The Power of a Single Wish

Your life depends on it

John Paragon (1954-2021) as Jambi the Genie on “Pee-wee's Playhouse.”

I want to be very careful with how I word this article. My contention is that a clarified wish can deliver you to unimagined shores. But I mean a certain kind of wish possessed of remarkable self-honesty.

It is the only kind of wish deserving the name.

I believe we are alienated from our truest wishes. By this I mean, we internalize custom and peer pressure to the degree of conditioning even our most intimate communications within. As a result, we obfuscate what we really want to express, attain, or perform in life. We substitute recitation for sincerity, embarrassment for earnestness.

Let’s say you encounter the proverbial genie in a lamp. He offers you one—and only one—wish. Your wish will come true, but only if you are entirely sincere and self-honest. Otherwise, you will lose everything. What is it?

This article ventures a deadly serious approach to this question. Any reader seeking spiritual mind-candy, “life hacks” (banish that term from our vernacular), or are you-are-good-enough bromides, should stop reading.

In matters of personal philosophy, I believe that knowing why something works is tantamount to it working. Hence, this article considers the power of a wish intently and in detail. If that sounds appealing, and only if, you are in the right company.

What Do You Want?

Twentieth-century spiritual philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff had many remarkable and enterprising students. Among the most impressive was English writer and editor A.R. Orage (1873-1934), a working-class man of letters whose thought touched the modern West both spiritually and socially. Historian J. Walter Driscoll wrote of Orage in the spring 1998 Gurdjieff International Review:

Equipped with the barest formal education, a formidable natural intelligence and an unquenchable yearning to understand, Alfred Richard Orage emerged from British 19th century working class poverty to survey the significant literary, psychological, political and spiritual trends of the early 20th century. His literary skills and wide range of interests led him to edit the enormously influential journal the New Age from 1907 until 1922 when he moved from London to Fontainebleau to attend Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

Orage produced an under-recognized classic of self-development, published in 1930 as The Active Mind: Adventures in Awareness and reissued in 1965 as Psychological Exercises and Essays. In it, the seeking author noted our daily inattention to our “native tastes”:

You wake in the morning and propose to get up. Ask yourself whether you really wish to get up. And be candid about it. You take a bath—is it really because you like it or would dodge it if you could? You eat your breakfast—is it exactly the breakfast you like—in kind and quantity? Is it just your breakfast you eat, or simply breakfast as defined by society? Do you, in fact, wish to eat at all? You go to your office, or being a woman, you set about domestic and social duties of the day—are they your native tastes? Would you of your own free choice be where you are and do what you do? Assuming that, for the present, you accept the general situation, are you in detail doing what you like? Do you speak as it pleases you to this, that or the other persons? Do you really like or only pretend to like them? (Remember that it is not a question yet of acting on your likes and dislikes but only of discovering what they are really). You pass the day, every phase offering a new opportunity for self-questioning—do I really like this or not? The evening arrives with leisure—what would you really like to do? What truly amuses you, theatre or movies, conversation, reading, music, games, and exactly which? It cannot be repeated too often that the doing of what you like comes later. In fact, it can be left to take care of itself. The important thing is to know what you like.

The method here suggested may seem trivial to those accustomed to the extravagances of the ‘literature of revolt’ but we undertake to say that a week of it would convince everybody of its magical efficiency.

Pay close attention to Orage’s observation that you need not lapse into distraction over the question of acting on your wishes, whether practical or impractical, possible or impossible. The question of “how” is a diversion that stymies awareness and acknowledgment. How often proves an excuse for inertia in matters of attention and desire, a point to which we return.

The Power of a Wish

My journey into the question and meaning of a wish began as do many experiments in ethical and spiritual philosophy: with a memory.

Many years ago, during my publishing career I was an acquisitions editor at a now-dead political imprint called The Free Press (not to be confused with the more recent news outlet). The imprint, newly bought by Simon & Schuster, was floundering. The man who made it great had left (and suddenly died) rather than work for the new owners. Meetings droned on about the need for fresh directions. I am often leery of media outlets announcing novel initiatives. I believe that most problems are solved by mastering the basics, which few people take the time to do.

