My Most Radical Claim

Magic is real. It is not a matter of bending reality to your will; it is a process of aligning your will with reality.

The first step in making magic is to find your way down into awareness, the still point at the centre that knows exactly “where you are”. In the same way that you have a sense of how your body is oriented in physical space, you are equipped with senses that align you with reality. With what IS. From that place, you can move.

You can move in ways that are aligned with The World As It Is. Clear perception of the world (or at least about the local part with which you are interacting) means that you will interact with it in effective ways, that you will be able to impact it to evolve in the directions you want it to. It is as if your awareness were water, and suddenly you were able to feel your way along the pass between two hills when you had been trying to climb them.

This is magic.

We can’t perceive the mechanisms in a double-blind study, so our scientific discourse, that which equates accurate models with reality, demands that we deny its existence. (This is a poor model of science, by the way. More on that later. In another post.) And thus we give up the power of consciousness, intent, perception, intuition… and rely instead on thinking and reasoning in situations in which they are completely inadequate. It is as if we, lacking a complete model of our senses of balance, relied instead on our rational minds for walking. Doubted that other people could walk. Or tried to guide our food intake with books…

But western thought has spent the last 200 years (or thereabouts) trying to prove the non-existence of the broader field… even after the discovery of quantum mechanics 100 years ago. Current “scientific” explorations into consciousness follow the same pattern, presuming that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, wrestling ever more with the old Cartesian duality: how can matter bring into being something that is non-matter? (To which I pose the question: where does music of a symphony reside? But, I digress.)

But I think they’ve put Descartes in front of the horse. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.) Because they’ve bypassed the more core question:  does form, in fact, precede consciousness, or does consciousness precede form?

Ever it was, ever shall it be?

These are not new questions; they are the stuff of which the ancient Indian and Greek texts are made. What is this consciousness thing? How do we know we are here? Is there a god?

I have become convinced that we (western scientists) are asking the wrong question. We have misdefined consciousness, confusing it with mind, the burbling bits on the surface, and self-awareness, the bits of consciousness focused on the separate experience of the self-in-body. The definitions in the academic texts slip and slide, sometimes even claiming that consciousness itself is an illusion. There is no ghost in the machine, or maybe there is no machine. So let me put this to you: the man who wrote my quantum mechanics text book has dedicated his life to the study of unity consciousness. After 20 years of trying to reconcile the materialist worldview with everything else I have experienced, I am also convinced. We have it backwards, and the yogic sages have known it for a hundred generations: mind is an emergent property of consciousness, not the other way around.

The universe is not composed of inert billiard balls. This insistence on radical materialism ignores the last 100 years of physics.

In a very real sense, the particles of which we are composed “know” where they are. They interact with their surrounding environments, “broadcasting” their own information “electron! electron! electron!” (Or, more correctly, “potential for electron!”) In fact, they and their surrounding environments are completely intertwined, co-evolving in constant communication. So it’s not just “electron”, but “electron bound to 14 other electrons, all grouped together with a clump of protons and neutrons” (or “Hi. I’m part of a phosphorous atom.”) They’re not communicating with words any more than an maple tree letting the surrounding maples know it’s under attack by caterpillars, but to claim that they are not communicating is absurd. It doesn’t have to be intentional, but they are moving (through space-time) and leaving traces in the field in their wake. Now there are subatomic ripples. Now there are pheromones. Now there are words. Now there are dots on a screen forming words, sharing ideas, calling across the void. “This is where I am. This is where I am.”

All these techniques of working with mind are designed to bring mind (conditioned patterns) into alignment with consciousness (direct perception). Here arises consciousness, moment by moment, perceiving, but the closest part of the phenomenal world (the body/mind) overwhelms our perceptions. But we can learn to perceive through the local field to orient ourselves in time/space/field.