The biggest single mistake that anyone involved with any magickal, psychic, energy-working or similar discipline can make--and usually does--is to underestimate the effect of their own mental attitudes and beliefs on their awareness of what they're doing.

Magickal, psychic and paranormal realities are not validated by our culture as a whole, which is intensely materialistic. People who have talents in these areas struggle against the ridicule, rationalization and even persecution of others, unless and until they find a supportive community or subculture of people who share their experiences. This means that most people who get involved in such work become instantly and irrationally defensive at any suggestion that "they're just imagining" what they're doing and experiencing. They've been told that so often, and subjected to so much reductionist debunkery and snide dismissive arguments about their interests, that they don't even want to critically examine their own assumptions to themselves. They fear self-doubt because so much about these areas is impossible to "verify" apart from subjective perception and assertions from others that they're experiencing something similar.

For this reason, anyone invested in pursuing a magickal, psychic, or energy-working path must begin with serious exploration of his or her own psychological make-up, and practice stringent self-honesty, critical assessment of assumptions, and constant reframing of interpretations, at all times. This also holds for any person, such as a Sanguinarian or Otherkin, who may not be doing psychic or magickal work, but who is struggling to understand an identity that is neither acknowledged nor validated by the culture in which he or she lives. It's simply too easy to go off on wish-fulfillment (or equally wrong, negative and self-denying) tangents without this mental discipline.

The power of suggestion, conditioning, and expectations is universal to the condition of being a sentient life form (human or otherwise). It's nothing to be ashamed of. However, it does need to be understood and fully accepted. When we deny something, we relinquish our power over it and put ourselves at its mercy.

When I taught psychic development classes for an adult education program, in the first class, I showed the students the opening scene of the 1992 movie, "Leap of Faith" and explained to them what a "cold reading" is and how stage magicians and frauds do fake psychic readings. I then told them, "95% of what you 'get' psychically is going to be your own extrapolations, deductions, imagination, personal issues, biases, and fantasies. The most important 95% of psychic training consists of how to tell the difference." This also holds true for meditation, magickal work, and incidently for a lot of memory recall. Our memories are made up of far more fantasy and interpretation than fact.

The amount of verbiage that's been printed about "the mind-body connection" in the context of the healing, self-help, motivational and New Age fields has cost the lives of several million trees--everyone has a fairly clear idea what the term means. But despite numerous exposés on the effects of advertizing techniques and other forms of manipulation, most people remain unaware of how profoundly suggestion and auto-suggestion are affecting them.

Long before the science of psychology was invented, magick-workers always understood how powerful suggestion could be. Every dark magick worker knows that if you're going to curse someone, the first thing you do is make sure the victim knows you're cursing them--and sometimes, you don't have to do anything else. That's been well-known since the beginning of time. You tell the victim, as dramatically as possible; you curse them; then, if they seem resistant, you poison them. There's a famous story about an Australian aboriginal who was "cursed," hospitalized with life-threatening symptoms that had no apparent cause, and only recovered because he was convinced that the hospital's "magic" was stronger than the shaman's. But this doesn't prove that the "curse" had an objective effect. Targets of negative workings are affecting their own states for the worse on the basis on suggestion. People always have trouble believing they would do this to themselves, but they underestimate how strongly we are all conditioned to be our own worst enemies and punish ourselves. That's the shadow side of the socialization process--we internalize the authority that punishes us for stepping out of line, and since we nearly always feel secretly ashamed and guilty about something, that self-punishing mechanism can be activated entirely out of context. Only self-awareness will prevent this.

Even in a less negative, everyday context, few individuals are conscious of the degree to which they react to subtle, even subconscious cues from other people. Human beings, and even non-humans, are hard-wired to perceive and respond to these cues. It's part of what makes us social animals. Our feelings, thoughts, and behavior are all constantly being influenced in this way, to a much greater extent than we realize. "Free will" is very much a relative thing. Our social interactions with other people are influenced by the expectations we have for a complicated coded system of give-and-take. When other people don't behave according to the "social contract," we tend to have strong negative reactions. "Psychological vampires" have a way of exploiting these expectations, and maneuvering other people into contributing far more than they receive in return. As long as we remain unconscious of these expectations and our reactions to them, we're completely vulnerable to being manipulated. The disruption of social cues is far more exhausting that most people realize.

