Talking about why "make me rich" spells tend to flop

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NoxLumina
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Talking about why "make me rich" spells tend to flop

Post#1 » Tue Nov 21, 2017 3:46 pm

Some things that came up for me while reading Silenciumetaurum's thread, Being Responsible for What You Learn from an Oracle, but in particular, Blood from a Stone: if you can do magic, how come you’re not rich? -

I'm undertaking a personal transformation based course of magic over the course of the next year, around the subject of finance/business. So these are the things I've been pondering for myself. This is, I suppose, transferable to a lot of different types of magical goals.

When I've advised or done magic for myself or other people, the very first I thing I like to do is to get clear on what I/they actually want. I suspect that not many non-magicians give this a lot of thought past what their neighbors want, what their parents want for them, what they want in rebellion, and what they're programmed to want by the media and advertising.

But if you really do a line of inquiry about the thing you're wanting - it's easy to find that often we actually want something else. Especially when that thing that you want is huge, foreign, or abstract. Scratch the surface and we discover that "getting rich" is actually a surrogate for some other deeper need.

For example. "Wanting to keep up with the Joneses" is as much a statement about social belonging and community as it is about money; the person wanting that doesn't really want *money* per se. They don't even want to exceed anyone in their group, they just want to keep up. They want to be accepted members of their community, and to be higher social status. Which is actually primate social behavior and not specifically connected to money. In doing intention mapping (a concept I have a hard time elucidating but I'll do my best), I might write down, "Keep up with the Joneses" -> well, what do I feel when I DON'T keep up? -> Scared -> Scared of what? -> Being left out -> So what do I REALLY want? -> Social belonging.

But I suspect that a lot of people for some reason aren't able to be honest with themselves to that level. It might mean engaging darker truths or upsetting the apple cart of the world they live in. If they actually performed the magic their genuine True Will wanted, they might find that what they want is something drastically different. That the black Cadillac that their neighbor has, isn't the car they want, then they might realize their life isn't even the life they want.

And actually changing one's social class, would be exactly that level of transformation. It might mean transformation at an identity level. Socializing in completely new circles. It may mean speaking differently, thinking differently, having a radically different view of life, it may mean you have different friends or even distance from your family.

I feel sure that most people don't even really deeply want to be rich, they'll stop at middle class and consider themselves happy. Their familiarity with rich people ends at the celebrity images on TV.

What some people want is to be more powerful consumers, to want the images of status that are delivered to them on the boob tube. But that often isn't even a direct need, it's often a proxy for a lot of complex needs (belonging, status, nostalgia, relationships - particularly for consumers who are lonely/alienated). I don't hold it against anyone, we are all part of this matrix to some degree, but it doesn't tend to make effective money magic (just as it doesn't tend to be an effective power source for career magic).

Another thing is that an actual commitment to magic and self-transformation may mean seeing through the veil in more ways than one, you may see through a lot of the lies of society, and it's hard to participate in society after seeing through it. For some people this may mean becoming an artist or an entrepreneur but for others it may mean losing everything and being homeless. It is inevitable a significant number of people are unhappy and not working their True Will, because industrialized society functions on the conversion of human beings into units of labor, and meeting who you really are and what you really want, is probably VERY LIKELY going to result in straying from the rigid rules of conformity in which we're invested at a survival level. Most of us make a lot of (figurative but probably unconsciously literal) Faustian deals in order to live in what Jonathan Zap calls the Babylon Matrix and a majority of us believe that life is easier within that social framework than outside of it.
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