NMR ISSUE 27

An Urban Wicca
Astrological Forecast 27
Cat
Crimson and Gold
Editorial 27
Elf-Calling
For Scott
Great Universal Mystery
Letters 27
New Abundance
Overcoming Inertia
Samhaintide Ritual
Shark
The Crystal Tree System
The Elves are Returning
The Life Flower Formula
The Secret of Magickal Power
Two References
Water Spirits

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The Editorial

By Scot Rhoads

Lottery Magick

What with the recent $111,000,000 lottery win, I thought I'd share (inflict?) my thoughts on Lotto magick. How do I feel about the lottery? I think the games are stupid. They promise misleading multiple chances to win on each ticket. They festoon cards with meaningless little shamrocks or pots `o gold or horseshoes to scratch off. (An honest card would have one number to uncover: your winnings (thus most cards would reveal $0, of course).) Lottery ads cynically exploit desperate hopes. And there are other issues like the social burden, disbursement of funds and sucker odds. I am not a Lotto fan.

Yet I still buy a ticket from time to time and I don't feel bad about it. Though the odds are absurdly small (people who expect to win the lottery might as well also worry about being hit by a meteor (or two)), the payoff is compelling. I refuse to get carried away, though. I think it is insane to buy more than one ticket at a time—though 1000 tickets offer 1000 times the chance as one, the odds of both still round off to 0.00000. And I despise playing specific numbers—that makes it too easy to feel compelled to play out of fear of losing rather than hope of winning (as the ads say: How would you feel if your numbers `won' without you? —grrr!).

But besides the potential winnings, I like to play the lottery because of magick. Don't jump to conclusions. I loathe lottery prediction software and lottery winning charms (advertised next the Powerful Witch Doctor who will Kill Your Enemies for $250 (each)); such items encourage us to give away our Power. But if we do create our own reality (which, to varying degrees, is a premise of magickal paradigms), then why not try to create a lottery win?

One reason I've heard is that all two million ticket buyers are out there rubbing their own magick lotto-winning mojo bags just as furiously as you, so you have to compete against their magick. This, even if true, is a horrible thing to believe. You might as well chuck magick and become a Newtonian physicist if you want to believe that. If magick works, then this belief gives away 99.99995% of your Power. (If magick does not work, then the belief is merely worthless.) Worse, it puts your energy into the Zero Sum Game paradigm that help create competition and need in our world. If we are going to make the leap and believe that we create any of our reality, we might as well believe we create it all. If this is false and we believe it to be true, we lose nothing (as long as we act RESPONSIBLY); but if it's true and we believe it to be false, we unnecessarily limit ourselves. So why not?

We should be able to accept the idea that we can create a reality in which all two million mojo bag rubbers win the Big Prize (without any inflation!). Particle physics is not confined to Aristotelian logic, why should we confine the rest of our reality to that? But we do. The idea seems absurd, even one winner can seem absurd when it's us (I never win anything!) And that tells us the limit of our consciousness. And our consciousness limits the reality we create.

But the point of magick is to stretch the envelope of that consciousness, and here the lottery can help. It can't change our consciousness in itself (unless I'm missing something), but it can act as a gauge to tell us where we are in our development of Lotto consciousness. Once we have done some work to develop ourselves, a lottery ticket can give us some idea of how far we've progressed. If, as in the California lottery, a ticket can pay $5, $50, $500,000 etc., it can tell us if we now have a million-dollar consciousness, a $5 consciousness, or whatever. This information can help us choose when we want to change our exercises or stick with the same ones.

But we must avoid the traps! Never ever, ever, ever, play the lottery out of fear or desperation. Never be irresponsible (which includes buying two tickets at once, according to me). Never play out of necessity. We don't need the lottery to tell us where we are, just as we don't need any magickal tool in our arsenals (and are, ideally, working on getting beyond using them). We don't even need to buy a ticket—Ed McMahon could hand us that ten-million dollar check (a fair trade for having to be exposed to him), we could invent the Deluxe Pet Rock and make a million, we could find a ticket, money could float from the sky, we could get whatever we without even using money. Why limit what your consciousness can create?

If you are working on prosperity, you may want to buy a ticket every lunar cycle or so—whenever you feel you might have made some changes that you have not yet noticed. Whatever—just remember to have fun. If you are aware and having fun, you are probably avoiding the blocks that interfere with manifesting what you want.

Blessed Be