On Magic

Lately I've been trying to predict the next card from a pack of digital cards in an app on my tablet. Envisaging the card I want to see manifest next, and have had some great results too!

I've been treating it as an exercise for improving my ability to manage my expectations. I generate a feeling of knowing what the card will be and then project this at my tablet screen, but when I'm incorrect I carry on conjuring the same sense of certainty regardless, and over time my expectations become less negatively impacted because consecutive wrong predictions hurt less each time.

Failure starts to feel a bit meh.

The mind becomes able to focus fully on the goal or vision it has set itself, and is immune to the despair caused when the reality we expect isn't the reality we get.

It's important to make thoughts that need to get out of your head tangible and real, and are represented in the most faithful way you can muster. But making something tangible and concrete in the world has its own problems.

I feel like the most important things in life all exist in a realm where words aren't able to describe what happens there. A zone of human experience where secrets, epiphanies, revelations and miracles all reside and must be felt in order to be known. A place where trying to analyse what you observe only pushes the thing you see further and further away, because observation is an act of distancing ourselves from the thing we wish to understand in order to see it fully, and in doing so we protect ourselves until we're satisfied it poses no threat.

Understanding through observation is an act of precaution before the moment of acceptance. An act of rational hesitation. A process which first involves assuming we are separate from the things that surround us - which seems in opposition to acts of oneness, unity, or love - all states of mind fueled by empathy in order to know how the other is feeling, or being.

Questioning things which feel magical in order to find out why they are magical, kills the magic. In a similar way, a butterfly immediately feels like a corpse in our hand if we hold its wings closed to observe its beauty, preventing it from flight.

Because magic isn't born from reason, so it's no surprise that reason should find it impossible to explain magic to us.