? is the Art and Science of causing change in conformity with Will
"Magick is the Art and Science of causing change in conformity with Will."
That is the definition of Magick as given by Aleister Crowley (see, e.g., Magick (Thelema) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and The Science and Art of Magick), and it's an excellent one. For one thing, clearly no Magick is done for no reason; always it involves the application of Will to whatever the purpose of any Magickal (or, for that matter, alchemical) operation. For another, the only things that do Magick are living creatures of one kind or another, and the hallmark of all life is purpose, willfulness in the service of survival and reproduction.
Which leads to "Life is the Art and Science of causing change in conformity with Will." Whose Will? That of the organism performing Magick, who may or may not be human or even terrestrial. For what purposes? Those of one or another manifestation of Life. Which could, at least in theory, be an entire biosphere, or the vast clouds of cold molecular gas and dust out of which stars and planets are born. Individual instances of life as we normally know them, such as a tree, an insect, a clam, a human, or some other organism of the sort with which we normally deal, though creatures and individuals in their own right, are also manifestations of the worlds into which they are born or hatched. And as such, they manifest the Will of their ecosystems and biospheres.
But there is more.
Successful Magick often entails manifestations of nonlocality, action at a distance, perhaps a great distance, in time and/or space (see, e.g., Quantum nonlocality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Journal of Nonlocality, etc.). In the last few decades, quantum physicists have shown that examples of nonlocality are part and parcel of reality at the smallest of scales. Successful Magick entails many examples of non-local processes and phenomena at much larger scales, such as those in which we live our own lives, or even those in which planets, stars, stellar clusters, galaxies, galactic clusters and superclusters, and perhaps even universes exist. The same is true in the physical realm, especially on scales on which subatomic particles exist. And there is evidence that the biological realm is replete with certain instances of nonlocal biophysical and biochemical processes (e.g., Quantum biology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Quantum Nonlocality - Biological Route? | Frontier Science News, https://arxiv.org/ftp/q-bio/papers/0510/0510039.pdf, Nonlocality beyond quantum mechanics : Nature Physics : Nature Publishing Group, CiteSeerX - Citation Query Biological utilization of quantum non-locality, etc.). This is more evidence that Magick and life are exactly the same thing, reality looked at from two different points of view that agree exactly. Crowley himself points out that in the end, the Magical universe and the objective universe are the same thing looked at from two different directions, and if the results don't agree, then somebody, somewhere screwed up.
So here we have a definition of life in terms of what it does, simple and inclusive of everything else it does, and show that esoteric (subjective) and exoteric (objective) reality are one and the same, though operated on in different ways and observed from different points of view.
Question: where do we go from here?
That is the definition of Magick as given by Aleister Crowley (see, e.g., Magick (Thelema) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and The Science and Art of Magick), and it's an excellent one. For one thing, clearly no Magick is done for no reason; always it involves the application of Will to whatever the purpose of any Magickal (or, for that matter, alchemical) operation. For another, the only things that do Magick are living creatures of one kind or another, and the hallmark of all life is purpose, willfulness in the service of survival and reproduction.
Which leads to "Life is the Art and Science of causing change in conformity with Will." Whose Will? That of the organism performing Magick, who may or may not be human or even terrestrial. For what purposes? Those of one or another manifestation of Life. Which could, at least in theory, be an entire biosphere, or the vast clouds of cold molecular gas and dust out of which stars and planets are born. Individual instances of life as we normally know them, such as a tree, an insect, a clam, a human, or some other organism of the sort with which we normally deal, though creatures and individuals in their own right, are also manifestations of the worlds into which they are born or hatched. And as such, they manifest the Will of their ecosystems and biospheres.
But there is more.
Successful Magick often entails manifestations of nonlocality, action at a distance, perhaps a great distance, in time and/or space (see, e.g., Quantum nonlocality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Journal of Nonlocality, etc.). In the last few decades, quantum physicists have shown that examples of nonlocality are part and parcel of reality at the smallest of scales. Successful Magick entails many examples of non-local processes and phenomena at much larger scales, such as those in which we live our own lives, or even those in which planets, stars, stellar clusters, galaxies, galactic clusters and superclusters, and perhaps even universes exist. The same is true in the physical realm, especially on scales on which subatomic particles exist. And there is evidence that the biological realm is replete with certain instances of nonlocal biophysical and biochemical processes (e.g., Quantum biology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Quantum Nonlocality - Biological Route? | Frontier Science News, https://arxiv.org/ftp/q-bio/papers/0510/0510039.pdf, Nonlocality beyond quantum mechanics : Nature Physics : Nature Publishing Group, CiteSeerX - Citation Query Biological utilization of quantum non-locality, etc.). This is more evidence that Magick and life are exactly the same thing, reality looked at from two different points of view that agree exactly. Crowley himself points out that in the end, the Magical universe and the objective universe are the same thing looked at from two different directions, and if the results don't agree, then somebody, somewhere screwed up.
So here we have a definition of life in terms of what it does, simple and inclusive of everything else it does, and show that esoteric (subjective) and exoteric (objective) reality are one and the same, though operated on in different ways and observed from different points of view.
Question: where do we go from here?