetup, or class (or in some cases giving them), I still often feel like I'm not doing as much as I should be to continue my own magical education.  It's very easy to stagnate, and hard to always keep moving forward.  Especially when the demands of The Real World™ start intruding.

*Nods*. I guess that’s just the way of many things, but in the end, I think we will all be able to advance to our satisfaction. Maybe even because of the demands of the real world.

Sorry I don't have a better answer for you

It’s fine. 🙂 I know I can find a way to make this work…I’ll just have to give it some thought. 🙂

Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:

I've heard that justification before, and somehow it just rings very hollow to me.  I've seen information released from oathbound traditions and the secret stuff is really no great shakes.  Most of it's freely available from older sources or in other traditions, or even from different branches of the same tradition who hold different aspects to be the secret and sacred parts.  The best argument I've seen for keeping any of it secret is that it looses its impact for initiation if it is known beforehand; and frankly I think that demonstrates an appalling lack of creativity on the part of those conducting the initiations.

Well, that’s a shame…I was hoping there *were* fascinating secrets unknown to ANYONE else. There are days when I’d love for it all to be less complicated…magical traditions without bullsh#t…but maybe that’s just a dream.     

*nods* I would never suggest that anyone should break their oaths.  I'm just not inclined towards those traditions that require oaths of secrecy.  Oaths to do no harm, oaths to help and heal, those I'll take all day long.  Not secrecy, though.

I understand the appeal of these oaths of secrecy, even if I don’t necessarily support them. People love the idea of knowing something that other people don’t, of being more powerful – so is [secret] knowledge really power?

I've been involved in some group work that raised a lot of power, and some group work that fell flatter than if I'd spent two minutes charging the area my own damned self.  A lot depends on the group and how it's being run.

*nods*. That makes me think of advanced-level classes in dancing schools. In the right setting, it’s exhilarating just to be there. In another school with another instructor, it can be pure drudgery.

Yep, they pretty much are.  The gray area is the channeled symbols.  They definitely exist, I've channeled a few myself.  My current belief on the subject is that they're a thoughtform construct, providing access to a specific “frequency” of energy when invoked with a specific symbol, much like a servitor responding to a sigil that represents it.  But the symbol itself is probably straight out of the mind of the person who channeled it, nothing inherently special.

Have you ever thought about writing your own books on Reiki?

Oh, that could be a long list… tell you what, I'm at work right now but later on I will put together a nice little long list for you.  I will also give you a link when I respond to your last private email (yes, it's coming up next. )

I’m never going to hear the end of this? *Runs and hides face in hands*. You’re too kind. 🙂

Heh… my satisfaction would include managing physical gates and physical shapeshifting.

Ahh, shapeshifting. Yeah, I’d like to be able to do that myself. It comes up rather often in my dreams, but I don’t really know if it’s something I was able to do or not, and it’s not like I feel phantom limbs or anything (with the exception of my ears). Maybe it’s just the concept of having complete control over myself that appeals. And gating, yeah. To just travel from world to world without restrictions…

Good luck!  Let us know what you work out! 🙂

Thank you. 🙂

Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:

If it's a dream, it's one I'm working on too.  It's part of the reason I'm trying to post articles about magic that strip away a lot of the false mysticism that has grown up around magical traditions.

*nods*. I hope to eventually contribute more to that field of study as time goes on (I’ll confess that I don’t consider myself nearly as competent, at least right now, in occultism as I am in other things…)

It's also one of the reasons I'm very big into comparing magical techniques across cultures.  I tend to believe that as with scientific knowledge the stuff that really works is going to be found worldwide, not in isolated groups, as different cultures independently discover the same principles.

I tend to think so as well; not that it’s anything to do with this thread, but it’s why I’m inclined to think that the stated objective of the Lostkin Project is actually feasible.

If I write one, it's probably not going to be on “Reiki” as such.  What started for me as working with Reiki evolved into working more generally with ki as I found Reiki's roots in kikou (japanese qigong) and then branched out into exploring how ki has been worked with across a variety of traditions.  I might eventually write one on energywork, though.  Also thinking of writing one on otherkin.

Cool. 🙂 I’d love to read them, if you do. 🙂

I have memories of a few lives where I was able to shapeshift, though the experience of actually doing it in those memories is so simple and effortless it's rather difficult to follow; it was done with the casualness that we might open or close a hand in this life.

It’s a fascinating idea, isn’t it? You, sir, have given me the deadliest of all things – daydream fodder!

