Magic
We all practice magic.
Watch people watch football on television. What do they do? They 'root' for their
team; they shout, cheer, jump, knock things around.
It's strange behavior if you think about it. They act as if they could influence the game
by shouting at the little images in the glass box. They will act the same way for a pre-recorded
game.
There's this primal urge to project an emotion directly at/on the thing being observed.
Of course if you point that out to people they will get defensive. "I don't really believe
... it's just a way of blowing off steam .. etc." But that misses the point.
This association of feeling with what we do is part of everything we do, all of us.
If you get in an argument with somebody, you try to 'project' anger at them. You focus that
feeling into words and gestures, but in fact it's the feeling which 'carries' the words and gestures.
For that matter, even in a quiet conversation, you are constantly trying to 'project' feelings.
Probably a much more sophisticated, subtler array of feelings, but still, it's the feelings which
'carry' the words and gestures.
We find ourselves doing this kind of thing, 'wishing' for something or 'hoping' for something and we
identify it as 'magical thinking', 'erroneous thinking', and suppress (or at least hide) it; but really, if
we didn't do it, we wouldn't even be able to hold a conversation.
Even the simplest action, picking a pen up off a table or something, has such a feeling associated
with it. Too simple and evanescent to even identify as a feeling, almost a 'proto-feeling', but
without it we could not act.
Magic is how we do what we do. We couldn't 'not do it'.
We live in two worlds.
There's an 'out-there' world, the physical world, and the 'in-here' world, the mental world.
The world we actually perceive is a mental copy of the physical world. This is a small
part of a larger mental world, whose boundaries we only vaguely understand. We've known, since
Freud, that there is a largely unconscious world and that the conscious mind evolves from that.
We have been spectacularly unsuccessful, though, putting our theories of how the mind works into
any kind of practice, so I think the safest bet is to be wary of any very precise ideas about what the mind
is and how it works.
We strive constantly to keep the in-here world as close as possible to the out-there world. If I
bump my shin on the coffee table in the dark, my first impulse is to get mad at the coffee table. In
the out-there world though, the coffee table is just an inanimate object. There's no reason to get
mad at it.
Like the mental world, the physical world we encounter is only a small slice of a vastly larger world,
whose boundaries we can only guess at. We live in a multi-dimensional time-space universe
which emerged from a quantum 'background' which is, at present, unknowable. We could say that
an infinite number of parallel universes emerged from the same 'background' or that none did.
Neither statement would really be true or false, since such a universe would be outside of time
and space.
So the world we live in is the infinitesimal 'slice' that occurs where the mental world intersects the
physical one. What we experience of the physical world is that part which is 'in tune with' our
physical apparatus (including not only our sensory apparatus, but both our bodies and minds themselves)
much the same way that a rainbow we experience is actually only that part of a continuous
electromagnetic spectrum which is 'in tune with' our eyes.
Unlike the rainbow though, we are in a 'boot-strap' situation: what we perceive of the
physical world is limited by our physical apparatus, but that physical apparatus is itself part of that
physical world.
Within this bootstrap, two-world intersection is what we call 'reality'.
Our first, most primary perception, is of the out-there world. At a primitive level, we blur the
rules of the in-here world with those of the out-there world, like the man bumping his shin on a coffee
table in the dark.
To some degree we learn that those objects out there interact by determinate rules. An
object out there is, in effect, dead, and will behave by consistent rules.
The gradual unfolding of these rules has been one of humanity's greatest achievements;
science.
One of the most important, effective rules we have had to learn in 'doing science' is that we must
completely separate the out-there world from the in-here world. Out of ten thousand or
whatever years of tool making/manipulation, we have only really grasped this in the last two hundred or
so years; and these have been the years of our greatest scientific advance.
In addition to the out-there rules, we have learned an Other Method for interacting with reality:
changing the in-here world so that when the in-here world again interacts with the out-there world,
we will be in a world more conducive to our intent; magic.
A pole vaulter, mentally visualizing her jump, over and over again before physically taking it, is
practicing magic. In many periods of history, a mathematician, manipulating a symbolic
representation of the world and producing knowledge of the world invisible to others, would be thought of
as practicing magic.
The latter is ambiguous, intentionally. Mathematics could be thought of as either scientific or
magical; in practice, there's not necessarily a razor-sharp distinction.
But there is a difference in technique.
Much as it is important for science to separate the out-there world from the in-here world, I think it's
important for a magician to first create a desired 'alternate world' and then hold it together by will as it
emerges into the out-there world. I think the biggest mistake magicians make is to try to change
the world 'by force of mind'.
At times the reality produced by magic might be so radically different from what one would have
expected without it that things do seem to happen 'by magic', in the vulgar, comic-book sense of the
word; but this is a result, not a means of attaining a result.
More on this later, perhaps.
I realize that a lot of this will sound so radically different to people in the occult world as to be
offensive. All I can say is, without the brilliant radical minds I have encountered I could never have
formulated this.
Sometimes a radically different way of looking at things is a Good Thing ®.
And then sometimes it's just a load of crap.
And this is no exception.
;^)