From my viewpoint, I believe that life is a verb. Some of the ancient greek philosophers believed that life is a motion, that it's all about motion. That's where words like 'emotion' came from. Emotions are the basic mental component of this motion of life. Love being probably the highest of these motions. Love is the emotion that brings things together, uniting them.

The basic component of emotions as I see it is desire. We desire something for ourselves or for others, and emotions spring from these desires as they are either fulfilled or frustrated. Magic as I see it is simply concentrated and directed desire. Every time you have a desire you are doing magic to a certain extent, as I believe.

Our desires and our actions make waves, and these waves propagate outward onto the big world wide web of life. These magical desires can have a great and sometimes completely awesome effect on the reality around us, because reality is nothing more than solidified motion. Any solid object is nothing more than energy moving at the speed of light, yet confined to a localized area.

Lately science has been coming to some really interesting realizations about the sub-atomic, sub particular structure of reality. It was once believed that there was something called ether that light and everything else traveled through. A cosmic ocean that everything drifts in, or as you and I might call it the web. That theory was discarded a long time ago, but they are coming back to it again.

Nowadays this ether stuff is called the 'quantum foam' and quantum foam is believed to be organized into a crystalline structure. Quantum Physicists believe that in the beginning at the big bang this quantum foam was in a more liquid like configuration, and then soon afterwards the universe 'froze' into the crystalline structure that it is in today. This quantum foam is the structure that has been created in reality. It allows for gravity. In fact it holds within it's structure all of the laws of physics. These laws were created when the universe first 'crystallized.' However, I believe that with much effort it is still possible to alter or bypass these laws, by traveling beneath the waves, or as old science fiction novels called it the 'sub-ether.' There are loopholes in the laws, like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that allow for this to happen.

Recently a new super collider went online (I think it's on Long Island, NY) and the goal of this atom smasher is to melt a tiny piece of reality in order to see what happens. For a long time this atom smasher did not go online because of fears that this melting of reality might cause a chain reaction that would destroy the entire universe. However the scientists pointed out that this sort of thing happens all the time when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. So far it looks like they were right, I believe it went online this summer sometime and we are still here.

It has also been shown that particles are connected in an unknown way, and that they can communicate at rates faster than the speed of light. I wrote something about that phenomenon called 'quantum teleportation' here on this page. http://pagancentral.com/science

Where I am going with all this is, like I said above, our desires and our actions make waves. These waves are like billions of ripples in a pond. These ripples are what give a shape to reality. Without our actions and desires and the actions and desires of other things, reality would be shapeless and formless and maybe even unmanifest. Nothing but possibilities enfolded into pure potential. Our job if we choose to accept it, is to unfold this reality into manifest motion with our desires and our actions.

However we should always remember that the ripples we create are only one source among many. When we cast our ripples outward our actions always cause a reaction, sometimes of incredible proportions. However, it is when many waves combine that a tidal wave is produced. Things almost never happen for one reason. We deserve some credit for the things we do, but not all of it, neither do we deserve all the blame.

Desire is a big topic in some philosophies, like Buddhism & Hinduism for instance. Some people believe that desires are bad and to be avoided. I think that this belief is antithetical to the practice of magic. Tantric Buddhists believe that desires are there for a reason and they are to be experienced in the fullest so we can get them out of our system and move on to other things. This is closer to being right I think, although it is certainly true that some desires are not appropriate to the situation.

Part of the Buddhist / Indo-European philosophy surrounding reincarnation is that every desire must be fulfilled, and that every desire we ever had will be fulfilled at some point in some lifetime, and once we have experienced the fulfillment of all these desires we will move on to another plane. This is an interesting theory, I don't know if it's true, but it's something to think about.

Regardless of whether or not that is true, I think it is prudent to enact those desires as they are appropriate and try not to dwell on those which are not possible. This is where magic can come in. I see magic as a concentrated and directed form of desire. A laser beam of desire you might say. It is like casting a vote to the universe. Your desire makes waves, and those waves combine with others, and the result is either a meaningless ripple or a tidal wave, or something in between.

I am not sure on this, but I have a tendency to believe that any magic that works is good on a certain level. Even if that outcome seems to be negative it is probably meant to teach a lesson. I think those works of magic that have no detectable effect at all are the ones that are truly out of line with the intent of the universe. Still we must use our judgment and our ethics in doing magic. That's what we have judgment for. We are like stewards who are encharged with directing the flow of the universe. Besides, would you rather be a good example, or a bad one?

Just remember though that every desire, every prayer, every conviction, every judgment is a form of magic, and it has an effect on the entire universe. At least that's what I believe. Of course some waves are bigger than others, it depends on your focus and your intensity of desire. In a coven of the 1734 tradition that I was in in California they had a saying, when one experiences a desire that they judge to be inappropriate they would say 'take it out of the law.' This was a way to express that your desire is not appropriate and you wish to cancel those waves before they propagate too far.

That's magic in a nutshell, and desire on a half shell.

Copyright 2001, Ray White. All Rights Reserved.



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