In something like 1997 I went to the Detroit Auto Show
Big deal, because no one ever does that, right? It felt big. It may in fact be the last time I felt technology was going to solve our problems, because they had electric cars, and they weren’t horrible little boxes but huge shiny objects of maximum desire.
After a few hours of bright lights on slowly rotating supercars, we left the semi-arid wasteland that was downtown Detroit in the mid-1990s and returned to the innocuous inner/outer suburb of Ferndale (pre-gentrification, as in they didn’t even have an Old Navy yet) in my friend’s economy four-door. An American-made car with an engine so poorly designed he feared to drive it two weekends in a row. Clearly we were not yet living in the glittering super-future.
But I had a thought. Like any good chaos magician, I know what thoughts can do. So I let this thought have its way for a little. It was a thought about myself in the future.
Even ordinary people have heard of using visualization to get their goals. This is nothing new to magick, and is pretty much how anyone gets anything done, not by knowing how they will do the thing but by knowing what they want to have done by the end of doing it.
You have to see it, feel it, taste it, know the experience of success. Our brains are easily fooled. Thoughts and memories strike us like lived experience, and so giving yourself the “false memory” of having achieved your goal fools the mind into thinking: yes, you have achieved before, and yes, it was this amazing. So let’s do it again.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and vision-work and “clarifying your goals” are similar paths to a similar goal, that of getting to know the feeling of having what you want. It’s one thing to plan how to reach your goal. What works even better is believing the goal is so achievable that it might as well have already happened. It exists in the future and all you need to do is keep moving and you will align with it.
I don’t give a hot damn whether magick is ‘real’ or not. It’s real because it works (we can discuss spelling in a minute if anyone cares.) It’s so real that science does it too (see above under CBT) and spiritual practitioners of all stripes have been doing more or less exactly that for centuries.
What’s my point?
My point is that as we left the auto show I saw a sort of self. A me that I might be. And I wanted it. I wanted that me to be a real me, to be where I was at the age of 45. In ways too complex to explain, through circumstance and luck and a number of really interesting mistakes, I think I might have done it.
I think about myself way too much. Really I do, so much that I had to start writing fiction to deal with all the selves I wish I could be.
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I’ve come to terms with my limitations. There are thousands of experiences I will not and cannot ever have, no matter how badly I want them. This isn’t because I’m denying myself, but because I simply do not have space or time in this single human life to do all one could ever want to do. I have to choose how I spend my time with deliberation because I can only have so many decades left, and certain paths take a long time to walk. I could become a neurosurgeon/flamenco world champion/*insert huge achievement* if I truly wished, but I would have to give up what I’m presently doing and make that my sole endeavor. Do you see now what I mean? There’s just too much world. I can’t have it all.
But I can have my little vision. I have become my little vision.
Which means I had better get another one.
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