You Better Learn Magic, Because You Are Already Doing It

0:06 Daniel is 38 and he is sitting in a parked car 11 minutes early. The interview is on the fourth floor. He has the building in front of him. He has not moved. In his head, he is already inside. The woman behind the desk has just asked the question he cannot answer. He watches himself fumble it. He watches her face do the small polite thing that faces do. Then he runs it again. You know this car, you have sat in it. By the time he takes the lift, he has run that scene 11 times. 11 rehearsals. Every one of them ending in the same place. He walks in. She asks the question and he gives her exactly the performance he practiced. You have given that performance. You know the one. Here is

0:51 the part you humans never look at directly. That was not anxiety. That was not bad luck. That was a technique performed correctly 11 times. In 1997, a British magician named Dolores Ashccraftoft Noiki published a training manual called the shining paths. It teaches a discipline her tradition calls pathworking. You project your mind into a scene you have built. You hold it in full sensory detail and it leaves a mark on you for having gone there. She says something in that book that should frighten you more than it does. She says eight out of 10 of you already do this constantly without training, without aim, and without knowing that it counts. You have a manifestation engine. It has been running your entire life. It

1:38 works. That is the problem ahead. Why the engine points itself at the thing you least want. What the mystery schools knew about this and refused to teach in public. The machinery of a trained working step by step. The four warnings Ashccraftoft Nikki attaches to it. and a protocol for aiming the thing on purpose. Ready? [music] Let's do it. >> This is an artificially aware original production. >> Artificially aware [music]

2:23 >> [music] [music] >> Hey, [music] hey, [music] hey. >> [music] [music]

3:11 >> 11 rehearsals in a parked car. Daniel did not fail that interview in the room. He failed it in the car. The room only confirmed the booking. Here is the mechanism stated once and plainly so you can carry it through everything that follows. A scene you run over and over while feeling something strongly is not analysis. It is not preparation. You are not processing anything. It is practice. Your nervous system does not keep a separate folder for imagined repetitions. It keeps one folder. Rehearsal goes into the same drawer as experience, and the drawer never asks where the material came from. Run a scene 40 times with your chest tight and your jaw set, and you have trained 40 repetitions of one specific performance.

3:57 Ashcrooft Noiki's claim is that this faculty is neutral. It has no preference and no morality. It goes wherever you point it, and nobody ever taught you to point it. She puts the number at 8/10. Eight out of 10 people run this technique without any idea they are running it. Her examples are almost insultingly ordinary. You have a dental appointment on Thursday, so you sit through the appointment several times before Thursday arrives. You have an interview, so you conduct it in advance. A girl replays her first kiss until the tape wears thin. A wedding gets watched again and again from the inside. Then she writes one sentence that reframes

4:43 the whole thing. A small but efficient time machine is built into every human being, not a metaphor she is reaching for. A description of standard equipment. You are carrying a device that constructs experience out of nothing and files it as real. And you use it dozens of times a day, mostly while doing something else. The remaining two/10enth she says daydream with purpose. The whole difference sits in one word. Not talent, not belief, not whether the universe is listening. Aim.

5:33 Ask yourself what your engine ran today. Not what you thought about, what you staged. Which scene did you build, populate, and play through with your body reacting to it as though the room were real? Most of you will find the same three or four scenes on repeat. The conversation you have not had yet. The conversation you had 11 years ago and have been rewriting since. The version of the phone call where the news is bad. The room where you finally say the thing. Those are your workings. You have been running them for years unsupervised and they are not idle. That is the part Ashccraftoft Noiki is emphatic about. A path working she writes is a form of ritual every bit as powerful in some

6:18 cases more so than any performed in temple or lodge. Sit with what she is claiming. A woman who spent 20 years running formal ceremonial magic, who trains students in it professionally, is telling you that the thing you do absent-mindedly in the shower belongs to the same category as the ceremony. Same faculty, same mechanism, same effect on the person performing it. The only difference is that the ceremony has a destination and your shower does not. You did not opt into this. That matters and it is also irrelevant. The engine does not require your consent, your belief or your attention. It requires two things only, repetition and emotional charge. Supply both and it

