Here’s an idea I had while trying to divine the location of face-down cards in a forty servants deck (but any deck will do). You can use simple optical illusions to allow your subconscious to directly guide your conscious mind.

By laying the cards out in a grid rather than shuffling, you can create a grid illusion like this one.

By following the illusion of elusive dots that appear at the intersections and watching which card they tend to congregate around can allow your subconscious mind to choose the card. This is arguably much better than shuffling, and with all the well known benefits of letting the subconscious do the magick for you (bypassing the psychic censor, avoiding fear of failure and self sabotage, etc).

It would look something like this, which is about how my friend had her cards laid out when I first noticed they create a grid illusion.

The same concept could be used with almost any illusion. For example a multistable perception like the spinning dancer could be used to ask yes or no questions with the answer decided by the direction of the spin (or even right/left to guide you to an object our destination you seek).

A simpler example would be the young-girl/old-lady illusion for a yes/no answer.

A/B illusions are like a coin-flip except guess what’s better at magick than your stupid hand? YOUR MIND! Now apply that concept to shuffling cards VS using the illusion above to access your subconscious and you can see the potential.

Stare and meditate to gnosis like other magical works, but now your subconscious has the ability to wave a big neon sign pointing the way.

Remember the old “stare at this for a minute then look at a blank wall” illusion?

Why not charge a sigil by meditating on the negative of it and then staring at a blank wall when you reach gnosis?

A paper in the Journal of Neuroscience even claims that the optical illusion below can reflect brain alpha waves.

To see the rhythm of your alpha waves, stare at a spot a few inches away from that image and the center should start to flicker.

α oscillations (8-14 Hz) greatly influence brain activity, yet we generally do not experience them consciously: the world does not appear to oscillate. Dedicated strategies must exist in the brain to prevent these oscillations from disrupting normal processing. Could suitable stimuli fool these strategies and lead to the conscious experience of our own brain oscillations? We describe and explore a novel illusion in which the center of a static wheel stimulus (with 30-40 spokes) is experienced as flickering when viewed in the visual periphery. The key feature of this illusion is that the stimulus fluctuations are experienced as a regular and consistent flicker, which our human observers estimated at ~9 Hz during a psychophysical matching task. Correspondingly, the occipital α rhythm of the EEG was the only oscillation that showed a time course compatible with the reported illusion: when α amplitude was strong, the probability of reporting illusory flicker increased. The peak oscillatory frequency for these flicker-induced modulations was significantly correlated, on a subject-by-subject basis, with the individual α frequency measured during rest, in the absence of visual stimulation. Finally, although the effect is strongest during eye movements, we showed that stimulus motion relative to the retina is not necessary to perceive the illusion: the flicker can also be perceived on the afterimage of the wheel, yet by definition this afterimage is stationary on the retina. We conclude that this new flickering illusion is a unique way to experience the α rhythms that constantly occur in the brain but normally remain unnoticed.

Edit 02/23/2020:

I saw an optical illusion going around on social media that I modified for use with charging sigils. As you stare and stay focused on the red dot in the middle the blue circle disappears.

If you add a sigil to the center in place of the dot, you can now use the blue circle as a low-tech gauge of how well you are staying focused.