The Essence of Magick

There seems to be quite some confusion about what Magick is and what it is not. In "Magick in Theory and Practice", Aleister Crowley writes in Chapter Chapter XVIII:
 
There is the story of the American in the train who saw another American carrying a basket of unusual shape. His curiosity mastered him, and he leant across and said: "Say, stranger, what you got in that bag?" The other, lantern-jawed and taciturn, replied: "mongoose". The first man was rather baffled, as he had never heard of a mongoose. After a pause he pursued, at the risk of a rebuff: "But say, what is a Mongoose?" "Mongoose eats snakes", replied the other. This was another poser, but he pursued: "What in hell do you want a Mongoose for?" "Well, you see", said the second man (in a confidential whisper) "my brother sees snakes". The first man was more puzzled than ever; but after a long think, he continued rather pathetically: "But say, them ain't real snakes". "Sure", said the man with the basket, "but this Mongoose ain't real either".
 
Crowley marks it as "a perfect parable of Magick".

Luke: "What's in there?" Yoda: "Only what you take with you."   Our accessible scope of reality - including mental processes - thoroughly consists of subjective perception and the only distinction between reality and illusion is the fairly arbitrary differentiation of assuming the one to be real and the other to be not. Perception is not a passive act of reception, it is an active act of creation. A great variety of words exist to describe the level of certainty we assign to our beliefs: Law of nature, fact, knowledge, theory, assumption, guess, delusion, deception, lie..., but if one thing is certain, it's the fluctuative nature of our convictions.

Perception and interpretation are so intimately connected, that they cannot be separated and what else is interpretation, but the process of evaluation based on one's personal beliefs. So what happens, if beliefs are changed... or manipulated? Observe, how the media tinges your perception of the world, how propaganda justifies war, how advertisements create brand images. Observe, how religious fanatics defy the most fundamental scientific findings or how scientism causes people to ignore and deny incidents that lie just outside the range of contemporary science. Observe, how your own expectations determine if you prevail or fail and how your self-esteem seems to exert wide influence on how other people respond to you. Those are quite common and obvious examples, but the rabbit hole leads much deeper than our imagination may reach at that time; we are probably just aware of only a handful of convictions that we hold, but the principal point is: Change your beliefs and you change reality. Magick.
 
It's not as easy as it sounds though. The illusionist uses ingenious "tricks" to convince the audience to believe in the illusions he creates. While the illusionist is not required to be persuaded by his own performance, the task of the true magician is unequally harder, because he must convince himself perfectly, without the slightest scintilla of doubt remaining. Imagine how hard it would be to unquestioningly convince yourself, that a solid chunk of rock is as soft and plastic as a piece of play dough, so you can shape it with your mere fingers. That takes more than a few lines of suggestive phrases, much more, but also less. In contrast to the illusionist, the magician does not need to persuade anyone else, but solely himself, for when he succeeds, he transforms the only reality that is significant to him: His own.
 
As becomes apparent, the parable above does not represent Magick - as I explain it - in quite every sense, but rather demonstrates the approach of the illusionist, convincing others. The essential message is conveyed though, only the target of persuasion varies.
 
Convincing yourself of something exceedingly extraordinary takes great effort, especially if it does not conform with your prevalent beliefs. Extraordinary tasks require extraordinary measures, therefore the magician makes use of powerful expedients: Adaptable belief systems (panthea, Tarot, Kabbalah, I Ching, astrology et al.) containing strong symbolic representations, arduous mental and spiritual practices and profound and elaborate rituals. Gradually, he restructures his concept of the universe into a consistent and self-contained form that allows him to manipulate its elements according to his intentions. Even more, he takes advantage of the plasticity of the astral realm, which is exceptionally convenient in aiding to persuade himself, because it has a tendency to instantaneously reflect his efforts. That is, why learning to project the astral body is one of the most fundamental tasks to be mastered by the magician and why the predominant majority of magickal rituals is meant to be performed in the astral state. As the saying goes: Seeing is believing... well, it helps a lot at least.
 
Of course this rather resembles the highly sophisticated and often occult side of Magick. Ordinary Magick may be as simple as flipping a switch to turn on a light. We do not label such a mundane thing like electricity as Magick anymore, but we did, not long ago - and let me assure you, we do not objectively know more about it today, than we did back then. We devised a fancy name (symbolism) and pretended to understand it, until that was out of question. We constructed a system of theories to describe the phenomenon in order to control it based on the rules we conceived. That is Magick.