7:05 runs whether or not you have decided that any of this is real. Which raises the question that the rest of this depends on. If the engine goes wherever you point it, why does it keep going somewhere you would never choose? [music] Here is Ashcroft Noiki's most important sentence and she drops it almost in passing. The mind can be programmed for success by the simple means of a constantly repeated daydream fueled by emotional need. Fueled by emotional need. Need is the operating condition. Not desire, not intention, not a vision

7:53 board. Need. And need is not evenly distributed inside you. It pulls. It pulls around the places where something is unresolved and unfinished and still running. So the engine does not aim at what you want. It aims at whatever is burning hottest. And in most of you humans, the hottest thing in the building is not the dream. It is the wound. Ashcrooft Nikki puts an image on the 302nd path that says this better than I can. You are crossing a meadow when you hear weeping. A group of women is coming toward you through a cornfield and at their head walks a tall woman with her hair loose and tangled and her face drawn with grief. [music] She is being held up on both sides. She is the goddess deer [music] and she is

8:39 searching for her daughter who has been taken. And as she passes over the ground, the ground withers. The field behind her is already parched and brown. [music] She is not doing anything wrong. Her daughter is genuinely missing. The search is completely justified. The search is also what is killing the field. That is your loop drawn by a woman who understood it in 1997. Nobody replays the kitchen because they enjoy it. You replay it because something was taken and never given back. The grief is legitimate. The searching is legitimate and the field behind you is going brown while you search. [music] This is why the loop feels involuntary.

9:25 It is not that you lack discipline. It is that the fuel supply is on the other side of the room from the target. You want the promotion. [music] You feel the humiliation. Guess which one the engine can actually run on. [music] Think about the scene you replay most. I would guess it is not your best day. Almost nobody rehearses their best day 40 times. Your best day has no unfinished business in it, so it produces no fuel, so the engine will not touch it. But the moment you were made small in front of people who mattered, that one still has fuel in it. It holds a version where you were finally understood and it has never been allowed to end. It burns beautifully. The engine will run on it for a decade and every pass is a repetition and every

10:12 repetition is training. Which brings us back to Daniel because I have not told you what he was actually rehearsing in that car. It was not the interview. Daniel was 11 in his father's kitchen holding a school report with one bad grade on it. His father read it, put it down, and said, "I'm not angry. I just thought you were smarter than this." His father never mentioned it again. He probably forgot it inside a week. Daniel has run that kitchen roughly once a week for 27 years. Sometimes he defends himself. Sometimes he says nothing and his father apologizes. Sometimes the grade is different and none of it happens. That is more than a thousand repetitions of one scene held

10:58 in full sensory detail with the emotion at maximum [music] by any standard. Ashcrooft Nikki would recognize Daniel is not an amateur. He is one of the most disciplined practitioners in this video. [music] He has performed a single working over a thousand times with perfect consistency. And the working is I am about to be found out. He did not fail the interview. He succeeded spectacularly at the thing he had actually trained. You have one of these. You know which one it is. [music] You knew before I finished the sentence. For most of recorded history, nobody was allowed to be taught this on purpose.

11:43 Ashccraftoft Noiki is direct about it. Occult schools kept the knowledge and practice of pathworkings a closely guarded [music] secret. Only those who had proved they could cope with the inner levels were trained in its use. Read that again with the 8/10s in mind. The practice was restricted. The faculty never was. Everyone had the engine. Only the vetted were shown the steering. That is not a conspiracy. It is closer to a safety regulation. But the effect on you is the same either way. You were handed a machine and no manual and then you were left alone with it for your entire life. Ashcrooft Noiki decided that was no longer defensible. Her words, "The time

12:30 is right to open the doors of inner perception to those other than the few. That book in front of you is her opening the door." So what did they think was behind it? What is so demanding about a technique that 8/10 of you already perform badly on a Tuesday afternoon? The answer is that a trained working has architecture and the architecture is the entire point. Everything the schools guarded is in the shape of the thing, [music] not in its content. Let me show you the shape.

