The biggest issue I see normally when it comes to manipulating our individual realities is belief. I ask you, what is belief? What is the true feeling and/or emotion felt when you believe in something? Ask yourself a question that you know for a fact you believe in, or something that can not be doubted. Interestingly enough, I feel nothing.
Not having to take the time to think about doubt while practicing whatever it is you are practicing is essential. Believe what it is that you want to accomplish as cliche as it may sound.
However reality is reality. Magic is not changing our fate. It's more like science and faith mixed together. Many of the things we thought were "magic" like herbs and stones have scientific evidence why they work. Like st johns wort and garlic being healing herbs because they bulster the immune system and yarrow helps with blood flow. Magic is called magic because of the mystery that makes many on this site sometimes appear like outsiders to common folk. But once others disect our practices and rationalize it, it becomes science. Things are what they are and will never be what they're not. Also many before have studied fate and found it to be trivial maybe it seems like changing fate because we didn't understand our fate. The faith part comes in when we realize that for all our science we don't understand everything.
First as a child you didn't come out of the womb with a bible or a Torah or a magick wand or holy vestments. You didn't come out singing songs of adulation and praise or deep in meditation and prayer. Everything you know about religion you learned from a source already here. So we ask where did that source learn it from and where did that source learn it from. All the way back to first man and woman. Now they are the first man and woman where did they learn religion from? It wasn't from the animals cause we don't see fish going to church, or monkeys fasting for days on end. So where did first man get religion from?
To me there are only two possible answers 1. He got it from a source outside of himself a higher source or it was just old superstition that he cooked up himself and everybody that came after him caught on and believed what he said and it's gone on for ages. We know where science came from. Brilliant minds examined, tested, and theorized the world around them. They took notes on their findings and after ages of compiling those notes created laws ect about how things work. But where did religion come from? How do we study it? If we use the scientific method we have to have something to observe!
For most of us magick and religion are both very real and the reason we believe is because we have seen and experienced it first hand! Unless you all just blindly believe in any crazy thing!
Religion very "real"? I would doubt that! Magic is real, religion is a belief. Where did religion come from? It came from the fear of death, from the knowledge that we were mortal. Moses tried to explain it with the story of the first man and woman eating "from the tree of knowledge". Then the Bible "twisted" the story to be about sex! That the first man and woman were "ashamed to find that they were naked". Nonsense, they were ashamed because they had found out that it was a certainty that one day they would die. We are, probably,the only animal on Earth with that knowledge. And that's what religion is all about---fear!
I said "where religion comes from", not as it is now.Nevertheless, religion is a belief; not a reality. As I have said many times on this site, you may believe anything you wish. But a belief does not make it true! In any case, it depends on what you mean by religion; there are hundreds of them!
In modern times, it is not so much a fear of death; but a belief that there "must be something after death". That, somehow, we "live on". In my opinion there is life after death, but not as a "spirit", or re-incarnation into another Human. But that belief is the centre of most religions. In my veiw, Life is a continuing "cycle"; never ending until the planet itself is destroyed.
But, all that I have written is only my opinion.
We are not the only animals on this planet that have a knowledge of our eventual deaths. Every animal has a sense of self preservation to a certain extent. Survival instinct. However we are the only animals it seems with a concept of life after death and that is where I see the fear. But why? Fear of the unknown? Space is unknown yet we have sent man to the moon. Only problem is when we die people don't come back to tell us about it. Or do they? If there is no after life then I'm wasting my time studying spirit communication and psychic phenomenon ect ect. And we automatically reverted to Christian belief systems with Moses. But what about other religions! There are so many.
