You know magick works, but what if you want your magick to work right now? There is a way.
We often go on and on about the importance of patience, but why should you have to be patient? Isn’t magick all about hacking the universe, and getting ahead, and gaining an advantage? Doesn’t that mean you should get what you want right now?
Well, yeah, a lot of the time it does. But let’s say you want to manifest an extra $10,000 for something you need by the end of the month. What you’re actually saying is ‘bring me $10,000 faster than usual.’ Because if you just wait around long enough, sooner or later a total of 10,000 unexpected dollars will trickle through your life.
It sounds weird, but that’s just normal. Money turns up if you wait long enough. It might be that one day you get $10,000 knocked off the price of a house. Or a wage increase that eventually brings you an extra $10,000. Or just lots of little increases that all add up. If it happens tomorrow, it’s magick. If it happens over a lifetime, it’s very ordinary and not much use.
What I’m getting at here is that in some ways, magick is not a way of asking for something that could never be yours, but it’s a way of asking for it to come into your life faster.
If you perform love magick, it’s not going to work on somebody who loathes you. If it works at all, it’s because that potential was there. All you do is speed things up. When it works, it seems like it’s utterly changed the world because a friend turns into a lover overnight (or whatever the situation is), but what you’ve actually done is speed up time, removed the blocks, made it all happen faster. Things that were always going to happen, if you made the right decisions, happened much sooner.
The Shortcut
This is a pretty big deal because by using magick you skip a lot of time, and you avoid a lot of moments where you might have made the wrong decisions. It is a shortcut. It is a way of getting what you want faster, without the risk of messing things up. You select the future you want, and by choosing the right results, you get the life you want.
But for a moment, let’s come back to that question. If magick’s so great, shouldn’t it work instantly? Sometimes it does. Often, in fact. But not always. When you catch a cold, your body starts working with miraculous power to restore your health instantly. But it doesn’t seem like that. It’s over a week of boring suffering while your body feels anything but powerful. The reality is that your body is healing all along, but you only feel the pain, not the healing, until it’s over. Magick is like that. The moment you finish a ritual, it is done, the magick has happened, and all you need to do is allow the result to come into being. Everything is already in motion. Patience gives room for everything that needs to happen, to happen.
Time isn’t always an obvious part of magick, but because you are manipulating your future, time is involved. Even if you’re just using magick to explore your true self, that’s like speeding up time, because you find out more in a few magickal rituals than you could from a lifetime of reflection.
This means that time plays a big part in magick. You don’t need to worry about the details of this one tiny bit. You just do your magick. But this does give you a clue as to why patience is important. Impatience is an expression of mundane willpower. It’s not supernatural or magickal. Impatience is your way of imposing everyday willpower on reality, and that can interfere with magick. Your magick works best when you trust that it will work and let it do what you’ve asked. You’ve asked, so let it do what must be done.
Making things happen
But, like I said at the start, the whole reason you do magick is to make something happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen. If you know you’re going to get an extra $1000 next week, you won’t do a ritual to get $1000. If you know your enemy has just been run over by a bus, you don’t waste your time cursing them. If you’ve been told you are being promoted, you don’t do magick to get a promotion. It seems ultra-obvious, but we do magick to get things that seem unlikely or at least uncertain.
If you enter a singing competition, there’s no way you can ever know you’re going to win (unless you’ve bribed the judges!), so you might use magick, either on yourself or to increase your luck and appeal. If you launch a new product, there’s no way you can predict how it will be received, so you might do magick to help it along. And so on. Magick is there to bring certainty where you have doubt, unease, fear or, let’s be honest, an urgent need. Which can also seem like impatience.
Some people reading this will be going, it’s ok, magick works fine and as fast as it needs to. I know lots of other people will be thinking, magick only ever works when I give up and forget about it. There’s a big broad spectrum when it comes to getting results. So what’s the secret to getting it right?
I think it’s important to accept that some level of impatience is always going to be there. If you want something badly enough to do magick for it, you often want to see results now. In many cases, where you’re using magick on a really long-term project, such as building a career or business, that isn’t the case, and those kinds of magick can work easily because of the relaxed approach. But if you’re doing magick for quick cash, or to find something you’ve lost, or to heal an illness, or get a job, or protect yourself, then you want it to work right now. Let’s just accept that.
And then let’s remember a phrase that Damon Brand used a long time ago. It went something like this. ‘When you demand that you get something tomorrow, you might have to wait years. If you’re prepared to wait years, you might get it tomorrow. Or instantly.’ I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. Patience lets magick work because you let go of your struggle with time.
If you find yourself feeling too impatient, and you’re worrying about results, and thinking about whether you should repeat the ritual, or maybe think you should do another ritual, then your fears are actually fears about time. You fear that the result is too far away from you in time and reality. This might all be sounding a bit theoretical, so what do you actually do? If it’s a pressing problem, you can’t forget about it, and pretending to forget about it feels like you’re lying to yourself.
What you accept
A really useful trick is to accept that whatever is going to happen, will happen. Now, this goes against almost everything we say about magick. The whole point of magick is reaching into the chaos and saying, no, I don’t want that, I want, this, this and this. You create your life by choosing all the results you want, from the smallest to the largest, and gradually selecting your life rather than giving into a random existence. So why would I say you should allow things to happen?
When you accept that whatever will happen, you’re looking at the big picture. You’re acknowledging that this one result is a tiny cog in the massive machine that makes up your life. You’re saying, ‘I have done what I can do, and magick will work, or it will not.’ This takes the pressure off you, it stops you hoping, and it means you focus on the real world rather than the magick. That gives everything room to shimmer into place.
This might all sound a bit Zen, but what it really means is that you’re rising above the needs of the moment. There’s nothing wrong with satisfying your immediate needs, for whatever it is you want right now, but when you can take a look at your whole life, that can take some pressure off your need. And taking the pressure off allows it to become real.
What happens next week might seem like the most important thing in the world right now, but ten years from now, it will be one detail. It might even be forgotten. Many of the disasters we obsess about, we can’t even remember a decade later. Some of the victories we work so hard for, they are also forgotten. This perspective is important.
When you complete a ritual, if you find yourself obsessing or demanding that a result comes to you fast, then just think about the whole span of your life. Think of where you’ve been, where you are, and all the magnificent things that could happen in the decades ahead. This can be just a gentle daydream. It has enormous power.
And remember that small, tactical changes make things happen faster. Things go slowly if you ask for too much change at once. Reach for too much, too drastic a change, and things may be set in motion, but they will go so slowly because there’s just so much that needs changing. Even if it’s working, it will look like nothing is happening, because you’ve asked for so much. When people do magick this way, they think the magick has failed (even though it’s doing its best in the background), and when you feel like it’s failed the energy goes out of it.
That why we say, reach for what’s just out of reach. Reach for things that are just impossible and improbable, and build your life with lots of little miracles. When you make small changes, in key areas, targeting your magick where reality is vulnerable to change, you get many small changes that soon add up. A year a calm and calculated magick will always lead to better results than a handful of desperate rituals that ask for everything at once.
Most of the time, magick just works. Even when people don’t believe. Just a while back somebody posted a review where they said they’d use the Magickal Cashbook, not really thinking it would work, but it did. It made more money than they’d asked for. So just do your magick, let things happen when they will, and you’ll get better results more often.
– Adam Blackthorne
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