Prelude to Magic

Well, when I invited us to ‘Talk about Magic’ in my last email, I started this, so it’s my job to take it from there. Nobody really started magic though. That’s always existed, probably by many different names.  The truth is nobody knows exactly what it is, that’s why it’s magic. It is indeed, therefore, part of The Great Unknown itself: has always been. To understand this, is to accept that there will always be things and situations that occur that we don’t get and can’t grasp from where we currently are. We hate that. Everything in our lives has been developed around trying to know the Unknowable, predict the unpredictable, for the purpose, of course, of controlling it. Not knowing scares us silly.

Likewise there have always been people that somehow were able to communicate with the Unknown. Or perhaps, be communicated to by it. This causes us to be really frightened of them just in case they could end up controlling us through what they seem to know. At the same time as being scared, we are also fascinated, which unfortunately put these extraordinary people on a pedestal, sometimes giving them that potential power. Hang on, I’m rambling ahead of myself. Very easy to do when talking about this nebulous subject.

Magic has always been for the courageous few that were willing to dive into the Unknown, learning how to navigate it as they went.  Which is fun because its job is to keep shifting so that we grow, always having mystery in our lives. We must come to admit that we cannot ever really know anything for sure. The vast majority of us have always been happy to sit back and watch the show, hoping that the magician would drop the bunny so we could stop being scared and laugh. ‘See’, we would say, ‘it’s not real after all’. But it is. Very.

In the beginning there was so much we didn’t understand that the Alchemists, Shamans, Curanderoes, and Tohungas went in search of answers for. Now it’s the scientist. Everything they turn up seems like magic. But we are still no closer to solving the conundrum of the Unknown than we were 32,000 years ago. The magic continues to entice us into unchartered water, where we find out lots, but end up with more questions than we started with. But what is magic? Hang on. I’m getting there. Magic is like a decoy, dangling a carrot that we cannot resist. Which is why we see love as magic. Nobody knows, when they set of into this Unknown space, where they are going to end up. The thing is, we are standing on the edge of it every moment of our short lives, stepping into it constantly, because there is nowhere else to go. We can’t stay where we are. We can’t go back. Seeing that we are being moved forward anyway, we have a choice. We either step forward bravely, or shrink back until we are dragged there, ‘kicking and screaming’ anyway, by Time itself.

So let’s be brave and step right in. What we see in our everyday lives is the equivalent of the paint on the surface of the canvas. Without the canvas, or some other medium to paint, draw or carve into, there would be nothing at all. A blank sheet. The Unknown is the background upon which we are being created every nanosecond of our lives. The more we understand this, the easier it is to become the creator that takes the opportunity to shape what we see in our own lives, knowing that the background surface is there to co-operate with the process. No background, no possibility of more. It ‘wants’ us to create on it. It provides the tools, the inspiration, and helps us develop the skills, because that’s what we are supposed to be doing here. That’s the whole game. What’s the point of having a deck of cards if you never lay them out? Or a book you never read? But the created world is not the magic. Nor is the creator. The magic is the process.

But wait. I’m confusing you. Of course I am. It would probably be more accurate to say that magic is the process of sitting on the edge of the Unknown dipping into it to bring ‘stuff’ out of it, bring it into being, to create a temporary ‘Known’. Because what is Known was always once the Unknown. Temporary because no sooner than it is known it is gone. Disappeared into a memory we call the Past. Magic is a language of communication that builds a connection between what is and what may become, providing us with the opportunity to create ourselves, choice by choice, action by action.  It has a lot to teach us, individually and collectively, The problem is that instead of dipping in, allowing ourselves to be shown who we can be, we want to control it. See? The controlling boot is on the other foot; ours. Magic doesn’t want to control us. We want to control it through our fear of it.

So magic is a portal into this ‘Unknown Everything Else’ that has been enticing us into feats of creativity from the beginning. Too few have had the guts to grasp the nettle, as they say, and dance with it in the freedom that innocence gives us.  The whole background of Life is magical, and Magic is the access into it, but we never know exactly what it’s going to offer us until we start. We are very different to the other beings that this reality is made up of. They trust it implicitly. They don’t question it, allowing the flow of the Unknown to pick them up, transporting them into experience after experience. From them they grow in skill and ability to rise to the circumstances that arise from this dance. We are being picked up in exactly the same way but fight like hell. Because we have been taught not to trust it. Actually, I think it is more likely Hell that we are afraid of than Magic.

