Wasn’t really interested in drinking cursed water out of a can anyway

More like “new age” cosplay imposters.

A ‘magical’ spell is simply a ritual in which a person surrenders their authority to a demon in exchange for some perceived benefit. However, the demon requires payment of some kind. Demons may require something simple to begin with in order to get you hooked and deceived into believing that you are somehow powerful. However, magic is actually weak since you actually surrender your authority to demons to be effective. Once the demon has you hooked, then the demon will require more and more payments. This is how people get involved in murder and raping children as so called ‘payment’ to the demons. For example, 33rd degree masons allegedly have to murder a baby in order to be promoted. The demons only want to manipulate you into agreeing to become more and more depraved though. Demons want to make you commit sins against God, yourself and others. If you don’t repent and accept Yeshua as your savior then the demons know that you will spend eternity reaping what you have sown. In summary, magic is a deception that demons use to make a fool out you in every way possible.

Every person’s understanding of anything above the mundane world is premised by his understanding of philosophy. Every person thinks according to a philosophical view whether he realizes it or not. The person who denies the importance of philosophy and philosophical study almost invariably thinks according to a relatively naive philosophy.

My views of magic are premised most importantly by my belief in realism* (as opposed to nominalism), monism** (as opposed to pluralism), and humanism*** (as opposed to transcendentalism). I also believe in a form of idealism, where the physical world is a special case of the mental world, similarly to how, in the relativity of motion, standing still is a special case of moving, (similar to the Buddhist vijñanavada, except I’m a realist instead of nominalist.)

I believe that there are real, deeper parts of a person’s mind which are as out of his control as the farther reaches of the so-called outside world.

I believe that magic, like everything else, is mental, but magic is an activation of a somewhat deeper part of the mind, in between the mundane and spiritual. It’s out of your control but not out of your influence. (As a monist, I believe the spiritual level is where all things, actual and possible, unite. Indra’s Net, as explained by the Hua Yen school of Buddhism is close to what I believe about the spiritual level of reality.)

In the following passage, I believe that William James, while not using the word, magic, was talking about magic:

“[T]he theologians contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as ‘higher’; but since on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true.” –William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XX, Conclusions.

Traditional Buddhists have always given strong warnings about diving into the world of magic. They say that one should only do so after rigorous mental, physical, and moral training, i.e., yogic training, and only with guidance from a mentally, physically strong, and morally good guru. Read about Friedrich Nietzsche’s explorations into his mental world. Nietzsche very well may have thought that since he was way more intelligent than any guru—and he was probably right about that!—rather than following an intellectual inferior, he’d go it alone. By all accounts, he didn’t fare well in that journey. His mistake may have been in discounting the value of the traditions which the lesser intelligent guru would himself be following. These days I wouldn’t trust anyone as a guru: there are way too many posers and nefarious characters out there. So, I don’t deliberately practice magic, but like the religious man in the James quote, I’ve had my moments.

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Glossary

* Realism. Duns Scotus defined the real as “what is thus and so, whatever you or I or anyone believes about it.” Nominalism is the idea that there is nothing to anything that we call real; so-called real things are figments of imagination. What’s real has a coercive effect on you, whether the real thing is physical, e.g., a heavy rock falling on your foot will be felt no matter what you wished to think about it, or mental, like in the laws of geometry, e.g., a perfect square in Euclidean space—which doesn’t exist in nature, so it can only exist in your head—has internal angles that sum to the exact number of degrees as a perfect circle, viz., exactly 360°. Just because it’s a non-physical thing and therefore a mental thing doesn’t mean you can make your square’s angles sum to more or fewer degrees than a circle has. You can’t, because it’s relation to a circle is real.

** Monism is the idea that every person and thing is, at the deepest level, one with everything. According to pluralists, there are natural limits to any being, so there is no “oneness with everything”. Pantheism is most congruent with monism. Theism and polytheism are congruent with pluralism. (Most Indian religions believe that there are degrees of reality, where at the lower levels, like physical reality, there is pluralism, but there is coalescence as you go up the levels; the Buddhists and Vedanta say (an inconceivable) monism is at the top level.)

*** Humanism is “the doctrine that there is no absolute being or absolute truth not relative to human faculties and needs.” (Century Dictionary.) C. S. Peirce preferred the word, anthropomorphism: “In pragmatistic philos., that philosophic tendency which, recognizing an absolute impossibility in the attainment by man of any conception that does not refer to human life, proposes frankly to submit to this as a decree of experience and to shape metaphysics to agreement with it.” (Century Dictionary.) Peirce, elsewhere, wrote, “I hold, for instance, that man is so completely hemmed in by the bounds of his possible practical experience, his mind is so restricted to being the instrument of his needs, that he cannot, in the least, mean anything that transcends those limits.” (Collected Papers 5:536.) (By “practical”, he included what’s practically imaginable.) The opposite of philosophical humanism is the idea to that there are transcendental truths, i.e., truths that are beyond even the theoretical possibilities of man’s mentality (beyond, e.g., man after billions more years of evolution, with the aid of future technology, etc.)