People write to me asking how they can improve their faith and belief in magick. My answer is that you don’t need to believe. But you should do some magick that works. Start with something small and simple. Once you see a result, you will believe and the whole process becomes free of doubt.
Belief is not a requirement for magick to work. Although some magickal systems work with belief as the main source of power, belief isn’t even necessary.
Belief is difficult to generate out of thin air. It’s difficult to have faith in something you don’t really have any faith in. You can pretend to believe for a while, and then after a while you will start to believe. That works. But thankfully, belief isn’t even required for you to get magickal results.
I know this because I’ve experienced it myself, and I receive many messages from people telling me that they weren’t even sure the magick was going to work, and yet it did. Others tell me they had doubts, but they did the magick anyway, with the results coming soon after. Some even go so far as to test the magick scientifically, having no belief at all until they see results. (This is not an approach I recommend for most people, and I’ll explain why later – but for some people, there is no doubt that this works.)
Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, once the results start to come, the question of ‘belief’ may seem alien to you. It’s almost like somebody asking you if you believe in electricity. You know that if you switch on an electrical device, it works. You don’t need to put any effort into believing in electricity, because you have sense of knowing . You know that it will be there and that it will provide you with what you need. Magick is no different. In time, you come to see it as something that works. This doesn’t mean you have faith or belief – only that you are connected to magick, and have seen the results often enough to know that magick is real.
I like to approach magick with a playful confidence. The reason for this is that it gets rid of doubt and fear. Although you don’t need to believe, you do need to free yourself of fear. If you’re worried about the results, and keep trying to check for results, or stressing about when results will manifest, and how they will manifest, that can stop results from manifesting.
This is why people who lack belief can get good results. They just do the magick as instructed, and because they’re not obsessing over the results – but sitting back without any real concern – they are in the ideal state to receive a result. Strange as it may sound, this is more effective than having really strong belief and performing your magick with complete faith but then worrying about whether the magick has worked. The calm skeptic who has no concerns about results is more likely to get results than a worried believer.
Results come when you are not looking for them, or when you already feel relief that the result is inevitable. In my books, I instruct you to perform magick with the feeling that the result has already been achieved. You don’t have to force yourself to believe this, you just have to imagine the relief you would feel if the magick worked. This is a powerful way of switching on the magick. It’s far more powerful than belief.
With time, when you use magick and get results, you will find that you do believe in magick, even if you don’t know why it works. You see results, and even though they might seem like coincidences, you eventually see there are too many coincidences for them to be pure chance. You know that your magick is having an effect.
Skeptics can get results too, as mentioned above, but this is not the approach I recommend, because true skepticism is a sort of extreme detachment where you are fully prepared to see a positive or negative result, with no investment in that result. This kind of detachment is difficult to achieve, and most people who ‘test’ magick are actually doubting that magick. They call it a test because they are worried it won’t work. This is not ideal. The scientific approach can work for some people, when they can truly detach from results, but for most people I think that having a calm confidence is a more surefire way to get results. Even if you just pretend to have a calm confidence, that is better than waiting doubtfully.
This is why you need to practice magick. Practical magick brings real world results. There are many people who read books and never actually carry out the rituals. That’s fine if you just have an interest, but to really know magick you should experience magick and get a result you desire.
You don’t need to believe a thing. Just act as though the magick might work. That means you perform the magick as though it is real, generating feelings and images as instructed. If you perform magick, and then free yourself of doubts, results will come whether you believe or not.
