Discovery: The Science of Magic

by Pappy October 30th, 2007, Posted in: Writing


Introduction

I wasn’t always a modern day wizard. Indeed, after years of looking for and failing to find a better alternative, it still doesn’t feel right to use that word. Wizard, after all, implies an adept of the arcane, a master of the mystic. But as my story will reveal, magic is neither arcane nor mystic, and I am neither adept nor a master. But to my knowledge, I am one of a handful of individuals who have stumbled onto the rediscovery of magic and an understanding of its source; knowledge that in this modern society of science and technology is worth more than all the processing power of the world’s super-computers combined.

Believe it or not, this knowledge came to me by the fusion of my choice in career path, and a penchant for juggling hobbies and interests as readily as a clown man-handles bowling pins. A student of anthropology, I focused my collegiate endeavors on religions’ influence on human cultures. The science of shared perception, that groups of individuals could in essence create their own concepts of reality in order to explain what their sciences could not, intrigued me. To really understand how these perception were built, however, I had to weigh in factors from myriad other aspects of that culture. From their level of technological advancement to the vagaries of sexual mythos, to understand the rise of religion in a culture one needs to understand almost every other aspect of a society’s evolution.

This naturally led me to dabbling in hobbies across the sciences. Agriculture, metallurgy, and historical context became evening playgrounds after the term papers and homework were complete. When I got around to examining the evolution of major modern religions such as Christianity and Islam I delved deeper into telecommunications, chemistry, and even physics to create my contextual reference points.

Most people would be shocked to learn that modern theoretical physics much more closely resembles New Age metaphysics than it does Einstein’s indelible E=Mc2 or the birthing of atomic energy. Today’s theorists are contemplating the very nature of existence. They ponder that the Universe itself exists only as we perceive it, and that by changing our collective perceptions we can change the Nature of our own realities. Great minds in physics evaluate factors from not 3 or 4 dimensions, but from as many as twenty-six dimensions; most of which are beyond human comprehension.

To boil it down, the line between science and religious beliefs are blurring, and whether believers understood it or not, I came to the conclusion that believing in something might just be enough to make it real. The most difficult part of this is so simple it’s nearly comical. You see, how does one believe in something when it violates every essence of thought the logical mind has come to recognize? It’s more than just a temporary suspension of dis-belief; one must accept these new realities without cause, nor basis in thought, the way we know the ground is there beneath our feet even when our eyes are closed.

It requires the absence of thought.