I felt genuinely gobsmacked a few weeks ago when a handful of people backed out of their membership in my WEALTH community (which will re-open for registration in September)...

... during the 7 day refund period.

These folks who bowed out told me they had read my book, Existential Kink: unmask your shadow and embrace your power, got excited about my work, and then they were disappointed when they found out that WEALTH has so much to do with weird magic stuff like Tarot and astrology and ritual and meditation and spells...

... because they had wanted "psychological" insight and not "magical" insight.

This gobsmacked me, because ... uhhhh... as far as I'm concerned, there is literally zero difference between psychology (the study and evolution of the psyche) and magic.

Of course, not every occult practitioner shares this opinion of mine...

.... some vastly prefer what's known as "the spirit model" of magic and find any psychological language in connection with magic to be very offensive, as it can be taken to imply that "magic is all in your head."

So I want to make it clear that I concur with the brilliant occultist Lon Milo Duquette's statement that:

"Magic is indeed all in your head, but your head is a hell of a lot bigger than you think it is."

In other words, no one has ever encountered anything... not a tree, not another person, not a building, not the most rigorous scientific experiment...

... anywhere outside of their own subjective psyche.

This seems a little obvious when you think about it for a second, but the nefarious secular materialism of mainstream culture likes to insist on what's known in philosophy as "naïve realism"...

.... - the tendency to believe that we see an independently-existing world around us, and that we see it "objectively."

This perspective is called "naïve realism" in philosophy because... honestly, it's a bit dumb.

In order to fully believe in naïve realism, you have to have never paused for even a hot minute to question the nature of apparent reality.

There's zero empirical evidence to suggest that any world at all exists beyond someone's subjective perception, a fact that the Buddha was quite fond of pointing out.

You can watch a video, see a photograph, hear 1000 eye witnesses describe a historical event, see a brain dissected and have a neuroscientist point out to you exactly which region of the brain creates what kind of experience.... AND... all of this will only ever happen in your own subjective psyche.
All of which is to say...

... I don't see any genuine difference between a psychological model of magic and "the spirit model" except perhaps a vocabulary or aesthetic difference.

Also: the psychological model of magic seems easier to access and work with for people who have grown up in a secular materialist culture.

Bottomline: it doesn't matter if you meet a spirit or another human being - they're both "in your head" since that's the only place you ever experience anything...

... -- what matters is that if you want to have a good relationship with either, you better treat them respectfully as autonomous entities with their own will, desires, and values.

*"And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur" by Leonora Carrington*

Here's why magic and psychology are so intertwined:

All of magic is about communication with an unseen world. It's about drawing information and events from the unmanifest into the manifest.

Whether you call that unseen world "the unconscious" (as in psychology) or "the spirit world" or "the underworld" or "the faerie world" (as in spirit models of magic)...

... doesn't really matter, because the rules of the communication are effectively exactly the same.

Furthermore, the penultimate goal of magic (alchemical marriage with the larger Self, the unio mentalis or unified will, which results in vastly expanded wisdom, joy, and effectiveness in life)...

... is the same as the goal of psychology: expanded wisdom, joy, and effectiveness in life.

In short, your psyche shapes your perception of the world. It shapes how you interact with everyone and everything, and therefore it vastly impacts what opportunities and experiences can come your way.

If you want to have different and better opportunities and experiences (and isn't that what every one wants, and what all magic is about?), you need to work with your psyche.

I developed Existential Kink as a magical practice...

.... and then I wrote a book about it that explains it in largely psychological terms.

In the book, I explained Existential Kink primarily in psychological terms explicitly in order to make the practice accessible to people who don't already think of themselves as "witches" or "magicians"...

...so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when such people get spooked by magic.

But still, here I am, shocked that anyone would seriously believe that there's a discernible difference between magic and psychology. ;)

Goes to show how silly I am, and I also just wanted to send out this public announcement, for those of you who haven't made the connection yet:

Magic and psychology are the same darn thing.

The Greek word psyche means butterfly. This is not a coincidence. Just like a caterpillar first needs to melt down its old form in a cocoon and then re-collect itself into a gorgeous new butterfly shape...

... the human psyche first needs to melt down its old form through magical, alchemical processes (solve) and then re-collect itself into a new gorgeous shape...again through magical processes (coagula).

A lot of the solve processes traditionally used by magicians to melt down the old forms of their psyche (confession, meditation, inquiry, etc.) and to re-collect a new gorgeous shape for their psyche (visualization, intention, affirmation, etc.)...

... have been co-opted by secular materialist psychology....

... and this doesn't make these practices any less magical, it just makes them branded in a new way to fit the prevailing prejudices of our time.

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox for today. ;) Wishing you great success in your magic-psychological development.

psychology IS magic - if you're doin' it right