I got a few more questions about magic so I’m answering them here:
“What techniques do you use to practice moving your consciousness?”
The techniques I personally use are ones I learned through many different contexts, ranging from improv theater, to therapy, to Eastern philosophies, to witchcraft, to psychological manipulation. People tend to stumble across this stuff independently, and while they may call it different things, it all uses the same mechanic: You use your mind to move and change the ideas impacting your reality.
Worried about something in the future? Pantomime sticking that future scenario in an invisible bottle and putting it away.
Bored at work? Pretend you’re a little kid who’s pretending to do your job.
Don’t like the vibes of a place? Literally pick up a broom and brush the energy out the door.
As an acquaintance of mine once said, “If your problem is invisible snakes, your solution is to create an invisible mongoose.”
This does require allowing ourselves to do things we consider nonsensical, but it’s only by doing this that we gain the understanding of how magic works and that it works.
Take care though: Moving the consciousness first requires becoming aware of how it’s already moving in your immediate reality. This is gained through Mindfulness, which is the practice of observing your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and self without judgement or correction as you go about your life.
Not being aware of how your mind’s already moving means you might interpret any attempts at moving it as the work of another force (e.g. God, deities, the Devil, hexes or curse laid upon you, etc). Since moving the mind is also done through playing out stories, you’d also run the risk of not realizing you’re telling a story and might end up confusing it for reality (though generally speaking, expanding your awareness just allows you to become aware of the stories you’re already telling yourself).
Always remember that growing awareness goes hand-in-hand with learning the techniques.
“How do you discern if you’ve gained enough awareness to use a certain technique?”
This is very simple, actually: Techniques that evade your awareness will always sound very esoteric, abstract, and even poetic when described to you. You may understand bits and pieces of the explanation, but you won’t understand their meaning, and you definitely won’t “get” the overall picture. They’ll just seem highly mysterious and philosophical.
When people encounter techniques that evade their awareness, they tend to react in one of a few ways:
Their logical minds try to interpret the mysterious information to complete the picture. The conclusion will always be incorrect.
They’ll interpret this “air of mystery” as what makes magic “magic.”
Their brains will straight-up delete the information they can’t parse, so they only experience and absorb the information that makes sense.
They’ll have a very negative reaction and reject it entirely.
When a technique does exist within your realm of awareness, the way it works will be obvious to you. This knowledge will take the form of intuitive understanding, as opposed to logical reasoning. At the very least, the technique will make sense enough for you to try it, which means the intuition will come to you once you do.
“Why are things like blessings, enchantments, and intentions safer?”
These are safer because they don’t require access to greater awareness.
Awareness is a bit like vision. Some activities (like driving or skiing) require good vision to do safely because you need to be able to tell where you’re going. Other activities (like riding a bus or doodling) don’t. Sure, having good vision helps you do these better, but it’s not required in order to do them safely.
The same can be said about magic. Some magic requires the ability to course-correct based on immediate feedback, which can’t be done if you don’t have enough awareness of what your mind’s doing. Other magic doesn’t require this.
“Are [blessings, enchantments, and intentions] also forms of passive magic, a lower level of active magic, or something else entirely?”
I used “passive” and “active” as arbitrary designations. Really, the difference is whether you’re automating your magic (i.e. sending things into your expanded conscious for it to take care of in the background) or doing it manually (assuming control of the process and moving your conscious intentionally). These are just different modalities and don’t represent “higher” or “lower” forms of magic.
Plenty of magic actually uses a combination of automated and manual processes, the same way moving our body does. Additionally, advanced magic can and does use automated processes, and basic magic can and does use manual ones.
As a general rule of thumb: Anything that works through “casting/firing/releasing your intention into the universe” can be thought of as automated.
