Deciding whether a practice works

Two pages either side of this one already do its neighbouring work. Magical workings teaches the discipline and states the refusal. Hermetic ceremonial magic describes the Western lineage and what it was made of. What is left for this essay is the question a person actually arrives with, which is not what the practice is but whether it works. It has three parts, and the popular answer collapses two of them. Everything after depends on holding them apart.

Did anything change in me? Did the change arrive by the route the practice says? Do I have any way of telling the difference?

The material already has a method here

Asked which system a student should use, the material names three, calls all three a construction of the archetypal mind, and in the same sentence tells the student to take one of them in depth.

It is appropriate to study one form of constructed and organized distortion of the archetypical mind in depth in order to arrive at the position of being able to become and to experience archetypes at will.

The naming and the instruction arrive together, and that is the method. It comes from the corpus rather than from us. A tool can be a construction and still be worth holding; naming it buys you not permission and not protection, but the ability to hold two things at once, which is the whole content of this essay.

On this account, an effect cannot grade the instrument

Here is the finding that makes the question answerable.

In this process you may see the transdimensional aspect of what you call will, for it is the will, the seeking, the desire of the entity which causes the indigo body to use the novel configuration and to reform the body which exists in space/time.

The operative variable is named as the will, the seeking, the desire of the entity. Not the implement, not the words, not the sequence. If that is the account, the change in you was produced by your wanting, and the observation that you changed is not thereby an observation about the tool.

That cuts both ways. It removes the inference from effect to mechanism, the inference the whole genre runs on, and it puts the weight back on the reader, who is the least reliable instrument in the room.

The one place the material tells a practitioner to test anything, what it tests is the person.

The practice of magical workings demands the most rigorous honesty.

Not the practice’s efficacy. The practitioner’s own estimate, and the requirement is that it be honest. The corpus contains a gate, and it is not a gate on outcomes.

What the research adds, and it is not that nothing happened

Figure 01

A practice, in three layers

The empirical literature is unambiguous on the one point the genre finds inconvenient, which is that a practice can do real work in a person while no causal claim it makes is true.

Kaptchuk and colleagues interviewed people inside the placebo arms of a randomised trial. Those people knew they had received an inert treatment. They improved, substantially, and the conclusion was that the immersion was a mingling of enactment, embodiment and interpretation, involving ritual performance and evocative symbols, with shifts in bodily sensation, mood, daily behaviour and social relations, all accompanied by self-scrutiny and re-appraisal. No single account of it suffices, whether expectancy, hope, conditioning, anxiety reduction, report bias, symbolic work, narrative or embodiment. Full citations and the study’s own terms are on the magical workings page; this essay does not restate them.

So it is not nothing. It is also not what the practice says, and the second not following from the first is not scepticism. A practice was built to produce a state in a person, the state is real, and the route is usually somebody else’s.

One detail is worth more than the rest, and the researchers reported it without seeing what it was worth. Asked what had happened to them, the participants almost never claimed to have expected improvement, speaking instead of hope and often of despair. And they worried, repeatedly, about whether what they had felt was a real change or an ordinary fluctuation of the illness. They were running this essay’s method on themselves, inside a trial, without being asked to.

Your own instrument is compromised, and in a known direction

The second half does not come from a critic of ritual. It comes from three findings.

The first is about what a ritual does to the person performing it. Working from a model of executive resources, Schjoedt and colleagues identify three features of religious interaction: a demand for expressive suppression of emotion, exposure to causally opaque action, and the presence of a charismatic authority. They argue that these limit the capacity for individual processing of the event, specifically by preventing participants from constructing their own accounts of it.

Causal opacity is load-bearing rather than incidental. A rite whose steps do not visibly produce the result is a rite whose meaning has to be supplied, and the supplier is whoever is standing in front of you.

The second is about which way the travel in belief runs. Van Leeuwen and van Elk distinguish a general belief, that something exists, from a personal belief, that it happened to me, then invert the usual account of how the second arises. Belief is usually not adopted and afterwards confirmed; it is arrived at. A general belief leads people to seek out the situations that generate the low-level intimations of presence and agency, and those intimations, read in the light of what is already believed, harden into personal belief. The authors are explicit that such practices may have developed over time in order to generate exactly those experiences, and that few practitioners would describe their own practice in those terms.

