Past, Present, and Future Sorcery

October 31, 2026

Past, present, and future sorcery: journeying into the realms of your past, present, and future selves

Three selves, one life

Most of us live as if we were only one person: the person we are right now, dealing with the day in front of us. But a life is longer than a day, and the person you are now did not arrive out of nowhere. You carry a past self, with its choices, wounds, and strengths, and you are already shaping a future self, whether you think about that self deliberately or not. Sorcery that works with past, present, and future selves starts from that simple observation, and asks what changes when you meet those selves as real presences in your practice, rather than as abstract ideas.

That line is worth taking slowly. Journeying suggests movement, not just thinking about the past or worrying about the future. Realms suggests places with their own character, not just memories or plans. And sorcery suggests that this is practical work, not only reflection. You are not merely remembering or daydreaming. You are going, in a disciplined way, to meet something, and bringing something back that changes how you live now.

This article explores that idea in general terms: what it can mean to work with a past self, a present self, and a future self, what can go muddled, and how to keep the work grounded in the life you actually live.

Why the past self matters in sorcery

The past self is not just a younger version of you. It is the person who made decisions you now live with, who learned habits you still carry, and who survived things you may have half-forgotten. Working with that self, in sorcery, can mean revisiting a turning point and asking what was actually decided there, what was feared, what was wanted, and what was left unfinished. It can also mean recognising a strength you had then and have since neglected, or a pattern you adopted then that no longer serves you now.

There is a temptation, in past work, to rewrite history in your favour, or to blame a past self for everything that is difficult now. Both moves are too easy, and both miss the point. A past self made choices with less knowledge than you have now, under pressures you may no longer feel. Meeting that self with curiosity, rather than with blame or nostalgia, lets you see the pattern clearly, and clarity is what makes change possible. If you cannot see the pattern, you will repeat it, no matter how many rituals you perform.

It also matters to keep past work specific. A vague sense that the past was bad, or good, will not teach you much. A specific moment, a specific decision, a specific habit, examined closely, will. Write it down before you work, in plain language: what moment, what choice, what followed. That specificity is what turns journeying from a pleasant drift into sorcery.

Why the present self is the hardest to meet

It sounds odd to say that the present self is hard to meet, since you are, presumably, present already. But most of us spend much of the day slightly elsewhere: rehearsing a conversation that already happened, anticipating a conversation that has not happened yet, or scrolling past our own lives. The present self, in this work, is the self that is actually here, in this body, in this room, with these responsibilities, and that self is often the last one we pay attention to.

Present-self work is therefore often the least dramatic and the most useful part of the whole journey. It asks simple questions that are hard to answer honestly. What are you actually doing with your days? What do you actually want, as opposed to what you think you should want? What are you avoiding, and what does that avoidance cost you? Sorcery that skips these questions and leaps straight to past or future selves risks becoming a way of avoiding the present, dressed up as depth.

A useful discipline here is to anchor any journey in a present fact. Before you work, name one concrete thing in your present life that you want to understand or change, in one sentence. After you work, ask how what you met relates to that one thing. If it does not relate, note that honestly, rather than forcing a connection. The present is the test of the journey, not an obstacle to it.

Why the future self is not fortune-telling

Working with a future self is often mistaken for fortune-telling, as if you were trying to find out what will happen, and then either relax or panic accordingly. Journeying to a future self is a different kind of work. It is not about predicting a fixed outcome. It is about meeting the person you are becoming, if you continue on your present course, or if you change course in a specific way, and learning from that meeting while change is still possible.

That distinction matters, because it keeps responsibility where it belongs: with you, in the present. A future self who is thriving does not guarantee that you will thrive without effort. A future self who is struggling does not doom you to struggle. Both are invitations to look at present choices with fresh eyes, and to ask which choices lead towards the life you actually want, and which lead away from it. The value of the meeting is in the choice it clarifies now, not in a prediction about later.

