“The experience of a magical result will reveal something very odd about the nature of reality. This will have a transformative effect—your previous view of reality, and so yourself, must necessarily change as a result of that experience. It follows then that the more you do magick, the more you will encounter revelation, and the more you will be transformed. It must be stressed that intellectual comprehension, or explanation, reveals or changes nothing. If you want to know the truth, you must experience it. Magick is one way of experiencing truth.”
— Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners, 2008, p. 18

“Magic is a set of techniques and approaches which can be used to extend the limits of Achievable Reality. Our sense of Achievable Reality is the limitations which we believe bind us into a narrow range of actions and successes—what we believe to be possible for us at any one time. In this context, the purpose of magic is to simultaneously explore those boundaries and attempt to push them back—to widen the ‘sphere’ of possible action.”
— Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos, 1995, p. 33

“Initiation means a beginning, and in the occult it is the occasion when one becomes aware that the world is more than just the material stuff within it. The stuff is merely the façade that lies over a churning sea of psychic energy, power whose currents and tides do more to determine how the material stuff will be arranged in the future than the stuff that is out there right now. Reality is the objective residue of a subjective process. The residue—the material world—has a certain inertia, to be sure; it won’t just go away. But it does dissipate, decay, get eaten up and covered over, and it is only created anew when some mind of some sort—animal, vegetable or mineral—puts effort into that creation. And so does subjectivity make the world. Magick is the art of managing that subjective process, of exploiting the flow of psychic energy to manufacture a reality that is consistent with our wills. A magician’s first initiation occurs in the moment that he or she realizes that this manipulation of psychic energy as a thing in itself is possible.”
— Stephen Mace, Shaping Formless Fire, 2011, p. 49

“Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic.”
— C. G. Jung, A Collection of Remembrances, pp. 51-70

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