underpaid, overwhelmed, or hopelessly lazy.
The magical path is a direct path to success as you choose to define it. You work directly with the creative forces of the universe, so that the life and the world you picture and focus on in your imagination very quickly become your life and your world in full, three-dimensional reality.
This is a course in real magic.
Real magic exists, absolutely. It is called by many different names by different people all around the world. Whatever word or words you use to describe it, it is the mysterious process by which something is created out of apparently nothing. It is the process that has created this entire vast universe with you and me sitting in it and pondering these words at this moment. It is the ever-mysterious process of life — call it what you will.
I’ve always liked the word magic. I still have memories of the mystery and wonder of childhood, and the word has always fascinated me. You can call it by many other words, including physics or chemistry if those words seem more accurate or sensible or realistic to you. You can call it intelligent design — whatever you call it, however you imagine it to be, there is obviously a vast intelligence within the forces that design and create this universe. You can call it God, you can call it science. You can call it creative visualization. You can call it strategic planning. Successful people use magic all the time, whether they’re aware of it or not.
Many people who use magic very effectively don’t believe in it, and don’t even like the word or the concept of magic at all. The word has a great many negative meanings for a lot of people. Yet a large number of them have found out how to apply what we can call the laws of manifestation and — yes — magical creation in their lives. They just give the process different words. Choose whatever words work for you.
The words themselves are not that important — they are tools to summon powers that are far beyond our words. Call this mysterious process anything you want. For the purposes of this course, we’ll call it magic.
There is an ever-mysterious process of creation;
we can call it many things.
We will never understand how the process works,
but we can consciously set it in motion.
The process begins in the inner world of the mind. It begins with a thought, a dream — something ephemeral, fleeting, as light and vulnerable as a tiny seed blown in the wind. By focusing on that thought, that dream, we can discover how to create it in our lives and our world. We can create something out of apparently nothing.
The course that follows has many different sessions. Each one is an inner journey, and each one is a complete course in itself that contains the essence of this entire course in magic. It is not necessary to master every one of these chapters or even go through this entire course before you will see some expansive changes in your life. Work and play with any one of these chapters, and you’ll start seeing some remarkable things happening in your life and in your world.
The important work, the essential work, isn’t in reading or listening to all these words. It’s in the inner journeys you take, and the resulting experiences you have.
A Magical Path in Today’s World
It may be helpful to include the story of how I was introduced to magic. It’s one example of how the ancient laws and practices of magic can be applied in very simple ways in our lives and world today.
In my early twenties, after three and a half years of college, I was in the worst shape of my life. I had read a great many books and written lots of papers, but I had done little or nothing for my physical and emotional health. I had taken way too many stimulants to get through all the homework and tests, with very little awareness of the harm the drugs were doing to me physically, mentally, and emotionally.
I had periods of depression. As I look back on it now, it’s so obvious: What goes up must come down. After several days of taking various stimulants, you’re bound to come down. Even worse, perhaps, was the ongoing anxiety I felt so often. Something was wrong with me, I felt, and something was wrong with the world. I couldn’t exactly say what it was, but something was messed up, in the world and in my life.
I lived in a state of fear much of the time. One ongoing fear was that I would be overwhelmed with anxiety and depression, and just wouldn’t be able to handle it. I had no idea that I could do anything about the emotions that came surging through me. I was powerless on a roller-coaster ride of my own emotions.
As soon as I left college, some remarkable changes happened. I got into a theater company and accidentally started taking a yoga class — the directors felt it was good physical discipline. The physical yoga and meditation we did as a group had a powerful healing effect. In a very short time, I was in much better health.
The yoga and meditation opened me up, in a way, and showed me there were new and different worlds to explore. One time, we did a little practice called Closing the Gates, where we sat comfortably, took a deep breath, and then covered our eyes, nose, mouth, and ears with our fingers. (I’ll explain in more detail later.) For the first time in my life, I had an awareness of an inner space inside, as vast and broad as outer space.
It sounds odd to me now; it should have been obvious to anyone. But I had never been aware of the fact that we have an inner world, a vast space we can enter at will and explore. A new world had opened up to me — a world of imagination — a world, I discovered soon after, where magical creation takes place.
Not long after I began doing a bit of yoga and meditation (nothing regular, as I was and still am lazy and undisciplined), I wandered into a little bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. I don’t remember the name of it now, but it had something to do with magic, and the entire bookstore was filled with books on magic, East and West. I had never read any of them, never seen any of them. When I entered that bookstore, I entered a new world.
A man with dark hair and a dark beard sat off behind a desk in a far corner. The beard was full and concealed a lot of his face; he could have been in his twenties or his fifties, for all I knew. He read in silence while I wandered around the store. I had an odd feeling, a combination of awe, excitement, self-consciousness, fear, and shock. I had no idea what any of this was about, and no idea where to begin to study the obviously vast and detailed and arcane subject of magic.
I went up to the man behind the desk and asked him where I could begin to learn about this stuff. He smiled, and invited me to sit in an old wooden armchair. Then he stretched back in his chair, relaxed, and began to give me what turned into an hour-long introduction to Western magic.
I left with a load of books under my arm. The shortest one, the first one I read, was The Art of True Healing by Israel Regardie. Without consciously thinking about it, I put all the other books aside and just focused on that book. The others sat there for months, years, with barely a glance from me. Over the years, I lost most of them. In Israel Regardie’s little book, I found all I needed to work with for many years to come.
The first sentence of the book grabbed and held my attention. It was written simply, with conviction and authority. I had never read any words like them:
Within every man and woman is a force
that directs and controls the entire course of life.
Properly used, it can heal every affliction
and ailment we may have.
And properly used, I soon discovered, it can also help us create fulfilling, successful, wonderful lives. The foundation of the work lies in an exercise of the imagination called the Middle Pillar Meditation. We’ll get into it in depth a bit later, but the simple version involves just relaxing and visualizing or imagining that there is a pillar of light that runs down through the center of your body, from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. That light, that