Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is almost here and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. 

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week.  This is my seventy-second published book and the beginning of a new fiction series. I'd spent years being frustrated by the way that fantasy fiction ignored real magic and fixated on Harry Potter absurdities instead. Once I finished my tentacle novels, that had the inevitable result and gave rise to the first of a series of novels in which all the magic is the stuff real human beings in the real world can encounter. Ariel Moravec, the protagonist of the series, is an eighteen-year-old girl who goes to spend the summer with her grandfather, an occult initiate who spends his time investigating paranormal happenings. Before long she's caught up in one of his investigations, centering on legends of a colonial-era witch and a cascade of very real and vicious spells in the present day...

There are two more novels in the series already in print, a third in press, and a fourth currently being written. It's turning into a very entertaining series to write and, I hope, to read. If you're interested, you can get copies of The Witch of Criswell here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere. 

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I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it! 

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG and commenters,
Have an excellent week, everyone!

I've been having negative thoughts for quite some time, usually about the same topic: "being the inconvenience at work" or "nobody likes me for some reason" or "they want to fire me from work for some issue." Yes, I realized I deliberately created this in my mind. These thoughts come to my mind every day.

And I also noticed that these thoughts create synchronicities, bad situations, coincidences, meaning they become reality. I co-created and manifested this reality of mine in a short time.

I also think about the future. What might come next...

I'm not sure I believe in the theory of good affirmations, like: "I'm a nice guy," "everyone likes me." I know it's a fallacy (because some like me, but not everyone).
1. What could I do beyond positive affirmations?
2. And I also think about the future. How to dissolve these already created and established thought-forms that could cause a very negative reality for me?
Thanks in advance!

[ecosophia]

Okay, you've bought into a common misunderstanding of affirmations. If they were true, why would you need to say them? They're incantations, not statements of fact -- and just as negative self-talk tends to be self-reinforcing and becomes your reality, so does positive self-talk.

Furthermore, the one really effective way to counter negative self-talk is positive self-talk, so get at it. Whenever you catch yourself thinking one of those patterns of negative self-talk, repeat a positive affirmation twenty times, then and there. Keep doing this. You'll find that it really does work.

[(Anonymous)]

thanks you!

[(Anonymous)]

Not the OP:

But is it possible such negative thoughts aren't even internal to the person having them?

I have had some similar episodes in the past and found that dealing with them as though they were an outside entity worked wonders. Like, facing *the thing* (whatever it is) and being like: "I see you, I know what you are, I know you're not *me*," and calling on a higher power to give it the boot... well, some really freaky things happened with that (a totally not-supplied-by-me mental image of myself with a long spear, impaling something that at first looked human, but then on the end of the spear turned into a freakish bug-type thing), and they left me alone after that.

Or does the exact diagnosis not matter because affirmations accomplish the same purpose?

[ecosophia]

Of course -- many of "our" thoughts come in from outside. I find affirmations a very effective response to those as well. Certainly there are other ways to deal with them -- yours, for example -- and I'd encourage anyone who's having trouble with intrusive negative thoughts to explore as many options as come to mind. The important thing is to recognize that repetitive negative thoughts are actively harmful -- they have the same effect as affirmations, but in a bad way -- and it's important to take concrete steps to expel them from your mind and overwrite them with positive thoughts.

[(Anonymous)]

Just some examples of positive self-talk that I find helpful for countering negative self-talk about work:
"I always say the right thing to the right person at the right time."
"I maintain good relations with my boss and all my co-workers."
"I always do an excellent job at everything I do."
These seem to work well for me.

[ecosophia]

These are good examples and ought to work well.

One I used for many years was simply, "I am the master." I needed to overcome the emotional legacy of an autistic childhood, in which it very often seemed that I couldn't do anything at all to the satisfaction of other people; the idea of being a master, in the sense of a master craftsman or a master of a martial art, helped with that, and gave me the confidence I needed to master the things that mattered to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Forgive me if this is going into verboten territory, but I have to ask: is use of affirmations something good for children to do? I have an 8yo son who is so prone to negative self talk and emotional downward spiraling, I need to find some strategies for helping him cope with this.

[ecosophia]

Yes. Affirmations can be extremely helpful for children; so can almost any simple verbal spell. When I was a child, the proper response to a nasty insult from another child was:

"I'm rubber, you're glue,
whatever you say
bounces off me
and sticks to you."

It worked, too. Come up with a little rhyme that addresses whatever your son's main issues are, and teach him to repeat it to himself.