So I’ve been catching up or reading the Completed Works and I’m on Baneful magic and EA talks about something called an “operation of manifestation” (page 325 of Tome) and he states that such an operations a person who is focusing intently on a particular outcome will proceed to do a ritual every day, morning and evening for a given amount of time until the situation begins to correspond with the desired outcome.
My question is that, at what point does an operation of manifestation(OOM) begin to tread within the realm of the law of reverse effect. I don’t want to say that such an OOM is an act of desperation, but rather an act of a dedicated person who strongly desires to see a certain outcome and has the ability to change it. Can it ever be ‘too much’ effort put into an OOM and what makes this any different from the acts of a desperate person?
I’d have to go back and look at BM to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. If you mean the act of intently thinking about the outcome becomes a type of ritual in itself then yes it does. I’ve had results manifest while planning out a ritual before. I never physically lit a candle, opened a sigil or anything. I poured it all into my notebook revising it over in over with the same outcome in mind. I didn’t lust for results because in my mind it was merely a matter of getting it outlined so the results could come. IMO it’s a lot like Law of Attraction, affirmative thoughts bring the desired outcome.
If your talking about literally doing a ritual daily that is not uncommon either. Again not lusting for results is the key. Thinking of it as just another step in the ritual process of getting the results instead of thinking of it as repeating the ritual. Putting in the work to get a manifestation is exactly that…work. Putting in the work is solidifying your intention, if your willing to do that for an extended period it shows how important it is to you.
Reversed effort is more about doubt in my experience. If you make a spell to get the girl next door say a honey jar for example, and before you’ve given it time to really start working you decide to throw in some candle magick for some extra oomph. The fact that you thought the original spell wasn’t enough made it a self fulfilling prophecy before you struck a match. I used to be terrible for this when I first began practicing trying to make my spells work better before giving hem time to work period.
when i perform ritual, much of the focus is actually exorcism of the desire itself. i can’t help it if i want something a great deal before i ritualise for it, just as i am not likely to ritualise for things in which i’m really not that interested.
however, going into a ritual with a strong desire is fine so long as:
- the desire gives impetus to, and fuels the ritual itself
- desire, used as emotional fuel, continually pushes the ritual higher
- at the peak, the desire is transmuted (not abandoned!)
- once transmuted, it is beyond human grasp/understanding
at this point, a sleepy boredom usually settles and i’m too damned tired to give a shit about the ritual or the desire. that’s when the fuel runs out and i feel the need to crash out for the night. this is also when the desire is “exorcised” through transmutation. if we look at the tarot, think of the human desire as the 9 of a suit. it’s almost manifested, but it’s imperfect. it’s the “wish” card of the suit, as the saying goes. through ritual, we elevate the 9 back to the ace through decreasing degrees of imperfection.
by externalising what we perceive internally (that is, conscious desire), we can objectify it and examine it. moving backwards through the tarot suit, we unconsciously separate ourselves from each aspect/layer/element of the desire until we reach the 2. this card is the “choice/change” card of a suit and in its simplest terms can be regarded as “to be, or not to be”. that is, duality, opposites etc. mind you, anything below the 2 (that is, 3-10 cards) is capable of being conscious of itself. it’s a long story for another day, but trust me on this. if you really want to know, ask me and i’ll post later but it will be long and boring.
so the ace and 2 are not capable of identifying the self (or themselves). push the desire beyond even the need to be, or to not to be, and you have not only the unmanifested, but the unrealised power of the ace. in other words, an idea which exists before it’s even thought up (and thus tainted by the human psyche). in essence, you’re not trying to expend your desire so that you no longer want whatever it is. that’s like reaching orgasm once and thinking you’ll never want sex again.
rather, think of ritual as a means of uncreating whatever it is you want from the inside out. the only card i haven’t discussed is the 10. this is the card of material manifestation and is where the desire ultimately manifests - otherwise known as malkuth or the tenth sephiroth. linking the ace with the 10 makes things happen, but it’s the 2-8 that gets in the way. start at 9 and work backwards (which, in ritual, actually happens as a series of psychological changes often sped up or helped along with daemonic assistance).
another way to think about it is, if you attain omnipotence in ritual and you become godlike for a few moments, what good are petty human desires to you anymore? once you rise above the need or want of things, the desire becomes transmuted because it is no longer trapped within a given context. need money for rent? there’s your context. why do gods need to rent in the first place? there’s the transmutation. that brings us back to the 2. to have money for rent, or not have money for rent. when “it doesn’t matter” sets in, you know you’ve reached the ace, but you need to be honest with yourself. if there’s a “but” in there, you should probably start over. the irony is, once it manifests, the petty human outside of ritual says “wow, cool! i have money for fucking rent!” and then you go and spend it on beer or something.
