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Consciousness plus intent produces magick. Anything that was produced by these two, even if present in the smallest way, is a magickal act or product.

The more we increase our ability to concentrate and to perceive reality clearly, the more we will begin to perceive the extraordinary magickal aspects of reality.

Magick can be looked at from two points of view:
1 From the ultimate, in which all that occurs is the natural, impersonal unfolding of the lawful pattern of totally interconnected causality.
2 From the relative, in which each individual Agent has the power to influence their field of experience/universe/life.
3 The combination of understanding of Ordinary Magickal effects and Relative Reality is something I will call loosely Conventional reality.

That leads to the degree to which the act is consciously rather than unconsciously seen as a magickal act.
For instance, an ordinary, relatively non-magickally oriented person might, in a moment of rage, suddenly decide that they wish to send that rage flying against the person they are enraged by. If they consciously understand that this act was as obviously magickal it is, it is more likely to be tempered by their own moral and philosophical codes than if it is not viewed as the clearly magickal act that it is. Thus, we have Conscious and Unconscious Magick.

Obviously, as the vast majority of people do not think that their every intersection of consciousness and intent is magickal, then from this point of view the vast majority of their magickal acts will be unconscious ones, again meaning that they are not recognized to be as causal as they are.
I would very much like to say that Unconscious Magickal acts are likely less powerful or effective than Conscious Magickal acts, but I unfortunately do not believe this to be true, which is one way of viewing the primary problem facing the world today.
Said another way, the failure of the average person to consider their every intent a magickal act with implications beyond what they ordinarily imagine it has and to thus fail to have a potent impetus to apply a Moral and Philosophical Code to their every waking and dreaming intention results in a huge amount of Collateral Unconscious Magick, much of which is ammoral, unkind and uncompassionate, as well as unskillful.

o the degree that the relative perspective is valid, it must be noted that where our experience field overlaps someone else’s experience field, there is an interplay of forces shaping that junction, specifically the consciousness and intent of each of those perceiving that junction. In this case, the difference between belief, intent and force is an arbitrary one.
The corollary of this is that the less obvious the junction of experience fields, the less obvious the interplay. This has important implications for those who practice magick when we examine the next few points.
Clearly, different effects may occur if the interplay/overlap is more or less overt, particularly if the beings involved have differing paradigms of what is possible. That is, if some of the beings involved think that some things are impossible and other beings involved think that those same things are possible, there is a set up for very deep conflict.
Our expectations, beliefs, previous experiences, and paradigms color what we perceive, which is to say, they have a direct effect on our field of experience and life. This effect is actually a very powerful one.
Most people don’t have a well-developed understanding of the vast and complex terrain of the magickal world.
This simple fact is an extraordinarily powerful magickal force, something I will generically label “The Field of Disbelief.” While not nearly as static or simple an entity as this name would imply, the general nature of its effects can be commented upon in crude terms. The Field of Disbelief is actually a field of beliefs about how things are.

The Fields of Disbelief may vary radically between people. For example, one person may consider a lucky rabbit’s foot to be very powerful, whereas another may have occasional premonitory dreams but think that the rabbit’s foot is pure superstition. One person may think that traveling out of body is not that unusual but may think that telekinesis is completely impossible. Some believe in angels, devils, spirits, fairies, pixies, trolls, and/or ghosts. Some think it possible to speak with the dead, heal by laying-on hands, read other people’s thoughts, or divine the past or the future. These are but a few examples of common magickal beliefs in modern times.
In general, the more people’s fields of experience you have overlapping, and the more obviously they overlap, the more Fields of Belief or Disbelief you have to deal with. In these circumstances, overt magickal acts that do not fit with the paradigms of these fields become more difficult.

