What if you just turned your magic all the way the fuck on?

I'm searching for something I cannot quite define, and I don't always understand how to activate it. I wonder what “my magic” actually is and how, in a practical and real way, I might turn it up, or even turn it on at all. I picture it as a dormant seed, enveloped in darkness, waiting for water, light, warmth, the right conditions to grow and flower. But I don't always understand those conditions. I don't know where to find the water. The more I think about it, the less I seem to understand about turning my magic on, let alone turning it all the way up.

Is there a switch I can pull? A button? A little spell I can whisper to begin the process? I keep searching, keep scrolling, and somewhere along the way lose sight of the original intention. If the magic is already there within me, does it need to be earned or bought? Do I need to learn it? If the faculty already exists in some form, should I assume it's simply been dimmed, neglected or scattered into the recesses of my subconscious? What would it take to turn it up, and what would it look like if it were fully engaged, turned all the way on, so to speak?

To me, this is a much more interesting question than whether magic is “real” in the first place. I know magic is real. What I do not always know is how to turn my own magic on.

For the purposes of this thought experiment, I wanted to picture magic as the deliberate use of attention, imagination, intention, symbol, language and material to bring about change. We can understand the mechanism however each of us likes: spirit, consciousness, energy, relationship, participation, co-creation, some combination of them. What matters here is that magic involves a person trying to create a change or bring about a new condition.

To me, that makes the usual division between magical life and ordinary life slightly strange, because if you think about it, as we move through life, aren’t we always trying to affect what happens next? We do it through many different means, but essentially we are using our minds, our consciousness, our spirit, our wishes and intentions, and whatever tools are available to us, to try to make things happen.

And yet we tend to reserve the word magic for candles, herbs, crystals, cards and oils. We reserve certain places for it: altars, circles, woods, temples. We reserve certain times for it: the full moon, the new moon, midnight, sunrise. When we enter those places or pick up those objects, we suddenly become very deliberate. We choose our words carefully. We think about what we want. We concentrate. We assign meaning to things. We pay attention to how the room feels. We try to make ourselves present.

If you're anything like me, you probably spend a lot of your life in the opposite state. Our attention is scattered. Our faculties are not particularly well trained. Then we reach for ritual, attempt to turn everything up at once in a very formalised way, and wonder why the whole thing sometimes lacks power.

The practice finishes and we go back to normal. We open twelve tabs. We answer whichever notification shouts loudest. We change our minds every twenty minutes. We say we are going to do something and then do something else. We ask five other people what they think before we have established what we think. We reach for the cards again because we didn't like the first answer. Then we spend the rest of the day behaving as though attention, language, intention and symbolism suddenly stopped mattering when the candle went out.

To me, there is something odd about becoming intensely intentional for an hour around the full moon and largely unconscious for the other 719 hours of the month.

So I started wondering whether turning my magic on might not mean spending more time doing obviously magical things at all.

Recruiting the Ordinary

If magic is partly the deliberate use of attention, imagination, symbol, language and will to bring about change, then those qualities are operating all day anyway. You are using language when you write an email. You are using symbols when you design something. You are using imagination when you make a business plan. You are using will when you decide what happens next. You are using attention when you choose what deserves your time. You are creating associations with objects and places constantly.

Perhaps the question is whether we are doing those things accidentally or deliberately.

Suppose you do sit down every morning and open twelve tabs, answer whichever notification shouts loudest, half-write three things and finish the day unsure what you accomplished. Calling that “computer magic” would be meaningless.

But imagine instead that you deliberately use that same desk as a place where particular intentions become material. You decide what you are there to accomplish before you begin. You have trained yourself to enter a focused state there. Perhaps one particular piece of music, scent, a crystal or repeated action helps you cross into that state. You know what you want to exist by the time you stand up. You work until the intention has acquired form in the world, and then you finish.

This is where I think the idea that almost anything can become magical gets useful, but I also want to be careful not to flatten the world into the assumption that “everything is magic.”

A cup is a cup until you repeatedly use it to mark a particular transition. A necklace is jewellery until you decide what it means, charge it with that meaning and repeatedly wear it in that relationship. A computer is a computer until you deliberately begin using it as an instrument through which your will takes form.

Repeated use builds the association. Eventually the smell, song, object or sequence becomes a switch. You sit down, do the same small thing, and your mind understands: we are working now. The object becomes saturated with purpose through intention, repetition and association.

That doesn't mean you have to believe that every biro contains dormant occult power. But I think it does mean that magical quality does not reside exclusively in the candle, herb, knife or crystal. Those things are useful because of what they allow us to do.

A keyboard could do that. A particular pen could. Your desk could. A pair of shoes could. A song could. Your phone could. The chair where you make difficult decisions could.

