The Most Important Skill of the Magician

My buddy Jack gave me a very small and polite poke when he said the problem with theurgists is that they tell you why they do things but not how. I suppose this is true. This space really isn't really about Golden Dawn style tech, which is my main training. Those techniques can be found on blogs and printed material far and wide. The problem with that is that most of it is adopted quite randomly and few that learn that way experience a full corpus. There is a lot of value in experiencing how that tech weaves itself together. Such things cannot be adequately communicated on a blog. I will come back to that point in the final paragraph.

That said, I will share with you some tech. Learn to concentrate. Every technique that I have ever took the time to develop with any sort of skill has worked just fine. Though, some worked better than others. Why? Those techniques work with my personality in such a way that my concentration is better. Every act of magick that I consider the 'best' I have done, has one thing in common. During the ritual or practice, my concentration was at its height. I can now do rituals outdoors with traffic noise and hear nothing physical at all. In returning to normal consciousness, there comes a point where it feels like someone turned on the sounds of the world again. All at once one hears the birds, cars, motor cycles, aircraft, children playing etc. 

There are lots of skills one should develop that will aid one in working various forms of magick. In my opinion, the one skill that crosses over into all forms of the WMT is concentration. It is the single most valuable skill of the magician. 

I give you this quote from the Researchers of Truth. The RoT is the group the Magus of Strovolos belonged to. 

If I have a magnifying glass and I concentrate a few rays of the Sun on a sheet of paper, it will catch fire. That's a phenomenon: concentration of the Sun rays through some means (the magnifying glass). Otherwise, the rays of the Sun are everywhere and we still feel cold. We have a cold Sun during the winter, yet a few of those rays can make a paper catch fire. Such is the Mind.

On that same page, you’ll find this:

The secret, now, is to use the Mind in the right way. We are using it in the wrong way now, definitely! And how: by enslaving the mind to serve so many petty unbridled desires, from morning to night! Desiring, desiring, desiring, changing the desires and thus enslaving the Mind to this or that desire to serve this or that emotion. And you call that life? That is not life! That is the way that makes a human being unhappy. What is the right way of using the Mind? And, what will the Mind, by using it in the right way, offer me? What is it offering me now by using it in this way? You'll have to study this.

The theurgist points the way but doesn’t direct the learning. This isn’t being secretive but respects the seeker’s ability to learn on their own in a manner that is best for that student. That skill of the teacher is much more subtle.