At a weekly editorial-board meeting, a colleague mentioned that an accomplished literary journalist—I do not recall who—wanted to write a nonfiction book on the power of a wish. The latest publisher, a nattily dressed and easily triggered man who harbored suspicion toward me and other staffers (“Conservative books don’t sell, Mitch!” he once yelled), perked up and said that he thought it sounded like a good idea. I heartily agreed.

The book, to my knowledge, never got written. But its theme haunted me. The unrecalled journalist was, to my understanding, approaching this study of wishes from a non-­spiritual perspective. But what, after all, is spiritual or non-­spiritual? I believe that our lives traverse both mundane and extra-­physical spheres, evidence of which appears, for example, in widely replicated lab studies of ESP, precognition, and telepathy.

The verity of extra-physicality informs my exploration. There exists a discernible bridge between psi phenomena and the passion of desire. As historian of religions Jeffrey J. Kripal—my own Professor X—wrote me in early 2022, “The notion that ‘passion is critical’ is embedded in the coinage of the term ‘telepathy’ or ‘pathos at a distance’ and not ‘indifferent neutrality at a distance.’ [F.W.H.] Myers, in fact, linked telepathy to eros.” As Jeff alludes—and repeated lab experiments and field studies support—passion is the lever for extra-physical communication when it fitfully, although sometimes with jarring vividness, occurs; knowing your passions abets a measure of awareness around this process.

In Jeff’s 2010 Authors of the Impossible, he quotes the nineteenth-century scientist and parapsychology pioneer Myers (1843-1901) from his posthumous 1903 classic Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death: “Love is a kind of exalted, but unspecialized telepathy,” adding his own observation that “the French word for ‘magnet’ is, quite literally, ‘lover’ (amant).” If it is possible to psychically reach the dead, this facet of nonlocal existence, Jeff surmises, is “how Love finally conquered Death.”

Success author Napoleon Hill, sensing the connection between telepathy and pathos, wrote presciently in 1937, with emphasis his: “Mental telepathy is a reality. Thoughts pass from one mind to another, voluntarily, whether or not this fact is recognized by either the person releasing the thoughts, or the persons who pick up those thoughts.”

The Long Road

It may not surprise you that The Free Press soon fired me (although I outlasted its then-publisher). I decamped, with some personal strain, to an imprint specializing in the kinds of New Age and metaphysical literature better suited to my tastes and instincts. The move was a significant step-down in prestige as The New Yorker was not reviewing many books the enneagram—but for reasons of pragmatism and a gradual sense of mission, I soon felt at home.

At what was then called TarcherPenguin (since redubbed the tongue-twisting TarcherPerigee), I rose to the position of a corporate vice president and division editor in chief. Early in my efforts, I issued the work of a widely read psychic about whose character I felt uncertain but whose capacity for foresight I considered actual and still do. One night, we were having a conversation and she said, “Do you know what you want? You want power. But you have an overdeveloped superego.” I recoiled from her insight and spent years rejecting it.

Let me say a further word about psychical abilities. Groundbreaking graphic artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) wrote in his 1954 Formulae of Zos Vel Thanatos: “Many experiences I cannot reproduce and in some cases even re-­vision.” This may offer a yellow light to those who visit by-­the-hour psychics. As alluded, I believe in the actuality of psychical insight. But such insight cannot, in my estimation, be turned on and off like a water tap. This is why J.B. Rhine (1895-1980), the preeminent dean of psychical research and one of my intellectual heroes, stopped working with professional psychics in the mid-­1960s.

I knew another channel or psychic in my publishing days who gave me vital and, I believe, veritable advice that rescued me from a work crisis causing health-threatening anxiety. In short, he told me—rightly—to immediately sever all ties with a thuggish author: the kind who wears a lobbyist’s suit, wants to save the world, and produces no end of misery for all around him. When my friend delivered this reading his face astonishingly assumed the features of the subject. Trusting my psychic source, I returned to him about year later with a question of deep intimacy. He encouraged me to confess my feelings to another, which I foolishly and selfishly did: the fallout almost ended my life, liberty, and happiness. This, I believe, is why a highly accomplished spiritual publisher once cautioned: “You should doubt 50% of what a psychic tells you.”

