MAGIC REVISITED
APRIL 19, 2011. Magic is a funny word. People have all sorts of ideas about it. The first is: it isn’t real. It’s a delusion. Or it’s something novelists write about and producers bankroll into movies.
Magic is, for blithe enthusiasts, angels riding on rainbows and Nature spirits coming out of trees.
Or magic is Gaia, the mother of Earth who cannot continue to exist in her current state, unless we clean up the rivers and the oceans (I find this one particularly odd, since the planet can recover much better from environmental insults than we can.).
Or magic is cults and ceremonies and brainwashing and arcane symbols and deranged sadists on parade.
What is actual magic?
Let’s start here. We live in a society of instruction manuals. You buy a piece of furniture, you take it home in a box, you read the guide and figure out how to put it together. If you’re lucky.
It’s a how-to world. Learn the system. Manage the structure. Become acquainted with the rules.
The scale has tipped away from subjective impressions, away from how things seem to YOU.
“I’m looking for a job that will pay me to explain how things seem to me.”
I’m not aware of any head hunters who can work that out for you.
When it comes to the subject of magic, once you clear away all the obvious nonsense, the mumbo-jumbo and the rituals and masks, you are left with your own impressions, however vague they may be. You are left with your own sense of how magic might feel to you, how it might operate, what you might be able to do and how that would excite or thrill you.
This is where most people stop, because they have no experience operating from that starting point. They want a compass, a GPS, a map.
What is a subjective impression? What does that mean?
It means a person has a fistful of feelings and thoughts and glimpses of something that can’t be cashed in at the bank. Nevertheless, that cluster is powerful. It can, at the very least, motivate and change a life.
For the majority of the population, subjective impressions are scrubbed from their minds by the age of 20. They’re gone. They are replaced by practical knowledge.
The “how-to” takes over.
What has been lost? The intoxication of smells of spring, the encompassing joy while doing nothing more than sitting under an old tree, the mixture of awe and ecstasy in the presence of a clearing in a forest, the intimation of grandeur looking up from the street at skyscrapers, the unnameable feelings that pass through the mind while reading a novel…
And these subjective experiences provoke a child to wonder about what he can create on his own.
Magic has to do with the ability to harness those subjective impressions and pole-vault with them into the sphere of imagination, where you actually INVENT impressions.
You invent perception.
That may seem like an odd statement.
Some people prefer to believe that magic (paranormal abilities, for example) will come about when scientists figure out how to deploy all the junk DNA hanging around doing nothing in the human genome.
A twist here, an adjustment there, an inserted DNA sequence over there, and poof, a person will suddenly discover he can fly.
I’m betting against it.
Furthermore, even if it could be achieved, who knows what the overall effect might be? The genetically manipulated person might experience something like what happens to a home wiring system when a huge generator is plugged into it: frazzle and burnout of circuits.
I wouldn’t volunteer for the experiment.
Magic, as I say, has to do with the ability to invent perception. We actually do it all the time. Sit in a movie theater. Watch the screen. You’re injecting motion and action and life and energy and a general kinesthetic sense into those flickering images, from start to finish. You’re projecting emotions into those characters.
You’re paying twice for the movie; once at the box office, and once inside the theater, when you insert life into the film.
If you want to get technical about it, the government is taking its cut, too. You wouldn’t cough up the ticket price unless you could walk into the dark, sit down, and make your own magic with the film. So your tax on the price of admission is what you pay the government for your opportunity to invent perception.
We get a clue about magic when we consider the mysterious operations of the old alchemists. The best of them considered that transmutation, the key aspect of their work, was really about transforming consciousness and taking it to another level.
One of their chief symbols was the cross. Two lengths of wood joined together. The four end-points of the cross represented, for them, the elements of nature: earth, air, fire, and water.
Contrary to modern bowing and scraping at the feet of a benevolent Mother Nature, the alchemists believed these elements were in constant conflict with one another. The conflict could only be resolved by what lay at the heart of the cross—at precisely the place where the two lengths of wood met, at the center.
This spot they called Quintessence. There have been many debates about what Quintessence means. It has been used in association with other alchemical terms like philosopher’s stone and elixir of life.
Paracelsus, one of the most famous alchemists, connected Quintessence with imagination.
This was a startling notion, to say the least.
But there is more to be understood. Quintessence has the sense of being a Place, a platform apart from the rest of the world.
As Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, once said, apparently thinking about levers, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.”
Well, here the idea is, to put it bluntly: “Let me create a separate world vivid enough, and from there I will cause things to happen in this world that are paranormal.”
