The Reverse Side of Reality

Although in its foundations and purpose, the Magical worldview is a purely pragmatic system of thought that enables the effective functioning of mind within the complex symphony of the world order, those who call themselves “Magi” or “esotericists,” on the contrary, are often distinguished by extremely confused and impractical views of the world.

Thus, when some “Magus” speaks about “egregors,” “larvae,” “energies,” and the like, and even more so when it comes to gods, angels, and demons, it is often seasoned with such a thick layer of irrational nonsense that it can scare even a reasonably open-minded person.

And yet, Magic is not an “alternative description of the world”; it is an expanded account of the world, which uses a much broader set of concepts intended to describe that wide experience that a being striving for more than mere physical survival and reproduction acquires. The magical view of the world does not cancel or oppose a rational description of the world; it expands and deepens it, although, of course, such a shift in perspective is often accompanied by a change in emphases and values.

As mentioned, Magic can be called the Physics of Mind, in the sense that it adds to the usual tools of physical description of reality the category of mind, the “anthropic principle.” In other words, if we are fixated on bodily survival, an “ordinary” description of the world will be enough for us; but if we are oriented toward the category of mind, we will need to expand our views. At the same time, we have also already said that Magic is far from modern psychology, because, first, the latter is aimed at increasing people’s adaptability in a consumer society, which Magic categorically rejects, and second, Magic strives for clarity and mathematical precision in its notions, whereas psychology often suffers from double standards and arbitrary interpretations.

For example, to describe the vortex basis of reality, it is not at all necessary to resort to intricate and vague categories like the “astral”; one can describe different wave-function collapses, or about the “independent reality” of desires, considered as objects. A vortex is not something that exists somewhere separately in a fairy-tale reality; a vortex is a way of interpreting experience obtained in interaction with the energy of desires.

Similarly, the magical concept of energy is not a fantasy of rivers of fire or beams from the eyes; it is a description of types of work that were performed to create a given object or process, as well as the work that this object can perform. For example, when we speak of the “energy of a table,” we do not mean some mysterious glows emitted by this table (although they may occur); we mean that in order to create this table, first the radiant energy of the Sun turned into the energy of chemical bonds in wood, then work was done to fell the tree, make boards, join them, sand, paint, etc., and at each of these stages energy was expended, which, by virtue of the First Law of thermodynamics, was not lost, but remained in the transformed parts of the table. Therefore, to describe a table as energy does not mean to pile up categories; it means simply to change the perspective. And, of course, Magic also takes into account other types of work performed in the process of making the table, such as the state of the tree at the moment it was felled, the mood of the workers, the level of “solar wind,” etc., as well as the presence of other carriers of mind, which an “ordinary” description ignores, considering them insignificant for the tasks of physical survival. For Magic, however, concerned with the development of the mind, these nuances may be of no small, or even decisive importance.

When a Magus speaks about the “games of egregors” and explains social processes with their help, he does not mean some fairy-tale creatures that conspiracy theorists like to talk about; he is describing the behavior of the collective mind in energetic terms, thereby making it measurable and calculable. An “egregor” is not an “additional” reality; it is a different view of the same social reality, taking into account a greater number of variables.

And from such a point of view, it turns out that what “ordinary” pictures of the world describe is only a surface layer, “bodily” phenomenology that takes into account only the factors affecting physical survival and does not consider the deep drivers and causal levels of phenomena.

Of course, if a person does not like the words “demons,” “angels,” and the like, they can call the phenomena described by these concepts in any other way; however, anyone who honestly looks at the processes occurring in mind will not be able to deny these phenomena. But from our point of view, there is absolutely no need to invent new terminology if there already exists a millennia-old tradition with its well-developed language and conceptual system.

Thus, Magic is a way of describing the fabric of reality that takes into account all available forms and manifestations of mind, as well as all factors and driving forces influencing them. A Magus is not someone fleeing the world, not a fantasist hiding in an invented reality; on the contrary, a Magus is a researcher who studies the world from the perspective of the mind, who sees more than “ordinary” people see, and who gains a broader and more diverse experience, whose imprinting he seeks.