My (no-longer-)secret magical practice

NB: This post is quite long, and may be truncated in your email client. I’d recommend reading it on the substack site. Actually I’d recommend that with all my posts, but this one it particularly matters.

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I actually had a lot of difficulty finishing the last post about the Manual, because there’s been a secret subtext to a lot of my writing for a while that it was incredibly hard to finish that post without mentioning. I promised myself I’d just come clean about the secret in a subsequent post, and that was part of what allowed me to finish it (helped by the fact that I do genuinely think that the post about the Manual is better without bringing the secret in). This is that post.

Another part of it is that I used the secret itself, the part of it that I am implicitly describing when I talk about the Manual, to help me finish it off. This allowed me to invent a new procedure to help me manage a particular type of writer’s block, and it worked really well. I’ll talk about them in a bit.

But first, the promised coming clean: Everything I said in the Manual post is true, including the bit about finding effective well designed procedures that you can use to solve a wide variety of problems.

But, uh, I don’t actually call them procedures. I call them spells.

For few years now,¹ on and off, I’ve been practicing an esoteric² magical tradition. It’s one of my own creation, although like all “new” things is really evolved out of a wide variety of existing practices. I’m currently very much in an on phase, and it’s proving extremely helpful and I’d like to try to embed it more thoroughly in my life.

Like my equally idiosyncratic and personal religious beliefs my magical practice has fairly low metaphysical commitments. It’s non-mystical³, and does not generally involve any supernatural elements, and started out slightly as a joke, but I do find it genuinely helpful to think of it as a magical practice.

The core of said magical practice is really straightforward though: When you figure out a thing that works, codify it, give it a name, and call it a spell. Now, iterate on the design of that spell to make it work better.

Anyway, let me illustrate with some examples of the sorts of thing I mean by spells.

Some spells for writing

I’m currently using a combination of three spells to write this newsletter. Two of them you almost certainly already know and just don’t think of them as spells. The third is a novel technique I invented last issue.

Pomodoros

You almost certainly know this one. Put a timer on, and work on a well defined task for that amount of time.

I mostly use sand timers for Pomodoros⁴. Some magical principles I adhere to are:

1. Prefer physical objects (e.g. don’t use your phone or computer as a timer. A dedicated electronic timer would be fine but I don’t like them).

2. Avoid choice points where you don’t need them.

3. Don’t introduce elements that you find unpleasant. (Have you tried finding an electronic timer that has a pleasant chime? Because I have, and it’s absolutely impossible).

So having a dedicated sand timer that I can just use as the basis of my Pomodoro spell fits this nicely. It also has the nice property that if I’m in flow and the timer runs out then it doesn’t interrupt me.

It is, otherwise, a perfectly normal Pomodoro practice.

This sort of consideration is what I mean by “iterate on the design to make it work better”. By turning the practice into a concrete thing that you have responsibility for, you can design it like you would software or anything else, by repeatedly asking “This is good. How could it be better?” and making changes that improve it.

Put on some headphones

Again, this is an incredibly mundane activity - put on some sound cancelling headphones for working with.

Again the advantage of viewing it through the lens of a body of magical practice is that the by thinking of it as a specific spell you can iterate on it by thinking about what makes it work well.

In particular, I think there are two key questions to answer:

1. What sort of headphones?

2. What do you listen to on them?

Historically my answer has been “whatever I’ve got” and “idk some music I like” respectively. These actually turn out to be bad, or at least suboptimal, answers for me.

For me the best choices seem to be:

1. Any sort of halfway decent over-ear sound cancelling headphones.⁵ Over-ear seems important to me because it provides better sound isolation and has better bass. I have and like some airpods pro and they’re OK for this but not nearly as good.

2. For focused work like this, something that is more like a sort of… audio experience than music. Brown noise, rain sounds, some sort of binaural music sometimes. That sort of thing. I’m currently listening to Hemi Sync tracks on Spotify but it’s only OK. I’ll probably listen to airplane noises later, which is pretty close to the brown noise part of these tracks.

   Whatever it is, it has to be something that can’t really absorb your attention - certainly nothing with vocals, but even purely instrumental classical music doesn’t work very well.⁶ It’s best to keep to a specific theme for any given session so there aren’t sharp transitions, but it doesn’t seem to massively matter which theme you pick as long as it’s roughly fit for purpose.⁷

   For other types of work other types of things to listen to are good. Drum music can be great for really active stuff⁸ , for incredibly boring tasks I’ll often listen to a podcast, and sometimes when I really need to be furious to do the work I’ll put on some metal or something else with angry screaming.