What is important here is to look for the steps to the dance we are being invited into and co-operate with it. We can learn some of this from what has passed for magical practice in the centuries gone. All the magical mystery schools have delved into their fabric in many different ways. Inevitably, they have all tried to patent their way of doing it as the only way, which ultimately has led us into religions that try to control Life, and their participants along with it. That’s where the control issue comes from. Exploration starts off with curiosity, ending up with power issues between humans. Animals don’t do that.

So let’s recap here. The Universal Energy Field contains everything. Like a massive warehouse we will never be able catagorise but are continually drawing from unconsciously. Always was. Always will be. That’s the Energetic Field, not the physical Universe BTW. We know this in our younger selves, until the Known world (the Enculturalised Mind) imposes itself on us, training us into believing that it knows everything. It doesn’t, nor can it, but likes to pretend it can, for social control purposes, of course. We are taught to believe this before we have finished growing a brain, on pain of rejection, so we do. This cuts off the communication to the magical connection that we had a right to receive all our lives, by convincing us our ‘imagination’ is not real, when in fact it is the vehicle through which magic can travel from reality to reality. Fortunately, the current Wizards are convincing us that there are many realities. We already knew that up until the age of about 6, until we were taught to forget, so the Physicist Wizards have had to rediscover the obvious all over again. And on and on the human species continues to hold itself back, creating regression every few decades, just to make sure we never realise that WE are the magicians.

Woah! What a lot of personal power that would give us. All of us opening up to the freedom and wonder of creating our own life outside the restrictive parameters of the existing cultural prison walls. Instead of asking others what we should do, and how to do it, we would ask the Universal Field, getting a custom-made solution, designed for each of us. The tool we must redevelop is to trust that the Unknown Field actually knows what is doing. Its vast unlimited resources are infinite, and we only have finite brains for the journey through time and space. So like it or not, we can never know what is available to us beforehand. No trust in the Universal Field, no magic.

Here is the last point I want to make in this article. The mystery of magic is everywhere, every day, from turning on the electricity, and the tap, to waking up in the morning. It’s not romantic. It’s practical. We have romanticised it through our lack of understanding. In so doing, we have become blind to its passage through our existing lives. Recognising this is the first step to learning how to build a relationship with it. Then when you need it’ll be there. And we actually need it ALL the time. We couldn’t exist without it. Just as learning to walk is just the first step, it leads to the next step already waiting for us to get there.  The next step in the Magical Journey is welcoming it into our lives as our essential partner. The more we do this, the more it ’looks’ to others as if we have something up our sleeve. And we do. We are learning to live a full life by graciously accepting what has always been on offer.

There are many ways we can facilitate that. We will be diving deeper into that episode by episode. We must learn to see differently when we look at the world, just as Carlos Castenada was always instructed to do if you have read any of his books about his journey with a shaman.  Stay tuned.

Tip: Do you remember the Magic Eye books? When we would look at a picture all that we could see was what looked like random dots. But if we were patient, learning to hold our vision in a particular way, patterns would form to make all kinds of images: dolphins, birds, etc. whatever the makers dreamt up. Maybe these books are still available? It’s really good practice for holding your inner and outer vision with no expectation, but with openness to see what arrives.

An example of this came for me today. I have been being with the ways my ancestors were able to work alongside magic. One of the things that I re-membered was the understanding of how the places that were ‘thin’ were recognised. Thin places are areas, usually in natural surroundings, where there is a closeness to the raw energy of the Universe. When you are sensitive to your feelings you can feel them more easily. NZ is full of them, certain parts of it particularly. The Otago Peninsula for instance. Areas around Britain, my whenua, are very thin. On these places, in Europe anyway, standing stones have been erected by my megalithic ancestors to magnify the energy there. Churches were often constructed there too, as a way to direct the people’s sensitivity towards seeing through the christian world view.

Thin places can occur when Tree, Rock, and Water are found together. When this was so, my people would go to these places for energetic replenishment; to sit, contemplate, meditate, and commune.  I was feeling the need to have access to such a space, and started devising ideas of where I could create that phenomena on my land. I have a tiny tree I have planted that will one day be big. I feel its energy strongly, but it’s just a baby. And besides there is no rock or water there and would be hard work to create it. Later, I stood looking out of my glass doors to my front garden, created bit by bit from nothing, around a lovely, shaped Ngaio tree. Then it happened. My eyes saw, for the first time, that unconsciously I had created a basalt stone cairn near the tree to place a birdbath on. It’s been there for years but I just saw it, right on que, Tree, Rock, Water. All I now have to do is allow it to communicate its energy to me by making time to be with it in that way. Magic. Thank you, Universe. I can already begin to feel the connection happening a calmer energy washes over me.

Bye for now.