In ancient societies, it was a very common belief that nothing bad ever happened to anyone accidentally: all bad luck, illness, even death was caused by black magic, demons, or some external, malevolent power. We're not as far away from that belief as we may think. Especially in the Pagan/magickal and vampiric communities, you see people quickly drawing the conclusion that a run of bad luck or ill health is caused by a psychic or magickal attack. Some of the huge "psi-vamp attacks" I saw blow up in the Vampiric Community chat rooms six or seven years ago were like Salem Village, compressed into a couple of hours. I've seen similar things happen in the Pagan Community. But the people in the middle of it couldn't see that, because they were too emotionally involved and too much in "threat and response mode" to have perspective. What they believed was occurring became their reality, in every sense.

There's a rather cruel trick that can be played on someone to demonstrate this. Suppose you are with some people you're friendly with, and know superficially (co-workers, say), and who have no reason to suspect that you'd try a trick on them. Choose a person who's in perfectly good health and begin expressing gentle concern about "gee, are you feeling okay today?" and "you know, you look a little pale," "hey, it's okay, I'll take care of that for you, you seem really tired," and so on. It's even more effective if two or three people all conspire on this. Within an hour or so, the "target" will be feeling sick--possibly even with objective symptoms like nausea, dizziness, or headaches. This can be done extremely subtly by skilled people--even telepathically--and it's often used by con artists, salesmen, and manipulators. It's also the core method of health care advertizing, which is devoted to making people feel sick, tired, and smelly through constant suggestion, and then offering them nostrums to relieve their discomfort.

Medical writers are fond of citing "the placebo effect" as a way of debunking alternative treatments. It always seems to me that these debunkers aren't thinking clearly about the implications of their argument. According to medical theory, "the placebo effect" means that people have the ability, through the power of their beliefs, to recreate the effect of a chemical substance (a drug) in their bodies without taking the drug itself. If "the placebo effect" could be fully harnessed and controlled, we might put all the pharmaceutical companies out of business. Yet to medical science, "the placebo effect" is a more banal explanation than accepting that acupuncture or homeopathy might really work for the reasons their practitioners say they do.

There are a lot of subjective symptoms that can't be measured or evaluated externally, and which are highly sensitive to the power of suggestion. These include fatigue or increased energy levels, sleepiness, euphoria, mental alertness, emotional moods, heightened or dulled senses, ordinary headaches, minor aches and pains, appetite or lack of it, sleep disruptions, and body awareness. Physical symptoms like sensitivity to pain, heartrate, breath rate, perspiration, and galvanic skin response can also be easily influenced by suggestion. These are exactly the symptoms which are commonly experienced as evidence of "needing to psi-feed" or as benefits of "psi-feeding." They're also commonly interpreted as indications of various psychic or magickal experiences, positive or negative. But these same symptoms are experienced by many non-psychic, non-magickal, and non-vampiric people, who blame them on everyday stresses or pleasures, minor illness, or in some cases pay little attention to them at all.

The fact is that all of these symptoms can be induced through suggestion, to the extent that we might sometimes wonder if they ever occur spontaneously. The only way to even begin to sort them out is by achieving and maintaining a high level of self-awareness and self-skepticism. If symptoms that you may have explained as "needing to psi-feed," for example, respond to strong suggestions or stimuli of an entirely different kind (such as listening to certain kinds of music), then your interpretation probably needs to be re-examined.

It's important to distinguish between "self awareness" and "self-absorption." Unfortunately, there's no lack of self-absorption in the Vampiric Community--there are few venues where you will find more people who are more obsessed with their own needs, identities, desires, and experiences, and more dismissive, intolerant and causticly critical of everyone else's. True self-awareness means awareness of oneself in relationship to everyone and everything else--other sentient beings, other living things, the environment and the cosmos. It's completely different from a narrow focus on self to the exclusion of anyone else. Self-absorbed people have lost all sense of proportion--nothing else matters to them but their own concerns. Self-aware people have an infinite sense of perspective and proportion, because they're aware of themselves as being part of everything else. It's an amazingly liberating point of view.

For some information about the power of suggestion, see:

National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Hypnosis and Suggestion

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