| TWPT:
For those out there who may not be familiar with
you as an author could you give us a capsule view of
who you are in terms of where you are currently on your
magical path and how it was that you began your study
of magic in the first place.
JO: I am what in many traditions
of the magical arts is called a solitary. I practice
alone and, except when teaching in a seminar or workshop,
I pretty much keep to myself with regards to magic.
This works best for me as it has worked best for a handful
of practiced neurotics throughout the ages. (I don‘t
use neurotic derogatorily by the way. A well-chosen
neuroses or two can add seasoning to one’s life. Just
choose well.)
My interest in magic has been there since I was young,
but I put off pursuing it in any serious way for years.
Then a decade or two ago I picked up a particular book
on the subject, read it and was hooked. (I don’t wish
to mention the book - each important book has
to find it‘s own readers ) At the time I was between
life philosophies and so I dug in. I really immersed
myself as I’m want to do when I’m truly interested in
something. Needless to say, all these years later I’ve
found it a valuable tool in life as well as a general
door-opener. Or to be more precise, a great door locator.
Most of us will open a door if it’s right there in front
of us, but we don’t even know to try if we don’t know
it exists. Magic made a lot more doors visible to me.
Lurking in the subtext of your question, I suspect,
is a query about magic and my spiritual journey This
is another arena where I tend to remain quite private
and so I will duck the question that you didn’t actually
ask.
TWPT:
You recently released your book Foundations of
Magic, what were some of the motivations/objectives
that you had in mind when you began work on this book?
JO: I have noticed for years
that whether we recognize it or not most of us use magical
thinking to get through our lives. The problem, it seems
to me, is that typically the thinking is muddled and
the magic bad - bad in the sense of being ineffective.
To take an obvious, if somewhat trivial example, just
read through the grocery store tabloids. Ads for magical
lucky charms and mystical pyramid key chains abound.
These, of course, contain no magic (and they aren’t
even really cool key chains). There’re tacky little
emotional props at best. And people must be buying them
in quantity because the same ads are in there week after
week, year after year. On a more global scale, consider
the magical thinking that has gone into launching and
now sustaining the war in Iraq. The US would wave the
magical wand of democracy and Iraqis would fall into
line and be grateful. At least key chains are harmless.
Most of us attempt to navigate magically in the more
day-today waters that lay between these extremes - the
waters of practical magic. You place a curse on the
women in the next office who got the promotion you deserved.
You wear the same pair of pink boxers every time your
team plays. You always play the six numbers of Groucho
Marx’s birth date on your lottery ticket. You buy another
magical potion - shampoo, herbal impotency remedy, gasoline
additive, skin crème, diet pill - to finally banish
that pesky problem once and for all. And of course we
don’t call it magic. And of course it always works perfectly
- right? The marketing folks, by the way, love our oblivious
and muddled magical thinking.
Ok so most people practice magic in an haphazard
and ineffectual way - what could I do about it?
My first inclination was to act superior and kvetsh.
This, it turned out, was great fun, but alas, it seemed
to do little to address the issue. So I decided to write
The Foundations of Magic: a how-to book on practical
magic for those unschooled in the craft. In doing so
I received a bonus I wasn’t expecting; feedback from
adepts - those who regularly practice magic and are
proficient at it - that it is a useful and welcome book
for them as well.
TWPT:
How did you come up with your theorem that you
don't have to believe in magic to effectively work it
but you have to 'act' as if you believe in magic?
JO: Simple observation. For example,
nine years ago I was leading a series of week-long workshops
in Austria on NLP techniques. One morning I announced
to the group that for the next day, instead of using
NLP we would use magic to get our outcomes. There were
howls of protest. You can imagine. “We didn’t come here
to learn occult nonsense.” “I don’t believe in no stinkin’
magic.” “If I learn to pull it from the hat do I get
to keep the rabbit?” The organizer of the group was
particularly upset. He pulled me aside and said something
to the effect of “Listen, these people didn’t
sign up for this. My reputations is on the line here.”
I pulled rank and insisted, and I also encouraged anyone
who didn’t believe in magic to just keep unbelieving.
I also prodded my organizer to participate. He refused.
