Dangerous Magic 1: How Magic Saved My Life

n. patedakis

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of Mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Today we go into the wisdom, love, and beauty archives to re-release our series on magic. If you haven’t heard this series, I think you’re in for a treat. It’s like a box of wisdom donuts—paleo superfood wisdom donuts for the soul.

If you have listened to some or all of this series before, these podcasts usually require more than one listen. We go into ideas that we try to consider in a very accessible way, but those ideas have a lot of nuance and depth in them. Extensive contemplation will bring a lot of benefits, including some inspiration and insight into the nature of magic.

In this series, we try to take a sober look at magic. Can we come to a truly skillful and vitalizing understanding of magic?

As we go along, we begin to see magic is an attitude—an attitude of reverence for the Cosmos.

The experience of magic arises as we enter into the sacredness and interwovenness of life.

Magic is not an opinion or a belief. In that sense it’s not an ordinary attitude, not an attitude as a personal possession.

Rather, it’s an attitude the way love and joy are attitudes. We could call it the attitude of wonder or sacredness, informed by wisdom and love.

Magic means we not only sense the wonder and sacredness of the Cosmos, but we sense the interwovenness of all things, the way our own mind arises totally interwoven with everything in the Cosmos—

how we are lived by powers we pretend to understand, but which we can come to understand and even wonderstand—

and, furthermore, that we live in a Cosmos that expects our participation, and we live in a community of life that depends on our participation.

All of that is magic, a feeling for the energy of life and its interwovenness. Magic arises in, through, and as an ecosensual or ecospiritual awareness.

As we move along in this series, we sketch out a sense of magical consciousness that corresponds to ecological consciousness, which in turn corresponds to spiritual or philosophical consciousness. In other words, Magic is LoveWisdom. Magic is a participatory philosophy of life, rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, and intimately arising with the total interwovenness of all things.

But all of this begins with a story, based on real events in the lifetime of your friendly neighborhood soul doctor . . .

Once upon a time, I ran into trouble with some of the toughest guys in my very large high school. A bunch of them had it out for me, including Athanasios Loukanis. That’s a funny name actually. Well, the first name is cool. Athanasios means deathless. But everyone called him Thanos, like the supervillain, because it means death. That’s what all the jocks called him. He was supposed to be a killer on the playing field.

He was so big and strong that we all believed the rumors he was on steroids. His hot temper added to the steroid vibe, but mainly, this kid was built like a professional wrestler. He was a senior and I was a mere sophomore when all this happened. I had never spoken a word to him personally, and I only ended up on his hit list by means of rumor, inuendo, and strange misunderstandings. Even back then, I found it all funny, and I wasn’t frightened so much as curious how it would all turn out.

I may have made things worse when I joked with someone about Thanos’s name. His last name is one of those occupational or tradecraft names, like Smith, Fisher, Fletcher, Baker. In this case, Loukanis would be a name for a butcher, but loukaniko is a Greek sausage, and I could NOT have been the only person to point out that the guy’s name meant the immortal sausage. Goddess help me if he’s listening.

Anyway, that added fuel to the fire, and It seemed as though a showdown might happen any day, and that day finally arrived on a school holiday. We had a day off in the spring every year, and a lot of kids had a tradition of going to an amusement park to let off steam for a day.

I went with five friends. These were some of my closest friends in high school. And we found ourselves standing in line for a roller coaster. The line curved back and forth like a labyrinth, and at one point I turned to see a couple of the lower-level tough guys of the school smoking cigarettes while they waited in line behind us. As the line snaked around, we came close to them. They stood just on the other side of the metal railing that separated the sections of the line, and I spontaneously asked one of them if I could have a hit off of his cigarette.

That might seem strange, but it was a Jedi mind trick sort of move. I thought if I asked him to give me a cigarette, he’d just say no. But I was right that he didn’t know what to make of my asking him for a drag off of his cigarette.

I didn’t smoke, and I would have looked like the kind of high school sophomore who didn’t smoke. I imagine he was a little stunned that I would even ask for something so intimate, especially since he ran with the crowd that was out to get me. I was trying to break down the barriers.

He looked at me like—I won’t say a deer in headlights, because it’s cliché, and it doesn’t fit. He was a bit of a predatory punk, but he was a kid, and I had confused him. He looked a little puzzled, a little confused, and as I stared back at him warmly and confidently, he handed me his cigarette.