For all that, I take seriously the psychical prospect, as explored here:

Psychic Spies to the Rescue?

Following the perspective of years, I had to acknowledge the truth behind my earlier psychical accessor’s insight, whatever its source, about my wish for power. I distinguish power from force. I saw my colleague as a forceful and aggressive person—I did not want power in that sense. I wanted the power of a thought leader. And, with it, recognition and remuneration. There is no time, if one values a seat on the lifeboat, for perfumed or precious attitudes. When facing existential questions, I neither accept nor proffer catechistic responses, often based on translations of translations of wisdom literature. I want truth as felt in body and psyche. I consider the latter a compact of thought and emotion. Truth is vulnerable and slightly embarrassing. It requires self-verification, not in principle but actually.

Can’t Buy You Love?

Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), a great twentieth-­century figure who helped bring Sufism to the West, was asked by an English-­speaking student whether it is necessary to give up riches in order to attain realization. Hazrat replied, “You do not have riches—how can you give up what is not yours?”

I must digress to offer inadequate tribute to the Khan family. In addition to Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat (1916-2004), who I was privileged to know, Hazrat was father to Noor Inayat Khan (1914–1944). While the Khans were dedicated to nonviolence—although Muslim they followed Gandhi’s initiative—Noor volunteered for service in the French Resistance during World War II. She was captured and executed at Dachau. Enough cannot be said about the bravery and decency of this woman. She is the subject of a justly detailed article at Wikipedia. Her brother Pir Vilayat, who had also taken a vow of nonviolence, enlisted as a sailor on a mine-sweeper in the Royal Navy. Pir recalled that his practice of meditation made him an especially good watchman.

To return to Hazrat’s injunction, anyone who contends, absent investigation, that worldly success cannot make you happy either has never experienced that success or has spent his or her life chasing it, finding it, and would never give it up—despite holding forth on its limits.

Some spiritual traditions and their modern exponents teach that we lack self-perspective and are too divided within to speak of possessing or understanding authentic wishes, especially of a worldly nature. Experience has taught me to dissent from that judgment. I believe that at certain sensitive moments, we, as individuals, possess higher perspective—not ultimate but higher. We are not the victims of a cosmic joke that deters us from knowing ourselves and what we truly want. Released from peer pressure and conditioning, we are more mature and self-availing than we realize.

One July 4th weekend, I made the slightly giddy offer of free Tarot readings to my social-media followers. The response was overwhelming. I did hundreds of three-card readings in about seventy-two hours. I noticed that nearly every question involved career, romance, health, and—a distant fourth—inner development. Those are facts of our lives not to be explained away or apologized for. I make no division in my search between higher and lower, white magick and black magick, inner and outer—I see no means of determining lines of demarcation among each nor evaluating the difference in the life of another since motive often proves subtler than choice.

Pushback against aspirational wishes in both spiritual and literary culture can produce ironic and nearly humorous results. In 2019, The New York Times op-­ed page published an essay by a Princeton University writing instructor arguing against the “desire for greatness” and extolling the ethic of being “good enough.” This is a popular theme among social critics, including philosopher Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) and bestselling columnist David Brooks. How did the “good enough” essay land on that coveted page? Its author won first­-place in an essay-­writing contest sponsored by the Brooklyn Public Library. This was noted without irony.

My point is: deal with actualities. Forget about “what seems,” “what ifs” or what some historic personage, tradition, or custom says. This is your life. The answer of who you are and what you want may vastly differ from what internalized culture, ritualized habit, or peer pressure induces you to repeat.

I stress the ethic of self-­honesty. In my view, every mature, seeking person is capable of sincerely answering: what do you want? I believe that many spiritual and therapeutic traditions and gatekeepers deprive the individual of that question—and make it seem as though he or she is unable to identify a core self because we are in pieces within. And this holds truth. Emotions, intellect, physicality, and sexuality are all running riot on their own. But the notion that the individual is unable to know what he or she wants is, I think, fallacy. I believe that any emotionally sensitive twelve-­year-­old could tell you what he or she wants without didactic qualification. I do not believe such realization should be taken from that person.