It also helps to meet more than one possible future self, if your practice allows it. A single future, taken as the future, can become a tyrant, either as a promise you cling to or as a fear you obey. Several futures, held lightly, remind you that the future is shaped, day by day, by what you do now, and that shaping is the real sorcery.

Journeying, in plain language

Journeying, in this context, does not need to mean anything spectacular. In many traditions, it means entering a focused, quiet state, holding a clear intention, and allowing imagery, memory, or encounter to arise, while keeping enough awareness to record what happened afterwards. The details of method belong to teaching, and this article does not publish a step-by-step method for a private teaching. What can be said generally is what makes a journey useful rather than merely vivid.

First, intention. A journey without a clear question tends to wander, and wandering can be pleasant without being instructive. State your question beforehand, in one sentence, and hold it lightly during the work, rather than forcing an answer. Second, record. Write down what you met, what was said or shown, and how you felt, as soon as you can afterwards, in plain language, before you interpret it. Third, discernment. Wait before you decide what a journey meant. A vivid image is not automatically a true one, and an uncomfortable meeting is not automatically a false one. Let the record sit, and see what still rings true after a few days.

Fourth, return. A journey that does not change anything in ordinary life is, at best, entertainment. Ask, after each journey, what one concrete thing you will do differently, or look at differently, as a result. If the answer is nothing, note that too. That honesty is part of the discipline.

Where this work can go muddled

Past, present, and future work can go muddled in a few familiar ways, and naming them beforehand helps you notice them when they appear. One is confusion between memory and imagination. A vivid scene from the past may be a true memory, a reconstruction, a wish, or a fear, and treating every vivid scene as literal history can lead you to rewrite your life on shaky ground. The counter is to treat journey material as material for reflection and for checking against what you know, not as courtroom evidence.

Another muddle is identification: becoming so absorbed in a past or future self that the present self is neglected. If past work leaves you living in the past, or future work leaves you living in anxiety about a future that has not happened, the work has become unbalanced, and the remedy is to return to present practice, ordinary responsibilities, and the anchor sentence you set before you began.

A third muddle is grandiosity or despair. Meeting a past self who suffered can lead to a story in which you are only a victim. Meeting a future self who shines can lead to a story in which you are only a hero in waiting. Both stories are too simple for a real life. A real life contains suffering and strength, mistakes and recoveries, and the work is to hold both, without reducing yourself to either.

Grounding the journey in ordinary life

The test of past, present, and future sorcery is not how vivid the journey was, but how you live afterwards. Do you speak more honestly? Do you keep a promise you used to break? Do you notice a pattern earlier than you used to, and choose differently, even in a small way? Those are the signs that the work is landing, and they are quieter, and more reliable, than dramatic experiences.

Grounding practices help here, and they are deliberately ordinary. Keep a regular sleep pattern as far as you can. Eat and move in ways that keep you steady. Keep appointments, pay attention to the people around you, and do your work well. These are not separate from sorcery. They are the ground on which sorcery stands, and a journey that makes you less capable in ordinary life should be examined, not celebrated.

It also helps to work in seasons, rather than constantly. A period of journeying, followed by a period of living with what you found, followed by a review of your record, will teach you more than continuous journeying without pause. The pause is where integration happens, and integration is where sorcery becomes a life, rather than a series of experiences.

Questions to bring to this work

If you are drawn to this teaching, it helps to arrive with questions, not just with curiosity. What past moment keeps returning, and why? What present habit do you suspect is shaping your future more than you admit? What future do you actually want, in concrete terms, not in slogans? What are you willing to change in the present to move towards that future? What are you not willing to change, and what does that refusal tell you?

Those questions are not a test you must pass before you begin. They are a way of entering the work with your eyes open, so that the journeys you undertake have something real to work on, and so that you can tell, afterwards, whether they helped. A teacher can guide a journey, but the questions you bring are yours, and they shape what you will find.

Finally, remember that past, present, and future selves are not separate people competing for your loyalty. They are one life, seen from different points in time. The aim of the work, as this article understands it, is not to escape the present into the past or the future, but to bring past understanding and future clarity back into the present, where you actually live, and where change actually happens.