In other words, if a person can invent a whole world consisting ofalternative perceptions, a separate world, if he can inhabit that world, then from that place he can do magic.
If a person can invent a separate world made up of his own INVENTED perceptions, he can move into that world…and from there, he can exert great power on this physical reality.
That, I believe, was the hidden message of alchemy and the ultimate meaning of Quintessence.
For a rough idea of what “alternative world” means, think of a fantasy novel. The author invents all sorts of sights and sounds and smells of a place that doesn’t exist, except by and through his own imagination.
The ancient Tibetans had their own version of “alternative invented world.” For them, it involved the adept creating a very detailed “personage”–and they believed that, if the adept achieved this invention vividly and completely enough, he would realize that the universe was a product of mind…and then he could make pieces of the universe disappear and reappear…and he could also insert, instantly, new elements into the universe.
However, in general, there is a tremendous limiter at work, when it comes to inventing a whole world composed of imagined alternative perceptions.
Confronted with the ongoing distractions of the physical world and the people in it, all that buzz and all that activity and chaos, someone who tried to invent an entirely parallel and sustainable world of alternate perception would be up against it. He would be trying to move a ten-ton rock up a hundred-mile mountain.
It’s a very impractical project, to say the least.
Yes, theoretically, if you could create an alternative world of perception and keep it with you at all times, the chances are you would be able to make some stunning magic. “Special effects.”
In theory, this is what magic is all about. A separate world, in which you can exist and operate, from a platform of power.
Archimedes, again: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.”
In practice, this doesn’t work out. All manner of difficulties arise, and the practitioner falls back into this world, sometimes with disturbing effects.
However, there is another path. It doesn’t demand the wholesale and frontal invention of a parallel world.
It is…art. Carried out with sufficient intensity and commitment, new perception arises as a side effect, and in a most natural way. A sense of dislocation doesn’t have to be part of it at all.
But the artist does need to realize he is creating. He has to have some understanding of a “philosophy of imagination.”
And he needs to be beyond demanding instantaneous fireworks. In other words, he has to have a deep fascination for creating art, quite apart from what magic abilities might fall into his lap as a result of the process.
Making art is, in fact, a way of inventing new perception. But that invention is part and parcel of a wider creative action. Again, the arising of new perception is a side effect.
So, you say, why haven’t we seen artists who can actually make paranormal magic in the world?
First of all, having talked with many artists, I believe some of them have made magic. They just don’t parade it in front of others—mainly because they don’t feel the need to. Also because they’re not looking forward to what the reaction would be.
Second, many artists don’t have a “magic perspective” on what they’re doing. They just don’t see it in front of their own noses, or they are busy with a kind of art which is, for lack of a better term, descriptive. They feel a deep connection between their work and the state of the world. They are trying to excavate down into human emotions and unearth realities there behind masks.
Third, we only see a snapshot of the artist during his life. It’s my contention that many artists are doing their work along a huge road of time, encompassing many incarnations. The length of these periods is enormous…and at some point the magical effects will appear as natural offshoots. Forty, 50, 60 years of making art is nothing. It’s just warming up the motor…
When I say art, do I only mean those branches we are used to calling drama, film, dance, poetry, painting and the like? No. I mean any sustained powerful creating in a direction.
And where does such creating start? It starts with subjective impressions and emotions that light sparks in the middle of night. You get up from your bed and go to the window and look outside at the world and sense space and time laid out like a carpet. You will invent something large and powerful that wasn’t there before. You will put it there…
In which case, you’re on the path. Of magic.
I don’t mean that metaphorically.
Imagination and creation are actually the philosopher’s stone that alchemists debated about for centuries.
Imagination overcomes all obstacles, especially those that appear to be final and immovable. It accomplishes this through sheer transcendence and also through the utilization of those obstacles in a transformative way.
Is this not what art does?
William Bake: “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is a shadow.”
The mistake (or difficulty) some ascetics have dealt with is trying to move lock, stock, and barrel out of this world into another one. That so-called spiritual path tries, in effect, to blot out the physical world. Why bother? Why try to move the ten-ten rock up the hundred-mile mountain?
Imagination is an infinite force that moves out from the center of the Quintessence.
More than a thing or a talent, magic is what happens along the long road of imagination, of art.
If you look at all the bizarre versions of magic that have been launched or promoted, the cults and groups and semi-spiritual forms, you find that coercion or hypnosis or propaganda are building blocks.
Art, however, operates from the basis of freedom. And in the long run, that is where true power starts.
JON RAPPOPORT
www.nomorefakenews.com
qjrconsulting@gmail.com