I find this combination extremely good for removing distractions from my environment, and it seems to have a generally positive affect on calm and focus above and beyond that.

Secondary anchor

This is the spell I developed to help me finish the last article. It’s for attention management. I’ll explain why it’s called secondary anchor in a bit, but here’s how it works:

First, get a rock.⁹ It doesn’t have to be a rock, it could be e.g. a ball, or a tungsten cube. But it helps for it to be something a bit weighty and relatively satisfying to fidget with without being too absorbing. A fidget toy would, I think, be a bad choice for this. I’m going to assume it’s a rock though. This rock is your secondary anchor.

Your primary anchor is the thing you are intending to focus on. For the purposes of this description I’m going to assume that it’s writing, and that you’re doing it in a Pomodoro, but neither of these are essential assumptions. e.g. I’ve also used this to read an article that I wasn’t that into but did want to read from start to finish rather than getting distracted from it midway through.

Importantly, unlike your secondary anchor (which is a very physical object) your primary anchor is more likely to be a task - it may be a task involving some specific physical object, but more likely it’s even more specific than that - something on the computer, writing something specific by hand, cleaning, etc.

Now, when you’re getting distracted - either because you catch yourself doing something off topic for your Pomodoro or because you feel the urge to (for me there’s a sort of tense anxiety feeling that arises in my upper arms when I want to bounce away from the current thing I’m focusing on, especially if it’s a writing thing), pick up the rock in both hands. Cup it between them, pass it back and forth, generally fidget, etc.

Importantly: this is not forbidden or treated in as any way bad or something to minimise. Your Pomodoro requirements are not that you do the task, they are that you work on the task, or that you are holding your secondary anchor. If you notice you’re failing to work on the main task, good job for noticing that and good job for transitioning to your secondary anchor.¹⁰ If you spend the entire time in your Pomodoro fiddling with your secondary anchor because you can’t face the main task, that’s not ideal but you’ve learned something important.

If you find yourself distracted, are irritated by this, and immediately switch back to your primary anchor, stop. Pick up your secondary anchor. You don’t have to hold it for long, but maybe close your eyes and take a single calming slow breath or something.

You can do whatever you like while holding the secondary anchor. I sometimes stare at the page, rereading what I’ve just written. Sometimes I lean back in my chair, close my eyes, wiggle my shoulders a bit. You can get up and pace if you want. Doesn’t matter. Do whatever. While you are holding the secondary anchor, you’re free to do what you like, as long as it’s not something too engrossing.

Now, here’s the important bit: You can pick up the secondary anchor whenever you like, but you are only allowed to put down the secondary anchor in order to resume focusing on your primary anchor.¹¹

What this means is that you lose a lot of the possibilities for distraction, because you’re distracting yourself to avoid focusing on the task, but you use things that are too absorbing to do it. e.g. it’s very easy to distract yourself by checking Twitter or discord or the like, or to go do structured procrastination on another chore, and suddenly you’ve eaten up all the Pomodoro.

In contrast, by having a secondary anchor that it’s easy to transition to from anywhere (because it’s easy to do, not anxiety inducing, and has no choice points) and only transitions out into your primary anchor.

This means you spend much more time focused on your primary anchor than you would if you tried to force your attention to stay on it, because it means that all states organically transition back to it eventually rather than acting as attractors for your attention that you can’t or don’t want to easily leave.

This is early days yet and spells often work better when they’re novel¹², but so far I’ve been finding this incredibly helpful for maintaining focus, and it works for reasonably sound reasons, so I’m hopeful.

Why are these spells?

OK, so.

You know the thing where the fundamentalist Christians got really scared about Dungeons and Dragons because they thought playing games about casting spells would lead to people actually dabbling in witchcraft?

And you remember how we made fun of them for this because it was obviously ridiculous? I mean, really, we can tell the difference between game and reality.

Anyway yeah the thing that got me into this magical practice was Dungeons and Dragons. Sorry.

The specific motivation for why this sort of thing is useful is that in D&D when playing a wizard you have a wide portfolio of symbolic problem solving tools. You don’t have some generic “magic” ability, you cast spells. These spells are well-defined things with well-defined effects.

Importantly they’re not for anything exactly. They’ve got a clear implied purpose on the strength of what they do - a fireball casts a ball of fire, so you use it for things which are useful to set on fire. Mostly enemies, but if you wanted to use it to light a bonfire you could.¹³

Some spells are more flexible - e.g. telekinesis - but fundamentally they are all a very well defined set of tools, and a wizard wanders around with a large variety of such tools available to them, and finds that many problems can be solved through a creative application of these tools.

