Magick with Alex

---

Performing Open-Heart Surgery on Reality

Magick is frequently marketed as a whimsical hobby for the bored or a collection of “cool” techniques for New Age dreamers. This is a lie designed for armchair eccentrics. To be a magician is to take total, terrifying responsibility for your entire existence. While it is true that “anyone can have a go,” it is equally true that not everyone has the aptitude to do it safely or successfully.

Think of it like brain surgery. Anyone could, in theory, pick up a scalpel and start poking around in some poor bastard’s gray matter, but it is a highly demanding, specialized, and often messy discipline. If you decide to pursue this path, you are effectively performing surgery on your own reality. Results are the only thing that matters. You must move from the casual interest of a “meat robot”—reacting blindly to external stimuli—to a serious, lifelong commitment. This isn’t about praying to a “gaseous dad” in the sky while acting like a worthless wretch; it’s about performing the experiment yourself.

The First Threshold: From Dabbling to the Deep End

Most people enter the occult through “dabbling”—performing minor operations like sigil magick to get laid or find rent money. This is the honeymoon phase, a bit of “pensioner magick” where things seem easy and consequence-free. However, if you stick with it, you will eventually reach a T-junction, or a crossroads, in your development.

At this juncture, you are faced with a choice that determines whether you are a magician or a ham:

• The Exit: You quit “messing around” with the occult to go and do something “serious” with your life, like working in a cubicle until you die.
• The Deep End: You go “all out, balls to the wall,” and dedicate your life to the ideal of being the greatest magician you can be.

Choosing the “serious” path means committing to a process of continuous, self-directed initiation. You stop seeing magick as a series of isolated tricks to manipulate your boss and start seeing it as an irrevocable transformation of your reality.

The Metaphysical Cycle of Insight

Magick accelerates a specific metaphysical process of insight. This is not a linear climb but a cyclical journey that includes predictable, and often harrowing, stages. Understanding this cycle is the difference between making progress and going “barking mad.”

Stage	Characterization	Common Phenomena
The Plateau	Steady progress and “Naive Enlightenment.”	Bliss, feelings of oneness, visions of bright light, and the absurd belief that you have already achieved the final goal.
The Trough	The “Dark Night of the Soul.”	Loss of success, fear, intense disgust, hate, and unpleasant bodily sensations. This is the realm of potential psychosis.
The Peak	Equanimity and Mastery.	A gradual peace with perception, culminating in the occurrence of the Absolute as a peak experience.

Many practitioners get “stuck” in the Trough for years—sometimes decades—because they “buy into the naive enlightenment event” of the Plateau. They think they’ve found God, and when the light goes out and the disgust kicks in, they panic. The only remedy for navigating the Trough and preventing a total mental collapse is the habitual practice of insight meditation (Vipassana or Zazen). If you aren’t prepared to deal with the fear and the physical revulsion of the Trough, don’t play with the process at all.

Navigating the Danger Zone: Four Major Pitfalls

The path is littered with “ham magicians” who stalled because they fell into one of these traps:

1. Ego Inflation (“The Big Balloon”): This is the risk of messiah complexes and elitism. Because you are experiencing things “meat robots” don’t understand, it’s easy to convince yourself you are the “Prophet of a New Aeon.” You aren’t. Apart from your weird friends, no one cares about your “special” status.
2. Paranoia and Misattributed Attacks: There is a persistent tendency among magicians to see every stubbed toe or piece of bad luck as a curse from a “Black Lodge.” This is usually just bad integration. If you think you’re under magical attack, ignore it; misattributing causality is a fast track to the loony bin.
3. Hostile Entities and the Goetic Blunder: Working with spirits—specifically the Goetia—without traditional protections like the circle and triangle is a recipe for disaster. Some postmodern “stars” claim these protections are superfluous; these people generally get “fucked up” by the entities they think they are commanding. If you want to work with the Goetia, use the whole system or prepare for the consequences.
4. Desire as a Prison: Hoping or wishing for a result is a magical act that qualifies the absence of the goal. If you are “hoping” for money, you are successfully performing magick to remain in a state of wanting money. The result of wanting is the experience of wanting. You must move from desire to the decision that the result is already true.

The Psychotherapy of the Self

A magical diary is not just a record of your “spooky” experiences; it is a tool for sane integration. The magician must act as their own psychotherapist to prevent their revelations from becoming delusions.

When you experience a revelation—like the LSD user who writes down “I am external!” and thinks it’s the secret of the universe—the diary allows you to look at that experience rationally once you’ve “come down.” By recording the method, the conditions, and the description of the state, you integrate bizarre states of mind into a rational narrative. Crucially, the words you use to describe any revelation are not the revelation itself. The diary ensures that these truths do not gather dust in the dark recesses of your mind as “obscure memories” but are woven into a functional, sane life.

The Core Practice: Connecting the Lines

While sigils, evocation, and divination are useful “Support Practices,” they are essentially just “polishing the phone.” The “Core Practice” of the Western tradition is the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), or the “future magical self.”

This entity represents a state of being that is completely beyond your current space, time, and ego-driven conception. It is the guru par excellence. Support practices “connect the lines” so that the “angel can speak.” Invoking the HGA is not about identifying with a “better version” of your current ego—that would be the Big Balloon again. It is about surrendered contact with the source of your own future magical instruction. Once contact is made, the HGA guides you through the Metaphysical Cycle with far more precision than any book ever could.

The Shift to the Prophetic Narrative

The ultimate reward of this journey is the transition from a world governed by “Either/Or” (causal logic) to a “Also/And” framework—the Prophetic Narrative.

In the beginning, you perform a ritual to “cause” a result. This is the Causality Impasse. Eventually, you outgrow this narrative. You begin manifesting results without the “work” because you realize that the ritual and the result are the same thing—a synchronicity. In the prophetic narrative, synchronicity becomes a permanent adaptation. The world is saturated with meaning, and the magician no longer sees a difference between themselves and the events of their life.

Magick is, ultimately, the art, science, and culture of experiencing truth.

• Art: Because it has no laws, only arbitrary aesthetics you decide upon.
• Science: Because it requires methodology and verifiable results.
• Culture: Because it involves the inescapable ethical implications of your power.

You move into a state of certitude where you realize that everything is in its perfect, natural place. This leads to an overwhelming happiness and a total loss of the fear of death. You have been given the tools. Whether you use them to transform your reality or simply to give yourself a sore wrist from charging sigils is entirely your responsibility.