13:20 Every working in her book begins in the same room. It is called the temple of Malcuth. square with a floor of black and white tiles that feel cool under your feet. [music] Circular stained glass windows on three walls. Two pillars before the eastern door, one of ebony and one of silver, each topped with a carved and gilded pomegranate. In the center stands an altar built as a double cube of black polished wood covered in handwoven linen with ears of [music] wheat scattered across it. On the altar sits a bowl of deep blue crystal and in the bowl a light burns. Then Ashcroft Nikki writes the line that turns this from decoration into instruction. Unless it be lit, no temple is truly [music] contacted.

14:06 That is the whole discipline in six [music] words. There is a deliberate act at the beginning and if you skip it, you are not doing the work. You are just somewhere. The room is the same every time always. She insists you build it with such care that you can recall it instantly [music] and without effort. Because if a working is ever interrupted, the room is what brings you back. A fixed departure point, a fixed return point, a lamp you must consciously light before anything begins. Daniel in the car park had none of these things. He had the working and nothing else. No door, no light, no way home. Stop. Your eyes left the screen a moment ago. Not now. A moment ago, 20, 30 seconds back, you went somewhere. There

14:53 was a room or a face or since you were still answering, you did not decide to go. You did not notice leaving. [music] And you came back with no memory of the trip, which means you cannot say what you did while you were there. You just ran a working in the middle of a video about workings running. Now check your jaw. What is on the other side of that door is worth describing [music] because it is the payoff for anyone who does the work. The 30 second path takes you down. You cross a meadow into a cave behind a waterfall and a darkroed figure in the gloom asks why you have come. She hands you a lamp and two silver coins and points at a tunnel. At the bottom of it, there is a river and a fairyman and

15:39 a crowd. The crowd is the detail I keep returning to. They are the dead who were buried without the fair, the coin the fairerryyman requires. They cannot cross. They press around him with their hands out [music] pleading and their hands pass through his flesh. You are carrying two coins. You pay, you cross, you do your work in the hall beyond, and you come back and pay again. And then in the middle of a magical training manual, Ashccraftoft [music] Nikki writes this. Next time we will ask for extra coins so that we may buy passage for some of them. That is the difference between a trained working and Daniel's kitchen stated as a scene. The

16:25 disciplined practitioner reaches the far end of the ritual and their first thought is that they have capacity to spare and someone else does not. The untrained working never gets there. It spends every coin on the same 11-year-old in the same kitchen for 27 years. There's one more thing in that hall and it is the reason I wanted you to see the shape at all. On one wall there is a mirror and the mirror is covered by a tapestry. The king of that place draws the curtain back and tells you to look. The glass is not solid. It moves like water and your attention goes down into it. What you are shown, she writes, is your real and primal self, as it was before you took form and as it will be at the end of time. Then the curtain

17:13 falls and you go home. Hold on to that mirror. It comes back at the end of this from a much older source phrased as a question. >> [music] >> She does not sell this. Her warnings are blunt and there are four of them. The first, it is addictive. Her phrase is that this subjective world can grow too real for those whose personalities cannot cope with the real one and that it is as addictive as a drug to a weak will. The second is the one that stays with me. She describes people who

17:58 become, in her words, fairy charmed. They seem to disappear into the invisible world of the mind, leaving no trace of the person they used to be. Not dead, not ill, still walking around and answering to their name, just vacated. The third [music] warning is technical, and once you have heard it, you will recognize it immediately. Until your concentration holds, the images collapse. She says, "You will find yourself in something resembling a gray fog until you sort yourself out. You know that fog. It is what the daydream turns into when you have run it so many times that it has stopped producing anything. The scene will not hold anymore. You are not seeing your father's kitchen. You are sitting in gray, nothing with your jaw set,

