Fantasies, Magick and Self-Control

by Mortir

"Adults though we may be, the forbidden wishes, impossible wishes, of our childhood continue to insist on gratification.

"And indeed our daydreams, our fantasies, are one of the ways we gratify those wishes. In fantasies our wishes can always come true. These conscious make-believings will express the changing concerns of our daily life....

"Fantasies can provide us with the magical solution, the fairy-tale ending. It is pleasing when our G-rated Hollywood happily-ever-afters drift through our consciousness -- but they're not the only images that do. For our fantasies also traffic in unabashed glory, X-rated sex, and bloody murder. And many of us, recoiling from these glimpses of disreputable desires, will sometimes feel guilty, ashamed and afraid of our fantasies....

"Many who accept quite far-out fantasies of sex may shudder at their hostile fantasies, wherein that brilliant woman they envy flunks law school, and their rich and arrogant brother-in-law goes bankrupt and the lovely flirtatious lady next door gets smallpox and everyone else who makes them feel frightened, jealous, threatened, inferior or enraged suffers... reprisals. If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty -- and frightened too.

"This fear has to do with what psychoanalysts call "magical thinking" -- the belief that we can control events with our mind... the belief that many sophisticated people are shocked to discover they hold: The belief that thoughts can indeed do harm. That thoughts can kill.

"....But even when we aren't afraid of what fantasies can do, we may be afraid of what our fantasies mean, appalled by those fleeting glimpses of our rage and eroticism and grandiosity. Do they represent our real reality? Do they tell the truth of what we are? In answering my question, one psychoanalyst related this lovely story:

"There was once, in an ancient kingdom, a most famous holy man, renowned for his generous heart and his many good deeds. And the ruler of that kingdom, who esteemed the holy man, commissioned a great artist to paint his portrait. At a ceremonial banquet the artist presented the king with the painting, but when, with a flourish of trumpets, it was unveiled, the king was shocked to see that the face on the painting -- the holy man's face -- was brutish and cruel and morally depraved.

"This is an outrage!" thundered the king, ready to have the hapless artist's head.

"No, sire," the holy man said. "The portrait is true." And then he explained: "Before you stands the picture of the man I have struggled all my life not to become."

"What this analyst is saying is that all of us, including the very holiest, have impulses we struggle against every day. And while some of that struggle happens outside our awareness, there are other urges and wishes -- sometimes shaped into those little vignettes we call fantasies -- that make us painfully conscious of the person we are trying not to become: the primitive and demanding and amoral and childish person that we sometimes find contained within our fantasies.

"But psychoanalysts note that the crucial word in the preceding sentence is "contained." Fantasies are contained; they are not action. To acknowledge our primitive self is not to become our primitive self, for fantasies tend to express what, in actual life, we have civilized, harnessed, transformed and tamed.

"They also point out that, whether we approve of it or not, anything in fact does go in our fantasies. Which doesn't mean, they add, that we should never feel any sense of concern about them.

"For instance, they say, if our fantasies are persistently violent and cruel, or if our sexual fantasies are totally at odds with our sexual life, we may want to try to learn more about our angry feelings or our sexual conflicts. And they say that if our fantasies too completely serve as substitutes for life -- if, in fact, there is no work and love, only fantasies -- we may need to understand why we are living in our head instead of the world.

"For the most part, however, they say that if we could feel less guilty, ashamed and afraid of our fantasies, we could find in them enormous release and relief. Recognizing them as essentially harmless. Recognizing them as substitutes for what we must, of necessity, lose. And using them to express and enjoy what we cannot or dare not live out in everyday life."

