High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row - Damien Echols 2018
The Magick of Visualization
Preliminaries
The most important tool we can use to accomplish high magick is our imagination. When magicians talk about visualization, that’s essentially what they’re talking about. People often remark that they’re not good at visualizing — I hear it all the time when I’m teaching classes in magick. Either people feel that visualization is totally out of reach or they think they’re horrible at it, and neither is the case. Just like doing magick, you’re visualizing all the time.
Every time you call up a childhood memory — say, something you and your best friend did in high school or your favorite Christmas morning — you’re visualizing. And every time you think about what you’re going to do in the future — what you want to make for dinner, your weekend plans, or that big trip you want to take some day — you’re visualizing, too. Any time you imagine something that isn’t happening right now in your small part of the physical world, you’re visualizing. And that’s the very essence of magick.
Visualization isn’t necessarily visual. Just because you can’t see something in detail doesn’t mean you aren’t visualizing it. For some people, visualization does involve sight, either with the mind’s eye or the physical eye, but visualization takes a lot of forms, with or without visual imagery. For many people, visualization involves a completely different sense altogether.
If you can remember the aroma of your grandmother’s perfume or the way that her house smelled when she baked a batch of fresh cookies, you’re engaging a form of visualization rooted in scent. And if you can recall your father’s voice when he called your name, you’re visualizing with sound (this is the basis for clairaudience). Other people visualize by means of intuition or a vague sense of simply knowing something. It’s what we’re talking about when we refer to having a “hunch” about something.
PRACTICE ” VISUALIZATION
This exercise isn’t so much about practicing visualization as it is understanding the ways in which your imagination manifests. This practice doesn’t take very long, and it’s a great way to warm up for the extensive visualizations you’ll be doing later. It will help to use a notebook or some other means of writing down the details for this practice, and it’s okay if some parts are difficult to describe in words — feel free to draw, paint, or use any other medium to convey the ways in which your imagination works.
1.Think of a childhood memory — a particular Christmas morning, a special moment with a grandparent, playing with a childhood friend you haven’t seen in years or decades — and imagine the details of that particular scene as clearly as possible. Describe everything you can remember: the smells, what the scene looked like, anything you heard, who was there, and how you felt inside (happy, scared, warm, etc.). Take as long as you need to express what you remember.
2.Now imagine a person currently alive who is important to you but who isn’t present with you right now (that is, they’re in another part of the city, state, or country). Try to picture what they’re doing right now as you’re doing this exercise, and note all the details that come to you. Where are they, exactly? What does the place look like? How are they feeling about where they are and what they’re doing? What emotions do you experience about them as you’re imagining them? What sounds and smells do they experience in this faraway place? Again, jot down everything that comes to you.
3.Finally, think of yourself in the future. If you consider yourself a young or middle-aged person, imagine what you’ll be like when you’re in your seventies or eighties. And if you’re already in your seventies or eighties, imagine your life ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. Take a few moments to visualize the scene. Where are you? How different do you look from how you appear today? How does it feel to be so much older? What are the sensations that come to mind as you imagine this future self? See how detailed you can get as you write all of this down.
4.Look at your notes. Compare what you wrote for all three exercises. Did you record mostly visual details, or emotional/psychological aspects of the scenes you imagined? Examine the details for common threads and themes. This will tell you a lot about your particular way of visualizing — or at least how you’re visualizing today — and the way that you’ll wield this incredibly important tool in the work to come.