Re: Yvonne--"I want to learn magic."

There are endless ways to learn magic. For example, for five or ten minutes each day (Every six months add another ten minutes to the practice) recall, reconstruct, and imagine something you have experienced. Eat breakfast again or play back a song in your mind or repeat a conversation. Work through everything you experience on a daily basis. During each practice, focus for a minute on just one perception--sight, sound, taste, smell, or touch. There are for example at least thirty different ways you use your lungs to breathe--when you eat compared to when you talk; when you read compared to when you walk. Observe every aspect. Recreate each sensation and action through imagination. Pursue equally all other bodily sensations. Learn to perceive without thoughts intervening.

And feeling--learn to feel without judgments or beliefs arising. Follow a feeling as if it is a stream in a dream and you don't where it is winding.

And thoughts too--hold one thought in your mind like a sentence you slowly repeat again and again observing how it affects your body and feelings and jogs your memory.Treat thoughts like light that illuminate the dark dispelling confusion and conflict. Make them laser sharp. And anything of the "spirit"--any deeper intuition or realization: replay it; recreate it.

Imagine you are seeing the world for the first time so that wonder is constantly by your side: at the edge of each sensory perception are infinite possibilities and that your life--what you perceive, feel, and think--is an artistic creation, that in each moment you are writing, editing, and revising your life script. Life and magic are both performing arts--you must fully internalize the part you choose to play if you wish to project who you are on the physical, astral, mental, and spiritual planes.

The difference between magic and New Age thinking is that you are not switching software from negative to positive thinking. You are upgrading your hardware so you can run programs this age of humanity knows nothing about. Unlike the New Age with its obsession with wish fulfillment, learn to master both light and dark so that life itself in all aspects is free to shine through your heart.

All magical methods--evocation, astral projection, mental wandering, Kabbalah, ritual, bardic, etc. are built on this foundation and only refine and apply what I have described.

End of Preface to The Little Book of Magic.