It delighted me to see that quizzical look on his face, and then to take a long drag on the cigarette, and watch him watching me. I smiled, held up his cigarette as if approving of its quality, and then I placed the burning end into my left hand, closing the hand around the cigarette as I looked calmly. “That’s a bit warm,” I said, smiling. He looked surprised. I exhaled all the smoke onto my closed hand, and as it opened, the hand was empty. The cigarette was gone.

Magic can seem a little nerdy. Some magicians have become pretty famous, and have given magic a bit of cachet. But when you’re in high school, it can go either way.

I found magic fascinating, and most of all I lived for the experience of magic, both receiving it and giving it.

I had given this kid the experience of magic.

This all happened before it was so easy to get online and find out how many ways a magician can make a cigarette disappear, and for him it was astonishing that someone could put a burning hot cigarette into their hand, open that hand, and reveal the cigarette had vanished, without a trace.

We’ll contemplate these things with greater care later on, but for now let’s say I could see the experience of magic in his eyes.

However, I had wielded a power that did not belong to me. I had mostly good intentions, but I was still so young and inexperienced, and maybe a bit cocky. That’s why it all went sideways.

I had tried to cast a spell that would break down the barriers between us. That spell held the little ruffian for only a minute or two. Then the spell wore off, and he remembered that I was the enemy.

He at first looked astonished and said, “Where did it go?” But then, he looked at me with increasing agitation, and his question became aggressive. “Where’s my cigarette? Where’s my f’ing cigarette, man?” He actually swore of course, and I tried to calm him down.

I said, “It’s gone. It’s just gone.”

“Bring it back!”

“Some things can’t be undone.”

“I want my f’ing cigarette.”

“Relax. It’s in a good place.”

“I want my cigarette.”

“I’ll buy you another. How much is a cigarette? A quarter? Here’s a quarter.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a quarter. He smacked my hand aside.

“I don’t want a quarter. I want my f’ing cigarette back.”

“I’ll buy you a pack.”

He wasn’t having it.

My friends were useless. They all remained silent. And the situation had become bizarrely intense. We only escaped because the line started moving again, and we began heading up the ramp to the platform to get on the roller coaster. The tough guys were stuck in the line.

It was clear that they wanted to ride the coaster, so we knew we had a head start to get away from them. They didn’t look like they were going to try and get out of the line, which would have been the easiest way for them to get to me. They could have gotten out of the line and waited at the exit from the ride. Maybe they had waited so long in line and were so close to getting on the ride that they didn’t want to bother leaving the line. Even more likely, they were so worked up that maybe it didn’t occur to them to get out of the line.  They were making fists and it seemed like they were trying to shoot lasers out of their eyeballs—either that or they suddenly felt painfully constipated—but in general they let me know that I was a dead man.

My friends and I got onto the roller coaster, and the tough guys were one or two rounds behind us. They watched us as the coaster pulled away to begin its dramatic ascent up the first steep hill.

Finally my friends began to speak, but all they wanted to do was chastise me for making trouble.

I said to them, “I wasn’t trying to make trouble. I was trying to make friends. Who knew the guy would react like that. He went ballistic.”

My friends didn’t care. They said, “That’s how those guys are. You should have known better, dude. You got into this mess and you keep making it worse. If they come after you, you’re on your own.”

How reassuring.

We got off the roller coaster and started walking, at first moving pretty quickly, because the guys were nervous. But once we got a hundred yards away, my friends calmed down a bit, and it seemed as though we could just try and dodge the ruffians for the rest of the day. Not the funnest way to spend our time, but none of us wanted to leave.

About an hour later, the day got unexpectedly better. We were walking along and Ariadne Theodrakis was suddenly walking toward me—not toward “us,” not walking in our direction, but smiling at me, looking me in the eyes, and walking right up to me.

Ariadne Theodrakis was one of the most beautiful young women in our school. She was tall, she had eyes like the Mediterranean, and a voice like honeybutter. She was in my grade, but she was so attractive that she spent most of her time hanging out with the seniors. Again, I was a mere sophomore, and this was at a large public school where we had over 500 people in our class, and the frosh students were in the middle school. So being a sophomore was kind of like being a freshman. We felt like newbies.

Needless to say, I was beside myself. Why on Earth would this lovely young woman walk up to me with such enthusiasm?