Gating was the opposite; it was for the most part complex to set up a new gate.  I'm still working on remembering everything that was involved in doing it properly.

Naive question, but has a working gate ever actually been achieved here?

The one complete memory I have of establishing a new gate by myself was what one might term “quick and dirty”… someone I loved was dying, help was hours away, I reached out and (I can only describe it with this term) “ripped” a passage to where we needed to be and by sheer force of will managed to hold it open long enough for the two of us to pass through, leaving the rest of our companions behind to catch up on their own.

That’s amazing. And very brave. If I may ask, what had happened? Had they been attacked or something?

It collapsed immediately afterwards, and I think I ended up passing out for at least a few days from the strain very shortly afterwards too.  Probably for the best, as I would have been underfoot while better healers were trying to help my loved one otherwise.

Poor you. 🙁 Were they alright?

Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:

I'm hoping that remembering more of what was involved in creating one on other worlds would help with that, but I'm not holding my breath.  That doesn't mean I'll stop trying, though.

Persistence is a virtue. 🙂 I don’t know if I want to go Home or not, yet. There are a lot of things I like about being here, believe it or not.

More stupid, really.  I could have killed myself, him, and everyone else at both locations doing it that way.  It was an insane risk to take, and my only real excuse was that we were lovers.  Just thinking about the logistics, I can't even count the ways it could have gone wrong.  I got incredibly lucky that the only ill effects were exhaustion.

*hugs softly*.

And attacked is a bit of an understatement, but basically yes, it was something like that.  I'm not really comfortable going into greater detail than that, but in this case it's not because of holding things back for verification or anything like that, it's just somewhat personal and it's not solely my story to tell.

I can understand that. 🙂 On another note, I don’t know that holding things back would be a reliable way to verify me – I’ve been known to accurately guess the facts of situations that have nothing to do with me – but if you ever think you might remember me, go for it. If it helps any, I do remember my physical appearance, though it’s probably descriptive of a million elves, and I have a vague concept of having worked in some kind of judicial system or as a kind of message-carrier (maybe both).

Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:

Offhand, I have no memories of the judicial aspects of our legal system.  I stayed out of politics as much as I could.  I think Arhuaine, Anadrael and Eyovah would have traveled more in those circles.

The council that Arhuaine has written about before is familiar, but I feel like there were several additional layers of government. The robes system as it’s described by some of the Elenari is foreign to me, which is one of the reasons why I think I may be remembering Alorya instead of Selar (which would be my next best guess).

I believe I was involved in enforcing one aspect of our laws, confiscating advanced technology, but more often I was involved with eliminating threats from off-world.  Our gating system was not what you'd call controlled, and nasty things from elsewhere tended to wander through, as well as vor'jen scouting parties showing up… they didn't gate exactly, they did something else that we've been calling “phasing” that's different.  Hard to explain if you haven't seen it.

*nods*. I don’t remember vor’jen (and at any rate, I don’t think I was ever involved with fighting taint), but there was tension for various reasons. I feel like I survived whatever dangers there may have been (as far as I can tell, still not really sure) and was involved to some extent with diplomacy and travel for political reasons, which I enjoyed.

I was also involved in a very long-standing, semi-cold war with another group of elves on our world, that would have a lot of small skirmishes and from time to time break out into open warfare for a while.

That seems really bizarre to me for some reason, and I don’t know why.

No message carriers are springing to mind either, at the moment, though I'm sure we had them.

Yeah, I’m still working on remembering everything my work involved. It feels like there were several different aspects of it, and there may not be an exact equivalent term here. I had a dream a couple of years ago, which I think I’ve written about before, which may provide additional clues. I was reading a kind of encyclopedia of elvish history, and my eyes fell upon an entry concerning a green gem, which was in a golden casket at the bottom of the sea. I thought that it was related to a legend or a fairy tale, or even a story told to children. Then I was pulled through the pages of the book, and found myself looking down upon the back of an unknown elf with very pale blonde hair riding a blue dragon. They wore matching blue robes, and “ambassador” flashed through my head before I woke up. I’ve worried that this dream contains influences from Eragon, and it very well may, but I also felt that there was some past-life truth to it. I knew that the green gem was a part of my people’s lore that had resided deep within my soul memory, and I believe that we traveled on dragon-back as well. And that’s a whole ‘nother topic.

I’m getting to a point where I think I’m just going to draw some of this stuff.