You might be surprised by what you want. In the confounding (and, I think, brilliant) 2024 Nicole Kidman thriller Baby Girl, the protagonist, a high-­powered CEO, discovers, after a life pursuing corporate leadership, that she wants to be told what to do. That certainly is not all that she wants but it reflects—especially sexually—an unacknowledged facet of self.

Kidman’s character, Romy, lets slip early in the movie that she was named by a guru and grew up in cults in a presumptive atmosphere of control. That early childhood experience, I reckon, colored her sense of intimacy and sexual desire, as do all early experiences, especially at periods of sexual awakening. For Romy, subjugation fused with sexuality. Trying to alter arousal is, I think, as futile as trying to change eye color. Magickian Anton LaVey called our early arousal points Erotic Crystallization Inertia or ECI—understanding it is of great help in magick, affirmation, and visualization. Points of arousal are highly individualized, sometimes curious and sometimes confounding, and should never be fought but accommodated within contours of self-respect and consent.

To use a different example, maybe you have dedicated your life to pursuing pure learning, which is a noble aim—yet what you really want is money. Money does a lot of good things. I think gross consumption usually points to an unhappiness or gap in the individual. So maybe the person involved in gross consumption does not really want money. These are maybes. But we rarely grant ourselves the opportunity to really ask.

The Feeling of a Wish

As is clear by now, if I have one inviolate rule in the search, it is a clarified wish. I urge unprejudiced and even uncomfortable acknowledgment of your innermost aspirations. I suggest revisiting your earliest memories, around ages three or four, to uncover authentic desires that predate full-­on social conditioning. This period is critical, marking the genesis of long-­term memories and galvanized dreams and wishes. Turn back these layers and ask, with unadulterated honesty, what you wanted then—and want now—free from shackles of embarrassment or moral judgment, which generally amount to little more than internalized peer pressure or fear. The congruity may surprise you.

Again, this effort of introspection must remain untainted by social labels or expectations. Looking back on my search, I find that deeply felt wishes I harbored as a child have appeared, albeit over a considerable span of time, such as speaking and communicating in public—including the words you are now reading.

What I suggest aligns with Goethe’s insight, indirectly considered in his matchless iteration of Faust, that the wishes of youth, for good or ill, emerge unexpectedly as we age. Recognizing and honoring these wishes, shielded from peer influence, is paramount. The path to self-discovery and activation of personal power often commences with this simple yet profound act: internally (and accurately) acknowledging your radically honest, unabashed wish.

Clarity of intent, in my experience, concentrates power either immediately or over time. This is a natural law inasmuch as particles or droplets densely concentrated form a near-irresistible force.

* * *

Let me share a private episode that galvanized so much in my current life. On a winter afternoon about eighteen years ago, I climbed to the top of a stone tower on the banks of the Charles River in Weston, Massachusetts. The Victorian-­era oddity (or folly as the style is sometimes known) was built in 1889 to commemorate a Viking settlement that some believe Norse explorer Leif Erikson founded on the banks of the Charles around 1,000 A.D. (In terms of historical accuracy, I can note only that a viable waterway, the Charles and St. Lawrence Rivers, connects the area to Leif’s probable touchdown in Newfoundland, Canada.)

Named Norumbega Tower, after the reputed settlement, the thirty-eight-foot column had iron bars on its windows and doors to keep out snoopers, ghost hunters, and pentagram-spraying heavy-metal kids (may השטן love them). All I knew was that I wanted to go inside. I slithered my six-­foot-two-­inch frame through a loose grill, discovered some graffiti left by said metalheads and climbed a dank spiral stairway to the top.

At that time in life, I had one great desire burning in my veins: to become a writer. I had already been active in that direction, but I was not young—I was past forty. I swore from the top of that tower that I would establish myself as a known author. I asked all forces available to me on that frigid day, seen and unseen, physical and extraphysical, to come to my aid.

