magic.

Seeing as it is a spiritual time of year, i cast about for a bit of relevant reading yesterday, and re-introduced myself to some basic thoughts on magic, courtesy of Mr. Grant (thumpa thumpa) Morrison, of Invisibles fame.
He lays out his basic priniciples of sigil-making here; stuff which I paid A Whole Lot of attention to ( I went down to DisinfoCon in New York in 2000, specifically to hear Morrison speak.)
GM talks about two kinds of magic in his PopMagic manifesto (and in Pop Magic part two). There is your basic sigil-making-focusing-your-will stuff, and then there is what he calls "narrative hypersigils". For him, this was The Invisibles. Basically the man drew himself into a comic book existence to parallel one he wanted to see for himself.

Both are very similiar to principles of living well or being ones real self, it seems to me. Namely, one has to make a decision, strip it down to the essentials necessary for said decision to manifest itself, and then stop thinking about said decision and let the will run its course.

And if necessary, fake it 'til you make it.

I've struggle with this. I am an empiricist, and I trust the reality of what I see with my own eyes. I trust facts. I'm too aware of "faking" to do it well.
I have based my ideas of "truth" on these facts for a long long time, except for those unfortunate times when my emotions get in the way. More and more I am coming to understand that honesty means Squat when there is more than one person involved. There are as many kinds of honesty as there are people in the universe.

Lately I've been pondering the fact that the liars might be more trustworthy than those who tell "the truth".
When you listen to someone's lie, you listen to what they need/want/aspire too, unassailed by illusions of morality, insecurity, or responsibility to others. This, I admit, is dangerous. But everything in the right context, it seems to me.