The Only Skill
I’ve been thinking about magick recently, and about skills and change and will. A definition of magick that I’ve encountered in chaos magick talk recently is the ability to create change in accordance with your will. I like this definition, and particularly the fact that it doesn’t actually exclude activities that we think of as “non-magickal”. Under such a broad definition, money is a tool of magick. Manual labor is a tool of magick. Effort is a tool of magick. Negotiation is a tool of magick. Anything you do in an effort to create change in accordance with your will is a tool of magick.
This got me to thinking that really, the only thing anyone does is create change (or at least attempt to). Asking for a promotion at work? Creating change. Finding that perfect relationship (or strengthening the one you’ve already got)? Creating change. Learning something new? Creating change in your brain. Playing music? Creating change in the air waves to produce sound, creating physical change in the ears of your listeners (even if it’s just you), and creating emotional change within them. Playing sportsball? Physical change (move the thing to the other thing, exercise and strengthen your body, sharpen your thing-moving skills). Everything you do, or try to do, is creating change. Even things you do to try to prevent change (e.g. paying your rent to prevent yourself from being evicted) can be viewed from a perspective of changing the course of events which would transpire (contrary to your will) if you didn’t intervene. Life is nothing but directed change.
This got me to thinking further that change’s opposite is stasis, and sometimes we use stasis (as in the example of continuing to pay rent on a regular basis to prevent an undesired eviction). Life, and the execution of one’s will, is a carefully controlled balance of using change to bring about desired events and using stasis to maintain desirable conditions once created. In a sense, the change/stasis duality is all that exists, the opposing forces that compose the universe. We know scientifically that the universe is on a path to heat death, and this “entropy” means that we expect stasis to win out. But all life is an agent of change. I note that this change/stasis dichotomy resembles the concept of order (or law) vs. chaos, but it’s not the same -- change needn’t be chaotic, and indeed we often seek a more ordered state with our changes.
So, I’m taking these ideas and focusing on my will. Motivation, the drive to act, would seem to be one of the most important aspects of magick given the concepts laid out above, as again, everything is you do is just a form of creating change, and since magick is just creating change in accordance with your will, everything you do is magick. Don’t just work the spell, actually do the work -- that’s part of the spell, too! (As an aside, this all works really well with my atheistic leanings.) I am finding this helpful in persuading myself to do the thing, whatever it may be. If it’s my will that it should happen, then I should do everything I can to create the change in accordance with that will. To do anything else would just be leaving magick on the table. (It is worth noting that before this can happen, it’s important to figure out exactly what your will *is*.)
I’m not so self-centered as to think I’m the first person who’s thought of this -- if anyone can point me to reading material aligned with these ideas, I’d appreciate it.
