Magic 301: Trial and Transmutation

One of the really painful parts of learning magic under the supervision of the spirits and a teacher is the trial. Any substantial power will always be gated behind the trials necessary for us to learn how to use it and that we can use it, so those trials are inevitable. There is a bit of a secret to getting through the trials with a minimum of suffering, and like many things in magic, it is paradoxical.

The secret is genuine gratitude. It cannot be forced. You cannot make yourself feel it. The emotion rises out of the experience of being in a trial, as the soul masters the involved lessons. It can take a certain amount of experience with trials and a certain amount of spiritual clarity to reach the point where gratitude can be expressed.

Trials up until that point are, to put it more nicely than it can feel, a long slog through the shit.

The reasons why a magician feels gratitude are personal. Each magician must come up with their own, rising out of their understanding and the current state of their soul. But when you reach that stage, suddenly—transmutation.

The trial does not suddenly become comfortable, nor does it suddenly become easy. What the discomfort becomes is unimportant. The emotional resistance to the trial, which constitutes a lot of the discomfort of the trial, begins to fade away, leaving only what needs to be done, whether to resolve the trial entirely or to resolve some stage of the trial.

The gratitude itself is clarity, and the magical thing which turns a trial from an intensely uncomfortable slog into something that is a thing to be done and evidence of the compassion of the divine, to give the magician opportunities to learn.

Getting there is a bit of a bastard. A teacher helps.