What I found was that I was walking around with a large variety of such techniques that I knew but was rarely applying, and that thinking of them in terms of “these are the spells in my spellbook that I can use to solve problems” was helpful to me.

The other half of this (and the actual immediate prompt for me thinking about it) was that in the Playing restricted games section of Learning to walk through walls I talk about the importance of creating symbolic games as a way to get better at something.

Specifically, in order to get better at Judo, Jimmy Pedro and his dad decided to specialise in gripping. They did this by systematising the grip fight: They invented a number of named grips, and they figured out how to do each grip right, and they figured out which grip to use when.

This takes the problem “are you gripping well?” and turns it into:

1. Which of these grips should I use?

2. How do I do this grip well?

You break up the space of gripping into well defined “grips” - a fake thing that you have just made up to cleave the continuous space of possible ways of gripping someone into a finite set of distinct named entities.

Each of these grips though is then a thing you can refine and practice until you get really good at it. You can go “OK, where does the hand placement for this need to go… What way should I be facing? Which arm am I pushing with?” (or something like that, I don’t actually know anything about Judo). It has a very tight feedback loop, in a way that “Did I win or lose the fight?” does not provide.

Now, when you go into a fight, you can apply one of these very well practiced grips. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But you can, when analysing the fight in retrospect, you can ask “Did I get the grip right? Did I use the right grip? If not, what was the right grip?”

Sometimes you’ll discover that none of the grips you knew was the right grip and you’ll have to invent another one. That’s OK.

Anyway, you can treat most problems in life this way. This is the Manual thing again - you develop a collection of well-defined procedures/spells, and you learn how to apply them in a variety of situations.

If you want to get better at life then, when you encounter a problem, solve it. If you’ve got a spell that does that, great use it. Otherwise, figure something out¹⁴, and then figure out a lightly generalised version of what you did to solve it, give it a name, and write it down in your spellbook as a first draft to iterate upon.

Further, by putting all of these things under some common heading (whether it be “spell” or something else), you allow for the development of a body of theory and craft around them. By iterating on your spells, you learn to make spells, and this helps you solve all sorts of problems you wouldn’t easily have solved before, because you get better at crafting new spells for the situation.

You don’t have to call them spells, but for myself, it seems to be a really helpful framing. After all, if my goal is the study of practical wisdom, I might as well be a practical wise-ard.

A theory of spellcraft

Brandon Sanderson would be very disappointed in me but I don’t actually have a well-defined magic system underpinning any of this. You just do stuff, and you figure out how to do stuff better. There’s no unifying theory of mana, or consulting the field, or invoking the spirits of the air. Tree does not speak to stone, nothing is written in the rain, and all the old alliances have been broken.

But there’s still some room for theory. It’s just that it’s not a simple theory, instead it’s a series of tools and concepts cobbled together like everything else practical that we do.

Importantly, in my view magical theory is almost never prior to magical practice. You start with concrete problems and see how they interact with spells, then you develop tools for describing them and predicting how they work. These theories (whether they’re right or wrong) serve as action generators. They give you ideas for things to try, and serve as the inspiration for new spells.

Sometimes these spells won’t work, sometimes they will work differently than you expect, but typically they’ll do something useful,¹⁵ and they should help refine your theories.

For example let’s talk about where the secondary anchor spell came from.

I actually arrived at it in two parts.

The first is I was thinking about phones. Have you noticed how your phone, if it is with you, often acts as a natural point that your attention drifts to? If you have your phone in your pocket, you will have the urge to check it, and you will find yourself checking it in situations where you’d really have been 100% fine if it wasn’t there.

The result is that often you can significantly improve your experience of something by just leaving your phone in the other room.

This isn’t just phones. Your laptop will work this way. A TV on in the background (even if it’s on silent) will have this effect. Electronic devices in general are prone to doing this, although it’s by no means exclusively an electronic thing - two people putting on a street performance would also work like the television for example, or a cute cat playing with some string.

I’ve previously referred to such objects as shiny things, but I decided I don’t like this term because it captures something too specific. Instead I now call them anchors. Things that your attention will naturally drift back to and never go too far away from, unless you deliberately remove yourself from the anchor.

The reason this rename was useful was that it made me realise you could use anchors for good instead of evil, by turning other things into anchors. My first spell doing this was “Walk and talk”, in which you go for a walk without your phone (or, if you must, with your phone in your backpack or bag. Certainly not turned on in your pocket), but with a physical dictaphone.¹⁶

Every time you feel the twitch of wanting to check your phone, or your attention otherwise needs something to jump to, get out the dictaphone and speak into it.

