Reconciling LOA, Magick and Anxiety

Hi All,

Still working through Modern Magick. I skipped ahead a bit and I am having trouble accepting what Donald Michael Kraig is saying about belief and doubt within Magick where he frames it that our day to day thoughts are powerful. This contrasts other teachings I’ve been going by for years which say that your subconscious programming and unresolved trauma/shadow are what gets in the way of manifestations rather than what we are thinking consciously.

I found the latter more comforting especially since I have a lot of free floating anxiety, which I have worked/continue to work on, but I also really respect Kraig.

How do you reconcile this?

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Maybe he’s saying that thoughts arise from those half-unexamined beliefs and programs?

So, kind of same thing, except he’s looking at the effects because those are easiest to perceive?

Also, a repeated thought, no matter how superficial, will eventually get embedded pretty deeply.

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Hmm. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I guess really this is more so a question of how to either forget or replace negative thought patterns with positive ones – because if the negative ones are already so ingrained that they override any magick then, are all efforts futile and how can that be changed?

(I found the times my patterns did change were experiences which totally went against my beliefs but they’re so uncommon and if they cannot be caused with magick then is it just a total waiting game?)

it just seems reductive for authors to say just to forget about something or to have a positive mindset. Sorry if I’m talking in circles it’s fairly late here.

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The author of Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz, wrote a book about exactly this issue: how to prove to oneself that bad events are not the only possibility, in order to shift the subconscious’ kind of needle on the “what’s normal” gauge.

I highly recommend the book but the tl;dr is that you invest some time in imagining different kinds of experiences, with as much focus and emotion as possible. Treat it as a proper project and not just daydreaming.

Like if every time I met a cat as a child, it scratched me, and I know I’m now so weird around cats that they act that way regardless, I would imagine going to a friend’s house or somewhere safe and seeing a cat which is friendly, and I imagine feeling it curled on my lap and so on, to prove to my mind (which he contends, and I agree, can be programmed by created images as well as actual experiences) that cats are cool… you get the picture I’m sure.

He’s kind of saying, if reality has not so far delivered you the programming you want, you must intentionally create your own, then your subconscious, which he defines, correctly I think, as a servo-mechanism and NOT a dark force trying to sabotage you, will believe that’s what normal is, and act in all ways to establish it.

Because the servo-mech is programmed to think all cats are dangerous right now, it delivers that, and once its programming has been changed it will deliver different things. Psycho-Cybernetics is the foundational work from which the whole, rather overdone and played-out, self-help industry originated by the way.

His original concepts are simple and logical, and each successive generation of authors put their own spin on top, maybe from what worked for them but probably also just to market themselves as unique, until the original messaging got lost.

If you check the book out, get the old version with the red & white cover, not the newer one which is some kind of commentary and according to Amazon reviews, not as substantial. It’s an easy book to read.

I did a post about it a while ago here: Getting your subconscious on your side

Yes, kind of useless without a “how.” :+1:

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Thank you @Lady_Eva, you’re a wealth of knowledge!

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