In general, when learning a magical system, how important is taking time to independently put the knowledge into use vs studying and doing the exercises?
The occasion for the question is that I have a lot of Capricorn energy and decided to plow through a course for several years just to have some spiritual work to do, but the text was very much in the vein of "do these daily practices and think about these lectures" and not much explicitly in the way of actually doing practical things, and being Capricorn, if the text didn't say to do it, I didn't. Then after several years of (slowly) doing the work, the course finally said "ok, here's a basic operative thing. Do whatever thing you want with it." And it was a hard enough assignment that I had to shelve my progress for a year because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I wanted to do with it.
On one hand, I understand from the work I did previously that building a solid foundation is important before doing anything serious, and I believe you've said a lot of older occult schools held off a long time on operative magic for one reason or another. On the other hand, I'm feeling there may have been an unwritten expectation that enthusiastic students would naturally be experimenting on the downlow, the scamps, so the course didn't need to go out of the way to encourage it in most people, but not being of that persuasion, I may have missed out on a lot of extracurricular experience and may need to compensate.
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branchandroot
How Regularly Should One Expect to Do a Flip
Date: 2025-05-12 04:37 pm (UTC)The occasion for the question is that I have a lot of Capricorn energy and decided to plow through a course for several years just to have some spiritual work to do, but the text was very much in the vein of "do these daily practices and think about these lectures" and not much explicitly in the way of actually doing practical things, and being Capricorn, if the text didn't say to do it, I didn't. Then after several years of (slowly) doing the work, the course finally said "ok, here's a basic operative thing. Do whatever thing you want with it." And it was a hard enough assignment that I had to shelve my progress for a year because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I wanted to do with it.
On one hand, I understand from the work I did previously that building a solid foundation is important before doing anything serious, and I believe you've said a lot of older occult schools held off a long time on operative magic for one reason or another. On the other hand, I'm feeling there may have been an unwritten expectation that enthusiastic students would naturally be experimenting on the downlow, the scamps, so the course didn't need to go out of the way to encourage it in most people, but not being of that persuasion, I may have missed out on a lot of extracurricular experience and may need to compensate.