article
by Janice Van Cleve
Just before last Samhain, I was taping a television show, and on the set with me was a magician. I love to watch a good magic show! I know it is merely slight of hand, but that does not detract from my enjoyment. Nor do I ever try to figure out how the magician does it. I really don't want to know. I'd rather just be amazed and awed.
Anyway, this particular magician played up the spooky side of magic. He was bald with a goatee and dark, ominous eyes under perfectly trimmed eyebrows. His black coat and diamond-studded ascot gave him an air of sinister sophistication. In a perfect tenor voice, he led his audience on, rambling about fate and death and judgment. He made it all sound so mysterious and just a little threatening.
Meanwhile, in his hands he manipulated a box with two compartments. Inside was a large block which he audibly shifted back and forth by tipping. Sometimes he would reveal it on one side and sometimes on the other, all the while seeming to illustrate his monologue by his movements. Finally, he opened the box and the block was gone completely, only to have him produce it with a flare from his hat on the table.
Of course, it was just an illusion. No laws of physics were violated. The block most likely never left the hat in the first place. The rambling pseudo-philosophical babble was just a distraction to create an atmosphere. Yet something magickal did take place. The magician not only manipulated the box. He also artfully manipulated our attention, and we willingly participated in his effort. His skill, combined with our wills, produced an energy of surprise and wonder. We emerged from the experience touched in some way, amused or even pleasantly entertained. That is a change of state or shift in reality, if only on a very small scale. Our wills and his action created a difference.
As such, this little performance fits the definition of magick offered by Starhawk in Dreaming The Dark. She says, "Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will." She calls it an art, because "it has to do with forms, with structures, with images that can shift us out of the limitations imposed by our culture in a way that words alone cannot, with visions that hint at possibilities of fulfillment... and magic is will -- action, directed energy, choices." There is a lot in that description, but one notable point is that in working magick, it is not objects that move but we who move. The block did not move from the box to the hat. We moved from expectation to gratification. Magick is about moving ourselves.
But there are many kinds of magick.
I'd had a quite different type of moving magickal experience just a few days before the show (pun intended). I was driving north on Interstate 5 in a blinding rainstorm. My reality was a complex spectrum of current circumstances and immediate plans ahead. I was driving with caution and paying attention to the cars around me and the large truck coming up from behind. I was also aware of my location and the time. I was coming home from a delightful visit with a friend and looking forward to dinner with another.
Then suddenly the driver ahead of me lost control. I watched in disbelief as what used to be taillights became headlights, then a side door, then around again. What used to be speeding away from me was now careening wildly right in front of me as I rushed inescapably toward it. I did not slam on the brakes for fear of losing control myself on the slick pavement. Nor I did want to remain in the path of the big truck that I knew was behind me. So in one motion I checked the right lane and made for it. The other car spun round again and lurched right in front of me. The force of our collision threw both vehicles off the road out of the way of oncoming traffic.
In that frightening, wrenching, steel-crunching 20 seconds, I was suspended between realities. The reality of my immediate physical world was taken over by reflex instincts. It was instinct that guided my car and ultimately brought us to the best possible collision, off the road, upright and not hurt too badly. In the world of sensory experience and data gathering, however, quite another reality was unfolding. Time seemed to stand still. The moment of impact acted itself out in slow motion. My eyes watched in fascinated curiosity as the front end of my car crumpled back into the glove compartment. My muscles felt the lurch of my body forward against the exploding air bags and the harsh bindings of the seat belts. My nose whiffed the acrid smell of air bag propellant, and my arms ached.