anyway, back to the point. performing ritual over several days or on several occasions will either reinforce the idea that you’ll never get what you want because you suck at magic, or convince you that your desire is so strong that you actually need to perform several rituals to move from the 9 to the ace. if it works for you, then whatever. you know how it goes. oh, and the idea of not thinking about the desire afterwards only applies if you haven’t transmuted properly. if you have, then the desire you’re thinking about isn’t the same “desire” you transmuted into a higher plane of being. in essence, you could obsess over it as much as you wanted, but you would only not receive what you were obsessing about, and not what the god in the ritual projected and transmuted into the cosmos. they may seem identical from the outside, but that’s only because our minds and language are incapable of expressing such complex notions. i obsess like hell after a ritual, but it’s like obsessing over a picture of a tasty, tasty donut, but receiving an entirely different donut which just happens to bear a striking resemblance to what you ritualised for. they may look the same from the outside, but you can’t eat the picture, yeah?
sorry for the long post. i’m so goddamned tired…
-james.
T-James, I do like the way you presented the idea with the tarot. I’ve never heard it put such a way but it actually kinda made sense once i read the entire post. I think the hardest part for me is excorsizing the desire from myself once I have done the ritual. I keep going back to it, think when it will manifest to its completed form, etc…yet that of course goes along the lines of the ‘law of reverse effect’ which kinda screws with my mind.
It seems like your suggesting the the ritual itself should not only encompass the goal but also the removal for the desire as well to the point where you no long care or have concern of the outcome. Thats something the my ego is gonna have to work on.
actually it’s fine to obsess over it, so long as what you’re obsessing about isn’t actually what you want:)
you know what you want, so you ritualise for it. thus, use the ritual to transmute your desire into something greater. you need to have obtained omnipotence for this as only the godself will be able to comprehend the transmutation and perceive the desire in the form in which it will exist when it is released to the universe. then, after the ritual, the human who’s left obsessing over the desire has no way of comprehending the new state of affairs recently perceived by the godself. thus, you either end up obsessing over something entirely different (even though you think it’s the same thing), or you realise that it’s been transmuted and the ritual itself served as an exorcism of the desire.
i only stumbled on this when i tried (like many others) to perform a ritual, push lots of energy into sympathetic magic, then make an impossible attempt at forgetting about it entirely and just waiting for stuff to arrive. my first question was, how do i know when i’ve pushed enough energy? so i just kept pushing, one day, for about four hours, until i fell asleep LOL.
after that, whenever i thought about the ritual or the desire, i actually re-lived the fatigue and frustration i felt during the ritual, and thus never really gave it much attention. after a while, i realised that it wasn’t the exhaustion that was the key to success, but the result of all that effort. i mean, if you push something far enough, and hard enough, eventually it starts to go places, and that was what i was noticing. soon enough i realised it was really much easier to figure out which direction i wanted to push so that i didn’t waste my time (and energy) going around in circles.
in short, i evoked, i raised energy, i used visualisation, i used sigils, recited litany, wrote out a couple of pages of free-flowing creative text etc, until i reached the ace. i would do many of these things in the same ritual (i.e, creating and charging a sigil which i would empower and burn after having evoked a daemon etc). each of these things represented one or more steps back from the 9 to the ace. they needn’t be linear, but they all need to be covered at some point. by the end of it, at very least, you’re just too tired to give a shit anymore. not exhausted like i used to get (as ritual of this sort only takes me about 90 mins these days) but enough to not be able to think up any other good ideas. that kind of mental-blank state where your brain just gives up and goes home. that’s when you know you’re past the 2 and into the ace, because at that point, if somebody offered you what you desired right there and then, you’d really only be able to answer with “meh”.
i guess it’s kind of like over-thinking something or starting a new hobby and researching it to death, until it’s actually not interesting anymore because you already know everything about it. that’s the purpose of ritual, kinda.
ergh, i’m rambling again.
-james.
James, I see what your getting at about invoking omnipotence and pushing the desire until its transmuted or exorcised. The best way I can describe my method was to build up the emotion of what I wanted until I literally felt myself buzzing with energy and desire. I would push that as hard as I could until I didn’t have that feeling anymore, it got to the point if I couldn’t build up that feeling I would stop the ritual and attempt it later because I noticed results came so much easier when I was able to do this. The trick for me now is to be able to do it on demand.
yep, that’s what i’m talking about. i just spent enough time analysing it that i can now relate it analogously to the tarot model:)
that “point” you’re talking about is the point of transmutation into the ace. if you pay real close attention right before this happens, you may notice a distinct ambivalence before complete release. the ambivalence being “to be” or “not to be”. that’s the 2 of the tarot. the ace comes when you release the feeling and it’s all replaced with “meh”.
good to see my theory corroborated independently:)
kind regards, james.