Following the weekend's little meetup, I've been inspired to dredge up some of my old posts from Barbelith, so I have them in the one place. Here's one from this thread regarding whether we're all going to hell in a handbasket and the role of the magician in the 21st century. There's also an unfinished comic taken from this that I'm going to dust off and add up here hopefully soon:
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Then you could use those same skills to motivate someone else with a different area of expertise.
Then another.
So the writing/magic/art is MORE EFFECTIVE than 'hard' solutions, it's meta-, your role and mine (and yours dear reader) is to INSPIRE PEOPLE and what could be better than Art to do that?
That's the way I see it. To me, the most important thing at this point and the one thing I am focused on cultivating and working with is creativity, creativity, creativity. In all its forms. That's always how I've seen magic at the root, the application of a creative mind to incite change.
I think the New Medieval™ is such a prevalent attitude because it's one the easiest ways to spin out our future, looking from where we are now. It speaks to us at a base level, it's comfortably dark and allows us to put the course of our future out of our own hands. It's childish because, for whatever part we have played, it almost absolves us of ultimate responsibility. We misbehaved and now Mother is coming back to punish us.
If there's one thing I find it's most useful to constantly remind yourself, it's that every situation has the inherent ability to turn out an infinite number of resolutions. The only barrier to realisation is the application of creativity and hard work to exactly the right pressure points.
Our defeatist mindset, like any properly functioning glamour, becomes a self-sustaining feedback loop. The idea becomes real by convincing you it always was in the first place. the more you see it pop up because of this, the greater its ability to replicate itself. Money has the very real ability to topple nations or build physics-breaking machines precisely and only because we believe that it does, blah, blah, blah.
Creativity is the one wild card we carry with us always. Its function is in shaking up what's fed into it, recontextualising it and applying it in new forms. It's the most potent tool (and possibly even the only real one) that we have for getting the train off the tracks and driving in a different direction.
There's billions of us, and we're all in this together. I should say that again. There'sBillions of us, and each of us does things differently. All us are connected to the source. Every one of us has a brain capable of turning the world if we're so inclined. The only thing we maybe lack is the willingness to look at what we each have to offer and apply it in ways that we haven't thought of yet. Some of us are healers, some of us are technicians, some of us are leaders and some are followers. All of these professions are vital, all are in need of growth in their scope and ability.
The physical world we live in flows from ideas, and the only thing you can replace and idea with is yet another idea. Art and creativity are the first port of call from their world to the physical one. They are the raw condensations, the transmission media.
The role of the magician is almost a bit of a nebulous concept, because I'm not sure there is really the one defining characteristic that you can use to point to somebody and say "that person is a magician". There are many different types of magician. There are magical doctors, magical technicians, leaders, followers etc. Each has to apply their skills to the situation in the ways they are best able to imagine.
If there is a "course of action" we should be following I'm inclined to think that, as is often the case, it's the simplest answer. A twofold process we've being practicing since the dawn of shamanism. Fostering communities where differently-talented people can see what they have to offer one another, where information can take root and flourish into tangible things through their efforts. And then showing them what happens when they open the door to potentialities.
