The
Importance of Understanding
the Internal Environment
By Taylor Ellwood
“You can have the best intentions in
the world, informing your actions and your magic, but what people
forget is that it’s the consequences of your actions and the impact of
your magic that are remembered, long after the intention has faded
away.”
– From Sayings of a Wise Fool.
One trend I’ve noted in almost all my fellow magicians and myself is an
initial focus on learning to manipulate external reality with magic.
Later, sometimes much later, this is followed up by an exploration of
the internal reality or environment of the magician. I must admit that
I think the order should be reversed. Focus first on understanding with
the internal environment and then focus on interacting with the
external environment (Though as we’ll find the two are inextricably
connected). Briefly, though, I want to consider why people focus
initially on working with the external reality, instead of the internal
reality.
The manipulation of external reality is usually done to gain a result.
Unfortunately the process used to obtain that result isn’t always
understood, nor do some people care if it isn’t understood. For them it
is enough to get the result, to have the desire temporarily met*.
Another reason the manipulation of external reality is focused on, at
least in the West, is because we live in fairly materialistic cultures.
The U.S. in particular is a culture that is focused primarily on the
acquisition of materials. In one sense, the ability to manipulate
external reality to gain more material is really a method of attempting
to gain control of the external environment. However, such control is
fleeting, usually because the magician doesn’t fully understand why
s/he is trying to obtain the desired result, beyond addressing an
immediate need or want that demands the result. A final reason the
external environment is focused on so much is due to the fact that
Western approaches to internal magic still ultimately focus more on
dealing with external reality. Approaches such as metaprogramming and
NLP focus much more on how to shape interactions with people and much
less with how to interact with the self. Where do they focus on
internal reality, it’s primarily as a way of changing specific thinking
patterns. While that can be useful to do, there’s a fundamental area of
the internal reality of the magician that is often ignored in most of
the current Western magical approaches, namely the emotions.
This focus on manipulating external reality before really understanding
the internal environment is problematic for a number of reasons. The
simplest reason is that if you don’t know what you really want, then
how can you be sure if you’ve actually gotten what you want? Building
off that reason, another reason is that a person will sabotage hirself
when s/he has an internal conflict with the external result manifested.
Yet another reason is that the distractions of external reality can
only divert you from any internal unhappiness for so long. A final
reason is that any sense of control that you think you have over
external circumstances can easily fall apart like a house of cards, if
the right internal pressure is applied.
I want to make it clear that I’m not advocating that everyone becomes a
monk and withdraws from life. However, I am advocating that a magician
spend some time learning how hir internal reality works before focusing
too much on shaping external reality. When you consciously understand
the motives behind your actions then you’ve taken a step toward
mastering your internal reality. Hyatt points out, “It is safe…to say
that the majority of our problems arise from the lack of consciousness
of our programming and the belief that we are more or less helpless in
changing our condition…Tension is a fact of life…Stresses and strains
are not only an integral part of life, but they often appear as life
itself” (2002, P. 49). Conscious realization of the motives that inform
your intentions can help you begin to identify the tensions and
stresses that impact you and cause a need to act. Consciously
acknowledging how you program yourself to deal with life will show you
how effective or ineffective that is as well as showing you the source
of your reactions, which could be considered your programming.
A reaction is an automatic response to a situation. The problem with
reactions is that they aren’t always appropriate for the situation
being dealt with. Because a reaction is an automatic behavior, it’s not
easily controlled. You’re probably not thinking about why you’ve
reacted in the way you have. You’re just reacting in a manner that
worked before and might work in a similar situation. But what if it
doesn’t?
A reaction is usually tied to an emotional trigger. When the emotional
trigger is sparked, the reaction is unleashed. Now imagine for a moment
that you’ve done a ritual and you got a great result, but something
about that result strikes an emotional trigger. You react and suddenly
the result is sabotaged. Your internal reality has spoken and explained
that this result goes against its fundamental reality. This can happen
in magical practice. I’ve seen it occur with other magicians and of
course I’ve sabotaged myself before as well.
What is really frustrating is seeming to get what you want and then
realizing that in fact it wasn’t what you wanted after all, but was
instead just a foil for your subconscious to express itself it to you.
If the subconscious isn’t being listened to, it will manifest itself
into your life through the situations you get involved in, until you
get the message it has to give you. For me, this has resulted in making
some bad relationship decisions because what I thought I wanted wasn’t
really what I wanted at all, but it was the only way my subconscious
could communicate to me. In fact, making those decisions helped
me realize that not knowing myself had a big impact on not just myself,
but on other people in my life, because if I couldn’t communicate with
myself, I most certainly couldn’t with them.
