Progress is a hard thing to measure, we often don't realize we're making any even though we're always in a state of forward movement. We don't realize we're getting older, stronger, fatter, thinner,balder ( oh the baldness...) or whatever. This stuff doesn't happen overnight and rarely do we see the results of our spiritual work manifest results overnight either. Many in the occult are hardcore advocates of taking meticulous notes and logging their experiences like scientific data. This is never a bad idea as one can look back and see what mistakes if any were made and see how to correct it. The magick journal also has another benefit I don't see get mentioned much. The magick journal is as much a snap shot of our past, a measuring point for the progress that's been made as it is a recipe book or log of what we did.
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| Measuring One's Growth |
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| How to aim a fart I think...poor tree. |
Doing occult exercises and perfecting techniques takes time. One can easily see results when they consciously push themselves to perform these exercises on a daily basis. None the less it's not uncommon for one to get deterred. Just like in the real gym (I've hear people use those things.) your magick muscles do not develop overnight and it's easy to feel like progress is not being made or at least not in a time frame that's to our liking. I've noticed when doing the work that often the immediate results we notice pale in comparison to the real progress that was made months down the road.
An example I'll share was a simple visualization exercise I had been performing for weeks and weeks trying to perfect or master it. It's a simple technique of visualizing a pendulum swinging back and forth, the point of the exercise was to visualize this arcing movement for a set period of time without losing the visualization as well as keeping the arc of the pendulum consistent. Sounds simple right? Yeah, that's what I thought too. This exercise kicked my ass, when I could keep the imaginary pendulum in sight for a few minutes the thing would start misbehaving and not swing in it's perfect arc (how in the hell an imaginary object misbehaves is beyond me) and would begin doing circles or figure 8's. I kept this exercise up diligently practicing everyday, multiple times a day, no way was I going to let an imaginary pendulum get the better of me. So long story short the imaginary pendulum got the better of me, this was a big let down to me that I couldn't control such a simple construct for a set period of time. I should be able to do this I'M A MAGICIAN after all, I bend reality, cause change at my whim and make a pretty mean bowl of cereal! Well a few months later I was looking through one of my notebooks looking for something completely unrelated when I stumbled across my old foe once again. I looked ahead and noticed that although my visualizations had gotten better I hadn't realized it as I had been so focused on that one particular goal I lost sight of the benefits I had gained.
So having said that I invite all of you to take a journey back through time and revisit your journals. Especially if your feeling like your not making progress, or things are slowing. Look back and see just how far you have really come and take a minute to congratulate, appreciate and motivate yourself to push forward and then get back to work.
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| Until we meet again...you bastard. |
