WHY MAGIC ISN'T REAL
What Dr. Manhattan says about miracles can just as accurately be applied to magic: “The word magic, by its definition, is meaningless. Only what can happen does happen.”
Only what can happen does happen.
Dictionary definitions will tell you that magic is all about supernatural powers that allow one to do the impossible, that which cannot be done. But magic is a strange word because few, if any, of us ever actually mean that when we use it. What we mean, when we use the word magic, is that something is being done and we have no idea how it is being done. This is the modern meaning of the word in this Industrial Information Age.
And in this respect magic does exist. In this respect magic is the only thing that exists because none of us understand how anything is happening. It's seldom in the modern age to hear anybody acknowledging how primitive we are. We marvel at the magic our scientists and engineers and doctors and filmmakers wield, and we measure the sophistication and civilisation of our society in comparison to that of the past. In measuring our current state of evolution in such a way it endlessly appears as if we're arriving at some kind of pinnacle, because everything we are using to judge it against is behind and below us. But the past is a poor benchmark - at least, ours is.
We are primitive, primitive, primitive. And there is nothing wrong with the primitive. The primitive is as beautiful as anything else. But to recognise it, acknowledge it, own it - this is rare. And that is a shame. My personal preference is to admit, to myself and the world in general, what I am, rather than try to persuade anybody I am something I'm not. I wish to be honest, and accurate, about both my greatness and my smallness. Here lies an empowerment I can believe in. I would like to see the geniuses of the modern age nod humbly and gracefully to their own primitiveness. Today's popular belief in a mechanistic slash quantum universe is as primitive as the magical belief of our ancestors. We have swapped a belief in supernatural forces that weren't there for a belief in human knowledge and understanding that isn't there. And there is power in admitting it.
A chap like Derren Brown will perform one of his seemingly magical feats and then take pains to emphasise that he has only created the illusion of working magic; he hasn’t really performed magic.
But he has! He has performed magic.
He doesn’t think he has performed magic because he thinks he knows exactly how he has done what he has done – but he doesn’t! Not one of us knows how we do what we do. We don’t know how it is that we can will our hands to lift a cup of tea. Scientists don’t know how a fridge magnet sticks to a fridge.
When pushed to describe what they are really saying when they talk about magnetic fields a scientist will reach a point where they are merely reporting on what they have observed without understanding in the slightest what is actually happening there.
A rocket scientist may have looked into the business of designing and building rockets in more detail than me, sufficient detail to actually build a rocket that flies into outer space, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a magician. Of course he is a magician. In truth he has as little understanding of how his rocket works as the first caveman who learned how to start a fire has of understanding what fire is and how it comes about from the friction between two pieces of wood. And so the rocket scientist takes a whole array of magical spells and very skilfully and confidently combines them in such a way as to send a huge hunk of metal flying into space. His understanding of how he has done what he has done only goes so far. This is the scientific extent of his knowledge. Beyond that point, where his understanding ends, the process turns into pure magic.
If I am sitting at a dinner table with some friends and I perform the correct incantation in the correct manner there is a good chance that one of my friends will do my bidding and pass me the salt. We think it isn’t magic because we think we know how it was done. But we don’t. We are monkeys performing magic that we have seen other monkeys perform.
And that is not to be dismissive of our abilities in any shape or form: for a monkey to learn how to work magic is a pretty incredible thing in my opinion. But there is a paradox waiting to be embraced here: when we see and admit our ignorance we actually take a step forward in our knowledge and understanding. When we recognise our primitive state we immediately become more civilised.
For me, to stand in that place of acceptance of ignorance is both beautiful and empowering. For me anything is possible, absolutely anything, because everything is magical to me. And my respect for the mystery is not about me handing over my responsibility for myself to unseen forces. It is about standing in the face of the unknown and being honest, even as I stand there and assert what I do know about myself. But I was born in the Chinese Year of the Monkey, so maybe it’s not so surprising.
Not being gullible and superstitious is an aspiration I cherish, and not becoming increasingly jaded by being constantly surrounded by magic, every moment of every day of my life is equally precious to me.
The answer to all of the questions that I ask about the relationship between magic and reality is Love. I’m forever wishing to bring my scientific mind and spiritualistic mind towards each other. The place that they can both occupy with equal enthusiasm is Love.
This is the only place to really experience reality from, whether one is scientist or other.
The magical thinking that we enter into when we’re in love, especially for extended periods, is literally what life is all about. And I’m making a distinction here away from the undiscerning whimsy of infatuation. I’m talking about going to a place of love and actually staying thee, as opposed to just experiencing those fleeting flares of it that most of us are so familiar with.