We did have a little chemistry. We were both Minoans after all. In the few exchanges we had, we always clicked. She seemed to find me charming enough, and Greeks with last names ending in “kis”—as in Patedakis or Theodrakis—usually have origins in Crete. Depending on your lineage—your ancestors may have been Minoans. My family always thought of itself as Minoan, as if we were ultimately indigenous people who had gotten swept up into the process of colonization.

So, when I saw Ariadne walking up to me with her unmistakable poise, I smiled and said, “Hello, Minoan princess. You look sensational. How are you today?”

She says, “I’m fine. How are you?” Her smile made me smile harder.

I said, “I am delightful now that you’re here. Are you enjoying the day?

“Yes. But I was wondering if you would do something for me.”

“For you? Anything. Name it.”

“Would you make a cigarette disappear for me?”

I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Since she hung around with the upperclassmen, including the popular kids who wanted to get at me, and since the lower-level ruffians would have reported to those top dogs, she must have heard about the magic. And looking in her eyes, it seemed she wanted to see the magic for herself.

I agreed with enthusiasm. She said, “Great,” and started walking, taking me by the arm. My friends were perfectly happy to walk along with this beautiful person, and they kept up in lock step as close as they could get.

It felt marvelous to walk with this young woman, but suddenly we went over an arching bridge, and as we cleared the crest of it, I could see a whole gang of people, including the little ruffians as well as the top dogs.

As soon as they came into sight, I kept my eyes on them, and at the same time my awareness opened up around me. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I became hyper-aware of the surroundings. So I noticed my friends scattering in all directions behind me, away from the tough guys who stood waiting.

I walked forward, and this group of people was large enough that as I stepped toward them, I could feel a circle form and close around me. Whooom. I was completely surrounded, stuck in a labyrinth of high school hotheads. And this maze of people surrounding me included several football players, several of the wrestling team, and a handful of guys who had a reputation for being tough. Among the little crowd was Thanos, who appeared right in front of me, and smiled at me with an inscrutable look. I couldn’t tell if I was being surrounded to hide the view of a fight. I trusted Ariadne, but Thanos was an uncontrollable variable. Most of these guys were.

I felt oddly at ease. On the one hand, I hadn’t been afraid of Thanos because I thought that he wasn’t really trained in fighting, and I had sparred and even competed against people almost as big as he was—my instructors were way tougher than he was. Sparring and standard competition are not the same as a street fight, but, being young and ignorant, I wasn’t afraid to employ the techniques we were taught exclusively for dangerous situations, and anyone who trains at anything seriously usually has an advantage.

At the same time, there were all those other guys surrounding me. They might decide to overwhelm me.

But my sense of ease came from my trust in magic, not in martial arts. Standing face to face with Thanos, and looking into the eyes of the other guys gathered around me, I sensed the power of the experience of magic. And I wanted to let it work this time.

Ariadne pulls out a cigarette. I thank her for it. And I say, would you light it for me?

She does so. That, again, made it intimate. The cigarette had been on her lips, and now it was going to mine. There was a sensual vibe—without anything creepy. Just a single young man and a single young woman, about to share a secret.

I say, “My dear Minoan maiden, our ancestors experienced the ancient mysteries. Some of the mysteries had to do with death. The biggest mystery is when something seems to go away, and it doesn’t seem to appear again. Are you comfortable with mystery? Are you comfortable with not knowing, which could one day lead to knowing a secret?”

Ariadne smiles and says, “Yes.”

I say, “Okay, we will all enter the mystery together,” and as I pronounce those words I look around, as if purposely including everyone, inviting them into a mystery, and casting a spell.

I say, “Can everyone see?”

One of the ruffians has his head directly under my hands. Thanos gets closer to me, and I can see him so clearly, see the childlike awareness beyond all the façade. He’s genuinely curious. He wants to see magic.

I say, “Let’s do this slowly. No tricks. Watch this cigarette, and ask yourself how well you tolerate pain.” The bit about tolerating pain made the magic a little shamanic.

I puff on the cigarette, point at the tip of it and say, “Looks hot, right?” I take a long drag, then put the cigarette into my hand, burning tip first. I blow smoke onto the hand, then open it.

Gone.

Everyone is amazed. Ariadne smiles at me, as if to say, “I knew it.” She knew something. I knew something.

I walked away while the tough guys talked over what they had seen. It was clear they found it inexplicable. And it was clear that the danger was over.

Those guys never harassed me again. We didn’t exactly become friends, because we didn’t move in the same circles or have any real shared interests anyway, but the whole ambience of aggression had disappeared with that second cigarette—aggression and tension going back several weeks all vanished.

