Grey Magick Options

Greetings all of SM ~
I've come to ask a question on "Grey Magick", regarding the various outcomes that would lead to it either being white or black. As I've heard many examples as to how different spells can in turn become w/b, I've yet wondered in great detail if other variables of performing any spell can in turn overcome the initial goal and turn that spell into the opposite sort of magick.
I'm not entirely sure if this statement clarified my question well enough so I'll provide an example. Let's say perhaps you perform a spell to help a stranger come out of a coma, a coma that this stranger would never wake from, with no other background information on this stranger whatsoever, you decide being in a coma is just a terrible thing to endure in the long run. You run the divination process to put your mind at ease of what you want to accomplish and it turns out you have the green light. In this case, divination has told you no real negative influence has befallen your wish to return the stranger to his health. You go through with the spell, the man awakes and all is well. Two years later you understand this very stranger woke up one morning and decided to grab his own personal automatic rifle and go down to a super market and wreak havoc on 12 other lives before turning the gun on himself.
Now, I'm currently not a practicing magician. Perhaps, divination would enlighten you to events like this, though theres also so much the divination process can tell you about what you currently want done. Is an example like this accurate? Can it be? If so, to what incentive do the rest of us have to continue with magick if it will have unknowingly dramatic feedback.
I base my life on, everything having a purpose, every action causing a reaction that can potentially be bad or good. Even though I do a lot of good in my life through natural means, Im not going to truly know if that bit a good I just did, will take a turn for the worse. Is this how we're supposed to view magick?
Please, put my mind at ease. Thank you all in advance. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/egypt1.gif)

Greetings Priest!
Welcome to the Forum! You have touched upon a basic concern for many people who study/practice various magics.
You will drive yourself insane if you get too wrapped up in wether or not your actions now will have deleterious effect down-the-line.
Personally, I don't ascribe to the black/white/gray shading of magic. The whole subject is so subjective that you will find that you must keep counsel with yourself about the karmic repurcussions of your actions. Stepping on a butterfly may cause a drought elsewhere scenario. You should always act responsibly when it comes to power. Try to ask for permission before trying to heal someone. The more intune we become to our selves and to our universe the easier it becomes to deal with these decisions. Morality and responsibility are very personal spaces. A love spell could be considered bad magic if it subverts the recipients will from its owners path. It can also be a blessing. Your ability to alter your reality is not in question until it overlaps and changes my own. *sigh* I'm not sure if I articulated that very well...but I hope that you can see my point. Also, your spirituality is uniquely your own, impressing it upon others unasked for is not very friendly, no matter what it is you're doing. Many religions get around this by blaming it on the ineffableness of their god(s). To easy and a very slippery slope, indeed! I wish you the best on your path! I'm sorry if I muddled the issue! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Let's say perhaps you perform a spell to help a stranger come out of a coma, a coma that this stranger would never wake from, with no other background information on this stranger whatsoever, you decide being in a coma is just a terrible thing to endure in the long run.

I have done this. A close online friend was a diabetic (unknown to me) and one day he disappeared. Another friend, who knew him also, reported that he had fallen into a diabetic coma and was staying at a hospital near me. This other friend came into town, and along with another person who knew the comatose man, we went to see him in the hospital. No one expected us there... he was unconscious on the bed in a sort of diaper, stuffed with medical equipment, and it was not a pleasant thing even though I had never met the guy in "real" life. I decided to use magic to save him,to prevent him from being claimed by the death his doctors pronounced likely soon to come.

I held my hands over him with a short spoken spell. I posted up a copy of the Tree of Life (the comatose man was into Qabalah) with our signatures on it in his room. He awoke very shortly after (we had already left) and began to recover, to the amazement of many doctors and all family members. Unfortunately he never healed completely, and over the course of several years he still had not fully recovered his full mental and physical capacity that had been damaged by the illness.

I try to be careful and to think ahead in all things, especially with magic. If this guy had gone berserk years after his healing, I would not begrudge having revived him.

why must we work within black or white constraints? - why not orange or purple constraints, or puce constraints, or the color of the inside of a grape constraints? - does magic even have to have a color? - do the gods think (out all the possible outcomes) before they do?

only humans are evolved enough to screw up magic by over-complicating it


es

This post has been edited by esoterica: Dec 17 2007, 04:13 PM

I agree with Esoterica's sentiments to some degree - why work with so many contraints?

But think of it this way - let us say there is a doctor who has discovered some unprecedented method of fixing a coma patient, maybe some kind of neurosurgery. Instead of your doing magick to help the coma patient, the doctor does, with no mystical intervention, and the patient wakes up. Two years later the same thing happens. Did the doctor incur bad karma, or practice black magick?

My point is that you should judge the magick you do just as you would your actions. People feel, sometimes, that they can hide behind magick and take actions they normally wouldn't, because magick is somehow more justified - you wouldn't kill someone, but doing magick to cause their death is no big deal, after all if it's unwarranted the universe won't oblige, or something like that.

Is it more or less moral to do love magick on someone than it is to just seduce (or woo) them personally? What if they already have a lover? Does a doctor ask a john doe if he can operate to dislodge the bullet in his brain that's keeping him unconscious?

Weigh it like you would any other action. In the end that's all it is. You don't get more or less karma for using magick to accomplish something than you do doing it any other way. One might argue that's one reason to reserve magick for the really big stuff you can't accomplish on your own, or as a supplement to guide your intuition when trying to accomplish something.