Something swelled within me at that moment: I felt in sync physically, intellectually, and emotionally, and at one with my surroundings; my wish resounded clear, strong, and assured, as though lifted by an unseen current. It was a totalizing experience, which went beyond the common. In the years immediately ahead, I did become known as a writer—I was published by Random House and other presses, won a PEN literary award, and received bylines in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Politico—outlets rarely drawn, and often culturally averse, to my occult themes.

My act that winter day was entirely spontaneous, neither planned nor prepared for. Nor was I reciting ceremonies, spells, or rituals from another’s playbook.

Some years later, I had a related experience. I was suffering a sense of failure in my efforts to break into television and movies. I yearned to host or otherwise present occult or paranormal themes on screen with integrity and intellect. “What you want,” a trusted colleague cautioned, “requires a revolution in our culture.” Well, that is what I wanted. In July 2017, I wrote these words in the margin of my dogeared paperback of Think and Grow Rich (covered in clear packing tape for durability): “My TV plans have not been sound—I am at cross purposes. I need a new vision of what will work, and what is right / compatible with my ideals.”

Just around that time, I visited the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, in New York. As part of the exhibit that summer day, movie-­set trailers were parked out front and visitors were allowed to enter makeup and holding rooms typically used by on-­set actors. Inside the museum (in addition to a life-­size, head-­rotating doll from The Exorcist) appears a delightful walk-­in exhibit that expressionistically replicates the interior of vintage movie palaces. I found myself alone in that space. It was a propitious moment in which I felt emotion welling up in me. I again prayed to all forces within and without to bring me the screen success for which I yearned. I repeated something similar when I entered—and stole moments of privacy in—the location trailers.

The road that followed was hard, twisting, and, at times, sufficiently difficult so that days occurred where I vowed to give it up. In a park on New York’s Lower East Side, after suffering betrayal on a screen project from someone I had considered a close friend, I wrote in my notebook on April 21, 2021: “My DCA [Definite Chief Aim] has failed. It is eating me alive. I need a turn of corner. . .I need a new DCA. TV is not viable. Kybalion movie = headed south.”

But an authentic wish is a strange thing: you cannot give it up. It owns you. You are indebted to it. Hours or at most a day later, the wish came roaring back, as it had other times. On April 23, 2021, I wrote: “I cannot move away from my DCA.”

As I write this, I have a development deal with the A&E Channel. I host a Discovery / HBO Max show, Alien Encounters, which spent three weeks in Max’s top-­ten TV shows. I play myself as a historical commentator in the latest installment of AMC-Shudder’s found-footage horror franchise V/H/S/BEYOND, which was nominated for a 2025 Critics Choice Award for Best Movie Made for Television (laurels to segment director Jay Cheel). I play a newscaster in the Sundance-premiering 2023 Paramount thriller My Animal directed by Jacqueline Castel. I am featured in the 2024 docuseries Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown on MGM+, executive produced by J.J. Abrams. My 2022 feature documentary The Kybalion, brilliantly directed by Emmy-nominee Ronni Thomas and shot on location in Egypt, premiered as the number-three documentary on iTunes. I have ethical management at SpectreVision, a media company cofounded by actor Elijah Wood. Jim Perry, Daniel Noah and other principals there collaborated with me on a dream-­come-true podcast, Extraordinary Evidence: ESP Is Real. I appear regularly on The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd on the History Channel. In a November 15, 2024, interview with Decider, Dan said: “I love Mitch Horowitz. He’s great. . .I kind of relate to him in a way. I just like his look, you know?” While moving by itself, Dan’s comment arrived several months after producers at a production company told my manager they were unhappy with my leather-­jacketed look. They pressed him to lie and say it was his idea that my leather go. He refused. Thank you, Antonio D’Intino. During this writing, I became an on-camera expert for the History Channel show The Proof Is Out There. I also shot a substantial interview for another network’s forthcoming occult-­themed, true-crime series. Days prior to completing this article, I shot a pilot for History—and so on.

The effort never stops and arrival is always tantalizingly a step away—but progress? In early 2024, when I stepped into the talent trailer on the Roswell, New Mexico, set of Alien Encounters, the sense of symmetry was uncanny and emotional. My eyes teared.