This worked perfectly. No notes (except the ones in the dictaphone). And it was an excellent proof of concept that you can, within reason, choose what to anchor to.

The problem is, that not all things can be easily anchored to. You can only really anchor down an energetic gradient - that is, it has to be less work to move your attention to the anchor than to stay on whatever it is that it’s currently on. For something like writing or other focused work, that’s typically not the case. If you slip off it, there’s probably an emotional reason for that, and you can’t just force your way back in and expect it to work.

So, I had the question: How do I turn my desired focus of work into an anchor?

This is where another observation I’ve been thinking about recently comes in. A lot of my spells are “I am in state X. I would like to be in state Y. What do?”

Often the answer is that you can’t get to Y directly, but you can move from X to a better state which it’s then easier to move to Y from. For example, if I’m too tired and headachey to function, how can I become less so so that I can then move to a working state?¹⁷

The goal of a properly functioning¹⁸ magical practice is to increase how much time you spend in good states.

In this case the relevant state of interest is where your attention is. The anchor is the state that you naturally end up in if you’re not constantly expending energy to prevent that.

The difficulty with making writing your anchor is that it’s very easy to slip out of the writing state, and relatively hard to get back into it. The result is a state transition diagram that looks something like this:

Where thickness of line indicates how easy the transition is. Because it is easy to transition from Writing to Distracted but not vice versa, you spend a lot of time in Distracted.

Introducing a secondary anchor fixes this problem:

Because the secondary anchor is easy to transition to (you just have to pick up the rock), you can easily move from the Distracted state to the Secondary state. But unlike most of your distractions, the secondary has no natural stickiness, and creates a space in which to think and calm down and, crucially, get bored, and because there is an easy to follow rule that you’re not allowed to transition from Secondary to Distracted, you will transition back to Writing when you’re ready.¹⁹

Another general principle here is that spells often consist of ritual practices: Rules that you agree to follow precisely because they make the spell possible, and that you treat as inviolable for the purposes of the spell. It’s not that you literally can’t transition from Secondary to Distracted, it’s that you’ve agreed that you intend not to do that, and that if you do you’re not doing the spell right and you should try to fix that.

If you want more examples of magical theory that I use for spell design, I invite you to read the rest of my writing. Most of it is there in some form of another.

OK but where’s the magic?

It is, I admit, an extremely non-magical magical practice. I think of it as the minimum viable magical practice.

You can²⁰ think of a magical practice as basically consisting of a metaphysics - a set of beliefs about the nature of reality, what exists, and how these interrelate - and a set of ritual practices for working within that metaphysics to achieve a desired effect.²¹ Mine is what happens when you start from a metaphysics that is very straightforwardly pragmatist in its assumptions and mostly takes to be real the things that I can poke²², but want to have a magical practice anyway.

The nice thing about this is that if you do have a metaphysics that admits entities other than mine, you can still use all my spells, you can still use all my practices, you can just apply some of them to spirits, or the Field. You can hand your inner demons an anchor and try to get them to state transition into a more productive place for you. It all works just as well if you add in mystical assumptions.

I’m not even really against adding those in. A lot of stuff I consider myself mostly agnostic about, and some of the spiritual side of things I do reluctantly find myself going “OK yes I still think this is a metaphor but I admit it’s a really annoyingly good metaphor”.

For the most part though, there’s not much “real” magic in it. It’s magic in the sense of doing the work, not in the sense of getting to take shortcuts. But it’s a way of helping make sure that when you do the work, you get the results you want.

So you want to be a wise-ard

If my ideas intrigue you and you wish to subscribe to my newsletter… oh, right, yeah. That’s this thing. Hang on.

Right. Sorry. If you want to take up this sort of magical practice, here’s my basic recommendation:

1. Start a spellbook. This can be whatever you like but I, unfortunately, recommend it be something electronic and in a place you’re likely to keep coming back to. My current spellbook is a private discord forum channel, for complicated reasons to do with making digital objects real.

2. Whenever you have a problem, try to figure out a spell for solving it. Write that down.

3. Learn from this, and do it better.

4. Talk to other people about their spells.

I may have better advice later. I’m still figuring this out, and I feel like I’ve only got the beginnings of a real practice, but it does feel like it’s developing into something very valuable to me, and maybe some others.

But for now, I’m going to cast one of my most powerful spells for influencing the world: Send newsletter.

1. I apparently first had the idea almost exactly two years ago, on 2022-05-24:

I started writing my first spell book the next day:

I have since deprecated this spellbook as legacy code. It’s actually a shit format to record spells in, and most of the spells in my first spellbook are amateurish.

