The Importance of Discipline in Magical Practice
At the same time breaking the rules can be a form of discipline. Just because you know the process to achieve a specific result doesn't mean you should always use that process. Sometimes you need to break the rules, try something different, come up with a new process to achieve the result. In other words, you need to experiment. Experimentation is its own form of discipline, calling on both the creativity of the magician and the ability to note both successes and failures and why the successes and failures occurred.
But experimentation alone is not the only reason to sometimes break the rules. A magician grows by challenging him/herself. This includes sometimes breaking the rules or values held by society, imposed on us by other people, or even the rules we give ourselves. And while I don't advocate going out and stealing or murdering someone (the consequences aren't worth it), I do advocate doing something different than what you would normally do, namely challenging yourself to grow by doing something that no one would expect of you. It could be as simple as doing an activity such as buying a lottery ticket, but it could also be exploring an alternate lifestyle. You don't necessarily even need to change your life drastically to do that, but learning about an alternate lifestyle will certainly open your eyes to how other people perceive the world. The discipline involved here is learning to be open-minded, learning to cross boundaries, to learn more about yourself and other people so that you can apply that knowledge to your magic practice.
Finally discipline is also the virtue of following through on keeping yourself disciplined. Sometimes you won't control yourself as well as you could, but then your task is to learn from the situation and make sure it doesn't happen again. By learning from our mistakes, we surely learn as well how to improve our discipline, improve the control we have over ourselves, and the importance of accepting responsibility for the actions that generates the consequences we deal with. In the end, the one of the goals of a magician should be to discipline him/herself, to learn to know when and where to respect the rules and mores of others and also when to cross those boundaries to help him/herself grow. We need to learn to be in control of our actions and be willing to accept responsibility for those
Latest Articles