In addition to enormous and longstanding effort—my first TV appearance dates to the Montel Williams Show in 2007 (we discussed the world ending in 2012, which it apparently did not)—I attribute this progress, as with my writing, to the power of a passionately felt, clarified wish followed through with tremendous sweat equity. In each case, my wish provided momentum, focus, and, I believe, some measure of the selective and telepathic agencies I reference earlier. Some will cry “confirmation bias” (a finger always pointed outward). My warranty stems from as much enduring effort and perspective as a seeking person can muster.

I believe that a single wish and laser-focus works best. This is what Napoleon Hill called a Definite Chief Aim, referenced earlier. But I also recognize that one wish realized (if not wholly completed) can be followed by another, especially in relation to the first. That, at least, is my personal approach. Should life throw at you something dramatically unexpected and urgent, a wish may of necessity change or grow. The point is not creating new orthodoxies (on which I gag) but responding to authentic passions.

Some argue that life’s myriad demands render it impossible to select a single wish. As noted, concentration produces impact. Bear in mind: one wish can cover a lot of bases in life. Your wish is not tantamount to turning your back on other needs and relationships. Irrigation channels branch off from your wish.

But How?

Before offering an exercise to clarify your wish, I must revisit the question of “how.” I contend that an authentic wish—barring extreme countervailing measures or emergencies—is innately practicable. A wish is neither pipe dream nor fantasy. We often cry “how?” not because we have tried and failed but because we intend never to try.

Let the person who has tried and failed ten times approach me or another with the question of “how?” Anything less is inertia, which is the modus operandi for which most people settle, at least those who can retreat behind conditions of relative ease. This retreat produces the ennui that drives many of us into repeat-loops of talk therapy, bellyaching to a shrink about this and that quotidian woe without once confronting the crisis back of it all: paucity of self-expression. I hope I do not seem coarse. But barring extreme tragedy or macro-crises beyond individual influence, I see this pattern among most people in settings of reasonable comfort.

Once upon a time, I wrote on Twitter, “Excellence is your only defense.” A reader replied, “The question then is, how does one achieve excellence?” For that, I lean on a intellect far greater than mine.

In 1964, the unclassifiable spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) conducted a series of dialogues with young students in India. It appears in his book Think on These Things. The teacher spoke of the dulling effect of conformity and the need to live by your inner compass. A boy asked him: “How can we put into practice what you are telling us?”

Krishnamurti replied that if you want something badly enough, you know exactly what to do. “When you meet a cobra on the road,” the teacher said, “you don’t ask ‘What am I do to?’ You understand very well the danger of a cobra and you stay away from it.” Krishnamurti noted:

You hear something which you think is right and you want to carry it out in your everyday life; so there is a gap between what you think and what you do, is there not? You think one thing, and you are doing something else. But you want to put into practice what you think, so there is this gap between action and thought; and then you ask how to bridge the gap, how to link your thinking to your action.

Now, when you want to do something very much, you do it, don’t you? When you want to go and play cricket, or do some other thing in which you are really interested, you find ways and means of doing it; you never ask how to put it into practice. You do it because you are eager, because your whole being, your mind and heart are in it.

Regardless, people make excuses why they cannot act on the one thing for which they long. They say they cannot possibly make a living at it or they do not know where to begin. Money is vital. But money is often an alibi for inertia. You can always begin something. And it is critical that you not condition that beginning on quitting your day job, which may prove a lifelong fact of existence, a question I touch on here:

It Is Not Too Late

In terms of life-work balance—a trope for the ennui generation—I knew that I would successfully complete my first book Occult America (2009), which I wrote while co-raising two young sons and holding down a corporate publishing job, when I realized that I wanted to write more than I wanted to sleep. That is unsustainable longterm. But for a fixed time, it proved workable. I wrote till my body crossed the point of physical fatigue, which arrives much later than we coddle ourselves to believe. When the body is truly tired, stop. Before then, all depends on what you really want; on whether your wish is real.

