“The manifest universe is just a tiny island of comparative order, set in an infinite ocean of primal Chaos or potentia. Moreover, that limitless chaos pervades every interstice of our island of order. This island of order was randomly spewed up out of chaos and will eventually be redissolved into it. Although this universe is a highly unlikely event, it was bound to occur eventually. We ourselves are the most highly ordered structure known on that island, yet in the very center of our being is a spark of that same chaos which gives rise to the illusion of this universe. It is this spark of chaos that animates us and allows us to work magic. We cannot perceive Chaos directly, for it simultaneously contains the opposite to anything we might think it is. We can, however, occasionally glimpse and make use of partially formed matter which has only a probabilistic and indeterminate existence. This stuff we can call the aethers.”
Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic (Cape Neddick: Weiser Books, 1987), 192.
“It is Zos’s basic theory that all dream or desire, all wish or belief, anything in fact which a person nurtures in his inmost being may be called forth in the flesh as a living truth by a particular method of magical evocation. This he named ‘atavistic resurgence’; it is a method of wish-fulfilment which involves the interaction of will, desire and belief.”
Three quotes that changed my perspective on magick forever…
“The experience of a magical result will reveal something very odd about the nature of reality. This will have a transformative effect—your previous view of reality, and so yourself, must necessarily change as a result of that experience. It follows then that the more you do magick, the more you will encounter revelation, and the more you will be transformed. It must be stressed that intellectual comprehension, or explanation, reveals or changes nothing. If you want to know the truth, you must experience it. Magick is one way of experiencing truth.” — Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners, p. 18
“Magic is a set of techniques and approaches which can be used to extend the limits of Achievable Reality. Our sense of Achievable Reality is the limitations which we believe bind us into a narrow range of actions and successes—what we believe to be possible for us at any one time. In this context, the purpose of magic is to simultaneously explore those boundaries and attempt to push them back—to widen the ‘sphere’ of possible action.” — Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos, p. 33
“Initiation means a beginning, and in the occult it is the occasion when one becomes aware that the world is more than just the material stuff within it. The stuff is merely the façade that lies over a churning sea of psychic energy, power whose currents and tides do more to determine how the material stuff will be arranged in the future than the stuff that is out there right now. Reality is the objective residue of a subjective process. The residue — the material world— has a certain inertia, to be sure; it won’t just go away. But it does dissipate, decay, get eaten up and covered over, and it is only created anew when some mind of some sort — animal, vegetable or mineral — puts effort into that creation. And so does subjectivity make the world. Magick is the art of managing that subjective process, of exploiting the flow of psychic energy to manufacture a reality that is consistent with our wills. A magician’s first initiation occurs in the moment that he or she realizes that this manipulation of psychic energy as a thing in itself is possible.” — Stephen Mace, Shaping Formless Fire: Distilling the Quintessence of Magick, p. 49
Magick comes from the mind, usually the unconscious. You can guide your unconscious with symbols, like in rituals, runes, and visualizations. You can guide it with temporary beliefs, like in Chaos Magick. And you can find other methods, too, like self-hypnosis.
Direct magick takes a new approach: We make those magick-driving parts conscious. It’s like using biofeedback to control your heartbeat.
Austin Spare vs. Neville Goddard: A Comparison of Techniques
The technique for materializing our demands is simple for Nature embraces all those who seek individuation, as Nature herself seeks every differentiation:
1) Our desire (for the thing) must be whole-hearted and all else sacrificed to that end.
2) Our belief must be fixed and be-lived, at least ‘as if’.
3) Our will (nervous energy) must be secret, and suppressed, to create tension and released only at the psychological moment. At that time gaze into, and beyond, the familiar vista (from hill-top), into The Aeon, the spaciousness beyond your meannesses, corners of reality, borrowed precepts, dogmas and beliefs; until you are in spacious unity. Indraw your breath until your body quivers and then give a mighty suspiration, releasing all your nervous energy into the focal point of your wish; and as your urgent desire merges into the ever-present procreative sea you will feel a tremendous insurge and self-transformation. The Devil himself shall not prevent your ‘will’ from materializing. In your prayers (media), remember: your Soul is your nearest, and the bringer of all good things. Your God is stone deaf.
Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant, and Steffi Grant, Zos Speaks!: Encounters With Austin Osman Spare (London: Holmes Pub Group, 1998), 237.
Let me again lay the foundation of prayer, which is nothing more than a controlled waking dream:
1. Define your objective, know definitely what you want.
2. Construct an event which you believe you will encounter FOLLOWING the fulfillment of your desire – something which will have the action of Self predominant – an event which implies the fulfillment of your desire.
3. Immobilize the physical body and induce a state of consciousness akin to sleep. Then, mentally feel yourself right into the proposed action, until the single sensation of fulfillment dominates the mind; imagining all the while that you are actually performing the action HERE AND NOW so that you experience in imagination what you would experience in the flesh were you now to realize your goal. Experience has convinced me that this is the easiest way to achieve our goal.
Open Hand Magick (OHM) is the exercise of parapsychical abilities without the use of physical tools or paraphernalia apart from the body and mind. Anomalous psycho-physical states and processes explored to this end may include but are not limited to: ideomotor phenomena, glossolalia, assumptive imagination, trance, flow, samadhi, hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, astral projection, thoughtforms, and mediumship. OHM theory draws heavily from contemporary western occultism and the field of parapsychology, while generally resting upon the speculations that: [1] Reality is fundamentally nonlocal, [2] parapsychical abilities are innate in all human beings, and [3] parapsychical abilities may be cultivated and enhanced. Fundamentals are developed primarily through yogic meditative disciplines.
Open Hand Magick should be understood as an experimental field of magico-psychic development — rather than a specific discipline of occult practice — wherein the innate abilities and agency of the psychist are trained to the extent that they may be exerted without the aid of physical tools and paraphernalia external to her own body and mind. Achieving repeatable and communicable results with whatever techniques the psychist adopts or discovers should remain a primary aspiration alongside the attainment of insight into the ontological nature of reality.
“Abstract or concrete: if you suggest a wish to the thing you desire, in its own manner, there will be a response. So, if I ask my mind in an appropriate manner for a definition of ‘consciousness’ I shall receive a true answer, although I may not be able to translate it: semantics are either remiss or insufficient to render the sequence of phonograms, but, without understanding, I would receive an emotional impact as from a significant passage of music (e.g, Bach or Mozart) thus inspiring a kind of semantic rendering as true as possible.”
— Austin Osman Spare, Zos Speaks!: Encounters With Austin Osman Spare, p. 168
Occult Aspects 