Things you can and can't control

[ragnvaeig]

There are two concepts I've been trying to reconcile in my religious practice: the belief in the capacity for humans to take an active role in influencing supernatural entities or the forces of nature through an act of will (i.e. magic), and the belief that a member of the faithful should accept the workings either of the natural order or a divine

Comments

[chaosphaere]

Interesting stuff, but this:

It's quite "natural" for human beings to influence the world around them in many, many ways, even without the use of magic.

I notice a lot of people see magick as something distinct from daily activity and thought... do you feel it is?

In my own practice, it's not.

[chaosphaere]

...I didn't mean that in a bad or "I'm better than you, :P pbtpbtpbt!" way. Just in a way of... "let's discuss"

[benndragon]

Magic is like playing most RPGs: even though you have control over a character's stats and abilities when push comes to shove there's dice rolling involved and you have to submit to the results. The trick is figuring out what is controllable and what isn't so you can determine when control has been relinquished (because at some point it is, in both real world projects and magical workings). The case you mention as an external pressure is an instance of someone else noting that transition before you did ;P.

(a Taoist would probably look at you oddly for that first question - when your will aligns with the natural order everything goes according to plan in submission to the universe; they aren't opposing forces if you really know what's up ;P)

[flow_her]

That analogy made me smile.

[chaosphaere]

This made me tingly. That's very close to my take.

In many cases, in my own experience... an act of magick *is* an act of surrender. After I perform a strongly energetic working, the object of working tends to leave my mind and I stop thinking about it/striving for it. It releases it. I don't know if I'm pushing my Will out into the universe - or simply stepping back to let things happen of their own natural accord.

I don't believe it's possible to force things too far out of alignment, anyway... or at least, it's damned hard.

[lupagreenwolf]

There are certain parameters that we must adhere to, like the laws of physics. So IME, the gods, spirits, etc. are by nature manifestations of certain natural phenomena and that sets the basic parameters in working with them. I work primarily with nature totems, and this is especially apparent with them. so to an extent dealing with the spirit world is like dealing with the physical world--Red Fox the totem, to a great degree, is going to react in the same way as a red fox would. Of course, deities and spirits are more than the sum of all their parts, just as we humans are more than collections of carbon-based cells with mammalian instincts and big frontal lobes. So a certain amount of appreciation for who an individual being is is necessary to better understanding the parameters surrounding them

[mageoflamancha]

I hold with free will, with a dash of pre-destination thrown in for flavor. I think we are able to chose many things in our lives, with some of the choices made before we take form. Which leads from time to time of finding currents in our lives that we can fight against and buck- or find that things go so much more smoothly when we follow them

[winterlion]

Anything we try to do "against the flow" of "the way things are" is - of necessity - hard. In some ways our act of standing up and realizing we CAN change the flow is a true act of power.... and changes it from submitting to the flow to swimming with it