Last night, I had one of those random thoughts spring into my drowsy mind. I suddenly started wondering why Stoics aren’t the most unlucky people to ever exist.
Stoicism is making a comeback, and one of the exercises this philosophy has always promoted, going way back to the ancient Greeks, is to visualize negative things in as much detail as possible in order to mentally and emotionally prepare yourself (as well as to let go) of all the bad things that could possibly happen.
So, Stoics were and are the type of people to do things like visualize their children dying, the funeral, and all of the things that come from their death. They visualize their cars being totaled, losing their jobs, their parents dying, their best friends being maimed, their girlfriends/boyfriends breaking up with them, them getting cancer, getting AIDS, etc.
Given the heavy emphasis on visualization in all forms of magic and the Law of Attraction, why aren’t these people the most unlucky people on the planet? Why aren’t their kids dropping dead, their jobs disappearing, and their health failing? They put a lot of time into thinking negatively, so why aren’t they attracting all kinds of negative garbage into their lives?
For the same reason that magick doesn’t work for everyone and not everyone is a professional weightlifter: if you don’t have the abilities yourself, nothing will happen, whether you think possitive or negative you won’t move shit.
It takes a lot more than the visualization of an untrained mind to manifest things into reality. Many beginners give up on magic because thats all they see it as ‘imagination’. Magic takes effort, energy, will, focus! The LoA is not so easily activated as it has been hyped up to be.
It’s because the visualisation isn’t backed with intention,
There is a huge difference between visualising something you want to happen, which carries emotional power, and visualising possible scenarios to prepare for them.
Remember, in magick, and the Law of Attraction, it is emotion that powers everything, so no emotion, no energy for manifestation.
An idea of mine (but not only) was, and somewhat still is, that one may think about bad scenarios but afterwards the events will be better than imagined. Indeed, also the “being prepared” part. Btw yes, some things seem tricky to put into motion and I’m thinking once again about taking a break from causing changes, in order to focus on study and training.
Just out of curiosity, are you of the camp that believes in inborn abilities, kind of like, “Some got it, some don’t?” I don’t mean that you believe people can perform magic right out of the box with no study or practice, but that some people simply can’t and won’t be able to.
I wouldn’t say that Stoics don’t put emotion into their visualizing, but you’re definitely right that they don’t intend for the things they visualize to happen.
All the psychic stuff that we call “magic” is just another thing that humans can do, and like with anything that humans can do, some people come with a better configuration for doing it and others don’t, that’s why I mentioned people who practice sports professionally. Not everyone will be an olympic athlete, and not everyone wants to be an olympic athlete.
I consider myself a stoic and not only have I never done this, I’m not aware that it’s a thing for stoics at all. I agree it would be a silly thing to do.
What a stoic does, is
a) Prepare for the worst and hope for the best, and
b) take events philosophically as they happen. As in, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset”… “keep calm and carry on”.
c) Know that “nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so”
But there’s a huge difference between planning for the worst case and fearing it. By prepping for a negative outcome you are already set to turn it around if it arises, and I feel that is positive not negative.
You also don’t go around trying to find negative things to worry about in isolation and without also planning for the positive possibilities in even more detail. And there’s usually more of them.