Of course, Nowadays, if I were still doing that kind of magic and wanted to make a cigarette disappear, I wouldn’t do it in any way that a person could find on YouTube. I wouldn’t bother because it wouldn’t give people the same experience of magic, which was very fresh and alive in this situation.

It’s essential to give people the experience of magic. That’s why I got into it.

So many of us, especially when we’re young, we sense the realness of magic in the world.

We don’t always know what it really is or how to access it. Especially in this culture. The dominant cultural leaves us bereft from the kind of magic the soul hungers for.

Make no mistake: The culture is filled with magical thinking. Most especially so because it’s a capitalistic culture and the marketplace is a place of magical thinking.

The marketplace has no real connection with reality, but tries to tell us stories of rationality, practicality, and being realistic.

However, when we’ve had the real experience of magic, whether in life or because someone produces it by means of sleight of hand, we feel something existential that the marketplace cannot give us.

It’s as if we know we have touched a truth about the mystery of life.

We long for the magician’s trick to be real. Because something in us knows the magic of the cosmos—and wants that doorway to open to it.

One of the interesting things about sleight of hand magic is that we think of it as not real.

If we think we live in a Newtonian universe, then magic in the most wondrous sense is not real. The only real magic is sleight of hand or illusion. But if someone does sleight of hand or they perform an illusion, we say, It’s not real. It was just a trick.

On the one hand, we might think we just like to complain. On the other hand, maybe we hunger for real magic. Something in us knows we don’t live in a Newtonian machine. Even our science admits this.

But our scientists get very superstitious and afraid. They behave as if something dangerous will happen if we were to even entertain the possibility of real magic.

The metaphysical police come out, and we get a real shakedown. When we take magic seriously, we get treated the way the dominant culture treats anything it wants to marginalize. It’s a far cry from being born black or indigenous, but we should note that many indigenous practices and beliefs relate to a Cosmos that is anything but a Newtonian machine. The dominant culture shows disdain for what it considers primitive. In other words, indigenous people often have their own magic, and that magic threatens the magical thinking of the dominant culture. It’s all rather ironic.

And if we listen carefully to the militant skeptics and militant atheists of the world, we often hear a level of downright meanness and contempt when they mention things that would qualify as properly magical. The attitude feels quite inappropriate for people who claim to be rational and good-hearted.

In romantic relationships, scorn or contempt is the deadliest emotion. Once we feel contempt for the person we supposedly loved, we have crossed a threshold and created a wound we need to heal, otherwise things will fall apart. So contempt only causes more problems, and yet many so-called skeptics seem to have at least a hint, if not an outright boatload, of contempt for people who want to speak sincerely about things that qualify as real magic.

The professional magicians of the dominant culture are entertainers. And they succeed in large part by giving us the experience of magic, an experience not simply of the impossible, but rather an experience of the possible—the possible mystery that we might really be a part of.

In a way, professional magic mirrors real magic surprisingly closely. While the professional magician may have none of it in mind, they nevertheless tap into archetypal patterns and energies, and thus magic mirrors many rituals, mysteries, and initiations.

Consider the kinds of things magicians do. What we see, again and again, is a death and resurrection show acted out on some small and intimate scale, maybe just right in front of you.

Maybe you’re the only one there or it’s you and a few friends.

Or maybe it’s acted out on a stage, which is still a small scale, relatively speaking.

Magic in the dominant culture is still an act of theater, but it’s a special kind of theater that displays before the soul the hero’s journey and the mystery of death and resurrection.

The mystery of death is right there before us sometimes.

At times, the magic show has to do with the part of the hero’s journey that involves seeking something, like seeking the holy grail, which heals all wounds.

When a magician asks us to participate in the show, we get put in the heroes position for just a few moments. It’s our quest, it’s our mystery.

The hero’s journey always involves mystery and the unknown.

The hero goes out and confronts a mystery, sometimes to recover a lost object, sometimes to learn a secret, and often to confront death.

Sometimes magic involves an object that is lost and can be found again, like a coin that vanishes and reappears. Sometimes it involves a secret that can be revealed, like revealing the card you selected or even revealing something you merely thought of.

But more often than not, even in the case of an object that’s lost and then found again, we see a death and resurrection show. We confront the mystery of death and the mystery of life.

The coin or the card vanishes. It’s gone. It died. And yet it can come back again.

A woman is cut in half and she can be restored, like a shaman who goes to the underworld, is torn to pieces, and puts herself together again.

