In 2008 I walked in to Planned Parenthood and got a vascetomy. I didn’t want to have kids. It was a fateful choice, a declaration of the legacy of my life.
When you think of the word legacy, what first comes to mind? Do you think about future generations or what the impact of your choices will be on those down the line or do you think of something else altogether?
For me legacy is a really important word because I don’t have any kids and I never will have any kids. My legacy is my magical writing, my classes, my art, and my overall devotion to the evolution of magic as a discipline and practice. I first began thinking about legacy magic, or long-term magic, back in 2017.
I had an important realization that my approach to magic, which was will-based at the time, was not working the way I hoped it would. I was putting a lot of effort into getting results and sometimes I would get the results but I would also come away feeling exhausted. I was essentially trying to muscle my way through magical workings instead of taking an approach to magic that involved less forcing and more collaboration.
I was particularly exhausted in 2017 after a year of intensive magical work and other mundane efforts, which had ultimately resulted in a business that I was running crashing down and me burning out. Everything I had done to try and sustain it and make it work had failed. I had failed. I questioned everything that I knew about magic and I questioned whether or not I was even really a magician. It was a humbling moment that forced me to come face-to-face with my own limitations and it also helped me realize that I needed to find a better way to practice magic.
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The Flaw of Will Based Magic
I had actually been practicing long-term magic before 2017. I have an elemental balancing ritual that I do, which is a year-long working and in some cases has been two or three years long. This definitely would fall under longer-term magic because it’s a lot longer than what most magical workings are. Most magical workings are typically a once-and-done affair or a spell cast here, a spell cast there. Rarely is magic viewed from a sustainability perspective, in which it is worked with iteratively.
My elemental balancing rituals had taught me the power and presence of longer-term magic and how, when magic is worked with over an extended period of time, it both shapes and is shaped by the ongoing evolution of changes in the magician’s identity and in the way the working shows up in the magician’s life.
I learned that magic wasn’t always a one-way street, which is one of the fallacies of will-based magic. Will-based magic is power over magic. It is magic based on trying to have power over the environment, power over spirits, power over other things in order to achieve results. It’s a forceful way of approaching magical work. It shows up in a lot of Western magic, particularly from the 19th century on.
However this approach to magic is ultimately flawed because it focuses so much on exerting power over the environment, power over spirits, and power over other people and beings. It creates a tension in the magical work that inevitably creates a backfire for the magician. This is why many magicians who have approached magic in this way end up leading rather chaotic lives because they are continually trying to force their will on reality and causing a rebound effect to occur.
My own experiences in 2017 and really in other areas of my life pointed to this fact as well. I had found a pattern where I would get a result using will-based approaches to magic but then inevitably end up having to do more magical work in order to maintain that result.
What had really ended up happening is that I was continually trying to force reality into a specific shape that suited me instead of actually opening myself up to a communion with reality that was informed by curiosity, imagination, and discovery.
The weakness of this approach is that the more you try to force reality into a particular shape, the more it actually resists that and pushes back against you. This can lead to the chaos that I mentioned earlier as well as an experience of burnout with magic because the magician is always trying to force results into place instead of working organically with reality to create a shared and collaborative experience that allows results to naturally occur.
Tracking Your Magic Exercise
Much of twentieth-century occultism inherited an implicit model of will from industrialism: the stronger the will, the greater the result. Will became analogous to horsepower as a finite resource that you can direct against resistant reality.
If you observe practitioners (including yourself) over years rather than reading their theories, a different pattern appears. Burnout rarely comes from “doing too much magic.” It comes from using will as a technology of control rather than a process of relationship.
One of the best ways to understand the burnout effect of Will based Magic is through the following exercise.
Go through your magical journals and pick out 2-3 spells/workings you did that you might identify as will based magic.
See if these patterns fit those workings:
Everything depends on my will - with this pattern everything about the magical spell becomes personal. Every setback is treated as evidence that you didn’t visualize well enough, ritualize enough, focus enough or believe enough.
Constant energetic tension - Power-over magic creates chronic muscular contraction on the physical, mental, emotional and energetic body of the magician. You never stop holding the spell and so you never let it fully land in your being.
Every obstacle becomes an enemy - Will based magic creates adversarial perception that focuses on overcoming resistance instead of cultivating curiosity. Are you fighting the world with your magic or creating a relationship with it?
