Deep inside of each witch is a spot that holds our Self. This Self can tell us many things, what ritual is right to do, which way to turn when lost, what herbs and oils are needed for the upcoming ritual. It holds many answers if a person can learn to listen to that quiet space. It is much like journeying to your own center and just sitting and listening to what comes.

Witches can find out things from other places as well. They are given answers by their spirit guides. Sometimes the answers just pop into their heads and they blink and wonder why they could not figure that out on their own. This is the essence of what knowing is. It is not worrying about where the answer came from or whether it is right, because the witch just knows that it is.

It is a difficult skill to learn, and an even more difficult one to accept. While you are learning, you will question whether or not the answers are coming from somewhere else or whether you are just making them up in your head. On occasion, no answer will come. How do you know that you are not deluding yourself? Essentially, you do not know this. As you work more with your skills, and as you learn more about the world around you and what your beliefs are, you will come to realize that it does not matter where it comes from. It doesn’t matter if it comes from deep in your subconscious and you are just playing games to get to where you can understand it or whether it comes from outside yourself entirely. When you feel that an answer is right, you can accept that you may never know where it came from and simply use it.

Throughout time, every religion has been asked to prove its beliefs. Solid, tangible proof has been demanded for everything from the existence of God to the ability of people to “just know” things. Oracles have been required to try to show how they are not really cheats and hustlers that have no special powers. Atheists, time and again, will try to prove that you are deluding yourself about the existence of higher powers and special abilities. Magick is not really, they will tell you, because there is no way to measure the results because they are so subjective.

There is no way to prove that God exists. This is proof, to someone with no faith, that there really is no God. By using a circular pattern of reasoning, they avoid having to think about things that confuse or disturb them. The things that cannot be measured are ignored.

Faith is the ability, like knowing, to believe in something while asking for no physical proof of its existence. It is the ability to suspend the reasoning mind for a while about something while leaving it active for everything else. Perhaps it is nothing more than the suspension of disbelief, and is not so strange after all.

It does not matter to someone who comes to you for healing whether it was the spell or ritual itself that heals them or whether it is their own faith and belief that it can heal them that brings about the state. The important thing is that they have been healed. We have faith that it was the magick that was done, but the truth of the matter is, it does not make a difference which it was that healed them.

The mind is a powerful tool that must be taught and shown how to work. Faith and belief are two ways of tricking it into working with little or no understanding of what is going on in reality. When you do a binding on a person and their behavior changed, has the magick worked? Maybe. If the person did not know what you were doing, behavior change might signal the existence of magick. Or, instead, it could simply be that the person has realized that what they were doing was wrong and changed their behavior. Does it matter which one it was? No. What matters is that the behavior changed.

We have faith that our magick works because we have no proof. We have faith that the Gods exist because we have no proof. What a boring world it would be if we needed proof for everything. There would be no little miracles or mysteries left for us.

The Rede itself is an altered, and simplified, version of this Law. This can be taken literally, just as any rule or law can be when a person does not wish to think about the meaning of it or the spirit of the law. By examining the underlying meaning, however, a person is able to understand the morality that is attached to it.

The first part, “Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law” is often taken alone, without the remaining parts, in order to justify doing whatever a person wishes to do without thought of the effects it will have on others. When looked at closer, though, it becomes plain that this is not what the statement means. First, the capitalization alone tends to call attention to the important factors.

This emphasis on Will and Law are very important. The capitalization of Law makes one believe that there are absolute laws and rules guiding our lives and paths, and that breaking these laws is a “bad thing.” What might result from doing these bad things is left to the imagination of the practitioner. How, then, is a person supposed to know what the Laws are and how not to break them? This is done by living according to Will. Will, in this case, is not living by however you want to live. It is living by True Will, the path that is laid out before us at the time of our birth. By following Will, we stay on that path and do not stray from it.

Many traditions believe that a person can know their path and their true Will by listening to the Self, the soul, or to God. It is an intrinsic path that is a part of each person, if they can only find and listen to it. It will tell them the right thing to do and how to do it. The first part of the Law of Thelema, then, tells a person how to live. Follow your true path and only your true path.

The next part tells us what the Law itself is. “Love is the Law.” Love, here, is not passionate love, romantic love, or any of the things that humans think about when they think of love. Instead it is an expression of the Divine in a person and what holds the universe together. It is the ability to sacrifice for someone that is a stranger, and it is the love that the Gods have for everything around us. It is the Order of nature and the world that tames Chaos.

This force, though, has to have its own set of restraints, or it, too, would become Chaos in the end. This is the third part of the Law. “Love under Will.” This brings us full circle back to the self. Your true path can tell you what the loving action is that needs to be taken. Sometimes that means healing someone, and sometimes that means cutting them loose to drift until they find their own Will.

When the Rede is looked at in the same manner, remnants of the Law can be seen. “An it harm none, do what thou will.” Looking at the second part first, a faint echo of “Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” However, the emphasis on true will and what the Law is has been removed, leaving a person looking to the first half of the Rede for the way to apply it. “An it harm none” looks nothing like the last half of the Law.

A person is left looking at trying to define harm to understand how they are to live. Harmful is defined as causing or capable of causing harm, or injurious in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Under this definition can be found words such as: malevolent, churlish, bitchy, malicious, catty, spiteful, malignant, treacherous, merciless, vindictive, evil, wickedness, curse, scourge, poison, pest, shame, and abuse. Undoubtedly, these can be bad things, but they still do not tell a person how to apply the Rede. Harm is subjective to the person that is creating it and to the person that is receiving it.

This, then, is why so many people reject the Wiccan Rede in favor of other methods of living a moral life. There are times when being malevolent is what is called for by your Will. If you are following the true path that is yours, then doing such will bring you no harm. There are consequences to every action, including inaction. Examine those consequences in order to see if they are something that can be shouldered easily or if they will be a burden to great to bear before performing an action….in other words….think.