The magician, vanishes and then reappears at the back of the theater, like a sage who dies on a cross and then reappears on the roadway.

A card is burned and reappears in the spectators own wallet, like a soul lost and then recalled.

This is the death and resurrection show, the mystery played out like a theatre for the soul.

And so you can see where I went wrong the first time I made the cigarette vanish. Remember, I asked the tough guy for a cigarette, made it disappear, and then he got really angry and wanted it back.

It might seem that the kid just got angry. But if we understand what I did to the psyche . . . I presented the psyche with death and didn’t offer the possibility of resurrection. There was more to it than that, but it was also the case that there was a tension there somehow some way. Like a lot of bullies, this was probably a sensitive kid in bad circumstances.

I myself was not a very good kid when my mother and step-father were getting a divorce. I didn’t realize how deeply all the things going on in our house were affecting me, because I was too young and we don’t live in a mature culture.

We’re just trying to acknowledge here that what seemed like a silly sleight of hand trick performed for hot-headed teenager was in fact a dramatic theater performed for a sensitive soul, and the ego erupted.

The experience of magic is powerful, and it doesn’t matter whether we want to call it real or not.

John Dewey tried to help the dominant culture understand this. Dewey was one of the greatest philosophers born on Turtle Island from within the dominant culture.

In his essay, “Reality as Experience,” Dewey tried to help us see the reality of experience itself, even if experience seems to us a late-comer to the dance. In other words, we have this story that the universe consists of matter, and that only after billions of years did experience appear.

But even if we are militant atheists, we can find the never-not-nownesss, the never-not-hereness of life. That may sound confusing, but it becomes essential to touch this if we are to truly wonderstand a better way of knowing and being, a better way of living and loving, because our philosophy of life always demands experiment and experience. Without serious experiment and increasing intimacy with our own experience, we find ourselves stuck in a limited reality.

Reality in one sense is what we take for granted as true.

What we take for granted as true amounts to what we believe.

In one sense, what we believe is based on our perceptions.

However, what we perceive depends on what we look for.

What we look for is a complex matter. It’s tied up with our personal and cultural karma.

In a simple sense, what we look for depends on what we think, and that means our whole style of thinking, the way we think, not just what we think.

The way we think depends on what we believe already, and also what we are able to perceive—and what we are able to perceive further reinforces our beliefs.

It’s a matter of capacity. In some sense, being trapped in our karma means being unable to fully perceive in a fresh way, and remaining stuck in our beliefs.

Our beliefs determine what we accept as true.

And what we accept as true remains our reality.

That might have been hard to hold in mind, and you might want to go back over that, but We went full circle there, describing how our reality can remain limited by what we take for granted, and if we take for granted the absence of magic in the world, then we will likely remain stuck in a world without magic.

All of this depends on experience. Reality is our experience, and we can practice our life in a way that opens up our experience.

We find here the heart of LoveWisdom. We can test any tradition of LoveWisdom, we can test any philosophy, only by means of experience. We have to test it out and run the experiments it proposes.

However, we also have a conceptual test. We simply examine the philosophy and consider the conclusions it suggests.

When we refer those conclusions back to our own life, our ordinary life as we live it, does that philosophy seem to bring our experience alive, making life somehow feel more significant and more luminous? And, does that philosophy empower us so that we find greater skill and poise as we relate to ourselves and our world? Does it help us become more graceful in our lives, more caring and capable?

Even here we can get a sense of why we have all fallen under the spell of the dominant culture’s technology and science—because technology and science in the dominant culture appear to give us a sense of enrichment and also an apparent increase of power over things. We mistake this for the meaningfulness and empowerment the soul naturally seeks to realize.

But does the philosophy of life that guides science and technology actually make our lives more luminous and fruitful, more genuinely meaningful and abundant?

Microwaves and single serving coffee machines can make things easier—relative to our current context. But do they make the world itself more luminous, the world as we experience it? Does a microwave or a coffee pod machine illuminate our experience of life and genuinely make it more abundant?

We have to ask this kind of question without making a duality between “theory” and “practice”.

Has science—which goes totally together with technology—has science given us skillful knowledge or practical wisdom, if skillful knowledge or practical wisdom has something to do with increasing the luminosity and real fruitfulness of experience?

How intelligent is it to direct our experience to the collapse of the conditions of life?

Dewey touched on all of these things in his own way. He proposed the idea of “Immediate empiricism” and that means anything and everything is what we experience it as.

