How to Explain Eastern Taoist Magic?

[ZGROPIUS]

How to Explain Eastern Taoist Magic?

In 2023, while reading, I experienced a sudden and intense outbreak of somatic symptoms. It was so severe that I feel I needed to be hospitalized and placed on oxygen. Over the next 3 years, I worked with two postmodern Lacanian psychoanalysis PhDs who graduated in France. During that time, I did self-analysis and reading every day. I came to believe that everything was projected by language and symbols.

As my symptoms calmed down, with companionship and increasing knowledge, I felt that I was making progress. But I also knew clearly that the core of my somatic episodes had not decreased in the slightest. When an episode happened, its intensity was exactly the same as it was three years ago.

Later, half-jokingly, I contacted a Chinese Taoist priest and asked: “No matter how I look at it, nothing helps—could I be cursed or something? Hahaha.”

He said he would take a look, and then told me: “You have Gong Tou on you, you have Bing Ma (spirit soldiers) on you, and there is an animal demon in your home.” I didn’t believe him, so I continued working with my postmodern psychoanalysts for another year.

In the end, what I was facing drove me to the point of collapsing and I wanted to suicide. I happened to have a large sum of money in my hands, so I said: “I can’t spend it all anyway—just remove whatever ‘evil technique’ you say is there.” So he did.

During the ritual, I still believed that the “evil technique” and “spiritual entities” he described didn’t exist at all. After it ended, I played around for a while and then went to sleep.

The next day, when I woke up, I knew I‘m cured. And the psychoanalysis to cope with my somatic symptoms, which I had been doing for three full years, has stopped completely.

My life has changed from 24h severe somatization、Vision distorted、triggers through music texts and sights to normal living.

After that, through spending time with this Taoist, I learned a lot about the worldview they had. They believe that people come into the world through reincarnation. The purpose of life is awakening—cultivating oneself to truly become “Immortal.” Only by learning the magic teachings, with the help of gods/immortals, can one become an yin spirit after death, then cultivate into a shigong (master/ritual elder), and finally become a god.

My original somatic symptoms have now completely disappeared. But what I experienced conflicts with what I learned on Actualized.org. How do Leo and you guys understand the idea that Taoist magic can directly affect reality?

 

The Magic paper is for recovery，protection，luck，and remove evil qi.

[ZGROPIUS]

Also, before I formally asked the Taoist priest to perform The ritual, I wanted to test his abilities with something small. Then something happened—he used I Ching divination (Bagua) to help me save my pet snake’s life. Based only on three random numbers I gave him, he accurately described the direction and location of my pet, the height/level it was at, and the surrounding environment. That information ultimately helped me save my pet’s life.

 

[LastThursday]

@ZGROPIUS I don't have a direct answer in your case. But I have some experiences in rapid change. I have some ideas about magic also.

The body, mind and environment form a dynamic system that likes to keep itself in equilibrium (which includes homeostasis). The equilibrium can maintain both positive and negative states, where a state is some part of the system: physiology or mental state. It can seem like a particular equilibrium is fixed or permanent, but this isn't the case. Even with a chronic condition, the symptoms (states) can come and go, this is an indicator that the system is in constant flux. 

All systems maintain equilibrium through feedback loops, if the system goes too far out of equilibrium then feedback loops push the system back into equilibrium. For example if your body gets low on energy then you will crave something to eat to restore that energy, the craving is a feedback loop. There are thousands of them in the body and mind, and even from and back to the environment.

The mind/body/environment system can be pushed into a new equilibrium at any point, and this can happen suprisingly rapidly. This can be done by pushing it far enough away from its existing equilibrium that the existing feedback loops don't work to push it back. Because the system is dynamic it will generally settle back into a new equilibrium over time.

All that is a long winded way of saying that if you mess with the mind/body/environment in the right way, you can experience rapid permanent change.

