Our Mysterious Universe, Part II

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled persons make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

-- Wikipedia

Creative Basis of Magick (Bertiaux)

The magician will always be looking for opportunities to create his own magickal system of the world. He will be looking always for ideas and the simplest of elements, to be found anywhere, from which there will emerge a picture of reality, his reality. The creative energies of true practitioners of this art of cosmic creation are collected from here and there and fused together into a very wonderful picture of being. This is the basis of magick -- your imagination is making the world to be as it is in itself.

-- Michael Bertiaux

Religion vs. Magic (AC)

The only real strength of any religion is derived from its pilfering of Magical doctrine; and, religious persons being by definition entirely unscrupulous, it follows that any given religion is likely to contain scraps of Magical doctrine, filched more or less haphazard from one school or the other as occasion serves.

-- Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

Abyss in Between (K. Grant)

The gulf of the Abyss is the cosmic analogy, in terms of infinity, endurance, and remoteness, of the infinitesimally near and the infinitely fleeting; the finest, and normally imperceptible gap between thoughts that yields to hypersensitive awareness, a sudden insight into the real substratum of Being. This only is Reality, the sole Reality, and it is Non-Being -- the noumenal source from which arises the world of appearances.

-- Kenneth Grant, from Cults of the Shadow