here is how to cast a spell. (quick writeup of a talk i gave at DunCon)
Short Version
1. have an intention for change.
2. take a symbolic action representing the change.
that's it. that's all you need. but also, if you want to do it more:
Long Version
Prep
1. get your guts/intuition/S1/unconscious in touch with your intention somehow, and work through any tangles you find.
2. choose a symbolic action representing (and ideally participating in) the change you want, and design your spell around that. to find the right action, try this thought experiment: one day you wake up, and find you're living in the future where you've completely succeeded at getting the thing you want. you stretch and open your eyes. what's the very first thing that tips you off that something's different?
3. when it's time, lay out your materials and do any other physical/logistical prep work.
The Spell Itself
4. dedicate a sacred space (aka "cast a circle"). for example, carry incense around the space three times, or pour a circle of oats, or just move stuff out of the way. maybe ask something that vibes with protection and/or sacredness for you to help (such as a nearby river, or the memory of your grandfather).
5. raise energy. this means, do something that requires effort and focus and that invites your unconscious to the party while getting it engaged with the materials of your spell. maybe chant something relevant, or hold your hands over the magic herbs while pretending you can pour your intention into them. this is not the symbolic action; it just prepares you for the symbolic action.
6. release energy (that is, cast the spell). take the symbolic action you've planned. cut the string, drink the potion, burn the paper, whatever.
Conclude
7. seal the spell. do something that means "i'm now on the other side, in the post-spell world". the wiccans say "so mote it be". the christians say "amen". if your spell involved a jar, you could literally seal it with wax. i once did a spell involving a pair of earrings, which i sealed by putting the earrings on.
8. ground. "return excess energy to the earth." do something that gradually brings you back to a more ordinary state of mind. maybe imagine roots reaching down from your body deep into the earth and pretend you can equalize with the ground by sending your breath down and up those roots. or shake yourself like a wet dog. or eat a piece of cake.
9. release the space. thank whatever helped you cast the circle, then take an action that's the reverse of whatever you did to dedicate the space. walk the circle backward, or put all the furniture back.
Reinforce
10. choose at least one concrete action to take in line with your intention, and take that action. bonus points if it's a repeated action, like "every sunday i'll call my mom"
now, obviously 10 is the physical mechanism by which a change might happen in the physical world. but i recommend trying to answer for yourself, "how could including 1-9 possibly be superior in some way to jumping straight to 10?"
Hypnotic Framing
one more model of spellcasting: a spell is a self-hypnosis script.
standard hypnosis has 6 parts:
1. pre-talk
2. an induction
3. a deepener (sometimes)
4. a suggestion(s) (pre- or post-hypnotic)
5. an awakener
6. following a post-hypnotic suggestion if one was given
In the Long Version above,
1-3 is pre-talk,
4 is an induction
5 is a deepener
6 and 7 are a post-hypnotic suggestion
8 and 9 are awakeners
10 is following the post-hypnotic suggestion.
i'm not exactly up for "connecting the dots" as i conceptualize that, but i'm happy to say whatever words happen to come to me after i finish typing this sentence.
[eta: the following paragraph is superfluous. feel free to skip it.]
i was kinda trying to write a novel, and over the years i've read a buncha books on how to do that, but i realized i'd been reading books with an extremely intellectual/design-based/outlining perspective on novel writing, so i thought i should read at least one book that was not like that. i read /from where you dream/ by Robert Butler. his thesis is that good writing comes "from the same place as dreams", as in the hallucination things you have when you're asleep. and he goes on about this for the length of a quite excellent book. i liked what he said enough that i thought i'd try his approach for a week, and i liked that enough that i decided to devote myself to it for a month. during the course of that month, i found myself taking Robert Butler a lot more literally than i think he intended; i decided that if i was really going to write "from where i dream", then why on earth was i trying to do all the work while i was awake? if the idea is to let dreaminess into waking life or something, then perhaps consciousness should try collaborating with dreaminess while i'm actually asleep. so i started to learn lucid dreaming.
