Magic 501: Trust of Self

This is always a tricky topic. The consciousness is not terribly helpful for trust. It can be easy to convince yourself that you can convince yourself, that trust is something you can just decide to have. On the same token, it’s easy for ego to inject a ton of things here, too. For instance, the idea that you should trust yourself and should feel guilty or defective if you don’t; that you do trust yourself and are therefore better than people that don’t trust themselves; or that trust is something you just have or don’t have on personal virtue. Ego, as always, does its job of confusing people, making them doubt the wrong things, or in this case defining trust in a way that requires you to get it or understand it outside the self.

If you have to convince yourself, that (false) trust is coming from the outside of the self. The consciousness might think of itself as the whole of the person, but it is a minor part of the soul and easily influenced by a range of other things. You will never be able to talk yourself into something the rest of your soul knows is not true. Trust of self comes from the inside, from the contents of the whole soul. Your whole soul is the only thing that can give it to you, and the only thing that can affirm it in you—nothing coming from the outside ever quite ‘sticks,’ ever really satisfies.

You will always earn that trust from yourself: that is, your experiences will teach you how trustworthy you are in various contexts. If you see yourself acting as if you are untrustworthy, as if you are faithless or easy to distract, disturb, or prevent from doing what you know to do, you will know yourself not to be worth trusting. If you have a habit of self-sacrifice or betrayal, you will know yourself not to be worth trusting. If you have a habit of betraying others or sacrificing others, you will know yourself not to be worth trusting. If you quit easily, you will know yourself not to be worth trusting.

Whether or not it is intentional, we observe ourselves and get to know ourselves through our actions and choices. This is another place where the consciousness is a minority partner. It is not the consciousness which observes, it is the rest of the soul. The consciousness is just where the result of those observations flow and are reproduced in our actions. If we have observed ourselves to be untrustworthy, that knowledge will be reproduced no matter what the consciousness might say about it.

Trust of self is the result of many, many lessons over many, many lives.

Trust of self has a whole series of magical applications, from being better able to get information from the rest of the soul in the consciousness to being better able to assert magical will. Where intuition, which is what we often call the (initially distressing) inexplicable flow of information from the rest of the soul into consciousness, has been honed, that trust of self becomes part of the reason we can consciously get that information. It also makes us faster to react to circumstance, removing second-guessing and a great deal of the agonizing over decision-making which tends to characterize people in most stages of spiritual development.

And it is how some of the more durably distressing lessons are finished: not in determination or anything the consciousness tries to apply, but in the conviction which the consciousness (or any of the various spiritual entities which influence it) cannot diminish. One just knows, no matter what else is happening, what one is.

You cannot know yourself without trust.