https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vdm6dnpreds
All right, so Leon says, can prayer be seen as a form of magic spell? This is a really great question. It’s a great question because I can understand why people would think that, and that it’s important to differentiate the two. And so, it really is something which is similar to other ways I’ve represented reality to you, which is that the difference between occultism and liturgy, or the difference between magic and prayer has to do with will, which has to do with the difference between do thy will, whatever like the kind of Thelemite idea, or the Aleister Crowley idea of that doing your will is the first of the law, and that it’s all about doing your will. Whereas prayer is not my will, but thy will be done. And so, although both are affecting reality and engaging reality through meaning making, they’re both the idea that words can transform you and can transform your connection to reality. One is more in the sense of a, like a technology, you could say using words as technology to manipulate other things and to get what you want from the world. Whereas the other, the liturgy or the prayer is rather using words to elevate that which is the highest and prepare yourself to receive from that what is going to come, right? You know, and not try to simply impose your will on reality. So that’s how I see it. But you can imagine why some magical sentences, right? Some magical, magic words were based on the liturgy, based on the sacrament, and that, I forget which one it is, but there is one of the famous magic phrases which is basically a kind of deformation of when the priest, when the bread and wine become the body and blood. So you could see how that would happen. And then people would want to take that, which is very powerful, and they realize it’s a powerful word that is basically participating in God manifesting himself in the world and say, wow, that’s a powerful word, that’s a powerful sentence, if I can do that and all these people come to church and are willing to participate in that, and like take the fruit of that, I’m like, hmm, maybe I could use that to do my own will, and I could use those words to manipulate reality in order to do what I want, therefore the magic phrases or the magic incantation. But you can see how it becomes kind of ridiculous, which is why a lot of the, I think it’s hocus pocus, I think hocus pocus comes from the transformation of the bread into the body. I’m not sure, yeah, someone says hocus pocus in the chat. But you can see why magic spells are usually kind of tricky and kind of funny, like if you look at a Bracadabra or whatever, it’s a word that you can flip upside down, that you can do all this stuff, yeah. So I would say, that question is important, because you could do that, you could use prayer as a magic spell, if you imagine prayer as just a way, like the secret, right, the idea that all you have to do is put your will out there, put your will out there, like write what you want on a letter, put it in front of you, meditate on it, send yourself a letter with what you want, so that you’re kind of coaxing reality into manifesting what you want from it. And people do that with prayer, people will ask God to give them a car, will ask God to help them get out of situations that they put themselves in, and so they’re trying to manipulate reality using God, but God is not a fool and will not be played that way. So Beautiful Summer says, Hocus inum corpus meum, this is the body. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone says, Amst, Arnstein, Killein, says my dad has Hocus corpus on the back of his Liverpool football jersey, that’s hilarious. Apparently Hokey Pokey was originally making fun of maths too, huh, interesting.