Magic: how to (principles)

So, when I say 'magic' I mean the ability to influence the world. If you want to think I'm talking about the unconscious ability of the mind to absorb and be aware of information it doesn't know it has... what ever.

After all, a rose by any other name smells as sweet.



Attraction

The first is the principle of attraction. You ever read the Secret? Yes, it's stupid and over simplified, but it refers to a real principle: ask and ye shall receive. The universe is amazingly abundant without us doing a damn thing. We exist in a pretty generous world.

As a quick overview: you get what you ask for, clear concentration and focus on a desire will go a long way towards helping it manifest. There's a couple of techniques - visualization, for example - that make it more effectively.

Word of caution: you get what you ask for, not what you need. If you ask for money, you'll get money - you'll be shit out of luck if you needed a job. Or worse if what you really lacked was respect and a voice in your world. But, here: wad of $20's.

There's a trick about listening to yourself for what you need, and then asking for it. I'll only say that the most powerful technique I've ever learned has been to recognize when I'm asking the universe for something that's actually harmful. That, and learning how to stop asking for stuff that will harm me, even if I can't stop wanting it.



Responsibility

The second principle is the principle of responsibility. Responsibility never got a best selling manual. It means "actions have consequences."

In the east they'd call it Karma, but our Christian influenced society has trouble seeing the difference between responsibility and blame. We understand it as God taking revenge (or the universe taking revenge) and associate Karma with guilt. It's not.

It's just this: if you shit in the water, the water will have shit in it. Your actions have consequences, and no amount of positive thinking can wish away those consequences. For example: positive thinking will have an effect when taking a math test. Drinking heavily the night before will also have an effect. Hell, studying will have an effect.

Sometimes the consequences don't fall on us: it's quite possible to deflect them on to others. But even if you, oh, say, steal money and get away with it. You now live in a world where people are robbed. You know it could happen to you, and your victim does too. If your victim tells his friends, they know it too. Every one is a little more paranoid with a little less trust. People are bigger assholes and the world is a worse place to live. Your world -- the one where you live.

Or, in the positive sense. Buddhism talks about 'the factors of enlightenment." The idea being, you do the work (meditate, live a moderate life) and enlightenment just happens. You set up the conditions, and your actions have consequences.

If you are a spiritual person (therefore more in touch with the music of the universe) say you do good. Say you pick up a piece of glass and toss it in the trash, just because you're there, just because you saw it. It may not make a difference to anyone; maybe a street sweep is along 10 minutes later. Still, you know you live in a world where humans can be good. Where people care, and will help each other out. You know because you just did it. And maybe someone else does too, even if you thought no one was paying attention.
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the Redeemer

So, I've been thinking about Jesus. I don't mean the historical guy, I mean the legend, the mythic hero that brings light into the world. As Campbell said, mythology is just the word for other people's religion.

I feel the Catholic Church's interpretation is wrong. Hey, they tortured people into converting, okay? They have no moral authority on this soapbox.

The redeemer sacrifices himself (or herself, it's a common myth of which Jesus is only one example) for the good and the future of the world. He leaves, must leave as he is sacrificed. And we are left alone, with only his memory and his legacy to guide us.

So, he doesn't save us. He gives us a world wherein we can save ourselves. He gives us hope, enough to get us through hell.

Hope is a horrible thing, because without hope we could just give up. Curl up and die. But we have hope, hope of a brighter day, of a better world. Hope that I myself could be a better person someday. And so I keep fighting, one day after the next.

The Redeemer falls, and in so doing wakes us up to the fact that we are worth dying for. That we are so holy and precious - God thinks so even if we don't - that God will suffer and die on our behalf. That maybe I am bitter and greedy today, but tomorrow is different, and the day after and the day after... I can be some one I am proud of. I can be someone worth dying for - God can see it if I can't.
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I have dreamed of a city of gold
Were the streets are paved with the blood of the bold
and every child of man is my relation

But the sins of the father are never far gone
and as the flags burn on the White House lawn
I remind myself that you ain't my salvation

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(imagine set to music)
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Hope

I know loneliness.

At the 2004 winter meditation retreat at Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple - I still remember it - I cried. I wanted to for a long time, but finally I was sitting eating lunch - broccoli soup - and I thought, "I don't want to die. I don't want anybody to die." and the tears came.

They came fairly often thereafter, and each time a pain so desperate and huge I wished it would kill me. I knew it would not. I'd weep, I'd howl if no one was around, and then I'd blow my nose and go to bed.

Dae Jin, if he ever reads this, will surely remember when I invited him to Peck Park, and sat on a bench and sobbed. The world was hurting and I was powerless. Thank god, he sat, and listened. He tried to understand what I couldn't put into words - what I didn't understand myself. He just listened.

I believed that I was like this - burdened with this pain so big it should burst my skin. I believed that any joy was a facade stretched across and ocean of pain. I thought I was always like this, and it was only rarely that I would stop denying it. I knew, at least, how great my suffering was. That was something.

I was talking to an older woman today. She was sitting in the street while we were working on her house, talking about the state of the world and so forth. She said how hard it is to know what to do.

"It's not that hard," I said, "If you listen. When you think you know, that's when it gets hard to hear."

Bruce told me that psychology had discovered that people will prefer guilt to helplessness. I always connected that to Christianity - the only religion I know where people get proud of how ashamed they are. "If I'm hurting, it must be my fault. I'm a sinner, but I'm in control."

(Standard disclaimer: I love Jesus, I think he was a great teacher and a real hero. I think the church and the preachers should crack a bible someday and checkout what the guy was talking about.)