Magick is only as black/white/grey as your own 'normal' actions are. Don't do anything magickally that you would not do normally, because it amounts to the same thing, with the same kinds of consequences.

peace

I agree with what everyone else has said so far, so I won't add anything else about the arbitrary naming of magic as "black" or "white" or "gray." But I will add to your hypothetical scenario. You save a guy from a coma, and you find out that two years later, he wakes up in the morning and decides to shoot 12 people and commit suicide himself. Investigations later show that the man was under considerable stress, suffered from depression and just couldn't take it anymore and he snapped; otherwise, however, he was a very caring man. In fact, he felt so blessed when he woke up from his coma that he decided to do something more meaningful with his life. He joined a mentoring program and became a mentor to a young man who was on the verge of getting involved with gangs and drugs. In the two years before he went postal, he was a very positive influence for the boy, who completely turned his life around, avoided gangs, and started college. As a result of the man's actions, the boy went on to become a doctor.

Now let's add even more: It just so happens that one of the 12 people the man shot was a serial rapist, and another would have gone on to have children and beat them regularly. The man did some good by getting rid of those two people, thus avoiding the future harm those two people would do. Also consider that abuse is a cycle, and many people who abuse their children are those who were abused themselves, so by stopping the would-be abusive father, you potentially saved several generations of people from abuse (granted, they wouldn't even exist because the original guy killed the father but I digress).

The point, which was already touched on, was that there's no telling how your actions will turn the tide of future events. In my opinion, it's quite likely that every action you take holds equal potential for causing harm and for doing good. Many actions will cause both positive and negative outcomes at some point.

How much karma do we collect for our actions? Is it all about the end result, the net balance of positive vs. negative? Or is it about what we do consciously? I think anyone who believes in karma would say that you'd create a karmic debt by picking up a knife and slashing your neighbor's tires. But do I incur bad karma for running over a squirrel if I didn't see it and had no idea that it happened? All I wanted to do was drive home from work--I didn't want anyone to get hurt.

I think the matter is simple: Live in the moment, and in the moment, do what seems right.

This post has been edited by Daathvader: Dec 18 2007, 07:00 AM

Thank you all for your responses, they are greatly appreciated and they are VERY useful. I use the color differential to make it an easy to remember way of certain things, though I would always turn to my views on karmic and moral standards in the end. All your posts were very helpful, I'm at a true understanding on how to interpret what I do in regards to this subject. I found Vagrant Dreamers and Daathvaders examples to be especially helpful, as I have though about it before but never tested it against "magick". I usually end up thinking to hard on subjects that are either new to me or I have a short knowledge on though it makes complete sense to associate the consequences of using magick and through natural means. Thank you all once more =D

Sorry for arriving late to the party.

This is a tough subject, and because of time I will not be able to give it the time it deserves.

In my opinion all magick is grey as opposed to white if it is going to affect anything other then you. And opposed to black where all you want is to cause pain to another. If you really think about this it makes it all gray…even a sadist would at least get a moment of get happiness out of causing pain to another.

Thinking about all the possibilities and all the things that could happen because of X would lead to doing nothing. My rule of thumb is knowing that I did the best I could with what I knew/felt at the time. Taking action to repair what I can if I am the cause of hardship.

I would not mix in the concept of Karma into this. It may be someone’s Karma to go through hardship, and you are the vehicle for that manifestation. Or it may be that the Karmic lesson is for someone to learn to rely on themselves for help, or for them to suffer.

All we can do in the practice of Magick is to “know ourselves” (much bigger then the two words imply) and to know our motivation. I can answer that I have never used magick without at least 5 reasons. It is not a rule of mine, but whenever I think about it…the reasons appear.

If I am not sure why I want to go into something “big”. I do divination. Tarot and Runes. I do them until I have exhausted the possible reasons for doing something. I usually don’t consider all the ramifications of all the outcomes as I think that is beyond my capability, but I need to know I am not rushing into something because of emotions and vanity. That I am doing what I would consider the best option at the moment.

I will also admit I go back and forth on my dark and light poles. My cycles are rather long (multiple years) but you must always be at peace with yourself on your actions taken, regardless of the outcome. That last is for everything in life not just Magick. You need to know you put it all out there for the thing, and if you failed, you failed not because of laziness or whatever but because it was not your time.

I have learned not to beat myself up about much…except when I need a mental kick in the butt to do what needs doing, I think we all have those days…or years.

Ultimately, trust yourself, don’t let what others tell you to guide your morals, do what you feel it right, to the best of your ability.

You will fail often, but it is not bad, it just was not the time.

Also regularly check your motivations, tarot and runes help me with this more then they do my future, from it I learn when I am obsessing, when I am doing it just because I told myself I would even though the time for good has passed….

I hope that assists you. We are not here to be perfect, we are here to learn to love.

Well, I am very happy you decided to reply Paxx, given your time was short it was a very, very informative post. In fact, I can look back on this entire thread and learn even further due to everyone's logic, it would make a very good integration conclusion.

I've never really thought on the subject of someone else's karmic deserving... If a person is evil and gets run over and killed by another man who is a very generous and kind being, does not the doing of killing another man, deliver such bad karma? Or does it stop with the death of the evil man as a sort of balance..? Without starting a new subject on karma, you've helped me understand how actions can indeed depend on others' instead of all of myself. Thank you (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smartass.gif)

I tend to with the magick is all neutral camp. The analogy I use is a lake. The lake is full of water. It gives life to many animals, yet many also drown. Does that make the lake good or evil? Its just a big ole puddle of water. It has no value of being good or bad. So what I do is seperate magick from intention - because thats the real debate. Magick itself is neutral but it can be used for "good" or "evil" intentions. The difference between white and black magick is not the magick, but why it is used. The problem here and why it becomes a slippery slop is that good and evil are relative terms that mean different things to different people. Thus what is white or black magick to you might not be to some one else. Then perhaps the difference between the two is the conduct of the individual.