— Bob-a-job-alog-a-roonie

In my Wellington days, I was young and screwed up via Aspergers, but I was young and adventurous also. Drunk, daring. I was staying in a backpackers, broke, working as a dishwasher. I applied to a TV game show – no idea how that was done pre-internet – and was successful. It was called “Face The Music”or something like that.

I drank a bottle of vodka on the train there (maybe just half, but it was all relative to my tolerance at the time), then some wine in the Green Room, and proceeded to be completely hopeless as it revolved around Top 40 music I had never heard of. Out of pure frustration I pushed the buzzer without knowing the answer, just to participate once, and went “yeah, nah”. That might of been the first utterance of that, I’m suddenly thinking.

Anyway, a bit of a disaster, entertained the hostel folks, and that was that.

Except!

An ex who I had unsuccessfully failed to locate for many years, happened to watch that episode, having never watched that show before. She had my parents details, and made contact. We met up. Nothing eventuated but I am still amazed at how she chose to watch that show when I was on it.

Not to forget the woman I met who I used to purposefully watch deliver mail in a bikini top (when I was a teen) every morning, and someone who lived in a house I knew so well I could describe every room perfectly. Both got creeped out…

Back in the day, in NZ, I had a special friend, a young German woman who shared my love of rock’n’roll, Herman Hesse and getting stoned. We spent a lot of days together, always a mix of fun and philosophy and I was in love to some degree.

However, by night she was mostly with her boyfriend, a Satanist drummer in a very popular band. The few times he and I crossed paths there was this eerie white cloak / black cloak stand-off (we weren’t wearing cloaks, but he did often perform nude).

Fast forward quite a few months, she was in Sydney and I was passing through, hitchhiking 1000 kilometres to a wedding. The receptionist at her backpacker hostel said she was working at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, and didn’t know when she would be back.

I wandered around downtown Sydney, meditating with intent, guide her to me. And then we bumped into each other. I made it happen.

I know magic works.

It is hard (yep, even for me) to calculate the odds of bumping into someone you know, given that through backpacking I got to know a whole heap of people, and they are prone to wander, and I am out and about a lot, and lots of them are Aussies, and that’s where I am now… But it feels higher than chance, the bumping-intos.

Once, wandering through Melbourne I took a path I had never taken before, bumped into an old friend, and we dated for a year because of that.

I know magic works.

After pondering on this my entire adult life, and having my own minor successes, I am starting to get a feel for what can and cannot be done. With magic**.

Here are the parameters that I have currently decided upon:

1. It affects the choices of living things, quite possibly just beings and perhaps only human beings
2. Those choices are not conscious, or are close to being not conscious
3. The target is a singular living thing, or many living things in a singular place
4. The effect is cumulative – it grows with time, meaning short-term magic is much less effective
5. Magic is weak, so weak it is hard to detect and even harder to prove

A bit more detail:

1. I have never attempted magic on anything other than humans. Whether it works on animals or not is like asking a Christian if animals go to heaven. As a pagan I figure it would certainly work on animals, and maybe plants, but as their capacity to make choices is more limited, the magic is harder to achieve. You can’t win lotto with magic, because you can’t influence a machine.

2. You can’t influence a judge and jury. They are putting a lot of focused, conscious effort into the choices they are making. You can influence purely subconscious choices, like what they dream about and who they love. It also works on matters that although seemingly consciously decided, it doesn’t matter much which way you do decide. For example, what you wear that day, where you park, or basically anything where you can say “I just felt like it”. For me the boundary comes from Star Wars – “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for”. Important to the heroes, but the guards don’t especially care.

3. Magic needs a focus. Try and target too many people at once, and the already weak force weakens accordingly. That’s not to say you can’t work concurrent spells, but each must be specific. I know that many people in a local space can be influenced. And I’m am quite sure you can affect many people in a single remote place as well – but you would need to know that place quite well, or at least have been there.

4. The more effort you put in, the better the results. A spell worked daily or constantly (as in an obsession) will have a snowball effect. A spell you spend two minutes on is bound to fail.

5. Magic is weak. Gravity is the weakest of the Newtonian forces, yet it still has powerful results. Magic is like blowing on a house of cards, where if you are close enough it will cause great change. If you are too far away, nothing will happen at all.

Magic is real. It is limited in many ways, but if you have imagination its uses are limitless.

** I am only discussing worked magic here. There are other magics that happen beyond the manipulations of people. Think karma, love at first sight, people with second sight, the universe aligning and so on. These other magics can be affected, amplified or negated by worked magic. But mostly they just do their own thing.