Magic 301: What Ifs

One of the things you will need to learn in the course of spiritual work or magic is that a split focus and daydreaming are not your friends. The kinds of visualization that people often associate with magic in other traditions will get you hurt in vodou.

Many things in the astral or spiritual spaces will strongly encourage you to daydream, ask “what if” or otherwise to engage in anything which commands your attention and emotions, driving you away from whatever is currently or actually happening. The further you are from whatever is currently or actually happening, the easier your attention is to control. Attention is energy, and the ability to control attention for those sorts of entities provides a consistent source of energy. They are more than capable of suggesting a scenario, interpretation, or emotion to you, to lead you in a particular direction.

Ideally, in their view, you spend more time in “what if” or daydreaming than you do anything else, getting excited about imagined scenarios. They prefer you to be so excited that it spills into your daily life, constantly reacting to something that is not happening, but you think might happen, has already happened, or otherwise you can be prompted to imagine. You will act as if those imagined scenarios are true, not just by committing time and energy to imagining, but those scenarios will inform what you do: you will act is if those scenarios are true.

They can be very subtle in their suggestions, and some are fairly good mimics. Until you learn how to hear the difference between your own processes and something else, they can suggest and control you with impunity. Being able to tell the difference is both absolutely necessary to prevent a magician from being enslaved by something in the astral spaces and is one of the harder, more protracted lessons in magic.

The daydream, the “what-if”, the imagined scenario belongs not to the individual, but to those entities. They are a technology of control, and one that is dangerous precisely because it is enjoyable and appears to be private: a place to pretend something we want is true, a place to speculate on what we want.

A wise magician is aware of this and takes steps to avoid engaging in that technology. What you take your eyes off can and will bite you.