THERE ONCE WAS, AND THERE ONCE WAS NOT

Superstition and Magick end of series

Magick and superstition work.

Until they don't.

Here’s how they work:

A belief that something is inevitable will cause your brain to filter out information that does not serve or reinforce that belief. Each Nano-second of our waking lives there are eleven million bits of information available for us to access, but we can only process about 50 of them. When we are focused on a goal, we develop the ability to filter out the 50 bits that serve our wants. Let’s assume your focus is on writing a great novel or getting rich or unification with God, the filtering of information provides you with salient information that you integrate into your framework, and that state of focus creates physic energy.

Years ago, when I was visiting my brother's family in Fresno, I took his kids for a walk by a river, a natural setting with tall trees and paths, and as we were walking, I held Ezekiel’s hand, the five-year-old, and I told him that we were entering into portal back in time, by which I meant that all we see could have been experienced the same way 100 years ago, but he took it to mean that we were really going back in time, when there were dinosaurs. For the entire walk, that beautiful boy was so focused, his body aware and completely under his command to move, to abruptly stop, to stand still and listen. He was so focused on spotting a dinosaur that there were in fact several times that he was certain he saw one, at least the tail end of one.

That's psychic energy.

You can direct your psychic energy toward what you want, and the Arena within which you interact (your reality) begins to play out as a movie in which you are the protagonist and the screenwriter.

This is why all the masters were right to teach us to have gratitude, it’s a container for positive physic energy. It provides the opportunity to delight in the details of every day that at first may seem meaningless or uninteresting. Gratitude shows us that God is in the details. If you love your child, you delight in her, and you can be moved by watching her pick up a cup of water and take a drink and smack her lips all happy. I delighted in seeing Ezekiel walking through the trees by the river looking for dinosaurs. I delight in the way my wife looks at me when she has a fun idea for date night, devilish smile, eyes wide with hope. When you delight in the details, you experience Oneness. These moments of delight cause a lot of chemical activity in your nervous system, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and I would even suggest endorphins and endocannabinoids. Gratitude moments are short bursts of The Writer’s High, or Micro-Flow, and they build up psychic energy, and it is my contention that your nervous system stores and has access to this physic energy and it can be released when you are working on that novel. What ends up in the novel are details that would not have been possible hadn't you been able to feel gratitude.

When you walk into the arena in a state of delight, you filter out details that don't reinforce your gratitude, the "bad things. And this is important.

We humans have a cognitive bias towards the negative. We notice negative things more than positive things, a result of our evolutionary imperative to survive, to avoid negative situations.

This bias towards negative information is still our factory settings, so there is work involved with learning to stay focused on a positive goal, to write that novel, to get them billions, or to become the best Christian you could be.

When I was I my 20s, I believed that if too many good things happened in my life, something even worse was about to happen, God’s way of humbling me. God was vengeful. God, like a Mexican father, was jealous!

¡Celoso!

I remember when I made the choice to not go to law school. I was graduating with my degree in Political Science, planning on becoming a lawyer, but my final semester I took a fiction writing class and half way into the semester I knew that was what I wanted to do.

Instead of applying to Law School I got a master’s in English, and suddenly doors opened up for me. I started teaching freshman comp, I got grants, I won awards, I got published!

It was all too good to be true.

I remember telling my graduate advisor that I knew something bad was about to happen to me. She asked me why I thought that, and I told her because things had been too good. Something bad is going to happen I know it.

I looked out for the bad thing, and the bad thing happened.

My mother suddenly died of cancer, at 48 years old. The doctor told her she had a month to live, and she believed it, and a month later she was dead.

But how can I say that her death is even slightly related to my fear?

Because that profound part of being a human, the death of somebody you love, was processed as a reinforcement of my belief. God is vengeful!

Deep faith or belief that something is inevitable can work for against or against you. When you take control of your consciousness, of your organism, when you understand how humans work, you can use that code to get what you want. This is why magick works. This is why, for the Poet, coincidence becomes a habit.

But it also doesn't work

Time and chance can kick its ass.

Our brains cannot filter the bus that comes out of nowhere as we step into the street and splatters us on the windshield, or the deadly spider that crawled in to our shoes while we were sleeping.

Not only that, but we are made up of trillions of active cells–each one a universe in itself—so much information within our skin that only Laplace's demon would be able to predict what we will think next, or the song that will get stuck in our head.

The preacher says, Time and chance happeneth to us all.

And that’s true even within our own bodies.

If you use magick, superstition, or a pseudo-scientific method to manifest riches in your life, if you strive to think and grow rich, if you use the power of intention, you will get positive results.

I’ve tried these methods, manifesting this and that, and when I needed $500, I would walk to my mailbox and pull out an unexpected check for $500 or get a phone call offering me a gig reading at a university. This has happened to me too many times to keep track of. Just six months ago I thought I needed $7000, and not even two days later I get an email offering me $7000 for my research. The gratitude I felt is still with me now. I feel it now!

It could have been different. There is a cognitive mindset wherein I don’t think anything will go my way. I think about wallowing in debt, and I lament that I will have to use my credit card to pay rent, and I’m so depressed I don’t bother to check the mail, and when I do there’s a pile of envelopes which I vaguely go through. I throw it all away thinking it’s useless, like my life. I don’t see the check.

If you practice a belief system, you will get confirmation that it’s working.

If you think about wanting something material, picture it, look out for opportunities for it and it will likely appear.

We have been allotted some ability to control our own consciousness, to rewrite our imperatives, and in doing so, we can change the landscape in such a way that every opportunity that presents itself to will not go unnoticed.

But the days are evil.

No matter what your mindset, no matter how well you understand your own code, no matter how control you are of your own organism and how it interacts within the arena, you WILL have to face death. Aging will cause your body to deteriorate, become more disordered, and eventually your subatomic particles can disintegrate into the wind like dust. But that’s a good thing. If you live a good life, the tiny particles that used to belong to you, might end up in the eyes of a total stranger walking through a windy day, causing them to blink, and maybe when they open their eyes, they might see something they otherwise wouldn’t have noticed without you. It could be exactly what they needed to see.

Is that too corny? Too woo woo?