Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Treat It As If Alive
For a chosen object, problem, place, or system, deliberately drop the mechanistic ‘it’s just stuff’ view and relate to it as if it were a living, aware being with its own moods and intentions — then act and perceive from that stance and notice what changes in you and in the situation.
Treat It As If Alive: Pick one inert thing — object, place, problem, project. Deliberately drop “it’s just stuff” and relate to it as a living being with moods and intentions: name it, attend to it, speak to it, make a small gesture, watch its “tracks.” “Personify the problem: treat it as an equal, an intelligent, aware being.” Empathise rather than seeking laws. Then switch back, and keep whatever attention and insight the stance gave you. It’s a chosen as-if — keep the off-switch.
What it is
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell) proposes that one of the oldest and most useful magical moves is simply to drop the mechanistic view and relate to the world as if it were alive.
In Uncle Ramsey’s Little Book of Demons he asks whether he has “persuaded you to abandon mechanistic thinking and to personify the world instead” — while frankly warning that taking it literally “will ruin you” in a culture where this stance is treated as madness.
The practice, then, is deliberately as-if: you temporarily extend personhood to a thing — a car, a house, a garden, a recurring problem, an organisation, an illness, “the city today” — and relate to it, watch it, and respond to it as you would to a being with moods and intentions. This is not a belief you are asked to swallow.
It is an experiment in attitude. The claim Dukes actually defends is psychological: that this stance changes how you attend, how much you notice, and how you behave — and that those changes are often genuinely useful, sometimes more so than the detached “it’s only stuff” stance.
The Method
A faithful practical distillation (short attributed phrasing, not full reproduction):
- Choose your subject. Pick one thing you normally treat as inert or impersonal: an object, a machine, a place, a chronic problem, a body part, a project, “today.”
- Consciously switch the frame. Say, in effect: for now, I will treat this as alive — as having its own character, mood, and intentions — while knowing you are choosing an as-if stance you can drop later.
- Personify it: treat it as an equal. Following Dukes — “personify the problem: treat it as an equal, an intelligent, aware being” — until experience suggests otherwise. Give it a name or a felt character if that helps.
- Attend to it the way you’d attend to a person. Notice its “moods,” its patterns, when it’s cooperative and when it sulks, what seems to please or provoke it. Dukes’s foundational rule: “resist the continuous temptation to look for rules and laws; return always to the present situation and empathise.”
- Relate, don’t just analyse. Speak to it (aloud if you can), thank it, ask it questions, apologise, make a small gesture or “offering” of care or attention. Watch how you feel doing this and how the situation looks afterward.
- Watch for “tracks.” Treat coincidences, recurring feelings, and small signs as the way the living thing “speaks” — as a reading of the situation, the way you’d read a friend’s face. (You are interpreting meaning, not collecting proof.)
- Then deliberately switch back. End the experiment by returning to the ordinary mechanistic frame, and ask: what did the as-if-alive stance let me see, feel, or do that the mechanistic one didn’t? Keep what was useful; drop the literal belief. (Sourcing note: these books are in print; the lines above are attributed quotation and paraphrase, not full reproduction.)
Source & Lineage
The stance runs through Dukes’s whole body of work — magic as a way of thinking in SSOTBME (1974), and the explicit “personify the world” method in Uncle Ramsey’s Little Book of Demons (2005), where he develops what he calls a kind of practical animism (and elsewhere “cyber-animism”).
Trained as a mathematician, Dukes is careful to present this as a chosen model rather than a metaphysical assertion — the discipline is being able to adopt and drop the living-world frame at will.
The Traditions' versions
The move — relate to something normally treated as inert as though it were alive and responsive — is ancient and widespread; Dukes’s contribution is to frame it explicitly as a switchable as-if tool for modern, scientifically-literate people: - Indigenous and folk animism — land, rivers, tools, and ancestors treated as living relations (the lived original, held as real rather than as-if).
- Neville/Abdullah “the world is yourself pushed out” — the outer world responds to inner state, addressed and assumed accordingly.
- Bashar’s “permission slip” — using a frame you don’t literally believe because adopting it produces the result.
- Jungian relating to inner figures / active imagination — treating contents of the psyche as autonomous personalities you converse with.
- Stoic “view from above” / re-describing impressions — deliberately switching the lens you place on events.
Common refinements
Forgetting it’s an as-if. Sliding from “I’ll treat this as alive” into “this is alive and out to get me” is exactly the slide Dukes warns can “ruin you.” Keep the off-switch.
- Watching for proof instead of relating. Don’t turn it into a test of whether magic is real; the value is in how the stance changes your attention and conduct. Empathise, don’t audit.
- Picking only flattering signs. Confirmation bias makes any reading “come true.” Notice when you’re cherry-picking.
- Using it to dodge action. “The car will be fine if I’m nice to it” is not a repair. The animistic stance supplements practical care; it never replaces it.
- Going too big too fast. Start with one object or one problem, not “the whole universe,” so you can actually notice the difference the stance makes.