The question that arises then is how we learn to communicate with the
subconscious and organize our internal realities so that we can
manifest effective magic as well as live mindful lives. One NLP
technique, pathworking, is really useful because you can use it to
interact with your subconscious mind through symbolism**. You create an
imaginary reality and then go through it, interacting with the various
personas and other symbols, which represent situations in your life.
This kind of work can be a good initial approach to dealing with
internal issues and the interaction they have with your reality.
To engage the subconscious at a deeper level, meditation that moves
beyond visualization is necessary, so that you can still the mind and
more importantly feel the emotions. Your goal with meditation isn’t to
label, define, or confine your emotions. Instead it is to learn how to
feel them, but in a manner that also allows you to step back and decide
if the method of expressing the emotions is really the method you want
to use. For instance, it’s perfectly normal to feel anger, but throwing
a temper tantrum isn’t nearly as effective as telling someone I feel
angry because of what happened in a specific situation. Emotions aren’t
rational. They aren’t something you can think out, but the expression
of them is something that can be controlled by accepting that you
actually feel the emotion. In fact, accepting what you feel is a very
liberating experience that allows you to begin to change how you act in
a situation.
One form of meditation, I’ve found really useful is the Taoist water
breathing technique. On the inhale, the person raises hir internal
energy up from the belly to the top of the head. On the exhale, the
person lets the energy flow down into the body. The energy is used to
dissolve internal tension and stress. At the same time, emotions
wrapped up in the tension are released so that they can be felt and the
stress can be worked through, instead of repressed. The benefit of
letting yourself meditate as you feel these emotions is that you can
feel them and work through them without necessarily having to be
overwhelmed by what you feel.
As you continue to do meditation that works on your internal
environment, you will begin to organize that reality. You will have a
much better idea of what you want. Consequently when you do external
magic to manifest that, you won’t encounter the obstacles you might
have experienced before. You may even find that you don’t need to do as
much magic to effect the external world, because you’ve already done
the internal work and everything lines up for you.
Even when you know your intentions and are aware of the impact your
actions have on yourself and others, there is no guarantee that you
won’t sometimes make mistakes. I’ve been doing meditation to work on my
internal reality for the last two or so years and I still occasionally
sabotage myself and discover patterns of behavior and belief that shape
my life and impacts others in ways that aren’t always good. The
internal meditation is on-going work. Sometimes I’m able to work
through behavior patterns and emotions before they sabotage a situation
and sometimes I only figure it out, after the sabotage has occurred.
Remember that no matter the mistakes you make, those mistakes only last
as long as you continue to perpetuate them. If you have the courage to
face yourself, than you can discover a way to work through them, and
eventually avoid making some of them. Be honest with yourself and that
honesty will extend to others, because you will find it’s less hard to
express yourself when you actually know why you feel what you feel.
I end this article with a thought. Managing yourself can be one of the
hardest tasks you ever embark on. It can also be one of the most
rewarding, because when it is all said and done, you will truly know
you act from a conscious and authentic place. You won’t inadvertently
hurt people or yourself, and when you have to do something difficult,
you will do it from a place of awareness and acceptance that will give
you the strength to see it through. The magician’s greatest tool
and strength is hir own self-awareness and how s/he chooses to
employ it is what shows a true mastery of magic.
Works Cited
Hyatt, Christopher. (2002). Undoing
yourself with energized meditation and other devices. Tempe: New Falcon
Publications.
Suggested Reading
Alli, Antero. (1985). Angel tech: A
modern shaman’s guide to reality selection. Tempe: New Falcon
Publications. Frantzis, B. K. (2001). Relaxing into
your being: Breathing, chi, and dissolving the ego. Berkeley: North
Atlantic Books. Wilson, Robert Anton. (2001).
Prometheus rising. Tempe: New Falcon Publications.
*I say temporarily because eventually the desire will
come back. This isn’t a good or bad thing, so much as it’s a fact of
life.
**Magical Pathworking by Nick Farrell is an excellent book,
which explains how pathworking can be used.
Taylor Ellwood is a co-author of
Creating Magickal Entities, author of Pop Culture Magick, Space/Time
Magic, Inner Alchemy, and Multi-Media Magic (Forthcoming). He is a
co-writer (with Lupa) of Kink Magic: Sex Magic Beyond Vanilla
(available November 2007). He is also the non-fiction managing editor
of Immanion Press, which produces quality advanced occult books. For
more information about him and his projects please visit http://www.thegreenwolf.com
