Modeling Works Both Ways: Beware the Broken

If you do what someone does, you'll get what they have and you'll become what they are. Modeling works. It's powerful, and it can lead both to success and failure. Remember that when you wonder if it would be a good idea to emulate the practices of someone (whether those practices are magical or mundane.) If someone promises you that their advice will make you successful, don't listen to their words. Look at what they are. Examine their lives, their thinking, their results.

It bothers me to see so many messed up, dysfunctional occultists, witches, and other magical practitioners handing out advice to their followers and readers. If someone's magical practice has turned them into a credulous wreck, you would be wise to look elsewhere for advice. If you believe that spending long years drug-addled, gullible, and paranoid is a necessary step to "enlightenment," then by all means, go ahead and do it. But if you want to become successful in the real world, you may want to rethink your strategy and adjust accordingly.

I have had the opportunity to meet people who are incredibly successful by just about every metric -- personally, physically, financially, romantically -- and none of them, NOT ONE, has been a magic user in the way that most people think of it. They have all been extremely efficient at using psychology to get their way (whether intentionally or not), but none of them got where they are by firing off sigilis while they masturbate in their bedrooms. And if they DID use some sort of magic to get where they are, they don't talk about it.

Now, there are a lot of ways to measure success, and, certainly, some people desire the kinds of trippy, synchronicity-filled experiences that so many occultists end up living through, but a lot of them come out of it broken because they are modeling what broken people do instead of modeling success. The Work is dangerous, yes, and many people will be broken simply by virtue of attempting to attain it, but you will up your chances for success considerably by carefully assessing who it is that you choose to call "teacher."

If your desire to do magic is driven by a desire to succeed on a mundane level, do not seek out someone who is attempting to rewire their reality for internal peak experiences. Seek out someone who is successful on a mundane level. Of course, the danger of that is you might not hear what you want to hear. You might hear that instead of sigils and grimoires and spells, you're going to have to go out and get a real career and network with boring people and go to the gym and do the mundane, tedious WORK that creates the foundation for success. And nobody wants that, right?

The "magical" path as it is usually presented online is littered with the fractured psyches of those who employed nonsense to get nowhere. Watch your step.