Advanced People Never Don't Do The Basics

Magic Edition

The title comes from a tweet by Alex Hormozi. He meant it in the contexts in which he is significantly more advanced than you or me: being jacked and getting very rich.

It’s a perfect frame from a common -dare we say basic- idea. My six-month ‘beginners’ magic course is called The Foundations because they aren’t beginner techniques; they are foundational techniques. The foundations of your house aren’t ‘beginner’; they are essential. In all of these domains, ‘beginner’ is the wrong word.

Hormozi’s framing is perfect because it retains the appeal or pull towards mastery. Without that frame, ‘starting with the basics’ sounds like ‘eat your vegetables’ or ‘you can go out play when you are done with your homework’. The basics are not just something you thunder through as fast as possible in order to get to the ‘good’ stuff. Advanced people do not progress from basic to advanced activities. They may add advanced activities to basic activities they always do. One of the reasons why advanced people are advanced in the first place is because they have integrated and applied this distinction. Consider beginner magicians: Beginners over-invest in (half the) equipment necessary to attempt to conjure one of the tricksiest list spirits and have a crack at it at 11:20am on a Friday morning. And no amount of insisting they memorise chakra colours or whatever first ever changes that. Perhaps there’s another frame? Perhaps this Hormozi frame?

Leaving aside -maybe another post- the difference between being experienced with magic and advanced at magic, let’s look at how this broadly applies.

What counts as the basics?

The plot twist here is that a basic’s understanding of the basics is actually pretty basic, and thus not ‘the basics’ at all. (Your mom’s basic.) The detritus of the Victorian era’s version of the New Age -Middle Pillars, LBRPs, Liber Resh, Gnostic Masses- most assuredly are not basics. The actual basics are what gave rise to those hoary old museum pieces.

1. Hygiene/Coherence

Maybe there’s a German word we can use to replace ‘energy’ or ‘energetics’ not because they are wrong, but because they are played out to such an extent that people just bounce off them.

But if you look at archaic goetia up until the Hellenistic era and fold in the first couple of centuries of Christianity, you see a central preoccupation with energetic sovereignty and cleanliness in a world riddled with miasma and unclean spirits. This is accomplished through boundary work, physical and spiritual cleanliness in the first part. It is then combined with ‘getting under’ or ‘getting into alignment with’ some conception of the Higher. This is the coherence part.

Which neatly brings us to the second basic. (Still your mom.)

2. Relationality/Contact

See how your system reacts when you swap out the words ‘working with’ for ‘right relation’:

“I’m working with the seven planetary angels” becomes “I’m exploring relationality, needs, desires and affinities with the seven planetary angels”.

Is it more wordy? Yes. Can you get the ‘feel’ of it once you have said those words internally once or twice and that is even faster and more natural than ‘working with’? Also yes.

As a language, English actually has many skills and abilities she rarely gets the credit for. But she does also have some well-picked-over shortcomings, and they are on display here.

‘Working with’ needs to be clunkily upgraded to ‘ongoingness of relation on all sides of the human-and-more-than-human, properly contextualised in place-time and not simply breathily-parroted, Victorian am-dram’. But you only need to do the clunky upgrade once. You’ll know it’s been successful when you can find it by feel, rather than words. That’s the whole point.

Speaking of words.

3. Prayer

Just prayer. Not ‘enflame thyself with’. Not ‘How do I pronounce’. Just prayer. Find your way into a form of prayer that feels like sliding into a warm bath at the end of a cold, hard day.

And then do it a lot.

Collect them. Memorise cool, short ones. Practice performing longer ones beautifully so that, reading them or not, they make the cheap seats shout and cry “bravo”.

Prayer rolls up the first two points in a way that makes them both immediately actionable - “oh, I suppose I do technically know how to pray”- as well as a lifelong pursuit that you are guaranteed to fail at - “prayer has been a human preoccupation for tens of millennia. What could I possibly add to this chorus?” (If you think that, you are already praying, by the way.)

Somewhere skirting the edge of appropriation is seeking inspiration in the pan-Americas-but-known-mostly-as-Diné concept of the Beauty Way. This is following, pursuing and expressing beauty in all that you do so that your entire life becomes a prayer of gratitude and celebration.

4. Restoration

God help me, I might have to call this point self-care. But also silence and turning inward and retirement and contemplation. Care of the Self. Dusting the inner sanctuary while listening to the wind blowing gently through the trees outside.

It is the other kind of self-care, too. Adequate nutrition, sleep, leisure, celebration. Done not out of some tit-for-tat game played with capitalism where you ‘deserve’ that pizza or you ‘are worth’ that new lipstick because of ‘how hard you worked’ or something. But rather done as a humble offering in a humble temple to what is nevertheless God. There is a gentle smallness to it. What quiet needs emerge when you make that inward turn? A walk along the river? A quick message to an old friend?

Making Basics Advanced

(Definitely not your mom.) About a month ago, I was calibrating Lance Baker and Mat Dragonstone’s amazing, amazing Pleiades pendulum and I had a brief moment, during the evening ceremony, where it occurred to me how simultaneously ‘big’ and ‘small’ the event was: These words spoken in a humble structure in a quiet corner of this planet to beings who have been entangled with the human story for at least a hundred thousand years.

And that got me thinking about something one of Alberto Villoldo’s Q’ero teachers taught him: “open sacred space and get out the way”. It carries that same small/big charge.

These thoughts came back to me this weekend. I’m up in Brisbane for Cassandra Tyndall’s 2025 Astrology Workshop (which was great, by the way). Now, on the one hand, looking ahead at next year and then looking where all the major transits hit your own chart is very basic. (There’s an astrology joke in here somewhere, I’m sure.) But, for me personally, it represented something of a shadow work/soul retrieval milestone that would come under basic point four: restoration. I have never in my own life taken several hours to really sit with an annual forecast and my own chart and thought about my life. If I had ever tried something like that, it would have quickly spun off into other people’s lives, into Rune Soup, into thoughts for clients.

Once in my childhood, my father yelled right in my face “we don’t care about your precious little interests!” Then he sent me to bed. Some real Harry Potter shit when I stop to think about it. That’s an example of the stuff I have reintegrated thanks to some soul retrieval processes I’ve been exploring with my lineage spirits this year that I shall unleash onto my shamanic healing clients in the next one. But it’s meant that I’ve never been great with Taurus medicine, which is to say Divine Selfishness. I’m sure that was part of my previous long-running unease with astrology: Who gives a fuck what happens to this asshole?

So this basic did something very advanced for him on the weekend. Something that itself is an advanced basic. Doing basic things right, and for the right reasons, I believe is the hallmark of an advanced practitioner. It is something I aim for rather than claim to be. I actually closed The Foundations by saying that if you just do the (foundational) things that are taught in that course, you are ahead of 90% of self-described magicians. Advanced basics is no easy goal, but it is a noble one.

It is a noble goal encapsulated in the archetypal story of the stonemasons, which I shall leave you with:

On a foggy autumn day, a traveller came across three stonemasons working by the River Avon. Curious, he asked the first mason what he was doing. The man grumbled, "I am cutting stones." Moving on, the traveller posed the same question to the second mason, who replied, "I am a stonecutter, earning my way back home." Finally, the traveller approached the third mason, who paused and looked skyward before answering with pride,

"I am building a cathedral."