Models for Change

Last week I talked about how Crowley used one letter to change the entire focus of a word, changing “magic” into “magick”, separating entertainment from the sacred. This week I want to talk about other ways in which you can create change in your life.

Over time, I’ve noticed two general frameworks that return again and again: the energy model and the psychological model. They’re not opponents but complementary dialects describing the same terrain. One speaks through sensation and symbol, the other through cognition and pattern.

The Energy Model

This is the old path, the one that most readily conjures the word magick. You take an athame-a ritual knife-and through rhythm, breath, and focus, you gather energy until it answers your will. Many who practice this say the proof is in the feeling: a low hum in the air, a tightening pause just before the intent is released. Here, the world itself is responsive, stirred by deliberate force and guided desire. Magick becomes a craft of motion and current.

The Psychological Model

This one wears subtler clothes: It borrows from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mindfulness, depth psychology, and neuroscience-the disciplines that chart how minds change themselves. These practices use various therapy systems as a kind of code, translating behavior into intention and repetition into transformation. It’s not a matter of channeling unseen energy, but reorienting thought and attention until the desired outcome becomes natural. The psychological practitioner doesn’t summon power from the sky, but excavates it from within. I have found both approaches effective, though never in isolation, and never in all of their elements. The energy model, without inner discipline, risks drifting into fantasy; the psychological model, without an embodied practice, can lose its vitality, collapsing into dry theory.

Toward Integration

My long-term goal is to weave them together. I want a magick that sets ablaze the senses *and* retrains the mind-a system that treats imagination as a muscle and evidence as its mirror. True magick resides within the meeting place between sensed forces and understandable mechanisms.