Reality in an important sense is not “pre-given”—not outside of us sitting still, waiting for us to detect it as it exists in itself—but rather reality must be alive, flowing, transforming, evolving, and completely relational, interwoven, nonlocal.

We can participate more skillfully in life when we responsibly enter into the ceaseless activity of cultivating the whole of life onward, and we discover there an essential aspect which we could call “always more”. This becomes quite real in and through practice, but we easily sense that life has this always-more dimension.

We sense it in our experience.

What is a horse?

Dewey would tell us that when we ask someone what a horse is, they will explain a horse on the basis of how they experience a horse. We can experience a horse as a jockey, as a veterinarian, as an owner and breeder.

If the veterinarian never rides a horse or never rides a horse in a race, the jockey has experienced something more than the veterinarian. On the other hand, if the jockey can’t heal the horse and doesn’t understand the physiological systems of the horse, the veterinarian has experienced more than the jockey. Neither the vet nor the jockey have truly experienced the horse as an investment, and so the owner shows there is yet more to the horse.

And we can see here the profound necessity for being critical of our own experience. Because all of these people experience the horse from the limited and limiting perspective of human agendas. All of them experience the horse in ways that go together with the domination of the horse and of Nature in general. Even people who claim to have a compassionate approach to working with horses may miss that there is more to the horse than their limited thinking has discovered.

We have to be able to critique our experience and get beyond our horizons.

Sadly, we have gotten to a point in the dominant culture at which we have so infringed upon one another that the only defense for some of us seems to involve hiding behind our experience. We have not faced up to the fuller vision Dewey tried to offer us or remind us of.

If we walk into a dimly lit room and see a coiled up snake, and we have a momentary freak-out, and then a few seconds later we turn on a light and see that it was only coiled up rope or extension cord, we would say we have had a truer experience. Seeing the snake was not less real. It was only less true. And we saw the snake because the coiled up rope contained in its relation to the world the possibility of appearing as a snake. The rope is more than a snake. We find that more in our experience.

The experience of magic is real, and it’s as real as any other experience. Moreover, the experience of magic is not necessarily less true than the experience of sleight of hand.

The issue in part has to do with the nature of mind and the nature of Nature. If mind and Nature involve a kind of magic, then the experience of magic might illuminate them.

For instance, we find a special power in illusion in particular. It is precisely because we know we are looking at a magical illusion that the illusion could liberate us totally from our ignorance.

People may have various understandings of the difference between a magician and an illusionist. Philosophically, we could say that the illusionist produces illusions, and the magician produces magic.

For the most part, the magician sticks to

the hero’s quest,

the death and resurrection show,

the finding of lost objects,

and the revelation of secrets.

The illusionist, in the most technical sense, focuses on one thing: Making us see what is not really there.

In practice, magicians will sometimes perform illusions, and illusionists will sometimes perform magic. Sometimes magic relies on illusion, and sometimes an illusion depends on magic. So it’s all interwoven.

Both kinds of performers can give us the experience of magic, but an illusionist technically does something ever so slightly different, and potentially even more empowering.

By showing us something that appears real and yet which we know is not real, they reveal to us the nature of our own mind.

If a magician levitates themselves or their assistant right in front of our eyes, we are looking at something that seems real—and it is real because of the principle of immediate empiricism. We see a floating person, and we experience it as if they are floating. But we know they are not really floating, so while the experience is real, we also find it not quite true. We sense there is something more. Oddly, then, the experience of an illusion points to a something more in our everyday experience.

For instance, when we look at a person standing in front of us, we experience a person standing in front of us, and yet we can find no such person. And thus the wisdom traditions teach us that we live as if under a spell.

This may seem incredible. How could the wisdom traditions teach us such a thing? And yet they do. Again and again we discover the teaching that what we perceive is just like an illusion: It’s real in a certain sense, and at the same time it’s not totally real.

And this is not merely an opinion or some sort of dogma. It’s a teaching we can verify, just as we could verify the way an illusion works. We could find out that the illusion is real as an experience, but not the whole truth, and so we could then watch the illusion and see how real it looks, knowing there is more to it than what we see.

Similarly, we practice meditation in order to verify the nature of our own mind, and thus to verify the mind of Nature.

We find out for ourselves.

Therefore, we ultimately require practice. We have to run the experiment for ourselves, read the blueprint of the mind, study the blueprint of the cosmos itself, the way we would read an illusionist’s blueprint for an illusion.