The altar becomes one place where these capacities are concentrated, rather than the only place where they exist.

And that gives “turn your magic all the way up” a much more practical meaning. I think it means increasing the territory over which your magical faculties operate. Your writing can become part of the practice. Your work can. Your clothing can. Your home can. Your money can. The way you speak can. The way you make decisions can.

Leaving an Empty Chair

There is another part of this, though, because magic cannot only be about directing force outward.

We've all heard about, or perhaps experienced ourselves, those moments when we are writing, painting, designing, researching, playing music, gardening, walking or sitting in ritual and the quality of attention changes. We stop consciously assembling the next move. An idea arrives whole. A sentence appears faster than we can explain where it came from. 'Like Magic' we say in amazement. A solution to a problem becomes obvious after hours of not being obvious. We suddenly know what the next section is, what the image should be, what needs to be cut, what needs to happen next.

People describe this in different languages. An artist might call it the muse. A mystic might call it guidance. Lots of people I know call it a 'download'. What we call it doesn't matter in the end, but what we are all describing feels very much like magic.

Isn’t that magical when you think about it?

So I think turning your magic up also means becoming better at receiving.

We tend to think of magical power as force: stronger will, stronger intention, more concentrated desire. But there is another kind of skill  involved in knowing when to stop pushing and become available. If you already know exactly what the answer should be, exactly what the cards should say, exactly what the ritual should feel like and exactly how the work should turn out, you have filled the whole room with yourself.

What Interrupts the Magic

When I think about what a person with their magic turned all the way up looks like in the world, I imagine someone who is harder to impress. Someone who notices more, but who is able to sit with uncertainty and say, “I don’t know what that means yet.” I imagine someone who can concentrate, and who knows what they want in a very specific way without carrying an enormous amount of embarrassment or shame around their desires. I imagine someone who can leave a coincidence as a coincidence until a pattern establishes itself, and who can distinguish between something that needs ritual and something that needs sleep, money, a difficult conversation, medical attention, practical action or time.

I also imagine someone who can decide when a thing is finished. They can leave a working alone without questioning it every five minutes. They can send an email and trust that what they sent contained the energy needed, rather than spending the next hour refreshing as they wait for a response. They can make a decision and allow it to stand long enough to discover what follows from it.

So, I wonder, if discovering the mysterious magical switch, and how to turn it on, is less about finding some hidden button, practice or spell, and more about accepting that modern life routinely trains us in ways that make turning our magic up extremely difficult.

We're all being pushed towards distraction rather than attention, commentary rather than experience, endless information rather than discernment, self-presentation rather than absorption, instant interpretation rather than patience, external validation rather than internal authority, and consumption rather than practice.

We can know enormous amounts while becoming less and less able to trust what we perceive.

Maybe our collective magic isn't asleep because we lack something. It may be asleep because every faculty through which it would express itself is being continually interrupted. Attention is fragmented. Desire is sanitised. Imagination is colonised by anxiety and entertainment. Intuition is drowned beneath advice. Decisions are endlessly reopened. Experience is immediately exported. The body is ignored until it starts shouting. The extraordinary is either dismissed immediately or believed too quickly.

So I wanted to put the idea to the collective that turning our magic up could mean experimenting by reversing some of those habits.

All the Way Up

Not by performing witchcraft twenty-four hours a day, but by abandoning the assumption that the faculties of the craft only develop while you are performing a spell. If will matters, every ordinary opportunity to make a decision and hold to it can train will. If imagination matters, then writing, designing, planning and envisioning can train imagination. If attention matters, learning to work without scattering yourself trains attention. If receptivity matters, then silence, boredom, walking, waiting and allowing the mind to become temporarily unoccupied become part of the practice too.

And then, when you come into ritual deliberately, you are already bringing strengthened abilities, and a deepening power with you. Because I don’t think the witch only becomes a witch when the candle is lit.

The same faculties she is trying to strengthen at the altar are the ones she uses when she writes, negotiates, chooses, builds, speaks, makes money, sets a boundary, cooks dinner, dresses herself, tends a garden or sits down at a computer.

Then magic stops being an activity category. It becomes a way of participating in the world and in your own life. It becomes a way of being in relationship with your body, your dreams, your kin, your work, your tools, the places you inhabit and whatever unseen world you know yourself to be participating in.

And I was thinking that maybe this is what “all the way up” means in the end. Your magic isn't something you switch on when the ritual begins because, in some small way, you have been practising it all along. You have become better at directing your attention and better at knowing when to receive. You know when to act and when to leave something alone. You have made more of your life available to the faculties you were previously trying to summon on command.