At the same time, my brain was processing the abrupt intrusion of this new reality upon the one that it had held just seconds before. Like a television screen image that morphs into a puddle, my visions of travel and dinner plans that night literally liquefied before my eyes. They seemed to coalesce into a greenish-brown blob that continued to rush ahead down the freeway as if they had never been interrupted. They seemed to have an existence of their own that was separate and distinct from me, or perhaps the collision forced me to see that I existed separate from my aspirations. Whatever the case, I watched them go down the freeway as I sat stopped in the pouring rain. I saw a lingering thread stringing out from the blob back to me. Then my cell phone rang. It was the person with whom I was supposed to have dinner. I realized then that the thread was my lingering concern for her waiting out in front of my home for me to answer the door. When I told her what happened and we canceled our date, the thread broke and I let go my concern. The greenish-brown blob sped forward down the road and disappeared out of time.
This was a rare experience of a type of magick in the working -- of being in multiple worlds simultaneously and being consciously aware of all of them. When I let go of the thread, I could let go of the whole collection of thoughts that made up the former reality and I could be totally present in the new one. The new reality was that I was sitting in the front seat of a crumpled car with a stinky airbag ballooned in my face and rain pouring through the shattered sun roof onto my head. In a surreal state of calm, I got out of my car and went to see to the condition of the other driver. Then I called 911 and crawled into the relatively less wet back seat of my car and put on my coat and boots and gathered up my belongings to stow and lock in the trunk. When the fire truck arrived, I climbed in to get dry and gather the elements of myself back into one reality again.
When I did, the projection of my immediate future was clear. I had to find a way home from this forlorn roadside south of Olympia. The state patrol officer was kind enough to take me to a bus stop. There I connected with the series of busses that would eventually get me to Seattle. Along the way, I found a passenger who worked at the state capitol and we passed the time talking politics. At the end of the line, a dear friend I had phoned was waiting in her car. She even brought a small plastic bottle of whisky because she thought that would cheer me up.
The whole experience revealed to me another kind of magick. This was no slight of hand or skill plus will. This magick was about opening myself to multiple simultaneous realities and operating within them. Each reality had its own set of rules and laws of physics. Each reality seemed to be accessible to me and even malleable to my will, as long as I accepted it and did not fight it.
This is not to say that magick is always passive. I believe in active magick, too. I used active magick to get my new car. Naturally, I started with intention. Intention is everything. It fixes the goal. It aims at the target. It gives direction and meaning to action. The thing that makes intention different from wishful thinking or daydreaming is the second step -- doing the homework.
Here, I felt lost. The last time I bought a car was many years ago. At first, I believed it was best to get another car like the one I had. That would mean the least change, but it would also mean the least growth. Not that I had any choice. They don't make a car like what I had anymore. So a friend pointed me to a couple of Web sites, and I started reviewing specs. I did the homework not so much to find out what was available, but to clarify what particular features I really wanted.
That's where the third part of active magick comes in -- being open to outcome. There's a big difference between floundering aimlessly and intentional, informed openness to outcome. I had informed myself, and I was able to articulate my basic requirements to others. The car that ultimately presented itself was a surprise to me. It was not what I had envisioned at all, but it did meet my requirements. As I sat there at the salesman's desk with the car out on the lot and the offer on the paper in front of me, I could feel the impulse of magick. The universe had moved to bring this opportunity to me. Now it was up to me to move myself to meet it. I like that part. I didn't predetermine my future. I put out some parameters and then grew into what showed up.
Maybe these experiences don't seem that magickal to most folks, but they do feel magickal to me. In each case, I sensed I was moving with an energy that was not under my control, yet I was not lost or powerless in it. It felt reciprocal. Starhawk says again in Dreaming The Dark, "Because every change we make is a change in a relationship in which we take part, we cannot cause change without changing ourselves." Sounds a little like quantum physics, doesn't it?
Whatever it is, I come away from these moments of magick less secure in my grasp of all the various realities that seem to be out there. On the other hand, because I acknowledge that they exist and because I have willingly passed through them, I feel more secure in my ability to navigate no matter which one I am in.
Janice Van Cleve is a writer who really doesn't do those kind of mushrooms. Really.
Copyright © 2006 by the article's author