The simple fact is that science and our understanding of the world and physical phenomena has vastly increased over the last 100 or so years. We cannot apply the same rigour and method to understanding the occult, for one of 2 reasons. Either the occult/magick was nonsense all along, and the fact that it cannot be proven or consistently observed or explained scientifically in any way means it simply does not exist, and was a mere stop gap in the constantly evolving human understanding of the physical world.
Alternatively, you can subscribe to the school of thought that the occult/magick is something that is completely beyond human comprehension, even beyond any sapient comprehension. That's an idea that is really difficult for most people to grasp, as with the aforementioned progress in science and human understanding, it's often used as a support system that at one point in the past, nothing was understood, and now in the present many things are understood, so that is taken to mean that in the future all things will be understood. That is simply not true.
There are many things which can never be understood. There are complicated examples I can give you, and there are simple examples I can give you. Humans (or any 3 dimensional intelligence) will
never be able to fully comprehend or visualise higher dimensional objects. Yes, we can easily describe/measure/compute them mathematically, through which we can understand certain properties and behaviours of these higher dimensional objects, but we can never, ever visualise them or understand what they actually look like. For the same reason we can't point a finger in the direction of a 4th spatial dimension. It will never be possible for us to even imagine a dimension that is orthogonal to all 3 of our current spatial dimensions.
In the same way, we can never hope to understand what a photon (or anything close to that physical scale) would look like, because we use photons to see. We cannot bounce a photon off another photon to see what a photon looks like. Forget about the things that are smaller. So every depiction we have of a smaller particle is simply an aesthetic representation of the mathematics we use to compute the properties and behaviours of these particles.
Same goes for things like black holes, where we can never experiment or observe what truly happens behind the event horizon, because we will never be able to travel faster than or communicate faster than the speed of light. I see a lot of uneducated people cry and whine that "there must be a way to travel faster than light, there were so many things we thought were impossible in the past that now we have discovered are possible" - but no. It is simply a property of this universe that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Our human intuition has been wrong often, throughout history, but maths has not been. We have discovered new ways to do math, sure, but really those only change what was previously uncomputable. We can already prove now that traveling faster than the speed of light through space is simply the equivalent of time travel (you can think of it like this - light already travels infinitely fast, but we observe it to travel at a finite speed because that is the speed of propagation of our universe, sort of like the speed of time itself, absent anything slowing it down).
The reason we have wave-particle dualities, singularities (infinities, black holes), imaginary numbers, objects with properties that are counter intuitive and can never be observed (like fermions having 1/2 spin, meaning they have to be rotated 720º to return to the original position as opposed to 360º) is because there are so many things going on under the hood that we are not only oblivious to, but that we will forever be oblivious to, due to them being so completely outside our plane of comprehension.
All this to say, when we perform magick, even if we follow the steps 100% perfectly, we
know that we don't achieve success 100% of the time. Either that is because magick simply does not work 100% of the time, or because we don't have 100% of the knowledge to perform magick. As in, there are hidden variables, perhaps that we can never know, in the same way we can never know what a 4th spatial dimension would look like. Ultimately, the result is the same. It's a game of chance, and we have to play to probabilities either in the method, or in the result.
Maybe if we lived in a 9358.4 dimensional universe, everything would make sense. There would be no mathematical singularities or infinities, we could see inside black holes, and we would completely understand how magick works. But we don't. Most people are not equiped to handle this sort of limitation, and certainly most people who try to explain magick don't even know anything about the science and jargon they are using aside from a few youtube videos or books they read. Let alone philosophical concepts like the absolute limit of understanding that I described above.
Most newbies like you tend to demand explanations of what magick is and how it works, so many "experienced" practitioners try to hand wave it away by using their extremely limited (and sometimes downright laughable) understanding of mathematics and physics. This results in what you, I and many others hate, pseudo-science. The fucked up part is, it works for them more often than not. You tell a tiktok girlie that certain crystals vibrate in a certain way, and she'll placebo that shit right into work. And then she'll spread that, with her anecdotal evidence. Or you'll see some dude who's watched a few PBS Space Time videos hear some nutcase who's drawing parallels between some quantum physics whitepaper to magickal practice, and because this dude heard those same buzzwords in the PBS video, he'll think the guy preaching this nonsense actually has some credibility.
It all boils down to a few things:
- Some things are unknowable
- Placebo
- A little knowledge = a lot of confidence
- People who are desperate to find answers can find them anywhere
You need to understand something, though. If there was a way to objectively understand what magick is and how it works, someone smarter than you would have probably done that already. So it's my position that it's unknowable. I'm not discouraging anyone from studying magick beyond the current literature and trying to find ways to "crack the code" or improve the effectiveness. If you can do that, great, go for it, and share your findings. But I have no faith in you.
Until then, it is simply, as frustrating as it is, either:
- Magick will do X, but only with a Y% success rate
- Magick will increase the chance of X happening by Y%
You have no chance of finding a better or more concrete explanation of the underpinnings of magick, and you're not even remotely equipped to broaden that field of understanding. Rushing to find an answer to these questions is a fool's errand.
That's why I wrote a book.