When we go to a place of love, and continuously remember to renew the choice to remain there, we experience reality in the way it was meant to be experienced. This is what our bodies, minds and spirits were designed for, whether one is talking in spiritual or scientific terms.
This is not difficult for anybody to understand because we all are human and we all know well the times in our life that we have really been engaged with life. We know that so well. And being more prone to magical thinking at such times is not an indication of imbalance … quite the contrary.
Mr. Brown likes to point out the human animal’s tendency to recognise familiar patterns, cross reference previously established associations and then make a personal interpretation that has little or nothing to do with reality. So, one looks closely at a photograph of a child in a garden, sees a pattern in the shadows and leaves behind her that reminds us of the face of a little man and then decides there is something meaningful in what is ostensibly a random and meaningless pattern: perhaps it’s a spirit of some kind. Derren would like us to say, “Hey, look, it’s just a random pattern that happens to look like a face. We’re hardwired to recognise faces. That doesn’t mean there is actually a face there.”
The clarity and simplicity of his reasoning is elegant and the purity of his intention can be felt. It’s a persuasive combination. And I myself am a fan of simplicity. It has a lot going for it. There’s nothing wrong with what Derren says at all. I don’t disagree with any of it. But there’s more. That’s all. He is describing part of a picture, and he’s describing that part very well. But there are whole sections of this picture he is not describing, perhaps because he doesn’t see them, perhaps because his interpretation of them is that they are random and meaningless patterns and he doesn’t want to impose a self-created meaning upon them. And that’s understandable.
When I was a very young child I saw my father as an ancient, powerful and mysterious being. That was the experience I had of him. If I could travel back in time and view that same man in that same time and place but from my current, older perspective, I would see a young man who doesn’t really know what he’s doing. So, where is the truth in this situation? Are both interpretations true? Neither? Just one of them? Is there an absolute truth about what my father was in that moment that only God can confirm, or that only the purity of science can confirm?
These questions are not the philosophical obfuscation of what should be a very simple, cut and dried scene. These questions lead us to a useful, worthwhile understanding: What my father is in that moment is relative. Both science and religion recognise that, and we as humans can recognise that. He is so much more than one perspective can describe.
He is so much more than one perspective can describe.
Is there anybody out there with the wit and humility to hear that, and detect the ghost of a hint of all it implies?
When we go to a place of love our pattern recognition abilities become excited, take us to a different level of experience in which all kinds of associations emerge, associations that people who are not in a place of love will struggle to make sense of. We may see a shape in the clouds that, as far as we are concerned, sends us a message, a message that confirms to us something we have long suspected and wished to have confirmed. If Derren is there he may try to point out that the cloud is a randomly shaped congregation of water vapour that isn’t actually telling us anything. That, in fact, is the message that the cloud is sending, from Derren’s perspective. That is the interpretation he arrives at after recognising and then thinking about the patterns he has detected. And his interpretation is completely valid. Of course it is. He is describing his experience of a moment in time and space, and time and space, as we all know, is utterly relative.
When a child, a gardener and a spiritual debunker go down to the bottom of a garden together and one sees fairies and one sees life in all its glory and one sees the amazing and mysterious unfolding of physics they are all seeing what is there. None of them are wrong in their interpretations. They are all seeing something that is really there.
And there is more there besides that.
The true magician, the genuine article, the actual mystic, seeks to work with his own consciousness in order to become open to seeing more of what is there, as much as he can, to hold the perspective of the child and the adult simultaneously, the scientist and the spiritualist, the left and the right brain, the heart and the analytical mind. It is not about choosing one over the other. It is about choosing all that is present: if faces in the leaves and shadows on the wall are a part of the picture then let me see them; if the observations of subatomic particles in a laboratory have a part in this then let me include those also.
And so, as more perspectives are discovered the magician expands his interpretation so that they may all be included and integrated. Many avenues of enquiry (branching off from all possible perspectives) lead to dead ends, and that is incorporated also.
The living of life from a mystic’s perspective may, when viewed from the perspective of another, appear as sheer madness. But none of us see the exact same patterns that another sees. Not a one of us is mad or wrong – we are all responding sanely to a reality that is unique to us. And so, Derren Brown’s interpretation of his experience of reality is absolutely correct. It couldn’t be otherwise.
What the true mystic understands (and many, many others) is that it is in the going to a place of love that one experiences reality in the most natural, most integrated way.
For the mystic, it is not ultimately about the magical at all, but the natural, the inevitable. It is about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
None of this is rocket science; a monkey could work it out.
© 2012 by Ian Moore