What I understand creates better results
How to strip out needless complexity from your magical work
One of the attitudes about magic that I always find problematic and frankly disappointing is the attitude that you don’t need to know how magic works. It reflects a lack of curiosity about magic and how magic interfaces with the world. It also creates another problem, which is something the just do magic crowd doesn’t recognize: A lot of needless complexity occurs when you don’t get curious and peek under the hood.
Why is this bad advice to just do magic so popular?
It’s popular because it encourages magicians to be lazy. If I just do magic, without understanding what’s happening, its one more thing done. It sacrifices understanding magic and being curious for the sake of expediency.
The problem is that it also leads to poor results. Just doing magic, without understanding what you are doing, creates open loops. It also creates the needless complexity, because a lot of the time we are doing activities that we don’t understand, and this creates a lack of alignment with what’s being done, what’s happening internally for the magician, and how all of that is interfacing with reality to create the result, or lack thereof that the magician experiences.
Explore - How has Needless Complexity Shown up in your magical work?
This is part one of a three part exercises. Parts 2 and 3 are available to paid subscribers at the end of the article.
Review the last 3-5 magical workings in your journal.
How much did you understand about what you were doing with the magical workings?
What did you understand?
How did your lack of understanding effect the experience and efficacy of the magical work.
What is needless complexity?
Needless complexity occurs in magic and it occurs in other areas of your life. Needless complexity occurs when a person makes an activity harder than it has to be, usually because they are adding needless steps or actions to a situation or because they aren’t creating a path of easiest manifestation. Here’s a couple practical examples:
You visit a store of some type. You are looking for a specific item. You could ask someone at the store for help and get shown where the item is or you can search for it yourself. If you search for the item yourself you take up a lot of time that could be put toward other activities, but if you ask someone for help, you are admitting you don’t know where the item is.
Take a moment and consider: How are you creating needless complexity in this situation? How is it serving you to create that complexity in your life? Look at each possible branch of the action and ask yourself which one is creating needless complexity for yourself.
The second example is a magical example. You are doing a magical working from a book. You don’t understand all of the steps or all the tools. You could do the working the way it was written, without understanding what you are doing. This leaves room for doubt and uncertainty, but it is doing magic.
Alternately you could create a different version of the working, where you understand everything you are doing and you can get fully in alignment with what you are doing and how it changes you and your relationship with reality.
Which approach would you take? Why? How does each approach incorporate needless complexity?
I’ve chosen both of these examples purposely, to illustrate how needless complexity can show up, but let’s consider what needless complexity is in further depth.
Why is needless complexity problematic?
The answer may seem self-evident, but I have observed, both of myself and others, that it is all too easy to make a given situation or scenario more complicated than it has to be. Of course, when you’re in the situation it may not even seem like you are making it all that complicated. Another person, on the outside, can see the gyrations and complications that are occurring and it can seem obvious.
How do we even identify needless complexity?
I can define it as taking extra actions that are unneeded or doing activities I don’t fully understand and those are examples of needless complexity, but I what I ultimately identify as needless complexity is the opposite of the path of least resistance. Needless complexity creates more work, more resistance and ultimately less effective results because of how I am giving away my power to the process, instead of using the process as a vehicle of my power.
In my next article, I’ll talk about the path of least resistance and what it looks like to apply that to our lives and our magical process.
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