>>114942
Someone with utterly no belief in magic's capacity to work and no concept of what magic involves can hardly be expected to perform magic with any degree of success, and it's ridiculous to think that someone who is brand new to it who's asking for the most basic of anecdotal proofs is wrong for not taking it on faith. I know better than to think of magic as a faith, I don't need to be told whether or not it works because I know that it does. Someone interested in it ought to know, if only for the sake of safety and full personal consent, that it is indeed quite the firearm they're being handed.
I admit I may have been a bit too enthusiastic in my quest to get OP to start practicing magic, because let's face it, magic is not only useful but an engaging and surprisingly creative pursuit. However, anything particularly usable is also abusable. It might be time for a story, actually.
>>114912
I do have a story, though this might be a bit of fair warning. I have plenty of positive stories, but many of them are so positive as to not even be stories since they lack conflict. I suspect the times when I fucked up might be more interesting.
For example, the reason I know not to go into human civilization in the middle of a nature-based experience is because I performed similar invocations a decent number of times and though my first time was successful, I got cocky. I went on a trek through the woods, and assumed that because I now had an internal compass and a decent sense of location, I could cut across a section of houses along a particular road, then keep going into deep woods. Bad mistake.
What had initially been a positive experience turned into a headfuck with breathtaking speed upon the sight of the apartments, and what had been a lesson on 'animal magnetism' of a sort became something I can only compare to horror trips. It was as if someone had shoved electrodes under my skin and was playing all at once the entire history of the conquering of natural territory by human intervention, by way of psychosomatic pain that radiated from my temples and salivary glands.
I decided that the only way out was through, but this, too, turned out to be stupid, since the apartments, though in the woods, were fairly well-peopled, and there were several spots where I had to pass other people, with me half-naked and just caked in filth head to toe looking like a fucking aghori in my goofy getup. Normally that doesn't bug me at all in the middle of an invocation because, yeah, no shit I'm going to look that way, I want it to work, but social expectation came back hardcore, and pretty much the rest of the experience, Gaia made me pay for it by telling me all sorts of fucked up shit about my own future and my own negative tendencies with respect to my nature as an animal and even as a human. This precipitated about a year of working 80-hour weeks and suffering from a terrible lack of sleep, and the only time I can ever say I suffered from something like anxiety or depression. She doesn't fuck around.
I had been sloppy and stupid with my psychic partitioning and because I was young and dumb, I had not yet sufficiently developed mental techniques to set 'anchor' points in certain mindsets, and my dispelling was, let's just say not particularly well-considered. Looking back, it's actually very lucky I came out of all of that with my sanity more or less intact, if a bit loosened (it was well worth it, that's the important thing). It wasn't the last mistake I ever made but that one stands out as one of the dumbest.
As for how it turned out in the end, the next time I made a serious attempt to contact Gaia or whomever it was in her place, it was a totally different experience. She wasn't punitive, but she showed me how to form mental anchors and develop useful astral totems, plus she upgraded my dispelling practices and unfucked my head of a lot of depressive stuff. That process in itself was wild, she reset a lot of basic stuff just to prove that it could be done, including sexuality, body image, my relationship to violence, etc etc. It didn't make me not myself but it did set me back to being a functional member of society, so it all has a happy enough ending. The lesson is really that your own mind is a terrible enemy to make.