We can understand this conceptually in various ways, and that can help.

As we contemplate this, if you’re driving, please stay at an intellectual level, because if you inquire into your experience you will become distracted from driving, and an insight into the magic of our mind can feel astonishing which can make things even more dangerous. So, it’s best to come back to this when you can be still and relax.

If you’re able to be still and relax, then you can inquire wholeheartedly, and you may realize something wonderful.

Let’s consider the words you are hearing right now. Where are they?

The words you hear are not my voice. The words you here are not even a recording of my voice.

We could say the words you hear are a sound. But how do you hear sound?

We think of sound as mechanical vibrations. But if we look inside your brain, we won’t find mechanical vibration, and we won’t find any sound.

There is no sound except your experience of sound, your awareness of sound. But we can examine you forever, and we won’t find awareness or experience inside of you.

The words you hear appear to you, but they don’t exist anywhere.

Again, if you’re driving, be careful not to get too caught up in this. It requires our full attention. But if you’re walking along or sitting somewhere, you can try to find these words. Where are they? Where is the mind that hears these words? No matter how long you look, you cannot find the mind that hears these words, and you cannot find the words.

You can also look at a tree or look at your own hand. What you see is real in the sense that it appears to you. You can see the tree, you can see your hand. But no one could ever find the tree or the hand anywhere inside of you. We can’t find the appearance of your hand.

It’s as if the words, the tree, and the hand exist like a spaciousness. They aren’t an object. Not really. Or, if you like, you can say that your awareness of these, the original mind aware of words, trees, and hands cannot become an object. You cannot make an object of your awareness, and yet the tree, the hand, the words are only awareness itself.

In each case, awareness itself is all you find. It must be spacious and free so that it can manifest as words, trees, and hands, and also it must have an inherent knowing or gnosis. This isn’t knowledge as we ordinarily think of it, which involves thought and concepts. Rather it’s an immediate and intimate gnosis, as if space itself had awareness, as if the words you hear right now are not words but awareness itself.

The appearance of words, trees, or your own hand in your awareness is like the appearance of a woman floating in front of a magician. You know the woman can’t really be floating, and yet it appears totally real. She looks like she’s floating.

Your hand appears real, and it has a relational reality, but it’s only relationally real, just like the illusion.

Your hand, the trees, and everything else you perceive is nothing other than your own awareness itself. Your own awareness is not a hand or a tree or a bunch of words, but it immediately appears as these things.

It’s like an incredible magic trick. And you do it all the time.

This is a pure and simple fact about our experience. It’s pure in the sense that, once we deeply, deeply realize it, nothing can be added. All the teachings of LoveWisdom could not add to this realization.

But, fully and completely realizing this doesn’t come easy, and in the meantime, we need the teachings of the wisdom traditions to guide us, to ground our vision and our ethics. And we all need each other in order to take care of the world and keep it evolving in a good way.

Our thoughts are part of this whole magic show. Your thoughts have never existed anywhere inside of you or outside of you.

The nature of mind is not what we experience as thought. Rather, our habitual thought is nothing other than our habitual ignorance and suffering.

And thought thus also has a relational reality. It has an effect on our experience and on the world.

If we can liberate ourselves from taking the illusion as real, we can go from spectator to magician. We can begin to actively participate in the magic of the Cosmos.

That’s why people follow the path of LoveWisdom: It teaches us the magic of the world.

The reason we go to see a sleight of hand artist has this hidden meaning, that the soul sends us messages to seek this experience, to understand this mystery, to feel how magic is real.

Of course, it’s not real in the sense that we saw people in half and then put them back together again. But there is a magic in the World, and it does heal us. It may heal our bodies and our minds, and it may put us back together when we feel our whole life has gone to pieces.

When people follow the path of LoveWisdom, they begin to experience magic. When we enter the path of LoveWisdom, we enter into an intimate experience of the magic and mystery of the Cosmos.

Even listening to these contemplations can begin to open things up. If you listen with a good heart, and you begin to practice your life, synchronicities will come, and they can correlate with the depth of your practice. You begin to touch the impossible interwovenness of things, and magic begins to happen.

When we think of synchronicity in the most general way, if we think of synchronicity as having to do with the interwovenness of all things, then we can think of a large class of phenomena as potentially synchronistic, including things like telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, and more.