it turns out that Stephen LaBerge, the head honcho of contemporary western lucid dreaming research, prescribes a curriculum that looks a hell of a lot like my naturalism curriculum, and it starts with prospective memory training—or what you probably think of as "noticing". on the first day, notice whenever you see an animal. on the second day, notice whenever you write anything down. etc. and each time you notice your target, that's your cue to perform a "state check"—a test of whether you're awake or dreaming. there's an important psychological component to state checks, but my favorite physical action for state checks is to pinch my nose and try to breathe. (in dreams, i can breathe just fine with my nose and mouth closed off.) once you're pretty good at choosing to learn to notice an arbitrary target experience category like "flowers" or whatever, then you can look through your dream journal for common dream signs (for me these include flying, or having long hair, or tornados), and then when you set the intention to state check in response to encountering a dream sign, you stand a chance of actually doing it.
there are a whole buncha other techniques and strategies that can help with lucid dreaming, but this seems to be far and away the most popular and effective. (the second most popular and effective is probably "imagining in great detail what it is like to become lucid in a dream", which also sounds like my naturalism stuff.)
why do our curricula have this in common? i think it's because in lucid dreaming, it's pretty obvious that you can't count on your intellect/system 2/deliberate reasoning/etc. to be online while you're asleep, so whatever method of "planning" or "intending" you rely on is going to have to operate by some other route. in LeBerge's field, the reason for this is transparent: you're asleep when the critical moments arise. you have to be so good at state checks that you can literally do them in your sleep.
although my naturalism stuff targets (mostly cognitive) behaviors in waking life rather than in dreams, it sort of says "look, if you really want to know something, don't try to know it with your waking mind. learn it with your sleeping mind, and then it'll be in you for real. it'll be part of you, you won't just be holding abstract concepts at a distance and thinking about them. if you wanna change how you see the world you'll have to go way deeper than the intellect. you'll have to be able to notice the critical moment while you're asleep and then in that moment wake yourself up enough to do something about it."
so i, too, tell people that if they can perform a simple action each time they smell something, they're already most of the way done.
1
>attempt to help people with something like 'generating the true hypotheses' rather than 'evaluating the hypotheses that I already have'. Or 'how to do ontological updates well and on-purpose'.
To me this seems like an accurate and beautifully succinct description.
1How to build a stockpile of testosterone for HRT, as a buffer in case of emergency:
- Get your provider to prescribe "single use" vials and make sure they're marking them as "single use" in their prescription notes. These usually contain 200mg, which for most people is two doses or more. By design, you're meant to throw away the leftovers when you don't use all 200mg in a single dose, and that is what pharmacies and insurance companies expect you to do.
- Use each vial more than once, just make sure you alcohol swab the top.
- Organize your vials by expiration date. This will not necessarily line up with the order in which you receive the vials, so you have to actually check. Use vials with earlier expiration dates first.
This will result in access to testosterone at twice the rate you use it, and you'll be able to build up at least a bit of a buffer.
I'm not telling anybody to do this. Just that if I were scared of losing access to HRT, this is what I'd do.
Edit to add: A friend suggested a couple more details to keep in mind. The "single use" vials lack a bacteriostatic additive like benzyl alcohol, so they pose a greater risk of infection. Extra important to be meticulous about sterilization! Also, sterile syringe filters can be used to save a cored or otherwise problematic vial—either filtering entirely to a new container, or just filtering when drawing.
Duncan has just replied on Facebook to my request for descriptions of what each person on his list does. He says it's fine to copy his reply over here.
*
Julia Galef: something like, a science reporter whose hobby side project is doing science reporting for middle schoolers, and it’s in fact good and engaging and not stupid and boring. Wholesomeness, clarity, a tendency to correctly predict which parts of the explanation will break down for the audience and a corresponding slow and careful focus on those sections. Not unrelatedly: a sort of statesmanlike, reliable diplomacy; genuinely civilized debate; not the sort of person who will ever ever ever contribute to a discussion going off the rails. Grounding, stabilizing, sane-itizing.
