Magic 301: Emotions

Attention is energy but so is emotion, which is a burst of energy with a theme. Few things create a wide open venue for control of the individual like emotions. Emotions are powerful to the person experiencing them, commanding their attention with such vehemence that people often struggle to think about anything else when in the grip of a powerful emotion. Emotions are also inherently pleasurable, even when negative. People enjoy being swept away by strong emotion, whether positive or negative. Most of art and leisure activity is the attempt to seek that experience out. Movies, paintings, music, etc: all an attempt to capture and express an emotion powerfully enough to persuade the audience to be swept away.

This makes emotions a very useful control technology to various entities in the astral space, which can evoke emotions and their reactions far more directly than having to rely on something outside the person they’re working on. This is especially true when those entities couple invoking emotion with daydreams and “what if” scenarios. Emotions can also be habit forming, with people seeking out whatever emotion seems most comfortable to them over and over, forming stable patterns of behavior. A “what if” scenario or a daydream might be attractive, but it is the emotions someone experiences while daydreaming that motivate them to come back.

Being a priest or spiritual worker does not necessarily mean having no emotion, but it does involve being aware of the tendency of emotions to be used by entities in the astral space and the capacity of emotions to blow judgement and balance away. Reaching a stage in control of self where you can choose whether or not to go along with the emotion is a late stage in learning how to be a magician in these spaces—emotion can be a useful tool, as an energy that can be applied to situations, but it is a tool that can backfire dramatically when the magician in question has not reached the ability to choose not to participate in the emotion.

You cannot reach that stage through suppressing your emotions.

Much like the road of excess, sitting in the riot of emotions can lead you to notice an empty space. If you have the capacity to notice that emptiness and the inability to be fully captured, you can begin to be a student of the dynamics of emotion as power, and their nature as ephemeral.

A teacher helps.