weirdway

Here’s an example of what I was talking about before /u/mindseal. I was talking about how probability alteration magic spells that don't involve more work/involvement seemed problematic to me somehow. I think I’ve got an example to explain what I mean. Take the idea of scarcity v. abundance. Lots of new age spirituality people talk about the need to create an ‘abundance’ mindset to replace your ‘scarcity’ mindset to get more of what you and everyone else wants out of the world. To bring more abundance to yourself and to others. This is a form of increasing the likelihood of finding/getting wealth.

So let’s talk about how this might work. Maybe it’s about something mundane like building confidence in oneself, but let’s dismiss that option for now because it is unrelated. Why do we have a scarcity mentality? Easy. Because we believe that this is a world with scarce resources and scarce space. There is a limited amount and the resources can be drained. So, assuming we maintain belief in the world ("the world" being a more long-term generally stable environment), how could you make the world abundant? Again, easy. Eliminate scarce resources by manifesting magically that the natural world is effectively infinite and has infinite varieties of infinite resources (including things we conventionally think of as requiring human labor right now) just hanging out right on the surface of the planet. You can go and just pluck a laptop and a mexican food lunch up off a plant in the park. That’s a real world of abundance with no scarcity. One other alternative would be to imagine that the natural world has abundant raw materials but that work may still need to be done – but you could create material abundance for all if you magically manifest a world where there are machines that do all the work and produce infinite finished goods for all of us as much as we want.

There are also two other ways you might change the world to make it abundant just for yourself without making it abundant for others: you could magically manifest the world the same as it is, but where every person obsessively loves you and wants to serve you so that the labor is always done by others to serve you without any effort or conflict. The other way is to keep the world as it is and magically manifest yourself as that one lucky person who just ‘happens’ to almost always have really great things happen to them.

So, mostly I’m saying that probability magic isn’t just a snap your fingers and change your experience thing without addressing some deeper beliefs about how you are manifesting your experience, or living with cognitive dissonance.

Mostly probability magic about the world will create major conflicts with the way we ordinarily think of the world. Only the luck option seems small and relatively easy without reprogramming our whole idea of how the world works, and even that necessitates eliminating the ‘randomization’ aspect of luck which may have other deeper beliefs that structure it that would become de-structured and in need of examination. I guess what I’m saying is that a lot of this stuff has deeper implications than it appears on the surface and is magic that would likely take as much or probably more work than something like healing the body from disease.

What do you think?

Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-03 05:39:21 (dmh9n2g)