The ego and consciousness experience their own reality by distinguishing themselves from the body.  This is one of the fundamental facts of the human mind and its discovery of itself as something distinct from nature.  Early man is in the same case as the infant and the small child: his body and his 'inside' are part of an alien world.  The acquisition of voluntary muscular movement, i.e., the fact that the ego discovers, in its own 'person,' that its conscious will can control the body, may well be the basic experience at the root of all magic.  The ego, having its seat, as it were, in the head, in the cerebral cortex, and experiencing the nether regions of the body as something strange to it, an alien reality, gradually begins to recognize that essential portions of this nether corporeal world are subject to its will and volition.  It discovers that the 'sovereign power of thought' is a real and actual fact: the hand in front of my face, and the foot lower down, do what I will.  The obviousness of these facts should not blind us to the enormous impression which this very early discovery must make, and unquestionably has made, on every infantile ego nucleus.

• conscious development
• consciousness
• early childhood development
• ego
• magick
• power
• nature
• will
• experience
• reality
• thought
• control
• body