What to do when a magickal operation is in progress

In one of my previous posts about sigil magick and thoughtforms, Ananael commented on how he 'forgets' about his magickal practice. He said that not obsessing about his magickal aim helps on the forgetting part. I decided to take this further and write notes as a post. He basically said this:

Not fretting about a magical operation in progress is my take on how the "forgetting" works as well. The time you spend obsessing about whether or not an ongoing magical operation will work really seems to diminish its effectiveness, though I'm not sure of the exact mechanism. It's almost like if you hold the form too tightly in your mind it can't get the work done that you charged it to do.

I agree with him and I want to add what fretting or obsessing about an ongoing magickal work just means that you don't believe in what you do. This is a shortcut to becoming unsuccessful in magickal practice because magick starts and ends in your mind. This holds true on every level of magical activity. When you do your work and then obsess about it afterwards, this is a clear sign of disbelief.

On first impression, not to obsess about your magickal work seems very difficult to some people. That's normal too and there are ways to overcome this. You can become pretty relaxed with practice and experience. One of the ways to get relaxed is meditation. You don't need to meditate deeply, just try to keep yourself calm.

Why does obsessing about your work affects your practice and why is this a bad thing? Well, you usually do magickal work to create physical change. It is usually something that you want badly (ok, not always but sometimes). Wanting something so much involves disbelief. You don't believe that it is going to happen or you don't believe that you are going to have what you want. Therefore, since your belief is a strong magickal force, your belief manifests the reality ending up with not having what you want. Because the request sent to a higher force (the universe, gods and goddesses, entities, your higher self or whatever you want to call it) contains just this information: that you don't believe in having a certain thing and in fact you don't want to have it. This is what magickal practice is all about.

There is another perspective tough. Steve Pavlina, who is a self-development guru and also a master on intention- manifestation process tells something different. In fact he doesn't disagree with what I tell here but he adds something called polarity. According to this polarity model, he thinks that it's okay to use your obsession as a force in manifesting what you want. His model can be shown in an example like this: Suppose that you want to attract or manifest money and you can't stop fretting about it. At this point, Pavlina says that one should stay in this fearful process and imagine what she wants in this emotional state. So, you will use your fear against not having what you want at the end while imagining what you want. Thus, you use your strongest energy at that moment.

In fact, this is nearly equal to high magick. Higher practices of magick and especially chaos magick involves using any and every kind of energy. However, if you are a beginner, I would always suggest keeping a high mood and transacting a positive energy for your magickal work.