I consider the nature of persistence in an earlier article:

The Metaphysics of Persistence

Let me return to Krishnamurti. Another Indian youth told the teacher that he feared being kicked out of his home if he violated his father’s demands and pursued a career as an engineer. Act, Krishamurti told the student, and life will rise to your demands:

If you persist in wanting to be an engineer even though your father turns you out of the house, do you mean to say that you won’t find ways and means to study engineering? You will beg, go to friends. Sir, life is very strange. The moment you are very clear about what you want to do, things happen. Life comes to your aid—a friend, a relation, a teacher, a grandmother, somebody helps you. But if you are afraid to try because your father may turn you out, then you are lost. Life never comes to the aid of those who merely yield to some demand out of fear. But if you say, “This is what I really want to do and I am going to pursue it,” then you will find that something miraculous takes place.

Philosopher Jacob Needleman (1934-2022) once asked me: “What do you do when someone offers you a gift?” After I stared at him blankly, he replied: “You accept it!” Krishnamurti’s words are a gift.

Wishcraft

Based on what I have described, attempt this technique:

1. As you complete this article, or another time when you have privacy, ask—without embarrassment or self-­censorship—what you truly want. It can be intimate, material, situational—anything. Your emotions must be in earnest. Damn all internalized peer pressure, “spiritual” ideals, or qualifications (and do not say “service” unless you are Albert Schweitzer). Be honest.

2. When identifying your wish, do not confuse means with ends. You do not necessarily need to focus on one singular path or solution. Things reach us by many roads. Do not hem yourself in.

3. Hold that wish. Speak it aloud. If you are alone, in nature, or on a platform as a train arrives, shout it.

4. Write it down. Clearly and plainly. Take the slip of paper or card on which you have written your wish and place it in your pocket. If possible, wrap it in clear packing tape (of which I am a fan) to protect it. Carry it like a talisman. The very act clarifies. And something more: writing your wish on paper provides a particulate yet tangible nascency of realized desires. Something is present that was not there before.

5. Run your wish through your mind as often as possible. Dote on it.

6. Pray for your wish to whatever Greater Force you seek a relationship with. (I explore this in Practical Magick.)

7. Recite your wish as you drift to sleep, i.e., in the highly suggestible, mentally subtle state of hypnagogia, and do so again as you awaken. Do not underestimate this.

Record what occurs. Try.

Abide Silence

In 2004, Bob Dylan made a valuable observation during a 60 Minutes interview about his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One:

Ed Bradley: You use the word destiny over and over throughout the book. What does that mean to you?

Dylan: It’s a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your mind of what you’re about will come true. It’s kinda the thing you kinda have to keep to your own self—because it’s a fragile feeling and you put it out there, somebody will kill it. So, it’s best to keep that all inside.

That is as good an explanation as I know for the importance of maintaining silence around your wishes and hallowed self-conceptions. In his 1856 Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, occult revivalist Eliphas Lévi (1810-1875) explained how the élan vital for which his mid-­nineteenth-­century generation had been searching dwells within the individual where it is aroused by desire, symbol, ceremony, image, and allegory. This power is retained by reserve and focus; it is diluted by excess and dispersal. Lévi provided a credo for the dawning magickal culture:

One must KNOW in order to DARE.

One must DARE in order to WILL.

One must WILL to have the Empire.

And to reign, one must BE SILENT.

Silence—it is the easiest treasure to hold and to squander. When harboring a key idea of self or plans, we often commit the knee-jerk error of seeking emotional validation, as I once did.

At one point in my publishing career, I dreamed of starting an independent press dedicated to classic, below-­the-­radar, and often public-domain reissues. I rigorously researched the market, copyright issues, and prevailing and unfolding technology. I never started the press but based on its premises devised a boundingly successful rediscovery program at Penguin Random House. One of my titles, a 2008 reissue of Napoleon Hill’s The Law of Success, had a 77% gross-operating profit. This was not an errant occurrence. I used to say over and over: “When you sell one copy of a public-domain book you sell the budgetary equivalent of two because you keep all the money.” The program rescued my imprint during the 2008 Great Recession, which shuttered the national book chain Borders. My proudest accomplishment is that no one at my shop lost their jobs during that harrowing period.