So I took an hour or so and led the group members through
the basic steps of casting a magic circle and gave them
a simple, effective ritual toward affecting some specific
change in their lives. We were in a big open room in
a seminar-house and all the participants found themselves
a space and performed their ritual. My organizer disappeared
with a scowl of disapproval. Immediately afterwards
we broke for lunch (the lunches at Austrian seminars
tend to last a while - that may have something to do
with the amount of beer that flows). When we reconvened,
we discussed everyone’s experience. Some people were
already getting great results. Others could sense changes
in the works. Many questions followed about how it all
worked? I said, “It works because it’s magic.” By this
time my organizer had re-joined the group but remained
silent on the subject. Finally, after most of us had
shared our experiences, he spoke up. “During the lunch
break, I decided what the hell, what do I have to loose,
so I cast a circle in my room and worked the ritual
to get rid of the headache I’ve had for the last few
days. When I was done, I still had my headache as bad
as ever. So much for this occult shit, I thought.”
Then he smiled a big old Cheshire-cat smile and said:
“For some unknown reason I had an almost compulsive
desire to take a shower. During the shower another guy
noticed the end of a sliver sticking out of the back
of my leg. [The showers were communal]. I removed it
and my headache disappeared immediately” My organizer
practiced Thai message and was very familiar with body
meridian lines. He said that the sliver had been lodged
directly into a line associated with pain.
To a person, no one in that group believed in magic
before that day, and my organizer was the most strident
non-believer. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I’ve
seen some version of this repeated over and over again.
Learn the craft, practice it, forget about belief. Everyone
has beliefs, everyone can practice magic.
TWPT:
For the working purposes of this book what is
your definition of magic and how do you see magic integrating
into your everyday life?
JO: The working definition I
use in the Foundations of Magic is:
Magic is the Art and Craft of using Will as the agent
for causing desired change to occur.”
Will is the key word. We generally tend to think
of Will as something inside our own minds - our means
of consciously setting things into motion: Getting out
of bed in the morning, sticking with a rigorous exercise
routine, finding a convenience store at twelve-thirty
at night that carries espresso -mocha Hagen Daz. This
certainly describes an aspect of Will, but notice that
in these examples the agent for accomplishing these
things is our own body, or the alarm clock we set, or
the personnel trainer we hired or our voice on the phone
and the ‘C’ page in the yellow pages that lists of all
the convenience stores within 25 miles. You get things
done, but Will stays tamely inside our mind. Magic sets
Will free. When we use magic our Will goes out into
the world as the agent itself.
Now, what I just described as magic often garners
all kinds of flack about how wrong it is, how incomplete
it is, how inaccurate it is and how totally I have missed
the point. I wouldn’t disagree with any of those criticisms;
I could be wrong in a million ways. What I do know is
that what I describe is a very good working definition
for practical magic, which is why I appreciate how you
framed the question.
As to how I integrate it - I use it to get things
done when other methods don’t work, that is when Will
is safely curled up inside the cage of my mind. It’s
a life tool, it’s that simple. Remember the subject
of Foundations of Magic is practical magic.
TWPT:
What was the purpose of not emphasizing any particular
school of thought or belief system when you wrote this
book and was it very difficult for you to strip away
the fact from the system when you were working on the
material that would eventually make up this book? What
kinds of criteria did you use during this process to
judge the difference between the two?
JO: I very much took a page from
the development of NLP. For those who are not familiar
with it, NLP is a set of practical psychological-models
designed for therapists, councilors and used car salesmen
to help other people get changes they want (or the cars
they don’t). Bandler and Grinder, the two prime co-developers
of NLP, noticed that there were certain master therapists
that were remarkably effective; people like Virginia
Satir, Fritz Pearls and Milton Erickson. Each master,
however, had his or her own beliefs and explanations
about what they were doing and why it worked. Problem
was, none of the explanations or beliefs matched very
well. So B. and G. decided to ignore the explanations
and just observe these masters very carefully to learn
what they actually did when they were practicing their
craft. By doing this they began to discern patterns
of behavior (voice, gesture, language, etc) common to
each. They built their NLP models around these effective
behaviors.
I’ve attempted to do the same with practical magic.
I think there are a couple of good reasons to do this.
First, it distills effective practices down to their
fundamentals - their foundation pieces. A solid foundation
is the basis for building anything of lasting worth.
Second, it avoids a preoccupation with the politics
and disagreements of belief and explanation (which often
obscure rather than clarify). It’s a shift of emphasis
from why to how. Lastly, if you have a clear, crisp
set of the essential steps to accomplish anything -
including magic - you can usually incorporate the practice
into your existing belief system without much difficulty.
Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Christians all use exactly
the same set of instructions to install Norton Anti
Virus (or any other software) on to their computer.