Anna Salamon: something like how modern AI art programs can take a verbal prompt and spit out endless variations of image, and can take an image and spit out endless variations of interpretation and description. An ability to do co-Focusing, to find matches for felt senses, to find MISmatches between a felt sense and the preexisting model, and zero in on the delta, and rapidly put words to the delta, ad infinitum. An ability to make the proposition “some things just can’t be put into words” feel much less likely to be true.
Rob Bensinger: something like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. An ability to continuously produce relevant related information, an ability to maintain equanimity, an often-refreshing decoupling (in the decoupling vs. contextualizing sense). Someone who is unusually able to productively set aside human baggage and discuss things in depth, with mild manner, despite them perhaps being heavy or dangerous or deeply confusing.
Scott Garrabrant: something like an ability to externalize subtle and deep introspection, and to track the impacts of various pressures on his own cognition, and to hazard sound guesses as to the impacts of various pressures on the cognition of others. Fittingly: much closer to being a lens that can see itself than most people, and as a benefit, sometimes being able to serve as a mirror for other lenses to kind-of-sort-of see themselves.
Vaniver: something like an ability to synthesize realpolitik and the real world with the ivory tower; unusually capable of both recognizing *which* swathes of unfortunately-messy reality are relevant, and of keeping the conversation tethered to those swathes. “Would survive in the Game of Thrones universe without necessarily having to resort to evil” is kind of opaque, as a gesture toward why-Vaniver-is-a-good-communicator, but it fits the felt sense. Another way to say this is perhaps “comes to the table with the same sort of savvy that a veteran factory-floor engineer brings to a design discussion.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky: something like an ability to start from first principles and actually run the simulation forward, reliably and without skips and hallucinations and glossings-over, seeing what would happen rather than discovering that what you previously expected to happen of-course happens. Probably relatedly, the ability to *not* have his thinking visibly swayed by the hootings of the other monkeys; to neither cringe in fear nor seek applause.
Logan Strohl: something like the ability to cast “detect fuckery” and then also *say aloud* the results of the spell without getting torn to pieces by the other monkeys. A high sensitivity to things-being-askew coupled with an ability to express a) what the being-skewed feels like, in terms that allow others to recognize it, and b) hypotheses about what is causing the skewed-ness that are right or very close to right a shocking percentage of the time. Sort of like the love-child of the Anna-description and the Scott-description. Someone who speaks language as a second language, with both the drawbacks and the benefits that this provides (and it’s the benefits I’m pointing at, as valuable).
Oliver Habryka: something like courage and something like candor (I don’t mean to belittle; maybe it just IS those things but I can’t see inside his head so all I can speak to is what they resemble from the outside). Unwilling to let a falsehood pass, unafraid to voice a disagreement. The sort of person who, if he’s just “in the room,” I can trust that *I* have not accidentally said something false, because he will beep more reliably than almost anyone I know. Someone who actually flies the flag of truth, higher than any other flags (this is true of many of the people on this list but it’s conspicuously *representative* of Oliver’s particular virtue even moreso than the rest).
Kelsey Piper: something like the ability to bridge gaps, the ability to translate, the ability to host powwows, the ability to make-legible to one another *very* different views and cultures. Perhaps the best translator on the list. Able to extract the shape of the whole thought-tree from the mind of Person A, and to skillfully plant, water, grow, and trim the resulting thought-tree in the mind of Person B such that they are, in all the important ways, the *same* thought-tree, despite the two mental environments being very very different.
Nate Soares: something like the ability to track, and explicate, all of the uncertainties, and the uncertainties around those uncertainties, and the uncertainties around those as well; to make crisp and workable-with all of the possible flaws in a stack of conjecture. Not unrelatedly, the ability to track (and make trackable, for others, at least sometimes) all of the branches of dependency and possibility in a complex chain of thoughts; to note that A depends on B and C, and B depends on D, E, and F while C depends on D (also), G, H, and I, and that depending on the conclusion re: A something will *change* about J which informs both H and E.
