Magickal Addiction Options

I'm not sure exactly where this topic should fit in, so if you can think of a better place for it feel free to move it. I know that a lot of writers and directors use magick as a metaphor for drugs (Joss Whedon comes to mind) and I was wondering what your thoughts were on addiction to magick. Do you think that people can actually get mentally addicted to using magick? And, if so, have you had any experiences either directly or indirectly

This post has been edited by Thorn: Dec 9 2006, 12:03 AM

I'm not sure exactly where this topic should fit in, so if you can think of a better place for it feel free to move it. I know that a lot of writers and directors use magick as a metaphor for drugs (Joss Whedon comes to mind) and I was wondering what your thoughts were on addiction to magick. Do you think that people can actually get mentally addicted to using magick? And, if so, have you had any experiences either directly or indirectly

Magickal addiction is very real, and can happen easily to people who are just beginning to get effective results for the first time. However, in my own experience, succumbing to addiction quickly blocked the mentality necessary to effectively wield power. So, it's a self-defeating system to a degree.

Now, maybe a more cultivated will, could be a different story but some people will develop a natural talent for affecting a particular kind of system with their magick, usually something paralleling an internal pattern of significance, and in some of those cases it's a particularly exploitable system.

When I was a lot younger, I was better at effecting probability. I could influence a dice roll, or the pull of cards, stuff like that, with what became a peculiar regularity. I was a kid, and did it around my friends when we played games, DnD, cards, etc., to the point that I won all the time, basically, for several months. Then, one day, I started losing, all the time. Now, all these years later, I can do it sometimes, but have to achieve a particularly non-competative mentality in which the game is no fun, and even then, doing it several times in a row is the most I ever get before I almost get fixated on the peculiarity of it, and lose sight of the proper mental 'posture'. It's nothing as special as it might sound, but the same thing sometimes happens during TK practice as well. I'll do good for the first half hour or so, then the second one will be all crap. I don't know if it is just the limits of my psychic stamina, or because I get too involved with the phenomenon itself, because in that state of mind it can be hard to tell, I have some thoughts but ignore them usually, at least to the point that I rarely remember exactly what i was thinking. And, there is some sort of gratification that comes out of TK practice for me. I haven't worked out whether that's totally positive or not - I should feel good about it, but should I notice so much, and is the gratification why i continue to practice? I do think that developing such abilities, and exercising ones will in any way, can be gratifying to the ego, and maybe the ego can become addicted to such gratification.

Interesting thought, good question.

peace