I think some of the success of magic is down to suggestion, in other words hitting your mental feedback loops, so they stop keeping the system in equilibrium. I use "mental" here loosely, because suggestion goes deeper than just positive thinking, it can have strong unconscious and physical effects in the body if the suggestion is taken seriously. Having a Taoist Magician suggest things may help. I'm a pragmatist, the result is more important than the means, so I'm not against it, using suggestion can be very powerful.

There is a more esoteric side to magic in that it may warp reality enough to change the world, and in your case, your somatic illness. It would do this because at its base level reality is fluid and largely undetermined, and magic shifts the probabilities towards what the magician desires. The rituals are designed so that there is the greatest level of effect achievable. In short we're doing magic all the time, but in a messy unconscious way, Taoist magicians are structured and focused about it. This also suggests that reality may attract towards outcomes, and work more like abstract thought, than a machine full of protons and light.

TLDR the body/mind/environment is a system, magic shifts the system.

 

Edited 9 hours ago by LastThursday

[ZGROPIUS]

@LastThursday

Your position is that consciousness (or the mind–body–environment complex) functions as a self-regulating dynamic system. In that framework, appropriately timed and sufficiently targeted perturbations—such as suggestion—can shift the system from one equilibrium to another. On this view, there is no additional “mystical” ontology beyond the dynamics of the system itself. So whether it’s magic, psychotherapy, or theory and knowledge, they’re all just different forms of stimuli that change the dynamic system. The distinctive role of a “magician,” would be to concentrate symbolic elements and authority in a way that makes a intervention compelling enough to be taken up by the system.

Is this an accurate representation of your meaning?

I think suggestion—together with positive psychology, the law of attraction, or relying purely on imagination to change reality—carries a flavor of the omnipotent narcissistic stage, because it makes everything feel simple: extremely simple, and exciting.

But my experience is that, on a certain level of reality, what doesn’t work simply doesn’t work. For example, imagination or suggestion won’t regenerate a severed hand, and it won’t bring the dead back to life.

When I first confronted my condition, I relied heavily on approaches adjacent to positive psychology. Influenced by Leo’s discourse, I also developed amplified expectations regarding love and “God consciousness” During this period, I experimented with multiple practices that function, in different ways, through suggestion and meaning-making: Tarot, fortune-telling (as a suggestive framework) and “singing bowl” healing that claims to regulate bodily frequency, Tai Chi, Yoga. 

Each time I engaged these methods, I did experience noticeable shifts, and I took those shifts as evidence that the methods were effective. Yet in retrospect, the core problem did not disappear. What changed, primarily, was my interpretive stance—my hope, imagination, and belief—while the underlying reality of the problem remained intact.

In contrast, I regard this Taoist intervention as credible precisely because my participation was minimal and psychologically “careless”: I did not actively cultivate belief, visualization, or expectation. I don’t believe demon are exist. I did not engage in sustained self-suggestion. And the outcome diverged sharply from all prior methods I would otherwise group together—Tarot, singing bowls, “energy frequency” tuning, positive psychology, mind–body–spirit teachings, post-modernism pschoanalysis, Tai Chi. The phenomenology and the result were not continuous with those earlier experiences.

[theleelajoker]

Your story reminds me of the one of a friend. He's a more or less "normal" guy, no superstitious believes, cult etc. 

I don't remember all details, but he also faced uncomfortable phenomena over a prolonged period, as far as I recall it was rather mental then somatic.

In short, nothing from classical Western medicine approach and doctors helped, so someone send him to some guy practicing some kind of esoteric stuff. He told my friend something very similar about being possessed by a demon.

My friend was sceptic back then, and he was also sceptic when he told me this story, but the guy did something, some ritual where my friend also needed to take responsibility for some actions (don't remember clearly) and it helped. Symptoms disappeared and did not come back. 

Doesn't help to explain how it works but felt like sharing when I read your story. The guy doing the ritual was not taoist but had Christian background, though.

Edited 3 hours ago by theleelajoker