Magic. That’s the foundation of the topic.
By standard, our modern cultures dismiss magic because there’s no evidence to suggest that any person can actually manifest fireballs from nothing or curse a person into deteriorating to death instantly.
I agree.
However, let’s not throw out everything just because the hyperbolic evolution of practices became obsessed with antics beyond reasonable tangibility.
We are tremendously powerful manipulators of our own existence and in that lies some degree of validity in magic.
Take the sigil.
The sigil is broadly described as any spiritual symbol believed to evoke an affect through using it as a medium for just such.
Modern magic adherents have plenty sigil practices. One such is the simple sigil of desire.
The idea described is to put down what you desire and then form a sort of symbol through a process.
This symbol will then act as the medium by which an adherent will channel their energy into so to receive the result of their desire.
That all sounds like a line from any random fairy tale, and it’s incredibly easy to dismiss it as flights of fancy.
It’s easy to say that adherents that swear by these things are simply under an illusion that they work because they want them to work.
In fact, the last assessment is not exactly far off the mark.
What is described in sigils for “charging”, as it is now called most often, is essentially pushing the human body to extreme sensational inputs, which would neurologically indicate that such an event would rev the CNS so that all processes in the body at that time are more embedded sensations.
Some of these practitioners bungee jump, others have sex or masturbate, some take radical drugs, and some inflict pain upon their person.
What all are doing neurologically, however, is dumping a huge amount of adrenaline, dopamine, and endorphin’s into their body within a confined and concise spiked burst while focusing on the symbol derived into that sigil; severe meditation basically.
Our bodies are extremely powerful receivers and transmitters of implicit information.
So much so that we have laws banning certain practices from being used in advertising because the effects of using the implicit part of the human body as a means to manipulate self control of other people is understood to be rather effective.
The practice of a sigil is not too different when you boil it down neurologically.
Let’s take a simple sigil of modern day culture.
We write a concept out that is of our desire regarding our self.
“I want to be happier at work.”
Commonly, this will then be slaughtered apart until you have:
WNTBHPRK
These are then warped radically by drawing the letters until they no longer represent letters, but end up in some way combined.
There are too many variations on what this can look like as the only real requirement is that it is manipulated by you into a form you feel best fits your design.
But you can see some in a google search.
google.com/search?q=example+ … 80&bih=945
This is then the only semblance left of the desire from what the adherent wrote.
In a way, it is rather poetic.
From the abstract and implicit sensational network of the adherent’s body came a sensation which arose as a cognitive reaction which was then taken by the person and articulated in mechanical linguistic activity, that requires explicit reasoning, so to be manipulated into an abstract and implicit medium to produce a sensation perceived and conceptualized by severe meditative chemical memory locking.
This process is a process of self brainwashing.
Or, to say it another way, it is the process of self installation.
If you do this, then you are essentially choosing what it is that you want to install into your memory as the piloting script for your perception so to subliminally cause you to create the concept which you had desired.
In a way, that is magic.
Well, it’s not magic, but we don’t have a word for controlling your emotionally existential experience in perception like we do for things like boxing.
So I suppose the best placement is to call it magic.
Although, to me, it seems more like pathological ontology. Pathontology?
At any rate, the point is that this actually stands as neurologically effective.
You could quite literally imprint what you passionately desire in earnest upon your amygdala affiliated processes in the lower frontal cortex where decisions first start popping in before they reach the cognitive stage.
You would be saving your cognitive will to your sub-cognitive reasoning data storage.
Which means that whatever you go after in such a way would be limited to what’s practically possible and not what’s simply fancied.
It also explains why many ancient civilizations perceived the act of doing these kinds of processes in attempts to manipulate the self control of other people than yourself in some fashion as bad, and using these same methods for leveraged self control was considered good.
The names differed, but regardless there was a gradient of good things to do with these methods and bad things to do with these methods.
A lot of other ideas were held alongside this one, and it ranged all over the geography, but this is one of the concepts that does seem to be consistent as functional.
We may not be able to conjure up externally physical spirits and elemental sources, but self evocation of perception does actually neurologically stand practical.
A further note.
While this discussion focused on a very specific form and culture of a sigil, it should be noted that there are sigils everywhere around us.
The American Flag is a sigil. The police officer badge is also a sigil.
The wedding ring is a sigil.
The Christian cross, Holy Trinity, Gospel Story, Buddhist Dharmachakra, Eight Fold Path, Judaic Torah, Talmud, Barmitzfa, and just about every other spiritual practice man has.
A desired behavior implicitly embodied into a sensation by representation of direction for action so to evoke the implied conception in action.