Serious doubts help me

[Dona]

I’ve been exploring magick and esoteric practices for a while, but lately I’ve been having a hard time believing in magick anymore.
I keep wondering whether I’ve been interpreting things as meaningful when they could just be coincidence, psychology, pattern recognition, confirmation bias, etc. And the more I think about it, the more skeptical I become. I’m not sure if this is just a normal period of doubt or if I’m actually starting to believe that magick simply doesn’t exist.
I’d especially like to hear from people who have practiced seriously for many years. Have you ever gone through a period where you genuinely stopped believing? If so, what happened afterward? And how do you personally distinguish a genuinely magical experience from coincidence or from fooling yourself?
I’m genuinely asking because I don’t want to convince myself of something just because I want it to be true. The more I read about skepticism, history, and anthropology, the more skeptical I become about magic and esotericism in general.
Honestly, I’m starting to wonder whether I should just focus on the academic side of all this if I want to keep some connection to the “spiritual,” so to speak. I don’t know.
The thing is, I’m not really seeing any benefits from the occult itself. Everything I feel like I’ve genuinely gained so far has come from my own hard work—reading psychology, history, philosophy, mythology, etc. But when it comes to the occult practices themselves, I mostly seem to have gained confusion, doubt, and possibly some illusions that I may have created myself.
I was planning to work through Quareia seriously, but I’m no longer sure I’m willing to invest that much time and effort into it without having some reason to believe that there’s actually something there.
And I know that probably sounds sad, but I think I’m becoming a non-believer. Or maybe I’m just going through a period of serious doubt. I honestly don’t know anymore.
I’d really like to hear from people who have practiced for years: have you ever reached this point? And if you did, what made you continue—or what made you eventually walk away?

 

[Faria]

I’d really like to hear from people who have practiced for years: have you ever reached this point?

No, never! Follow the three simple rules I will mention in this post, and you will end this counterproductive phase of your work.

1. DO NOT VISUALIZE! This is the single most important thing you will ever read about magic, and one that almost nobody will agree with. To hell with them! This rule is extremely simple: if you are doing any sort of magic whatsoever, anything... make sure it happens outside of your head. Say something OUT LOUD. Burn something. Move your hands a bit. Don't let it be all in your head. Nothing that goes on in your head matters. Your "intention" is meaningless. Do a thing. If you watch a video of yourself doing it and it doesn't look like you are doing a spell, assume you aren't. That will fix 99% of all "why didn't it work?" issues.

2. Realize that your assumptions are WRONG. Not just some of them. Not just the wild ones. Spirits, auras, karma, any mechanics of magic, anything... forget it! The core foundational beliefs by which you try to operate magic... are wrong! It's too bad! You have bad/false/dumb ideas about how any of this works or what it's supposed to do. Correct that error by reading a broad range of materials and taking the time to understand them. If a book is easy to read, it's the wrong book! Come back to all those ideas after ten years and then start thinking about how it works.

3. Pretend you are learning to play a sport or an instrument. Spend that kind of time at it. If you are looking for some useful activities, get yourself a copy of the three-page "Liber E vel Exercitiorum" and follow it as if it were given to you as an essential task by your employer.

 

[Tryp]

I want to share a few thoughts. Apologies for not having the time (or being able) to wrap them all together in a nice discourse. In no particular order...

• Consider that this may not be the place to find practitioners who "walked away" and can explain what was a breaking point for them.
• If you read about skepticism, chances are you will become more skeptical. If you wish to keep exploring and stay open, avoid explanations that seem to have everything figured out or to have an answer for everything. This is probably a good policy regardless of where you are.
• You can easily explain many things as coincidence or delusion (which can be, if you ask me, a rigid system that shuts you down). I've been close to that. But sometimes Occam's razor disagrees with that kind of explanation. Consider your experiences and honestly decide if seriously calling them "coincidence" makes sense to you. That helped me in the past.
• Do not isolate magick from other aspects of your life. Your own spirituality. Your experiences around death. Experiences shared by loved ones. You may decide to stop any sort of magical practice, yet what other experiences show you about the cosmos probably, strongly suggest you just cannot u turn into a reductive materialistic mindset. Can you?
• Exercise: try to thoroughly explain the placebo effect from that skeptical perspective.
• Another thing that helped me in a rout: would denying magic make your life easier? What is more reassuring? Are you sure?

A crisis is an opportunity, best of luck to you getting good lessons from it.