- from Necessary Losses, by Judith Viorst

The above is excellent advice for "normal" people. But we, as Wiccans know that magic(k) works. Don't we? Is there a difference between magic(k) and "magical thinking?" Is there a difference between visualizing and daydreaming? If I'm pissed-off at my boss and daydream about "reprisals," am I guilty of working "bad woojie-woojie" (as dear Fafner once put it)? The answers are yes, yes, yes, and a qualified no.
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as magic(k). Since we spend a large amount of time learning how it works, I won't really go into it deeply here, save to say that two of the critical parts of the formula are passionate will and focused control, using both to change reality and the self.
Actually, this answers the remaining questions as well. "Magical thinking" is different from magic(k) in that magical thinking is a refusal to accept reality. Magic(k) accepts reality and builds upon it, shapes it. If someone you wish to love you loves someone else and you walk around telling people that this person loves you anyway and really think of them as being in love with you, "building castles in the air" and trying to live in them, you are using magical thinking -- and you are obviously not dealing with reality very well.
Even magic(k)ians live with the painful rocks of reality. But those rocks may be shaped into beautiful works of art, or used to build firm foundations or... only the situation and your imagination limit. Those rocks, however, must be looked at, accepted, understood, and experienced before they can be used, shaped by the will.
Wiccans are human. Even the "highest and wisest" of us are subject to the failings common to all humans. Being initiated 3rd degree doesn't mean that you no longer feel anger or spite or rampant lust after someone who is already attached and hurt over it. We all have vindictive impulses and jealousy and envy and fury and insecurity. We all feel pain. We all occasionally dream of being Witch-Queen or -King of the Universe in flashes of egotism (allowing this one to get out of control and acting like you are King or Queen of the Witches is called "HP-itis"), or envy those who have flashier skills and gifts. It is what we do with these feelings, how we control ourselves that counts.
The Horned God symbolically represents the perfected self (we're going to get a little Jungian here) -- he is part animal, part human, and part divine, all three at once and in balance. And all three are expressed. We are all like this (perhaps not as well balanced, but working on it, we hope) -- the human is the civilized, mature part of us, the divine is, well, divine, and the animal is the childish, animalistic part of us that wants us to be the envy of the rest of the coven or even the rest of Witchdom, to see someone who hurt us hurt themselves or fail miserably in public, or naked and lusting after us (ooooh, you animal!).
This animal part of us is just that -- a part of us. To ignore it, to repress it, will not make it go away. Certainly, we don't want it to go away -- I, myself, like sex a lot, and anger and ambition can be channeled usefully to help us achieve. Our love and joy spring from the same place our hate and misery do. Would you give them up? Our animal natures are part of the formula for working magic(k) as well. The emotional energy used flows from here. Would you destroy your ability to work effective magic(k) because you fear a part of yourself? Many have done so.
So these visions of another's ruination or enthusiastic debauchery are normal and healthy - but are they safe? The answer lies in the balance we must strike and continually maintain to be our best selves. To return to our Horned God model, it is the human part of us that must handle our animal nature. Like a horseman, we must know when to let our animal have its head and when to reign in, and with experience we learn to better exercise our control skills. And as magic(k) workers, we must control what we allow to manifest -- if our animal nature is the origin of the passion which is used in magic(k), it is our human portion which is the lens, focusing and directing that energy, as well as the shutter which keeps that force in check and allowing the flow to pass through when conditions are right.
This, gang, is why we do all the introspection and focus on ethics and question our own motivations. This is one of the reasons we learn to listen to that inner voice -- which is connected to the divine -- for when it says "that's not a good idea" and we pursue it anyway, we are invariably sorry. We must learn to let our "inner child" throw its tantrum while safely contained in fantasies, dissipating that resentment safely. We must learn to let our destructive passions out in constructive ways. We must learn when our amorous desires are influencing someone else unethically. This is usually the toughest one (we get so ga-ga over the object of our desires that the ethics sort of slip into the background and besides we really WANT them makes our heart go pitty-pat gives us the lust-bumps in a vicious way and besides we LOVE them truly we do and can't eat can't sleep because we can only think of that absolutely wonderful person whom we could make very happy we know and we really NEED them now Now NOW!) because we are generally less afraid of our lust than our violence and it tends to override the embarrassment we feel over our megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur. In short, the alarm bells either don't ring or are drowned out by the inner jungle cries of this love-sick maniac that we've become. It is only later that we realize and say "Oh. Oooops!" as our rational mind returns and we survey the scarred landscape of various people's emotional lives (our own included) and the first installment of the karmic credit plan comes due.

When you asked to study Wicca, your teacher told you that this was not an easy path to follow. Those who follow this path do not completely avoid pain, we learn from the lessons it teaches. We use what we learn to enrich our lives and the lives of others. We take responsibility for and learn to better control ourselves, our magic(k) and our lives so that we may avoid that pain again. We build and create from our pain and suffering as well as our joy and love. We strive to creatively express our lusts and desires and angers. We grow and become more balanced. We become wise, and this is why Wicca is called the Craft of the Wise. This hard-won wisdom, however, is bought at the price of suffering -- of being human and animal and divine. We accept our fantasies and use them to learn more about ourselves, paying attention to our childish/ animalish portion without letting it control us.
Usually.

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