Accidental Sorcery?, Casting spells without trying? Options

Hi,

I'm not sure if I posted this in the right section; the way I learned, sorcery was defined as magick done only in the mind. So if I did post this in the wrong section, would a mod please move it to the right section?


Tonight, as I was outside watering my plants, I was looking at the lights from the elementary school that's across from my back yard. As I stood there looking at the lights I thought to myself how I really disliked the lights (they are very bright street light type lights that are always on).

I started to think, wouldn't it be great if I could just get rid of the lights with no effort? So, just playing around, I picked out a light and imagined that I had a sharp metal spearhead in my hand. I imagined myself raising my hand to my mouth and blowing, as if I were blowing a kiss. In my mind the spearhead zoomed through the air and in 1 to 2 seconds traveled the 100 to 200 yards to the light and made contact, destroying it. Almost instantly that exact light went out. I don't know if it turned off or burned out, but it went out and didn't come back on.

It reminded me of something else that happened earlier this year where I was at a funeral and thought to myself, "wouldn't it be strange if the deceased's spirit started playing with that lamp; making it turn on and off?" And that's what happened; the lamp shut off immediately and flickered on and off throughout the whole service.

In both these incidents I didn't intend to cause any change, I was just playing in my mind. 'What if' scenarios, but they happened anyway, instantly.

I've been practicing magick for well over a decade, but I've never had this happen, that I know of. I may have but just wrote it off as coincidence. And instant results to boot.

My question is, is it possible I was preforming magick without any intention of doing so? And if so, why the instant results? I understand these could very well be coincidences, but that's really far out there if they are.

Do any of you have any experience with this happening to you or anyone else? Do any of you have any stories like this where you might have caused change but you weren't even trying?

I welcome your thoughts and stories.

wow, I work some overtime and you guys pack 50 zillion of my favorite topics into a single thread while I'm not looking.

gosh I don't even know where to begin. I guess i should start with a preface as well, and point out that on some of these topics, the subject matter is so complex that I may speak in a dogmatic sounding tone, just for the sake of expedience, to get an idea across as concisely as possible. I'm not really a fan of dogma, and I am distrusting of religion and other self proclaimed sources of 'truth'. My thoughts on the matters which follow are the result of either first hand experience, personal experimentation, personal insight, or direct teaching from a deity (no middle man). And so I tend to feel fairly sound in my concepts on much of these things, for reasons which I could elaborate on extensively but will skip the rationales for the moment. Anyway, nothing is "provable", there is no "really real truth". But I have what I feel are strongly backed inclinations on some of these topics.


Time:
Time is so weird. Time is like... "flowing through causation". Basically things happen in a predictable pattern. the pattern itself is only predictable if you know every single subatomic particle in the universe though... so it can seem quite a bit unpredictable. And it is unpredictable without omniscience (or 'foreknowledge', which is another topic related to the relationship between 'mind' and 'matter'). But basically, in a somewhat simplified version of the way things really are (simplified to portray the underlying basics of how it works) everything happens as the result of everything that has happened. Tomorrow you will drive to work, because yesterday you got a new job. you will stub your toe because you forget your keys when you go outside, and return to find them in a hurry. you will do this because the day before you left them in a different spot than usual, because you were more focused on the ketsup stain on your jeans and getting some soapy water onto the spot. etc. etc. etc. except it's not just you, its 7 billion other people, animals, plants, inanimate objects moving through space, or not moving through space, all interacting with energies, potential energies, etc. resulting in "the time-line". And it's predicated entirely on "causation". A causes B causes C causes D, etc.

Do you have free will in this model? yes.
Are your actions, and even thoughts, "predestined" in this model? yes.

now most people will stop here and say "hold on, you can't have both free will and predestined behavior!" But I am saying that you can, and that this is the answer to that philosophi-physics dilemma. It's difficult to solve only because the nature of it is hard to grasp. Basically, you have free will, but your free will is one of the billion things which interacts in the universe, in a predictable way, building the timeline. Or put another way, you are a co-author of your destined path through time, yet it is destined, following the basic rules of causation. Or put still another way, tomorrow you will decide what to eat. you will get to freely decide what to eat ...but ...you have already decided what to eat tomorrow, you just haven't caught up with that decision yet. So in effect, you WILL eat a certain food tomorrow... and even though you decide to eat it, you're destined to do this, and will flow through that action without consciously realizing anything other than your own free will. It's equally fair to turn the two around and say that even though you're destined to eat that food, you're going to decide to do so. This is very hard to grasp if you try to make 'the universe' or 'time' into a persona. It's not a persona. it's not a contest of wills here.

Past, present, and future, all exist concurrently. Only our consciousness exists (most of the time) at a single point in this expanse of 'time'. What you will do tomorrow, you already did "yesterday" two days from now. You get to express your inner will and your hyper-individualistic sense of self... your free will. But you already did it. it's already done, you just haven't caught up with it yet. so you're going to do things a very precisely particular way tomorrow, and it will seem like you're making it all up as you go, but in some ways you'll be more like a needle following a track on a record. I'm really running out of metaphors for this concept. so i'll move on.