 

[The Wizard Tim]

I’ve been exploring magick and esoteric practices for a while, but lately I’ve been having a hard time believing in magick anymore.
I keep wondering whether I’ve been interpreting things as meaningful when they could just be coincidence, psychology, pattern recognition, confirmation bias, etc. And the more I think about it, the more skeptical I become. I’m not sure if this is just a normal period of doubt or if I’m actually starting to believe that magick simply doesn’t exist.
I’d especially like to hear from people who have practiced seriously for many years. Have you ever gone through a period where you genuinely stopped believing? If so, what happened afterward? And how do you personally distinguish a genuinely magical experience from coincidence or from fooling yourself?
I’m genuinely asking because I don’t want to convince myself of something just because I want it to be true. The more I read about skepticism, history, and anthropology, the more skeptical I become about magic and esotericism in general.
Honestly, I’m starting to wonder whether I should just focus on the academic side of all this if I want to keep some connection to the “spiritual,” so to speak. I don’t know.
The thing is, I’m not really seeing any benefits from the occult itself. Everything I feel like I’ve genuinely gained so far has come from my own hard work—reading psychology, history, philosophy, mythology, etc. But when it comes to the occult practices themselves, I mostly seem to have gained confusion, doubt, and possibly some illusions that I may have created myself.
I was planning to work through Quareia seriously, but I’m no longer sure I’m willing to invest that much time and effort into it without having some reason to believe that there’s actually something there.
And I know that probably sounds sad, but I think I’m becoming a non-believer. Or maybe I’m just going through a period of serious doubt. I honestly don’t know anymore.
I’d really like to hear from people who have practiced for years: have you ever reached this point? And if you did, what made you continue—or what made you eventually walk away?

Hi Dona,
I have found identifying and separarting the following helpful for me.

There is magic - David Blane, Chris Angel, Penn & Teller, David Copperfield.... These are all magicians, they practice magic. Magic is amazing, brilliant, and but an illusion.

Then there is magick. Alchemy - The Great Work is magick. Crowley practiced magick. The Golden Dawn practices magick. Magick is a means of affecting an outcome through a specific magickal working.

When working in magick there are three models of magick one can work in (see "Unraveling Magick: An In-Depth Examination of the Psychological, Spiritual, and Resonance Models" By Headmaster Nicholas Kingsley of The Grey School).

These models of magick are;
Psychological - where it's mind over matter
Spiritual - where you are making supplications to a deity, or invoking a deity
Resonance - where you are using correspondences in a specfic way to affect a desired outcome.

Faria speaks true; "10 years" magick is not a get quick scheme, it's a craft, it takes time to develop skill, just as it takes time to play a musical instrument, time and practice and dedication.

If you spend time each morning grounding, centering and shielding, and then at the end of the day meditate and journal on your day, you'll find you make fantastic headway in but a few weeks.

And if you continue that work for a few years... Well you will probably be a master of yourself at that point in time!

Keep up the good work!
-Tim

 

[MorganBlack]

1. DO NOT VISUALIZE! This is the single most important thing you will ever read about magic, and one that almost nobody will agree with. To hell with them! This rule is extremely simple: if you are doing any sort of magic whatsoever, anything... make sure it happens outside of your head.

Yes! Exactly!!

Very wise advice there.

I'm Gen-X, raised secular, and it took me a while to figure this out on my own. 20th-century magical intruction is pretty much horrible for the practice of traditional magic (meaning pre-Eliphas Levi, pre-Blavatsky, pre-Crowley on down magic), even while I enjoy the philosophy.

I have advised for years not to "project into"ceremony. No ruminating, not explaining, no whatabouts. JUST do the ritual. Be present. Say the words, wave the sticks. Feel deeply. Be a little in awe. If conjuring demons, be a little wary, a little concerned. A little fear-trance / amydala hijack is fine, but not too much.

Now with Quareia. Not my thing. As a professional artist and art director, I dislike visionary 'journeying' magic. That is just my day job. That is also not the magic of the grimoires. You will most likely also get plenty of visions when 'doing' the grims, but I usually advise to ignore them, and just charge the spirit with things to accomplish in the physical world. After a few successes under your belt, 99% of online magical disussions will become academic hot-air to you.

 

[Kepler]

And I know that probably sounds sad, but I think I’m becoming a non-believer. Or maybe I’m just going through a period of serious doubt. I honestly don’t know anymore.
I’d really like to hear from people who have practiced for years: have you ever reached this point? And if you did, what made you continue—or what made you eventually walk away?