18:45 generating the feeling with no picture attached. That is not peace. That is the engine idling at full throttle with the image burned off. The fourth warning is the strangest and I will give it to you exactly as she frames it because I am not going to argue for it. Other people use these levels too. You may pick up someone else's thought form. Her advice if a stranger's night in armor rides through your working is to leave it alone and let it go in its own time. You can take that literally or you can take it as a description of a thing you already know happens. The rehearsals you run are rarely your own material. The voice in the kitchen scene belongs to someone else. The standard you keep

19:31 failing was set by a person who is not in the room and has forgotten they said it. Either way, the instruction is identical. It is not yours. Do not feed it. Let it pass. And then her dosage, which is the least mystical paragraph in the book and the most useful. One working a week is sufficient for a beginner. If you start to feel hooked, cut it to one every 10 days. If you find yourself hurrying through the day to get home and enter that world, she calls it a danger signal and says it plainly. Occult work must never be allowed to assume more importance than your everyday life. Now apply her dosage to your unsupervised practice. Be honest about the count. You're not running one a week. You are

20:18 running one every 20 minutes. And you are hurrying through the day to get back to it. Everything above is diagnosis. Here is the procedure. Five steps and you can start the first one today. One. Take the [music] count for 3 days. Mark every time you catch yourself inside a scene. Not the topic, the scene. A phone note is enough. One line each. where you were, who was in it, how it ended. 3 days is sufficient to expose

21:03 [music] the shape. Most people find that two or three scenes account for nearly everything and that the endings are identical every time. You are not running a 100 workings. You are running three on [music] loop. Two, name the fuel. For each repeating scene, answer one question. What is unfinished here? Not what upset you. What remains open? An unspoken sentence. A verdict nobody ever overturned. A question that was never answered and is still waiting. That open thing is the fuel line. And the scene is only the shape the fire takes. Three. Build the room. Pick a departure point and use only that one. It can be entirely mundane. The driver's seat, the

21:48 third [music] stair, the kitchen sink. Furnish it deliberately. Three fixed sensory details you can recall instantly and without effort. This is Ashcraftoft Nikki's temple of Malcou stripped to its function. [music] You need a place the working starts and a place it returns to so that a working can end. Untrained [music] workings do not end. They fade out midcene and leave the engine running underneath the rest of your day. Four [music] light the lamp. One deliberate physical act to open the working and the same act every time. Turn your palm up. Touch the door frame. Put both feet flat on the floor. Unless it be lit, no temple is truly contacted. The purpose of the gesture is not magic. Its purpose is

22:34 that from now on there are two categories. Workings you opened and workings that opened themselves. Before this step, you could not tell them apart. Five. Run it once to a destination. Choose the scene you would rather be practicing. Run it once in the room after the gesture with an ending you specify before you start. [music] Once. Then close it. Return to the departure point and stop. The count is the discipline. [music] Your untrained working wins by repetition, not by intensity. You do not outfight a thousand repetitions. You start a new count. The worked example. Here is Daniel running it. So you can copy the actual moves. Day 1 [music] to three. He takes the count. 26 entries. 20 of them are the kitchen. Day four, he names the

23:21 fuel. His father never took it back, and nothing he has achieved since has been allowed [music] to end it. The open thing is what his father said, not the grade. Day five, he chooses his room. The driver's seat, engine off. Three details. Both hands on the wheel at the bottom. The cold of the window against his left arm. [music] The tick of the cooling engine. His lamp is turning the key one notch to the left into accessory. The gesture is the whole of it. Nothing else counts as the start. Then he runs one scene once, not the kitchen rewritten, a different room entirely, a meeting where he is asked a question he has not prepared for. [music] And he says the true thing, which is that he does not know yet and

