1. To begin the Magi Process, you must think broadly and think in the body.

2. The Magi Process is not a reasonable process any more than spring or summer, fall or winter are reasonable. Water rushing through a stream is not reasonable: instead the stream is about a series of pre-determined consequences (water loves to flow, things will be swept aside, sunlight will glint off the water….)and the chaos that arises with everything being indeterminate within the determinate system. Chaos within order; order within chaos. This is way beyond reason.

3. There is no reconciling or unification to be done: you do not need to “find both sides of the story” or problem you are working with; you do not need to reason things out.

4. Yet, some work needs to be done. We need to learn to be present to our own self and the situation we are working with in a certain way.

5. For example, the other day I was preparing to work on the fact that the Republican chairman of the federal corporation that funds the public broadcasting has begun interfering in the shows themselves and revealed that he had done a secret investigation into Bill Moyers’ show to prove how liberally biased it was, and then used the information he found to demand that more conservative shows be shown on PBS stations.

6. In order to do the Magi Process, one must bracket all of the details of the situation and hold them all in consciousness. For instance, in the example I cited above, I held the fight between the corporation for public broadcasting and the interests he represented; the president of PBS itself and his side. I also included my own feelings, to wit, that the chairman was a bully he wanted nothing better than to destroy the public broadcasting system, making it an arm of the government. And so on….

7. In other words, my work was to be aware of all of this dissonance, which I held as a single unit or shape or dissonance. I use these different words because people will react to them differently and usually one or two are most meaningful and descriptive for any given person.

8. Nothing needed to be “worked out.” I needed to be aware of the entire thing however.

9. If I had been working with an issue that was more directly personal to me, for which I had “hotter” or more intense personal feelings and beliefs, I still would have had to bracket all of it as the complete shape or dissonance it was. In other words, I would not have to deny my own feelings of being “in the right.” I would however, need to include them in my consciousness. This is very much like riding the wave of transference or the bracketing experiment described in the [The Set of the World].

(please go to A Society of Souls to order this and other works by Jason Shulman)

10. All of this, the various pieces, insights, conflicts, thoughts, annoyances, concerns, fear, anxiety, hope and so on, are held In the body. In a sense they have boiled down to a shape or body felt sense of the “whole” situation. Therefore, there is at that point a single location for the whole conflictæalong with the desire for change, the thought that “it should/could be different.”

11. Once the situation or dissonance or shape is held in consciousness along with the desire for change, one begins the Process.

12. The Magi Process is a series of statements and poetic utterances which, on the surface, have no particular order apparent by reading them. They seem deeply mysterious.

13. Yet, there is a deeply organic lineage of ideas going on. In fact, many people have reported that not only does the Process lead you to the next step, but it sometimes reports or describes where you already find yourself as you hold dissonance and desire for change together in your consciousness as you proceed with the process.

14. In other words, the Process is predicative as well as being a map of how change and the material world interact.