The third completes it. Hong, Slingerland and Henrich ask why demonstrably ineffective rainmaking protocols survived for millennia in a population with writing and recordkeeping. Their answer is not that the practitioners were credulous. It is nearly the opposite: they were consistently empiricist, they tracked outcomes, they emphasised results, and their adaptive learning still failed to remove the practice. A commitment to a supernatural worldview supplies theoretical support for an otherwise implausible mechanism; success by chance looks like success when several methods run at once; and failures are systematically under-reported and not transmitted.

So the error is not a stupid one but a systematic one, and it runs the same way every time. Which gives you a test that runs against you, and it is the only genuinely useful thing here:

The strength of your own conviction is evidence against your having reasoned independently.

The method, and what it cannot do

Four moves, then. Separate the two claims before you begin; do not let a yes on the first become a yes on the second. Write down in advance what would count as this not having worked, because your error has a known direction and the disconfirming case is the one that will go missing. Notice what the practice is arranged to produce, and ask honestly whether you were its author. And treat the strength of your feeling as a datum about the situation rather than about the truth.

And then the part that makes it a method rather than a technique: you may not delegate it.

It is important to allow each seeker to enlighten itself rather than for any messenger to attempt in language to teach/learn for the entity, thus being teach/learner and learn/teacher.

You must realize that we offered these concepts to you so that you might grow in your own knowledge of the self through the consideration of them. We would prefer, especially for this latter query, to listen to the observations upon this subject which the student of these exercises may make and then suggest further avenues of the refinement of these inquiries. We feel we might be of more aid in this way.

It is necessary that each being use free and complete discernment from within the all-self which is at the heart of the mind/body/spirit complex.

Read the reasons precisely, because the temptation here is to overread them. The reason at 15.13 is structural. A messenger who teaches in language becomes teacher and taught at once, and the material calls that an imbalance running toward the distortion of free will. The reason at 66.21 is developmental. The concepts were given so a seeker might grow in their own knowledge of the self by considering them, and a messenger who refines the inquiry has removed the thing the inquiry was for. Neither is an epistemic claim. Neither says that messengers are unreliable, or that teachers are usually wrong.

That is worth sitting with. The corpus forbids delegation and gives you no reason to distrust anybody. It supplies a prohibition and no warrant, which means the half of the problem it leaves open is precisely the half the research fills. A reader who takes 15.13 as licence to disbelieve every teacher has turned a prohibition into a permission and run the argument backwards.

The requirement it does state is positive, and it is the whole of what is left.

So we will not run this test for you, and we will not tell you what your experience was. That refusal is the one the practice page states, and it belongs here in its hardest form, because a method essay is exactly the kind of page that could take a reader’s judgement over if it wanted to. The last move is the reader’s, including the decision not to make it at all.

What we hold, and it is our judgment

The rest is the library’s own position, argued rather than hedged, and it is not the material’s.

A practice can be genuinely transformative in a person’s life while the mechanism it claims for itself is not the mechanism it produces. We take that as the ordinary condition rather than the exceptional one, and as no evidence of dishonesty. Nobody designs a procedure meant to work on people through enactment, embodiment and interpretation while advertising a route through the subtle body. The description and the practice come apart because the description does a job no instrument can verify, and instruments that cannot be verified get described rather than tested.

The conditions under which a reader is least likely to notice are those named above: an action whose steps do not visibly produce the result, an authority present to interpret it, an emotion the format asks you to hold, a conviction that arrived by arrangement, a record of failures never kept. None of that requires anybody to be lying, and all of it together is what a genuinely working practice looks like when the account of why is not.

We refuse the flat version in both directions. We will not tell a reader that nothing is happening, because people in placebo arms improved and the improvement was not imaginary. And we will not tell a reader that because something worked, the account of it must be right, because on this material’s own account the wanting is the variable and the tool is not.

If you carry one sentence out of this, take the unglamorous one. Before you begin, write down what would tell you it did not work. Everything else here is in the service of that one piece of paper being harder to explain away than the experience that follows it.