Concentration is a cornerstone of magical practice, being able to focus on what you are doing in the moment. When you are doing any spell work you don’t want to be thinking of anything else other than what you are doing, as you will bring those thoughts into the spell and this may affect results in all sorts of unwanted ways. For example if you’re thinking about washing the dishes when doing a spell for wealth expect an abundance of dishes to come your way. So best to forget about those dishes when doing the magick! By the same token you don’t want to be thinking “I hope this spell works” and putting too much mental strain into it, just do the ritual, focus on it, then avoid obsessing about it.

Concentration practices enable a practitioner of magick to explore ways of keeping their brains in the moment, free from any distractions. When performing these exercises you may find that things look at little different. The world appears to be misted up a little and colours blend. This is the type of trance that you want to be when performing magick but it’s still important to keep your focus on the spell work and not be distracted by any odd visuals that may be appearing around you.

When I initially encountered concentration practice exercises within magick it did take me a while to get behind the practice. I think this was partly due to my personal baggage with the semantics. That’s the thing about magick, when embarking on the magical path we take our baggage with us and whatever we experience during our magical journey can be filtered by this baggage. This can sometimes prevent us from having the fullest magical experience possible.

This is why examining our beliefs is important in magick and a very crucial part of the chaos magick path that I have been on for 20 years now. Sometimes our beliefs or baggage is so fixed and immovable that it acts as a block for us. Humans have a habit of taking a belief into ourselves often unconsciously. Then everything we encounter is interpreted in the context of that belief instead of interpreting what is there as a thing unto itself. This means that the human condition is full of bias and the reason why human people are so susceptible to being lied to. If the lie makes sense in the context of our beliefs then we accept it no matter what information is available to the contrary. This is why the magical practitioner needs to examine their beliefs and bias very carefully.

I had a bias against concentration practices simply because of the word “concentration”. Its funny isn’t it how one word can conjure up so many memories. When I hear the word “concentration” all I can see in my mind’s eye is a succession of maths and science teachers yelling at me for “not concentrating” and telling me that “you must concentrate”. My younger self thinking well I probably would if you made the subject more interesting I don’t have this trouble in my English literature class. I mean come on…10A and 10B= 10A and 10B…really, must I? When I was asked to imagine 10 apples of for A and 10 bananas for B all I wanted to do was to throw those apples. I was discordian, even then. Hail Eris.

This is where the reframing of the word became helpful for me. As well as examining my own personal baggage that was invoked by the word concentration I also decided to change the word to “Contemplation.” Now I was able to do the practices; so for sound contemplation I simply did the same thing as what’s done during sound concentration. I sat and payed attention to the sounds going on around me avoiding getting caught up in any train of thought or judgments about the sound. However, instead of calling it sound concentration I called it sound contemplation and the practice went well. There you go, I was now able to do that practice by a simple change of semantics.  Emotional baggage and beliefs can go deep, particularly if those beliefs are a result of something negative that has happened.

The unpacking of those negative feelings invoked by the word “concentration” also led me to re-evaluating my belief that I am bad at sciences. What I discovered in that unpacking is actually yes, maths and the hard sciences are not among my greatest talents: well we can’t all be good at everything. What I also discovered which was a huge surprise is that I kind of like those subjects, despite it taking me a bit longer to grasp concepts than the average person. I’m not brilliant at math, I need to check my calculations in triplicate but I enjoy it. I like gathering statistical information and analysing it.  My schooling did not teach me the love of science but I have found it nevertheless. If someone had told me when I was a thirteen year old girl that I would love science as an adult I would have fallen off my chair laughing, but here I am. So you don’t necessarily have to be good at something to enjoy it.

What this means is that we need to examine the core beliefs that we have about ourselves. In magick we are taught to question. Question everything. Often this translates to questioning others but really the people we need to be questioning are ourselves. What are our values? What are our beliefs? What opinions do we hold about ourselves and about the world? Are these beliefs and opinions serving us? Is there evidence to the contrary?

This is what the belief shifting in chaos magick really prepares us for, to free our stuck thought patterns sufficiently to be able to appreciate an illumination experience when it presents itself.  Often the chaos magick approach of trying out a variety of techniques from different magical traditions plus its use of pop culture icons is criticised for being superficial, but it’s done for a reason. The idea behind the approach is not to get too fixated on any one belief system in such a way as one imprisons one’s mind against new information. It enables illumination.

Chaos magick is often criticised for its lack of emphasis on enlightenment. I have found that all of the core practices of chaos magick do lead in the direction of illumination. The lack of overt focus on enlightenment is helpful to avoid the lust of results but the techniques of chaos magick creates a situation where enlightenment is more likely to happen.

As we move into the New Year and the wheel turns to the time of light this is an ideal time to be asking those questions, to seek self-illumination, to dig a little deeper into the self. To take our attention from the contemplation of the world around us to contemplation of the world within us. To ask those big questions “who am I?” and “What is this I who is asking the question?”

May you find the light.

Choyofaque.