Also, until I had looked these up, I had totally forgotten that that section from Learning to walk through walls was literally the inspiration behind the spellbook concept. I thought that was a connection I had only recently made!

2. In the sense that it’s practiced only by a small handful of people, to wit me and some others on my discord server.

3. In the mathematician’s sense of “non-” meaning “not-necessarily-”

4. I’ve actually got two sand timers I use for Pomodoros. One is (allegedly, and pretty close to) 45 minutes. I don’t actually know how long the other one that lives on my computer desk is. I think it’s an hour? It’s very cheap, so I wouldn’t count on it being an hour even if it’s meant to be an hour.

I actually thought it was half an hour when I started writing this piece, but then noticed that clearly nearly an hour had passed and the sand timer was still going, so I guess it must not be.

It would be easy for me to find this out but I actually prefer not to. There’s something nice about having a unit of time that is just that specific sand timer.

5. I’ve currently got some expensive Bose ones that I got from work a while back but I’ve previously used these cheap ones and honestly they’re almost as good for most reasonable puproses. They’re not that durable though - my first ones lasted me a few years, but the second broke quite quickly.

6. An exception, but it’s almost its own spell that you use separately from a pomodoro: If you want to feel like an absolute bad-ass and get shit done for 17 minutes exactly, I can strongly recommend And I Will Kiss, the opening drum track from the 2012 Olympics.

7. If you’re using Spotify, make sure to actually put whatever you’re listening to on shuffle, so it doesn’t randomly add songs of its own choosing afterwards. It’s not good enough at this for it to be seamless.

Alternatively, just find like a random 6 hour long youtube video of rain noises or the like.

8. e.g. big fan of the Spotify album drums of the world.

9. My rock is one that I collected from my garden to use as drainage for the pot that hosted my sweet orange tree, Orla. Unfortunately, Orla died. When we finally gave up hope for her resurrection we repurposed her pot to use as a grave site for our, also dead, pet hamster, Joe.

This required removing Orla and all her potting material from the pot first, so I reclaimed the stone at that point because it was a good stone and Joe didn’t need drainage so much.

None of this is relevant to its task as a secondary anchor. It’s just a good size for it. But I thought you might enjoy hearing a story about a stone.

10. This is a mindfulness trick. I learned it from The Mind Illuminated, which I only read the first chapter of, but it was a very useful first chapter.

11. Obviously you’re also allowed to break out of the Pomodoro for anything sufficiently significant that it takes priority. You can put down the secondary anchor if you need to break out of the spell.

12. I’ve had lots of “great” spells that “mysteriously stopped working” and then when I came back to them later I decided that the reason they mysteriously stopped working is that they’re basically shit and I was probably kidding myself about the fact that they worked.

13. It’s a bit explodey though so maybe don’t.

14. There are, of course, spells that will help you do so.

15. It is surprisingly difficult to come up with a completely useless spell without actively trying to do so.

16. The dictaphone is an interesting example, because a lot of my ritual objects are old school or analogue, but not all of them. Physical things are more magically useful, but they don’t have to be non-technological things. The physicality, and that they have a reasonably well defined purpose rather than the infinite flexibility of software, are what’s important about them. My old-school digital watch is occasionally a ritual object too.

17. The spell to do this is called “isolation rest”. It’s a little involved, but short version is you lie in bed with a sleep mask and sound cancelling headphones on playing this specific track of headache music (it probably doesn’t have to be this one in particular, but this is weirdly better for me than almost everything else I’ve tried. I suspect partly it’s familiarity at this point), with a timer set to go off in 45 minutes. Possibly take an ibuprofen before hand, possibly take 50mg caffeine before hand. There are a bunch of other details, I might write about this more in future.

18. Which, to be clear, I do not possess. I’m working on it, but I wouldn’t say I reliably achieve “properly functioning” by this standard.

19. To the mathematicians reading: Yes I am absolutely thinking of this in terms of waiting times and Markov processes. I’ve not explicitly run the calculations, but that’s absolutely the underlying intuition.

20. Or, at least, I do.

21. This is a very modern-fantasy separation of magic from religion, but then my magic and my religion are mostly separate. A lot of magical practices are more religious, and in particular the set of things that exists include gods, angels, demons, spirits, etc. that you call up and have a chat with.

22. Look it’s more complicated than that. e.g. yes numbers are in some sense real. You know it, I know it. It’s not important right now. This is a useful simplification which really means “I don’t think spirits exist”.