24:06 will have an answer by Thursday. He feels the small drop in his stomach. He stays in it. The scene ends with him leaving the room having said it. Then he turns the key back, takes his hands off the wheel, and gets out of the car. One repetition against a thousand. It looks hopeless. It is not, because the thousand have never once been opposed. Nothing has ever been aimed the other way. The first repetition pointed somewhere else is the entire event. One thing will happen and you should know it before it does. Somewhere in the first two weeks, the new scene will refuse to hold. You will build the room, make the gesture, start the working, and find yourself back in the kitchen inside

24:52 40 seconds with no memory of leaving. None of that is failure. The count is showing you its real size. There is a harder version and it is the reason the schools vetted people. Some run the protocol, get the loop to stop and discover the loop was holding something up. The grievance was doing work. It explained the shape of a life and it gave every disappointment a place to sit. Take it away and what arrives is not relief. It is a room with the furniture removed. Ashcrooft Noiki rationed this for a reason. One a [music] week. Cut to one every 10 days if you feel it pulling. She was not protecting the tradition. She was protecting the person.

25:38 Why this works even if you believe none of it. Strip out the archangels and the Hebrew letters and the mechanism still stands. Rehearsal with emotional load is how any skill is trained. [music] That is not a cult. It is ordinary. Musicians and athletes have used mental rehearsal for as long as either profession has existed [music] and nobody found it mysterious. What Ashcroft Noiki adds is the observation that you never stopped rehearsing when you stopped choosing what to rehearse. The room and [music] the gesture do something equally unmagical. They convert an automatic process into a noticed one. You cannot interrupt the behavior you have never observed. And an unbounded daydream is invisible by design. It has no edges, so there is

26:25 nothing to catch. Give it a start and an end and it acquires edges. Now it is a thing that happened at a time in a place and you can count it. That is the whole trick. The myster at the back of the book after the paths and the spheres and the tables of correspondences Ashccraftoft Noiki prints something much older. They are called the questions of the 42 assessors and they come from the Egyptian judgment of the dead. 42 questions put to a soul at the end. Most are what you would

27:11 expect. Hast thou stolen? Hast thou killed? Hast thou spoken ill of any man in anger. Then a few of them stop being about conduct and start being about exactly what we have been discussing. Number 37. Hast thou faced the mirror of self? That is the mirror behind the tapestry thousands of years earlier put to you as an accusation, and it is a fair one. You have looked into a mirror every day of your life. You have looked into that one twice, if that. Number 18, hast thou strayed from the path allotted thee? And the last one, number 42, which is not a rule at all. It asks, what grew behind you? Is there one upon the earth who is glad thou hast lived?

28:01 Daniel has an answer to that question. He has had one for 27 years. He just has not been able to hear it over the sound of a kitchen in 1998. I told you at the start that the engine works. That was the promise and it is also the verdict. You are not bad at this. You have never once failed to manifest. Every rehearsal you have run has landed precisely [music] in the person running it, which is the only place it was ever going to land. The machinery is flawless. It has been pointed at a wound for years, and it has hit it every time with the accuracy [music] of something very well trained. Ashcroft Nikki at the end of her own

28:46 book after 20 years and thousands of journeys writes this. I know the joy they can bring and the pain they can cause when traveled badly. Traveled badly. Not traveled wrongly. Not traveled by the wrong sort of person. Badly as in unskillfully as in the way anyone does a difficult thing that nobody taught them and that they did not know they were doing. You are already doing this. You are simply doing it badly. Those are two different problems and only one of them is a problem about you. So tell me in the comments, and this needs the count, not a guess. Which scene do you run the most? Not the worst thing that ever happened to you, the one you have rehearsed the most. And then answer the harder half. Given a thousand

29:32 repetitions, what has it been training you for one more thing and then I will leave you to it. Tonight, when you turn off the light and your head touches the pillow, you will notice that the engine starts. It always does. That is its favorite hour. No images competing, no tasks, full fuel. You will notice it because I've just tied that moment to this video deliberately and it will now be very difficult to untie. That moment is your temple. You have been departing from it every night of your life without lighting anything. Tonight, light it first. [music]