Eric Rogstad: something like relentless good faith, the ability to be “on the side” of all parties in a meaningful and true sense, even if those parties are themselves opposed. Curious, and somehow *safe* in his curiosity; not someone whose curiosity comes with risk; not someone whose curiosity you will regret indulging (which is unfortunately not always the case!). In similar fashion: genuinely good-willed and good-natured; where someone like Julia or Kelsey might be low-conflict because Actually Diplomatic and someone like Scott or Logan might be low-conflict because Actually Has No Horse In This Race, Eric seems (to me) to embody and project something more like actual universal compassion, with correspondingly positive effects on discourse.
Spencer Greenberg: something like clean, something like straightforward, something like matter-of-fact. Stays firmly within the boundaries of his competence, keeps the ground under him, is cautious and reserved in his claims, stretching them only as far as observation will permit. Avoids trash fires and demon threads, possibly with a corresponding sacrifice in *which* topics he’s able to publicly discuss (mild contrast to my depiction of Rob above), but with the result that the Spencer-garden is well-kept and flourishing and tranquil and engaging. A Japanese tea garden of discourse.
Dan Keys: something like a Logan-esque detect fuckery, except instead of being focused on the human experience it’s focused on the interaction between information and summary. Reliably notes “I don’t think that Y conclusion is actually supported by X data.” In fact cares about the record, in fact cares about the evidence. An actual logician, an actual scientist. Trustworthy, by virtue of having filters that strike down 99 claims out of 100 and only allow the actually-deserving ones through.
i'm sorry not to be engaging with the content of the post here; hopefully others have that covered. but i just wanna say, man this is so well written! at the sentence and paragraph level especially, i find it inspiring. it makes me wanna write more like i'm drunk and dgaf, though i doubt that exact thing would actually suffice to allow me to hit a similar stylistic target.
(the rest of this comment is gonna be largely for me and my own development, but maybe you'll like reading it anyway.)
i think you do a bunch of stuff that current me is too chicken to try. skimming quickly through, here are a few phrases that stand out as "I'm too chicken for that":
"There’s no data for Antarctica because all the people there are penguins."
"To make olive oil, you grind some olives and press them."
"Lots of trials where vegetable oils look great were also excluded."
the middle quote strikes me as a paradigmatic example of what happens when you take all the most standard writing advice i know of and apply it without tripping over your own damn feet. "To make olive oil, you grind some olives and press them." even though i love reading it, when i imagine writing it, i feel so scared of everything i'm leaving out, as though the complexities of the world will haunt me for as long as that sentence is available to other people's eyes. "what about removing the pits? what about combining the paste with water? what about how maybe there are other methods of making olive oil that i don't know about? when i made buckwheat flour, i didn't even have to do the 'press' part, but it still took me hours; am i really gonna compress something like that into six words?"
why can't i write "all the people there are penguins"? because there are in fact a few humans in antarctica, and also even if we exclude the humans there are at minimum whatever people the penguins eat, so on multiple counts it's literally false. but clearly i prefer the world where you write "because all the people are penguins", and i'm pretty darn sure i would also like to be able to write "all the people are penguins".
why can't i write "trials where vegetable oils look great"? for almost the same reason as the penguins thing: i have some kind of stick up my butt about excessive precision and literality. "there's no such thing as something that looks great, without some kind of perspective or reference from from which or for which it looks great."
seems like i have an interesting internal disagreement that hews close to the foundations of my beliefs about good writing. thanks for helping me pinpoint it. also, having examined these particular examples, i'm seriously wondering whether being drunk really would be a tremendous improvement for me along this axis.
Ah, so would I! I think I never actually got to see more info on the outcome. I don't know whether or not anything was actually compiled. Once it was in Leverage's hands, I guess I lost track of it somehow, but I don't remember why.
btw, although i've read a lot of witchy books at this point, this specific framework is most heavily influenced by the book "Spellcrafting" by Arin Murphy-Hiscock.