The Art & Science of Magickal Creation is one of the best texts you could possibly read if you are serious about creating your reality in a deliberate and personal way. With the kind permission of the author, Daniel Keaton, I am now able to present a short extract from the beginning of the very first Neophyte I Level (there are six levels of study in the package, as well as some incredible bonus materials). Enjoy…
Magick Defined
When spoken aloud, the words magic and magick (with a k) sound identical, yet their meanings are far from interchangeable. Magic is the art of conjuring for the purposes of entertainment – pulling rabbits out of hats, making white doves disappear and so on. All of this is achieved through optical illusion, sleight of hand and showmanship.
Magick, on the other hand, has nothing to do with conjuring or entertainment. It is, in many respects, the real thing. In other words, whereas magic gives the illusion of bringing about changes in reality, magick really does bring about changes. Magick can therefore be defined as the Art & Science of bringing about genuine change in a universe through Intention and Will.
I call magick an Art because it is supremely flexible and can be used a wide variety of situations to achieve an even wider variety of outcomes. The more creative you are, the more ways you will find to apply this Art in your life.
At the same time, magick is a Science because it is supremely reliable. Just as you can be confident that 2 + 2 will always equal 4 no matter when you decide to test the theory, so you can just as confidently assume that magick will always work when it is done properly. Unfortunately, there are far fewer people who know how to do magick properly than there are those who know how to count. But that is by the by.
Magickal Mechanics
If magick can be defined as the Art and Science of bringing about genuine change in a universe through Intention and Will, then how exactly does it work? Well, in order to understand this you first have to consider how the physical universe as a whole operates. In other words, we need to talk about physical mechanics and what I like to refer to as magickal mechanics.
We are all taught about physical mechanics in school, and we learned that all matter in this physical universe can be classified as being a solid, a liquid or a gas. To illustrate this, most school pupils are (or at least they were when I was one!) given a block of ice in a metal bowl. The ice is, of course, a solid object. When the ice gets warm, it melts into the bowl, thus becoming a liquid. When the metal bowl is heated sufficiently, the water boils and evaporated, becoming a gas.
We also learned about cause and effect at school. In brief, we were all taught that if you want to bring about an effect, you need to set in motion a preceding cause. So, in order to make a ball roll (the effect) you first need to push that ball (the cause).
In magickal mechanics, we agree with all of the above, but with certain distinctions. To begin with, we recognise just one state of matter – energy. Magickians have maintained for thousands of years that everything here consists of pure energy, and regardless of whether a thing is manifested in solid, liquid or gaseous form, the thing itself is really just energy when all is said and done. Today’s physicists are at last beginning to confirm this longstanding belief .
A second distinction concerns cause and effect. We agree that every effect must be preceded with a suitable cause, but we maintain that the Will and Intention of an individual can often set magickal causes in motion that are just as – if not more – effective than physical causes alone.
Again, modern physicists are beginning to confirm the accuracy of this belief, and recent studies into prayer and intention under laboratory conditions have resulted in some very convincing evidence which supports it.
Put all of this together and you can arrive at a fairly good understanding of Magickal Mechanics. If you have something that you want to change in your life, you don’t have to do things the hard way by running around setting lots of physical causes in motion. Instead, you can use the principles of magick to harness your inner power and set energy causes in motion. And since energy is the basic building block of the physical universe, results gained through the employment of magickal mechanics can often be dramatically more effective than using physical mechanics alone.