More Power is needed - When force doesn’t work, apply more force. Will based magic tries to force the outcome into place instead of creating harmony with the outcome.
Review your magical workings to see if any of these patterns fit your spell work. If so, you may want to change you relationship your Will, specifically how you apply it to your magical work.
Instead of taking the approach:
“I will make reality conform to my will.”
Change your approach to:
“I will organize myself so that this possibility has the greatest opportunity to emerge.”
This changes everything about your magic.
Your magic becomes:
orientation instead of pressure
participation instead of domination
listening instead of constant assertion
adaptation instead of escalation
stewardship instead of ownership
You align your magic with the dynamics already present. If you want to learn my practices for doing this type of alignment, sign up for Legacy Magic.
From Will to Legacy
In light of what had happened in 2017, I evaluated how I practiced magic and came to the conclusion that I needed to take an approach that was informed by the conscious decision to surrender to the experience of the magic. I allowed it to show up in my life in a way that shaped me as much as it shaped the environment. Instead of just focusing on externally shaping the environment around me, I started to explore how the magic shaped my identity as well as the environment and how it created a shared consensual experience.
This approach to magic flew in the face of conventional Western wisdom about how magic works. Yet nonetheless it made a lot of sense. The more I dove into it, the more I began to see that this was a particular trait of Western magic as opposed to other magical experiences. My studies in the esoteric practices of Taoism and Dzogchen had already shown this to me to some degree because the approaches of those two respective schools of thought and practice demonstrated a willingness to let go of being in control and created a focus on the harmonization with nature. Additionally I had some experience with indigenous practices that I had learned and those practices also pointed to the same conclusion. Magic that is done to collaborate with reality is more effective than will-based magic.
However what I didn’t have was an approach that was based in my own background of Western magic that actually allowed me to create a similar harmonization and collaboration with the environment around me. I realized that I needed to develop my own practice for long-term magic. The elemental balancing ritual was the seed for the long-term magical work, but I needed something else as well.
I started studying with R.J. Stewart. I’d taken a few of his classes but I was drawn in particular to the Sphere of Art, which was a practice that was partially derived from his studies with William G. Gray. I had read William G. Gray’s works and been heavily influenced in my magical practice by how Gray framed magic and explored its workings. Gray, in my mind, was one of the original magical experimenters in that he rigorously tested and explored what magic could do. He did it from a perspective that was significantly different from the will-based approach to magic that was being espoused by so many other Western magicians at the time he was alive.
Studying the Sphere of Art under R.J. Stewart proved to be very helpful. It meshed with my existing system of space-time magic. It also fit within the container of my studies around William G. Gray’s works. I found that I could apply my martial arts studies and Taoist magical practices into the system which was significant because it allowed me to integrate my inner alchemical body work into the long-term magic as well. I adapted the sphere of art to fit my own particular system of magic and used it as a way to create a system of long-term magical work that was focused on designing my life proactively instead of using magic to reactively try to solve problems.
The majority of spells, sigils, and magic techniques focus on solving problems in the short run. A long-term approach to magic actively sculpts and shapes the design of your life in order to create a particular outcome. When you focus on legacy or long-term magic, what you’re doing is you’re asking yourself, “How can I shape my life using magic in a process that is repetitive but creates a significantly easier path of manifestation?”
When I started practicing magic by design, creating a long-term vision for how I wanted my life to manifest, it changed the way that I practiced magic. I focused less on solving the immediate problems and more on identifying what within myself needed to change in order to align with the ideal reality I wanted to create for myself. This exploration naturally brought a lot of change into my life because in questioning how my life was in the moment, I began to see what wasn’t working and I identified where I needed to change myself to design a better life. I ended up leaving a lot of things that weren’t working in my life behind so that I could create a life that brought me a deeper sense of contentment and happiness than I had ever experienced before.
I share that because when you start to practice long-term magic, you will naturally end up questioning the direction your life is going, and it may require significant changes to who you are. Long-term magic is inner alchemical magic, because it requires you to become the most honest person with yourself. That necessarily means that you are going to shed everything in your life where you are being dishonest with yourself and other people.
It is a path of surrender instead of forcing, discovery through curiosity instead of domination through will.
In the next article we’re going to explore this path in more depth to understand how it can be applied to practical magic.
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How to use magic to build a life time of results, instead of one moment.
How to calibrate and improve your life and magic through long term magical work.
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