Another extremely important point about having magickal experiences is that your paradigms will begin to diverge from those around you who don’t or haven’t yet. There is no way around this. The more times you see visions, travel out of body, do energy work, trace glowing pentagrams in the air, speak with spirits, shift into altered states of consciousness, manipulate the world in various extraordinary ways or understand aspects of ultimate reality, the more you will be out of alignment with “Conventional Reality,” not that you could get two people to agree exactly what that was. Real practical wisdom involves working with this to everyone’s benefit or at least not to anyone’s detriment if you can help it.
There is a difference between one’s inner world diverging from “the non-magickal norm” and one’s outer world diverging from it. This has to do with external marks of being “different”, such as unusual clothes, tattoos, hairstyles, props (such as wands, daggers, pentacles, crosses, amulets, etc.), special languages, special symbols on one’s belongings, etc. While having cool and unusual props can be great fun, giving one a sense of there being something special and symbolic in what one does or just getting attention or both, they can also cause adverse effects on one’s jobs and public relationships. These props and trappings may also attract people of like mind, and so are, like everything, a mixed blessing.

The example of the candle flame moving vs the work situation resolving raises another important consideration: there is magick that works within what might appear to be natural causal mechanisms and effects, e.g. the work situation resolving, and magick that works by what are, for most, clearly extraordinary or unnatural magickal methods and effects, e.g. the candle flame moving. For lack of better terms, and defaulting to limited and inaccurate paradigms, I call these, naturally enough, Natural Magick and Unnatural Magick.

Natural Magick is definitely magickal, and yet the way that everything worked out could very reasonably be explained by a so-called "rational" or "scientific" person as being totally within the laws of what they think of as ordinary reality.


Unnatural Magick is also definitely magickal, and much more in line with what most people think of as magick, in that something truly extraordinary seemed to happen, such that a so-called "rational" or "scientific" person will have to resort to some very complicated mental gymnastics to try to fit the occurrence within the standard laws of reality, and this may include you. All things being equal, Unnatural Magick is generally harder than Natural Magick.

Related to this is the degree to which what from a relative point of view are independent Agents' intentions align with your own. Were we to view Reality as the sum total of the Fluxions of the Magickal Influence Clouds (of which Fields of Disbelief are a small-subpart) of the sum total of the Agents (defined as those things with consciousness and intent) in the Universe, then the degree to which your True Desire aligns with or is not explicitly countered by that sum total of Influence Clouds will also influence the outcome. In plain terms, if a bunch of beings have wished in line with, neutral towards, or in conflict with your own, this is significant. This I term the degree of Synchrony or Asynchrony.

The degree of Concentration skills will have a direct effect on the power behind the act, and this is particularly true for Unnatural Magick and Immediate Magick, though it applies to all other types as well. Most magickal practitioners greatly under appreciate the degree to which very strong Concentration skills open doors to experiences and abilities. A hyper-concentrated mind becomes malleable, pliable, bright, and jumps to the task with great facility. At a certain point in concentration, suddenly things just happen by merely inclining to them. You wish to draw a symbol in the air: there it is, trailing off your finger like syrup. You wish to visualize an image: it appears fully formed, luminous, extremely detailed and radiant. You wish to jump out of body off the cushion, suddenly you are out, just like that. You wish to have deep intuition into some situation, there it is. You wish to see past lives, there they are. Learning to concentrate well, which usually takes days to weeks of practice to set up properly, opens a universe of ability that those who have never really learned to concentrate and set up that way might occasional visit in spurts and flickers but otherwise will never know.

The Confidence of the Agent: never underestimate the ability of someone who truly believes they can succeed, or the degree to which a lack of confidence can scuttle an otherwise very well-set-up magickal act.

The level of Singlemindedness of the Agent. Having the sum total of one's attention, passion, and intent dedicated to one act is much more likely to result in stronger effects than the mind that is distracted or divided.

The Familiarity of the Agent with that specific act will also make it much easier: practicing an act makes it easier and easier, with some notable exceptions that are too complicated to detail here.

Finally, as the Web of Causality is so infinitely complicated, there are the factors that can't possibly be known, and these will be generically and only somewhat appropriately called Luck. It could in many ways be considered the most important of the factors, but in this case Luck clearly favors the well-trained and well-prepared, though not always.