Regarding how I went about doing this; I studied
how different practitioners practiced magic. I looked
for the common factors. I tried to practice the Zen
art of beginner’s-mind. What would a beginner observe
that lay obscured by familiarity and belief, preconception
or explanation? How could it be described using the
simplest language, free of jargon? Could I eliminate
a certain step and still have the magic be effective?
If not could it be refined, simplified, shortened, made
lovelier without diminishing effectiveness? And I tested
my ideas and had others test them. I constantly solicited
feedback; not about how sacrilegious, out-to-lunch or
arrogant I was (for I provided ample material for all
these) but about how effective the practices were.
TWPT:
How did your training in the fields of psychology,
hypnotherapy and as a counselor shape the way you presented
the material in this book? Do you feel that your approach
is unique in as far as other reference material is concerned?
JO: I believe it is unique in
a number of ways. I have attempted to short-circuit
the tension that so often exists between most practitioners
of magic and those, generally outside the craft, who
seek psychological explanation for all of magic. I have
tried to make clear in The Foundations of Magic that
the mechanisms of magic and the mechanisms of psychology
are not the same but that the practices of both are
integrally joined. You are not the ground (issues of
the unity of all things aside) but without it you can’t
walk. You need a place to stand, a surface to push against,
a place for you to land when you fall. You and the ground
are integrally joined in this life. Same with magic
and psychology. Think about it; what human activity
does not involve psychological processes? Magic is a
human activity. So I attempt to clarify this.
I also emphasize psychological preparation for most
of the spells. Often it is in the form of an exercise
you can practice in the privacy of your own mind. Sometimes
it is a set of steps that requires accessing specific
psychological states - trance states (i.e. self hypnosis)
being but one example. Just as I counsel material preparedness
when practicing magic (attending to your surroundings,
your cleansing tea, your alter, etc) I counsel psychological
preparedness. Imagine being in your circle, casting
a spell that involves a candle and you realize you didn’t
think to get a candle - You weren’t prepared to
cast the spell. The same applies to psychological preparedness.
Lastly, I believe The Foundations of Magic to be
unique in that it provides all of the material required
to become quickly proficient in mastering the 33 spells
included in the book. It offers a limited kind of mastery
- mastery in a very clearly defined, and, above all
useful, set of specific magic practices.
TWPT:
How much NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) have
you incorporated into your Magical practices aside from
the 'Well Formed Intention'?
JO: It is prevalent throughout
the book. Most of the spells incorporate standard NLP
techniques along with standard magical practices. Take
for instance the spell for Resolving Uncomfortable Situations;
it includes NLP anchoring techniques (a method for associating
specific mental or emotional states to a stimulus).
And why NLP? Because it is the most efficient, precise
and - most of all - effective set of psychological models
I know. And just as an aside, as with magic, you don’t
have to believe in NLP for the techniques to be effective.
TWPT:
The second half of your book offers the reader
33 spells to use along with your teachings, what are
your beliefs on the idea of practitioners creating their
own spells/rituals or magical workings? Is it just as
effective to take a template and use it for your working
or is it better to start from “scratch”?
JO: For beginners, I emphasize
that they need to stick to the spells as written. Every
aspect of every spell is in there for a reason. What
I aimed for when writing it was for someone with no
background in magic to be able to pick it up, and after
reading the book and doing the simple exercises, to
be able to start casting effective spells that get results.
When that happens, it is a real turn-on; it makes magic
real and then folks can go on to other sources and learn
more if they are interested.
Spell-craft and spell-design are skills learned through
instruction, modeling and experience. Until one has
begun the process of learning these things in earnest,
I advise against altering or creating spells. I am sure
that The Wiccan/Pagan Times has reviewed and recommended
any number of good books that can help people along
that particular path.
Having said that, I feel compelled to make one last
comment on this - a plug for the book I guess. As I
mentioned before, to my delight I have had feedback
from regular practitioners of the ancient craft that
The Foundations of Magic has helped them clarify their
thinking and improve their practice. This is a bonus
I didn’t intend - it happened as if by magic.
TWPT:
Given the idea of instant gratification that permeates
our culture what are your thoughts on how much time
and effort someone will need to devote to the concepts
you teach in your book to be able to integrate them
into their own magical path and become effective with
them?
