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Originally Posted by John Freestone  I am sorry, it was rather harsh, but you do not exactly help your case by replying that I should look it up in a dictionary. |
I am not particularly interested in making out any particular sort of "case", for you or to you.
I suggested that you look up the term for yourself, simply because I thought that this would be the most convenient way for you to convince yourself as to the meaning of this particular term. I mean, you weren't just going to BELIEVE me, were you.
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Kind of QED then, isn't it. The definition includes the assertion of its reliability.
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For you perhaps. Personally I prefer a good theoretical understanding combined with direct experience.
By "theoretical understanding", I merely mean an understanding of what the principles, methods and philosophy of the topic; and not necessarily actual acceptance or agreement with it.
By "direct experience", I mean .... Oh wait, you were once rather Buddhist, so you do know what good old Gautama said about direct experience, don't you.
Anyway, if or when you have some theoretical understanding and a little direct experience of the topic, we could discuss further. Till then, the discussion would be quite fruitless for you as well as me. It does seem unlikely at this point that you have any theoretical understanding or direct experience of magick, since until a day ago, you did not even know the word.
For now, all I will make are a few rather obvious propositions -
1. If your thoughts can affect your reality at all, then it is at least reasonable to suppose that unusual methods of thinking could affect your reality in unusual ways;
2. Unusual methods of thinking might include hypnosis; NLP; meditation; positive affirmations; creative visualisation; prayer; or simply, magick.
The labels & definitions don't particularly interest me, although they do serve some limited purpose for intellectual pigeonholing. I say "limited" because there are things which people do, which could equally be classified as "prayer" or "magick"; or "prayer" or "meditation"; or "meditation" or "hypnosis"; or "hypnosis" or "creative visualisation".
On my own blog, when recording my personal experiences, I have given up on the labels. I simply call each of my experiences "a mind session".