Consciousness (related to time):
Now we add our consciousness to the mix, and it throws a monkey wrench into the system I just described. Basically time is a predictable flow of causation "within a closed system". But our consciousnesses exist (at least in small part) outside this closed system. The human mind is magnificently more than just the sum of it's physical parts. I dare say that the human brain is more like an intersection of physical and metaphysical realities. So this part of ourselves is capable (though rarely) of undertaking iniatives which are not naturally occurring parts of our universe's causality driven time-line. This basically gums up the whole system, and makes it so that knowing the exact state of every subatomic particle in the universe is no longer enough to actually predict the flow of causality. Though it comes close. Basically you could know the future, like say take a 60 second slice of time from tomorrow. And in that 60 seconds, things should play out 'as scripted' (in the causality time-line). For example, during those 60 seconds, a dog will bark outside, exactly 17 cars will pass by on the road outside. the dust particles in a sunbeam coming through a window will move "just so", you will blink exactly X many times, breath Y many times, etc. Any conversation will be 'exactly so'... 99.99% of the time. But 0.01% of the time, something will be 'off'. And that is because someone else (in the intervening time between our foreknowledge and the time frame we have foreknowledge of) also has a foreknowledge, and may, based on that foreknowledge, decide that they don't want to stub their toe. Which may have a cascading effect on the timeline itself, resulting in a very noticeable LACK of the dog barking on time in our 60 second 'foreknown' time frame tomorrow, and a couple of the dust particles may be a bit off too. Basically, psychically capable minds act like conduits which introduce influences into the timeline which come from "out of bounds" in our universe's causation flow. The further into the future a foreknowledge is, the less 'solid' it is, as there is more intervening time for extra-universe 'noise' to distort the flow of events.

I can say that the only times which you can be 'aware' of engaging in an action or thought which is not a part of your 'script' in the time-line, is when you have an episode of very detailed foreknowledge. Like during a prolonged precognitive deja-vu. You can come to realize that things are occurring 'just so'. Usually this realization alone will knock the mind out of whatever gnosis it was experiencing which caused the deja vu in the first place. But not *always*. Anyway, even knowing what you are supposed to say, do, move, etc. it is easy to follow your 'script'. It requires no effort at all. Instead it takes conscious, willful, effort (born from the consciousness processing foreknowledge) to deviate from the causation flow. So perhaps you say what your friend was about to say, (jinx you owe me a coke) and make a point of waving your arms around in the air, just because it didn't belong in this universe's natural time-line. All of which probably won't have any dramatic effects on the time-line ...probably, there is that whole 'butterfly wing effect' theory (IMG:style_emoticons/default/bigwink.gif)

And then of course there's the possibility of 'holistic' changes in behavior, based on long term exposure to 'out of bounds' influences. For example, I may come to feel empowered by these realizations, and seek to build up Will as an unstoppable force, manifesting my life in ways which are wildly different from how I would have without psychic/extra-universal influences. I may not know "exactly" how I am deviating (without a very detailed foreknowledge to compare with) but I can realize that I am making life choices and forging a path which is different than I would have without the influence of information & forces external to this universe's causality system. The most extreme example of this, is that I sometimes view my relationship with my 'mentor' (a discarnate deity-being) as a cooperative venture seeking to forge a path through 'potential variants of the timeline' to engineer my intersecting with a particular event in time. That event namely being the achievement of my ultimate spiritual goal.


so where was I... oh yeah, the "UH" as you guys have designated is perhaps not really a "universal human"... I mean i know that's just a metaphor, but its a metaphor which follows in line with a very human tendency to "personalize" things which do not *really* have a persona. For example, cars, plush toys, rivers, mountains, stars, etc. So I guess my point is, that there is no overriding force which "decides" when someone will die (following your guys' example here). If they meet with a bus, then they have already met with a bus, and you will have been able to read all about it in next weeks obituary which will have been eloquently written 'just so'. And the only way they will not meet with a bus, is if something 'out of bounds' to the natural causation chain in this universe interrupts that particular line of dominoes from tipping that way. Which all sounds very fatalistically predestiny oriented, but it's not, the guy walked out in front of that bus of his own free will, for his own reasons, but by the time the obituary is written next week, he will have already made the free willed choice which we *then* know he made. He's already done it, he just hasn't caught up with it yet (currently).


"Infinity is infinitely depersonalizing"
When you are finite, existing as a single point in the universe, you have an 'identity'. What shapes that identity is the fact that you are separate from 'everything else'. Let's say you like ice cream... you can't like ice cream without being a finite being. if you were infinite, there is no specific "I" to like ice cream with. And even if there was, your 'self' would consist of 7 billion humans (among other things), not all of whom like ice cream. The very basic concepts of 'like' and 'dislike' which are the foundation of identity, are not possible from an infinite perspective. Personal identity is the very living breathing art of differentiating between self and 'other', if there is no such distinction, then there is no personal identity. This is the basis for the difficulty in engaging the infinite Aum, as finite beings whose existences are literally based on our individual ego. This is why nirvana is sometimes described as 'nothingness', and sometimes described as 'everythingness', both of which are equally incompatible with personal identity, the existence of a personality, inherently incompatible with Descartes "I think therefore I am".

much of which is 'loosely' related to my spiritual path. loosely
I mean, my "ultimate goal", my magnum opus, is essentially to achieve and maintain a paradoxical state, at once finite and infinite.
__

technically, your thoughts about rejecting the concept of being "less than" something, IS fairly "satanic" in nature (if we go by the philosophical tennants of nontheistic satanism).
Which is one of the reasons I'm fairly satanism-friendly. though I just can't bring myself to throw myself fully into any path that seems to be trying to fashion itself as a mirror of my former brainwashing cult... err... faith.

And I agree Iamnoone, being a hairless ape can be a real drag sometimes. It's not the physiology, its the other hairless apes.

(there's a lot of cool comments and ideas and insights by both of you that I didn't get a chance to respond to, this is a very neat thread though, in terms of the ideas being kicked around (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) )