Magic--Guided Imagination for Creative Inspiration
I am an acknowledged oxymoron, but I'm fine admitting that. I am a demystified mystic, a gnostic ignostic. And yes, I know precisely what I mean by that.
I have no need for supernatural concepts to explain the world around me or to assuage my existential anxieties. Still, I am profoundly moved by and grateful for the beauty that exists all around me and for my life within that existence. I am so moved, that I enjoy symbolizing this gratitude through creative ritual expression. Of course, when existential anxieties and life woes do seem overwhelming, ritual can help me process and release the stress. So even though I don't feel the need to be a true believer in any one thing, I do not underestimate the role that ritual and myth can play in life.
The inspiration generated through ritual helps motivate me towards action in the community and/or the family. Ritual often helps to reinvigorate me for those tasks. Likewise, I find many magical systems, in general, help to cast the conscious and semi-conscious states of mind about in manners that may not be typical to the daily experience before individuals take up the practice, and by engaging in them, practitioners gain inspiration for creative acts.
Personally, I am freestyling because I am a free spirit. I need my ritual work to be more improvisational, a creative act in itself, rather than imitative. I see magical systems, as well as religions*, at the very least, as templates for guided imagination and behavior, which allow the practitioners to get their creative juices flowing and provide motivation for all sorts of creative change, in themselves and for the world. Their greatest expressions foster both personal and social growth and cohesion. And while I appreciate this element of group work, I suppose my brain simply gets very bored of templates, which tend to lose motivational charge for me after a while. I prefer to craft from scratch.
*I include religion in this discussion simply because I was brought up living a rather religious life and find the dynamics to be very similar in terms of techniques used and the states achieved. The religious templates generated for me were often at odds with my life experiences, and while they gave me great sources of inspiration, they are the results of carefully cultivated motivational experiences designed by and for other people in dramatically different times, so my growth was both fostered and then, ultimately, limited by their constructs.
It may seem ironic then, that I am still capable of being quite reverent. I don't worship in the classical, often slavish, supernatural sense of the term, but I do celebrate and I do pray. As a gnostic ignostic, I have had amazing experiences that have left me with the profound sense of interconnectedness and, indeed, holiness of existence, but I know that logically proving the origin, substance or even value of these experiences to another is not possible.
So, who do I pray to, then? All who listen--no one, anyone--even if they're just the voices in my head. It cleanses me, even if only psychologically, and allows me to focus on the healing work I need to do.
For a more archetypal example, the Holy Mother as Mother-of-God, is a good focus for nonbelievers as well as believers. How? Think of necessity as the mother of invention. A mundane interpretation might see human need as the mother and our imaginations as the vehicle for what some experience and define as divine.
The belief in a deity is not essential here, it is the act that brings us closer to this feeling of connectedness, and this feeling can help provide the groundwork for amazing things. It is perfectly reasonable for people to assert that this is all just a product of the imagination, and this is fine, as long as people realize just how powerful a tool the imagination really is.