Synchronicity in this larger sense is not a personal psychological experience, but rather an expression of the nonduality of mind and matter, or of the fundamental meaningfulness and interwovenness of the Cosmos. A synchronicity always means the rupture of our habitual and egocentric notions of time, space, and self.

These experiences are quite common, and also scientifically validated. The science of the dominant culture doesn’t know how to explain them, but the findings are as real as any others we have. We just don’t like to talk about them in mainstream science and culture.

So—we are going to try and talk about them, to contemplate magic in a serious way. Our story about magic . . . It showed how the experience of magic can bring us healing. It softened the reactivity and the karma of a whole group of people. There is actually a lot in that story, and it’s a good prelude to a discussion of the real principles of magic.

What are the principles of real magic? And can we consider magic in a serious way? What is the real magic of the world?

And at the end of the day, Can we enter into the inconceivable and let go of the deluded magical thinking that pervades this culture?

That final question is essential, no matter your views on the other kind of magic. The dominant culture is filled with magical thinking under the guise of realism.

And it’s not easy to acknowledge the ways in which magic might be real. And it’s essential to think with care and sensitivity, and to remain critical of unskillful ideas and practices.

But although we may find some strange kinds of magical thinking in the dominant culture, we may come to sense that we needn’t concern ourselves as much with the things we find in so-called new age books as we should concern ourselves with the stuff we find in political speeches and corporate mission statements.

Granted, some of the law of attraction and abundance mindset stuff is dangerous and very unrealistic, and it’s quite unfortunate because it harms the world and harms the good name of magic.

Woo-woo magic that doesn’t come with wisdom, love, and beauty and doesn’t come with critical reflection—that won’t help us. The notion or discussion of magic that doesn’t root itself in good, clear thinking, discernment, wisdom, compassion, and care will lead to more suffering.

And even when we’re discerning—it doesn’t matter what topic of LoveWisdom—even when we’re discerning our penchant for spiritual materialism, our tendency to want to co-op the spiritual ideas and the tendency for the culture to try to encourage us to co-op the spiritual ideas, the philosophical ideas, for the benefit of the culture and for the benefit of our own self-centeredness, that danger remains. These currents usually remain unconscious. We don’t realize we’re doing this, that our thinking about magic or anything else—whatever our supposed beliefs about it—our thinking comes with a tendency to perpetuate our self-centeredness and to perpetuate the dominant culture.

That danger will loom over us, but we can at least try to avoid the kind of shallow notions of magic in the world that simply have to do with medicating ourselves, making ourselves feel better, giving us a sense of false hope, and empowering us to pursue agendas that don’t really help the world, whatever we may profess.

The agendas of the dominant culture don’t ultimately help the world, and there’s a tremendous amount of delusion about that. And so it seems the kinds of magical thinking we find in the capitalist marketplace, the kinds of things our standard education and the vast propaganda now gets us to believe, these present the real danger that magic could help us overcome.

Can we arrive at an understanding of magic that will empower us to heal ourselves and our world? That is our question and our quest in the next few contemplations.

This may sound bizarre, and we should appreciate that bizarreness. We will ask how magic might save our souls, and how it might heal us and our world, and how magic might help us to mature.

We will need to look at several things:

First we will consider some basic principles of magic, in a way that allows us to think about it with discernment. We could say we will take a rational approach to magic, but the notion of rationality has gotten encumbered in the dominant culture. Fans of rationality tend to sound like priests of the religion of scientism or the religion of capitalism, or both. Critics of our encumbered rationality tend to emphasize things like emotion and intuition, and they do so usually without enough emphasis on holism, so their critique ends up as fragmented and fragmenting as those they perceive as on the other side of the discussion.

We can only do our best to think clearly, without getting woo-woo, but also without shutting down in the face of what feels threatening.

This will lead us to our next contemplation in the sequence, which has to do with confronting the fear that magic instills and confronting our resistance to magic. Intellectually, people can say whatever they want, but in practice, many people either keep magic away from themselves, and thus never experience it, or people may experience it only to find that it actually frightens them. The latter fact, the fact that it FEELS frightening, means that collectively we might be doing an awful lot to keep magic out of our lives.

Finally, we will consider what it means to enter into the real magic of the World, what it demands of us in terms of our way of life, so that we have a realistic and skillful sense of magic appropriate for supporting the community of life and honoring the sacredness and wonder of the Cosmos.

Please join us for this series, and remember to send in your questions and reflections through wisdomloveandbeauty.org

Until next time, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things. Take good care of them.