JO: In writing this book I made
a blatant attempt to appeal to those who desire quick,
if not instant, gratification. It was written for those
who don’t have a lot of time on their hands but who
want to start using effective, practical magic. I’m
not one who thinks a desire for instant gratification
is necessarily a bad thing. It’s only a bad thing if
you desire it in all aspects of your life. Some things
require slow, deliberate, and often difficult pursuit
before you become proficient. Take for example mastering
computer programming. If you just learn basic computer
competency and carefully follow the directions that
come with any good software program, you can install
and use the program and you can quickly begin accomplishing
all sorts of amazing things with it. This doesn’t make
you a computer programmer. The same is true with magic.
If you read and use The Foundations of Magic as it’s
designed to be used, you can quickly learn to do all
sorts of amazing things. That doesn ’t mean you have
a mastery of magic.
Most, but perhaps not all, of the major pursuits
in our life require lots of time, learning, experience,
success and failure and so on: our personal and spiritual
growth, our careers, our parenting - in general most
of the biggies. But that
doesn’t mean that in
all of these pursuits there aren’t lots of examples
of quick or instant gratification along the way. It
is often these feelings of gratification that keep us
going or determine the direction we take. The Foundations
of Magic approaches things from this perspective. But
even as it is geared to rapid results, it does require
the reader to follow the instructions - do the exercises,
practice & rehearse, and apply the lessons learned.
If this is done, I would estimate that in less than
a week any conscientious reader can be practicing the
magic of this book with results that will amaze them.
That’s not instant but it’s darn quick.
TWPT:
Tell me about the exercises you offer your reader
in this book? Will they work for anyone who follows
through with your teachings?
JO: Again, you have to learn
the material and correctly apply the instructions. Part
of learning the material is doing the exercises. As
with all book learning, there is both some reading and
some doing required. The exercises are the doing part.
Will the spells work for anyone who conscientiously
does the exercises and applies the knowledge? Yes.
TWPT:
Once a person has mastered your techniques and
devoted the appropriate levels of study and practice
to them what can someone reasonably expect in return
for all of these efforts in their lives?
JO: At a minimum, they can start
to use magic in their life to get things done - to accomplish
things that seemed otherwise too difficult or unattainable.
Just read through the titles of the 33 spells and it
becomes clear the scope of what I’m talking about.
Once someone gets it that this is real, it can help
to open up his or her perspective on life - on the possibilities,
the wonder, the paths not yet traveled. Each person
brings this teaching into their life in a different
way.
TWPT:
How would you say your ideas and methods presented
in Foundations of Magic stack up to the teachings and
beliefs about magic that are currently being taught
and written about around the world?
JO: I think this is a very good
question and I’m not sure that I’m all that well equipped
to answer it. Like all shy egotists, there is a level
at which I think the ideas are great, fresh, unique
- name a positive attribute. In my more dour states,
I see all of the things I left out and those things
seem to be larger than, and somehow more prominent than
what I included. During more balanced times I believe
it is an very good book that accomplishes the very thing
it set out to do; to provide folks with a ready way
to incorporate effective, practical magic into their
life.
Magic is a realm of vast expanses and varied landscape.
I have attempted to focus on one small parish in that
realm and to make it accessible to those who wish to
go there and learn. I am convinced I have succeeded,
but really, only my readers can determine that with
any certainty. I always appreciate their feedback. So
far it has been very encouraging.
TWPT:
Any final ideas, thoughts or comments that you
would like to share about the creation or use of your
book Foundations of Magic that you would like to share
with our readers?
JO: Years ago I took an undergraduate
thermodynamics class at Stanford University. Everyone
in the class had taken a lot of prerequisite physics
and math classes before so the subject of thermodynamics
was not new to anyone (it is relevant to all sorts of
physical processes). On the first day of the class,
the professor said this: “Forget everything you have
learned about thermodynamics - absolutely everything.
Forget it not because it is wrong, but forget it because
it will get in the way of you understanding my model
of thermodynamics. Mine is not better, but it is useful,
consistent and self-contained and it approaches things
differently. Once you have learned the material in this
class, you can go ahead and forget it too should you
choose; the important parts will stick and you’ll be
in good shape to go on and incorporate this material
with other perspectives and other models.” If I were
to ask anything of my readers who already know a great
deal about magic, it would be the same thing;
forget what you know just for now. You wont loose it
and understanding what I have to offer will come much
more smoothly.
TWPT:
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us here
at TWPT and letting our readers get to know just
a little about you and about your book Foundations of
Magic. I wish you nothing but good things with this
book and those books you still have within you that
just haven't been put down in a solid form yet.
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