I’ve been following this conversation and it’s been interesting learning the various beliefs of my fellow coven members. I personally do not believe magic is either good or bad. (Who came up with white or black? Really?)
I don’t believe we can control it. I believe we tap into the natural flow and what we believe to be control is actually us being controlled. In my opinion it is the height of human arrogance to believe we control the forces of the universe.
Think of tarot and other forms of divination. Are you doing anything that controls magic or are you tapping into something already there? I practice candle magic. I create spells and look to deities, too. But at the end of the day these are all rituals for us and not for the magic, not for the universe.
A friend recently asked me to be kind to a loved one. I said I never cast negative spells. I asked for cosmic justice, as I believe karma is from one life to the next. Cosmic justice took place that evening and it had nothing to do with me and it had nothing to do with good or bad. It was balance.
I help lead the energy exchange, but the category for energy exchange was here before I started to organize it and it will probably be here long after I am gone. I have seen miracles with it and I believe it is something “good” in the sense that we see things we consider to be good coming from it. But I know what we are doing is ritual. We are tapping into what magic will already do and we are being controlled not the other way around. So, in effect, the energy exchange isn’t just for the ones we send light to, it’s also for the people that send the light.
All of this is my personal belief and opinion so I hope no one takes this as an attack on them. But I believe giving in to the temptation to research dark magic is paramount to giving into the idea that we somehow can bend the universe to our will.
The universe doesn’t care about us. It’s possible we are reborn thousands of times on this rock flying through space. Eventually we will find ourselves in another physical place, another type of existence, or we will all be gone when our star enters its red giant phase. Good and bad are concepts that change with each generation. We may all believe that life is good and death and pain is bad but at the end of the day life is a quirk of the system and entropy means nothing, including our concepts, will exist in the physical plane.