I now know that it takes belief for magick to work. That is why it is now starting to work for me in small ways; I was successful in temporarily suspending disbelief. I HATE this fact because it seems too much like me helping myself. But whatever. It works. The question I have is this: for someone to do, say, a health spell on someone to cure them from cancer, the recipient has to have some amount of faith for it to actually work. However, if a curse were laid upon someone to destroy their life, it would work regardless of whether the person were an atheist. How can this be?
I dont think the reciepient would have to believe anything to be healed.
Beleif is only required on part of the "sender’, the exception being if the reciever ‘knows’ that they are being worked on than they may be able to resist or enhance the effects through desire or doubt.
A magician can heal or even kill someone with out them ever knowing it. The belief of the target is Irrelevant. As long as the will of the magician is stronger than the target is all that matters. A atheist disbelief works against them must of the time…as they never see it coming=)
It’s not belief, it’s focused attention. The act of disbelieving just eats up a lot of attention.
Effectiveness depends on how much focus you can bring to bear, and reliability of outcome depends on what you focus on.
[quote=“The Cusp, post:4, topic:7287”]It’s not belief, it’s focused attention. The act of disbelieving just eats up a lot of attention.
Effectiveness depends on how much focus you can bring to bear, and reliability of outcome depends on what you focus on.[/quote]
One could go into the theory if how things work for some time, regardless I think the general consensus is that the targets belief is largely irrelevant as to the efficacy of the work, unless they also utilize objective spiritual resistance to the work good or bad.
I can vouch for this one too!
That’s the beauty of those hardcore atheist bastards, they never see it coming. Although, it’s near impossible to convince afterward that the bad thing happened to them because you cast a spell against them but, if you keep doing it they will eventually catch on. I’ve had to fend off some pretty heavy atheists and eventually the only way to convince them I was the reason for their sudden shortcomings was to yes, spill the beans and say hey it was me and I’ll do it again on Saturday at 1:00 a.m.
I know they say you should never prepare someone for what’s to come because it gives them a chance to rebuttal you but in these cases the recipients still didn’t believe me so I warned them, they shunned it off like bad acting skills on my part and were more than shocked when the thing actually happened. But of course, doing it once wasn’t enough to prove my point (it was just coincidence you dumb bitch…) so I had to mess with them several times and make them aware of it every single time.
I only go messing with atheists when I have a really good reason for doing so, otherwise you’ll literally just exhaust yourself wasting precious time trying to prove a point to someone who is massively stubborn when the end result may not even be worth the time. Sure you can just kill them but they are dead so they won’t be alive to see the damage that was done, unless of course you go haunt them on the astral plane in death.
I’ve done remote healing on animals, children, and friends of friends who didn’t even know I was doing it, and they all had an effect, although cancer is often considered a tough one to crack.
But no, in general the recipient of healing doesn’t need to know or believe, because you (or the spirits you deploy) are making changes at the deeper causal levels.
Do you believe in murderers? Plenty of people are murdered daily on a global scale.
“It’ll never happen to me”, they say.
I like the idea of magick not requiring any faith for it to work. I much prefer that concept because it makes me believe that these entities are “real” and not just an extension of myself. But most people on here have told me that belief is necessary for magical to work. That caused confusion regarding how curses could work on non believers.
It’s necessary in the magician, absolutely. If I didn’t think I could do those things, they wouldn’t have worked.
You need to believe that what you’re doing isn’t deluding yourself, and that everything you’re doing is real, yes.
I was referring to the victim.
The Santeria witch that I have referred to on several occasions said that my lack of faith was the reason that her spell to get a girl back did not work even though she was the one doing the work. Assuming for the sake of discussion that she was not a fraud (which I think that she was), my lack of faith kept her magick from being able to work.
Someone above posted about “healing denial” I believe- where a patient learns they’re being “healed” but doesn’t believe it so their subconscious fights back and may actually counter the magic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if an emotional variant of that was the cause of the spell’s failure.
Going with the theory she’s not a fraud, she’s operating on this girl with her belief, you’re operating on this girl with your disbelief - they cancelled each other out.
This is why performing an evocation in front of a room of non-believers is going to be, at the least, very hard work - it’s not a passive LACK of belief, an absence, it’s that on some level you (or any disbeliever) needs to see what they think is real, so theyr’re actually ACTIVELY exerting magickal force to prevent it.
This is how psychic battles occur, and how one defends from a curse - one person wills one outcome, you will a different thing back at them.
So if you have a magician and someone who doesn’t believe, both want to see their reality come true, but probablistic forces (my definiton here) favour reality going along the way it would have without the magician - hence, I believe, the emphasis on secrecy in almost every magickal tradition.
I only log workings on here once they’ve “bedded in” thoroughly and entered probablistic flow, and I noticed E.A. usually lets some time pass before he posts his live rituals, so although I can’t be sure it’s for the same reasons that delay does, IMO, serve the same effect.