Sharing my vision of an indie reissue press with a close friend, however, I found he ran it down and diminished it with snide remarks. He sometimes dropped such asides into otherwise relaxed conversations, blindsiding me. In retrospect, I realize I was foolish. You cannot disclose your treasured plans to another, whether friend or family, but only to professional colleagues with real expertise (who you might have to pay for it). An exception are close colleagues united in Napoleon Hill’s conception of a “Master Mind” group, a harmonious, liked-minded fellowship of mutual support.

Human nature often seeks to destroy or devalue what it cannot personally attain. Hence, when you disclose your wishes to another there exists likelihood—barring special circumstances—that he or she will either subtly or ham-­fistedly attempt to shatter it.

Do not let that happen. Silence is your sword and shield.

Letter to an Inmate

Some of my critics consider me too materialistic and conventionally aspirational. I have been called “outer looking.” I sometimes maintain correspondence with incarcerates. Here is a letter pertinent to that issue:

January 10, 2025

Dear Mike,

Thank you for your letter of November 12 and your birthday wishes.

You cover a lot of interesting ground in your note. In hopes this reply proves useful, I will share an element of my recent search. As you noted, I am unsentimental about wishes: I believe they must be clear, blunt, and unflinchingly self-­honest. I also believe in reciprocal ethics.

In my mid-­thirties, I discovered the work of spiritual philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff to which I dedicated about eight years of group effort. I treasure the experience daily. The question of what one wants from the work was always a hot-­button issue for me. I am clear about what I want; one can read it in Daydream Believer or elsewhere. My search is pretty public for the sake of exchanging transparently with readers.

I have lately revisited a passage from In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky’s invaluable record of his time with Gurdjieff. In it, the teacher asks a circle of students to state their personal aims and what they desire from the work. The answers are fairly ordinary: world peace, to know the future, immortality, to be a real Christian, and so forth. In short, Gurdjieff replies:

Of the desires expressed the one which is most right is the desire to be master of oneself, because without this nothing else is possible. And in comparison with this desire all other desires are simply childish dreams, desires of which a man could make no use even if they were granted to him.

For many years, I resisted his formulation. It did not stir my passions. It seemed too far away. (The more involved one becomes with the work, the further and further it seems, almost to the point of impossibility. Only those who have been stripped of fantasies about self can understand that.)

I used to, and in some ways still do, pose an exercise to others and myself. Let’s say you encounter the proverbial genie in a lamp. He offers you one—and just one—wish. Your wish will be granted, but only if you are entirely self-­honest about what you want. If you are not, you will lose everything. What is it?

I despise treacly responses and set up this question to get down to the emotional skin-­and-­bone of things. I often say that life strikes a tough bargain with us: we are granted the one thing we want above all else, whether we admit it to ourselves. People object: I have so many needs and obligations; how can I boil it all down to one thing? I say that one well-­selected aim can cover a lot of bases: so choose carefully.

Lately, I have been newly posing this genie question to myself. I find that I am starting to sound a little bit like my interlocutors. I have many bases to cover and I want to ensure that no one I love (of whom there are few) gets left behind. Hence, I am thinking anew about Gurdjieff’s demand. Is being “master of oneself” possible? Probably not. But this aim fulfilled would allow someone to actually place hands on the levers granted us—and find his or her way in the world, something impossible for someone controlled and contorted entirely by external influences, i.e., all but a very few of us, if any.

I share this by way of exchange. I am happy to send you a copy of this book if you like.

Wishing you all good things,

Mitch

Perhaps this would prove an august note on which to end. But if I practice the same honesty with you that I urge you to practice with yourself, I must be plain. In the five months that have passed since I sent that letter, my wishes remain as passionate—and aspirational—as earlier.

As alluded, and without sentimentality, a wish choses us not us it. I nonetheless abide the passage above as food for your journey and mine.

I end, finally, on the words of nineteenth-century Swiss ethicist Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881), who in 1857 wrote in his journals: “Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.”*

Go tell yourself the truth of your most deeply felt passion. There will appear your wish. And with it, very likely, your life.

_______________

*Translated in 1885 by British novelist and social reformer Mary Augusta Ward (1851-1920).