Not at all bad. It's a precious state of being.
The breakdown of initial belief systems is to be expected, as with any learning process.
Illusions are trying to be stripped away to allow the opening up to new discovery, horizons and a way of being that corresponds and validates experience and reality from your explorations.
Either you will succeed and adapt to a new way of being with the dawn, or fail and rationalize staying locked in ignorance and darkness.

New models of reality from experience and investigation, dissolving the old, opened the way for me to continue in a larger worldview that has alignment with physical sciences for occult exploration.

 

[HermesX3]

Hmm. Op needs a break or something to do that has results. The occult is very much real. I'm not going to teach you evocation to physical appearance. They also say no visualization although in a deep meditation like the day before it does help, but not so much during ritual. Well ok then. Let's do something simple.

Get a piece of paper. Draw the sigil of the entities you want help from. Perhaps add a pentagram to the corner of the paper. Write down what you want and from what entity. If you can write a petition that's good but using your words is enough. Menstrual blood, blood or seminal fluid can be wiped across the paper if you want to. Let it dry. Roll the paper up to the thickness of a marker. You'll need a place like a balcony or a garden or somewhere you won't be disturbed. Light the paper on fire at one end let it burn a little then blow it out. Now turn the paper with the smoldering and smoking part downwards and hold it until the embers consume it into ash and smoke.if it goes out light it again, and make sure the end smolders too. It works for me most of the time when nothing else does.

 

[12RelayT10]

I’ve reached that point several times. But walking away from the path doesn’t really seem possible for me, because in a way it feels like my natural state of being. I can certainly become temporarily distracted by other things, but somehow I always find myself coming back to it.

For me, it feels more like a balance, where the two sides are, in a sense, actually part of the same thing. If something is not A, then by definition it is different from A. Yet “different from A” can only have meaning because A exists in the first place. In that sense, the two opposites seem to give each other meaning.

Perhaps faith and doubt work in a similar way. Maybe doubt itself is not necessarily the opposite of faith, but a part of it. At least, I’ve come to think that there is something valuable in allowing yourself to doubt rather than trying to force yourself into certainty.

As for distinguishing something supernatural from something that is simply a product of our own minds, I honestly don’t know. I suspect that’s one of the hardest questions there is. We are very good at finding patterns and meaning, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that every meaningful experience is therefore meaningless or imaginary.

In any case, your post gave me a little boost of what I suppose might be called “faith.” So, thank you for that.

A little off-topic, but your answer also made me think about something else. I sometimes wonder whether people who are interested in the occult should approach it more like growing up in the so-called “normal world.” We don’t enter the normal world by immediately reading books about it. We’re first raised by our parents, we play, interact with other people, go to school, have experiences, and gradually learn how the world works.

Maybe the occult should be approached in a similar way. Rather than immediately diving into books and trying to understand everything intellectually, perhaps you should first “grow up” within the practice itself, through experience, observation, and guidance, and only later use books to make sense of what you’ve experienced.

Another thing I find really remarkable is that there always seem to be only a handful of people around. When I first saw the shoutbox, I honestly thought, “How is this ever going to work if tens of thousands of people are shouting at the same time?”

 

[Frater R.P.G.]

I've gone through such a period of doubt twice or so, both cases relatively early in my practice. Because the thing is, if you practice regularly for a couple of years, you WILL see results that are really hard to explain "sceptically".

There is no denying that magic works, but we can still argue about how and/or what it means. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of BS and pseudo-science, but there are practices that are undeniably effective, especially when it comes to personal development.

The problem is that it's not easily verifiable in a scientific study, due to complexities involved. It's like with various business principles - they clearly work, but you wouldn't be able to verify them scientifically, because there's no way to create a proper environment where they can be rigorously tested.

Because of that, I personally prefer to think of magic as an art. It has some rules and principles, but ultimately a lot depends on the person and the context. Just like with any art, there are objective aesthetic rules and subjective beauty standards.

If it helps you, you can also approach magic with the psychological model. I don't think it's a true representation of reality, but it doesn't hinder you much in practice, and thinking of magic in this way can help with the cognitive dissonance.

I haven't worked with Quareia and I've only skimmed through it once. My impression is that it's a valid if not a little bit soulless system. IMO working with an established system of symbols is more effective at the beginning.

 

[akenu]

I would say healthy skepticism is fine. I don't really go around believing in Magick; the trick is to learn to shut your skepticism up in the middle of practice. Be present and focused when you are performing the rituals, or the meditations, or whatever your practice entails; then forget it. Go make a meal, tend to plants, do a strictly physical activity to get your mind off the spiritual one.

You can do some journaling after if the practice was worth the journal, but you don't have to write down every single QCoL or visualization exercise.