Leveraging Belief

In some ways, our reality is composed of what we belief is possible and impossible. It’s common practice in many shamanic traditions to have a great explosive display at some point in a healing procedure. Some shamans would, for example, hold a feather in their cheek. When they’d accomplished what they needed to working with a patient, they would spit out the feather along with a spray of blood - as if the feather was the wounding intrusion in the patient’s body that had now been extracted. Rather than being simple trickery, this was part of the healing process. It signalled to the patient’s subconscious that something significant had happened. The depths of the patient’s mind had been signalled that it could let go the pattern of sickness and shift toward health and wholeness.  In other words, they were given inspiration to believe in a change. Without this extra bit of pageantry, the healing wouldn’t work nearly as well. 

Modern science has given us many examples of the power of belief in the form of studies on the placebo and nocebo effect. In one example of placebo, a set of hotel workers were told that the activity they were doing should lead to weight loss. Another group who were doing the same work were not given this information. The group who’d been given reason to believe their work should lead to weight loss did lose weight - without making any other adjustments to their diet or lifestyle. It would seem that belief reached down into the countless processes of metabolism and fat storage and tweaked them. Studies like this point to the possibility that believing something will happen leads to it happening.

Alchemy leverages this power of belief. The ground level principle here is that what’s true and real in one’s inner world becomes true in the outer world. Alchemy provides ways through which a practitioner can help make this so. This involves a feedback mechanism of sorts.

In Daoist magic for example, a practitioner supports her intention by placing it in a matrix with attention, sensation and imagination. The word sensation includes everything that happens in the kinaesthetic or proprioceptive sense, including the subtle feelings of energy flow. When there is a shift in the body - a sense of vibration, a release of tension - it provides feedback to the mind that something is happening. Change is afoot. What was true yesterday might not be true tomorrow. Kinaesthetic sensation also provides one way of feeling that some part of reality is actively involved in support of intention. An intention involving love might be supported through the sensed feeling of the heart being open. Love then is not a hypothetical possibility in the future; its sensed and felt now. An intention involving prosperity might be supported by a feeling of richness and inner bounty. Rather than positioning oneself from a sense of lack and asking the world to fill it, one fills oneself as if to say to the world “like this”.

The word “Attention” in Daoist Magic refers to persistence - holding attention on a given idea over time. Through this persistence, much of what might complicate or obstruct the intention comes bubbling up from the unconscious to be noticed. So it becomes clear that at first, a given intention is often complicated by conflicting intentions. The hope to enter a new relationship might be countered within by an even stronger impulse to avoid the emotional risks involved in connecting with someone new. An intention toward wealth might be undermined by a powerful belief that one isn’t worthy of prosperity. The more these complicating factors rise into awareness, the more an intention can be unified into something with a singular message - rather than a quarrel of different messages.

Imagination involves the inner visual sense: seeing something happen in the mind’s eye. This aspect of magic is now used in competitive sports. Many successful athletes spend time envisioning themselves running faster, jumping higher, dominating the competition. In a more traditional approach, the practitioner holds a visual sense of what she’d like to see happen. But there isn’t a gap of time involved - the thing imagined is not envisioned as happening some time in the future. Once something is imagined, it is. It is present - in consciousness, and therefore in reality. Instantly or over years, that which is present in imagination becomes present in form as well. For example, a healer might imagine divine light entering a patient to clear out stagnant energy. This begins as a visual idea, but can immediately have an effect in the patient’s energy body. In qi gong therapy, envisioning the wholeness of a cancer patient’s body  (shifting attention away from tumours and their sense of sickness to hold a vision of underlying health) can effectively treat cancer. While such treatments may be on the far outskirts of medicine in the west, they are routinely used in some Chinese hospitals, supported by a wealth of scientific evidence for their efficacy.

The area of sensation also invites us to realize a sense of body-ness that goes beyond the limits of our skin. If we hold a stone in our hand, the solidness of it can link us to the quality of mountain solidness. That solid sensation can reflect in the human physical body as a sense of feeling grounded and solid. And that mountain solidity might reflect in mind as a quality of immovableness: even if thoughts are flying all directions, some part of mind can stay mountain-still. The boundary between you the world around you is broken; or you realize it never existed in the first place. Now intention doesn’t rest in the centre of an empty vacuum dependent on the energy of personal will for something to happen. The mountain-quality of the world is present now: as support. This support lends itself to what the Daoists call *Ling Shen* or magical soul: the quality of consciousness that takes part in the creative activity of the world. When mountain stability is activated, it supports calmness and precision of perception and thought. The world in all its stability is present as a place on which the seed of a given intention can be supported unrelentingly, like a mountain goat who never has to worry that the range in which he lives will blow away in the wind.