What is Magic?

[anagogy]

I have seen quite a bit in the Ra material about magic and magical, but I would like a simple explanation of what "magic" means in this context. I am NOT talking about the Tarot card, the Magician.

However, now that I've mentioned the Tarot, a second question would be why does Ra speak so much about the Tarot and the cards in it. Is it perhaps because Carla and her group are especially interested in this "distortion"?

To me Tarot and Astrology have meaning perhaps because there are so many thought forms built up around them in the mass consciousness.

Getting back to my first question, can anyone explain - in very simple terminology - what Ra might mean by "magic"?

According to Ra, magic is the ability to use the unconscious mind consciously. Another variation on the definition is the ability to create changes in consciousness at will. Since all is composed of consciousness, this is literally tapping into the primal powers of creation itself. Many magical rituals are designed, through symbology, to create a condition whereby one's will is communicated down through the trunks and roots of mind, that we do not ordinarily have access to, where they affect a level of collective mind or consciousness we might call "cosmic" or "universal", thus causing changes in the less broad levels of reality we perceive at. In magic, one is working with their "unmanifested self", or that time/space analog of themselves, that does its work without regard or reference to other selves -- the self become creator, in other-words.

The significance of the tarot is that it, among other systems such as astrology and the tree of life, is a map of the archetypical mind. The reason Ra talks so much about Tarot, as opposed to the other systems or maps of the archetypical mind, is firstly because they were questioned so much about it, and secondly, when Ra was 3rd density, it was the system they used to study the archetypical mind, which they found quite useful for understanding the mind, body, and spirit.

Ra says:

The philosophy was to create a foundation, first of mind, then of body, and then of spiritual complex. Those concept complexes you call the tarot lie then in three groups of seven: the mind cycle, one through seven; the physical complex cycle, eight through fourteen; the spiritual complex cycle, fifteen through twenty-one. The last concept complex may best be termed The Choice.

Upon the foundation of transformation of each complex, with free will guided by the root concepts offered in these cycles, the Logos offered this density the basic architecture of a building and constructing and synthesizing of data culminating in The Choice.