This mentality of, "I there's a book, it tells me exactly what God is going to do," really means "God is predictable and therefore controllable. I follow the rules, and I am in control of my destiny." This thinking . . . is very destructive. The rules say killing people is okay, well, I can kill with impunity. It's all for the sake of God. He needs to be protected.

When I thought I knew, I was safe. I was in control, but I didn't have hope. Hope is a miracle, and miracles don't happen in the world if we've got it by the short hairs.

I'm finding out that I was burning through my grief - as much of it as I could take at a sitting. And that each time I wept, I was a little lighter when I was done. Turns out what I thought was the "real me" was "me at a moment in time" - when I was laughing at the sunrise it wasn't any different.

I don't know. I learn, every day I find out a fact, or face a darkness I didn't know I carried. I piss my friends off by being concerned about them, now I know there's a chance they just needed to be pissed off. Or at least, that I can't know what they need, and all I can do is love them and hope that it's good.

When I admit that the world is larger and more terrible and more wonderful than I can dream, there can be miracles. There always are miracles, but I can admit that they are there - coming out of left field, arising from some secret place in my heart, in the face of fear and death, there are miracles.

The biggest one is called hope.
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If You Haven't Started . . .

A friend once told me I had a questing soul.

And . . . yeah. I am always seeking, searching for something: trying to accomplish something or trying to get somewhere. I'm always questing, whether or not I'm aware of what I'm looking for.

I say this by way of introduction: questing colors my view of the world. It took me a long time to realize that, for example, not everyone was trying to build a stable life - there are people who devoted their energy to living one.

I've been walking the spiritual path for pretty much my whole life. Before I found the path, I was searching for it, looking in books and churches for a connection to that . . . that something true. Whatever that meant.

A great teacher gave this advice on the subject: If you haven't started, don't. If you have started, finish it.

My translation: Your millage may vary. Not everyone is going to want to get down and dirty with their inner demons. Some people will work and have families and drink beer on the weekends, and you know, that can be heroic. That can do more good than a whole year of navel gazing.

BUT! I can't tell you about drinking beer. I can tell you about three things that have been necessary for me, and probably for anybody looking to be a better person.

Thing One: Intention
More than once I have been surprised and frightened by the power of positive thinking. It's great when I formulate a desire, and I just happen to run across someone telling me how to get it less than 20 minutes later. It's also a little scary - somebody up there is listening to me.

Somebody up there is listening to everybody.

We humans are confused creatures, though, and every time I have a noble impulse ("I want to help people!") I have twice as many neurotic ones ("And get rich and famous doing it!"). The nobler ones are louder, I think, and because we live in a reality that just totally kicks ass, the balance gets pushed towards the side of growth and wisdom. Maybe 51% of the time.

It's enough.

So if you want to walk the path, you will find yourself walking the path. You will find yourself running into teachers. You will find yourself in situations that offer you the chance to be courageous (ie, freaking scary ones). You will find that if you are doing a good thing, the whole universe is right there with you.

If it doesn't overwhelm you, well, you're a stronger person than I ever was.

Thing Two: Patience
A few months after I started sitting daily, I used this metaphor: The mind holds a log jam, clearing out a little bit each time there was a moment of No Thought.

(And by No Thought I mean essentially I was paying attention. Ever get really absorbed in a good movie? Hah! Welcome to the world of Zen.)

I don't know if I was really experiencing what Buddhists call Samadhi (and psychologists call Flow State), but I'd occasionally get a moment where my brain wasn't planning lunch. After that metaphor, every time this happened, "The log jam is clearing!" would pop in there.

Now, reflect: this was a thought triggered by not thinking. It happened every frigging time.

There was nothing I could do. I fought it, I sought advice, eventually I just said "screw it" and kept sitting. When I reached this transcendent state of surrendered... nothing changed. Kept on popping in.

Eventually, my brain got bored. That's what it does: it gets bored. Months later, I thought about it, and the log jam hadn't popped in a while.

On the spiritual path, we talk about determination, about great effort, about energy. Screw that. You need patience - enough patience to out last your neurotic thoughts. Enough to keep going until your bad habits have called it a night and caught the last bus uptown. It doesn't have to be some big dramatic teeth-gritting walking-a-thousand-miles-up-hill-both-ways thing, you just have to show up every day.

That suffices.

Thing Three: Hope
(I'm using non traditional terms, because it's easy to get tied down to words. My teachers would have used the phrase Great Faith. Same thing. Probably.)

The world isn't fair. Ain't that a pisser: no matter what kind of rules we make up or how we define justice, the universe refuse to play along. Everyone still dies at some point, whether I think they deserve it or not.

What the world is . . . the world is okay. We get beat up, the trees made food for us today. We go broke, and the earth still supports our weight. We get our hearts broken, and the universe continues to provide space for us to exist in. Doesn't even ask for a tip.

The world can look like a cruel scary place sometimes: it's not. There are parts of it that are rough, times where we get hurt. But we have to keep hope: there are people who will love us, there is rest and respite. Things will change, and any pain - no matter how bad, will pass with time.

People who have near-death experiences can come back changed. They died, and what they felt was great love and great welcome. After the EMT's got them going again, they carried that back with them - that even death is a coming home.

I have hope. I have a hope that I won't be questing forever. That I'll get somewhere and recognize what I've been looking for. That someday I will look into some one's eyes and see home.

And then I'll head out to see if I can help anybody else find the way.
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Scars

Humans were not meant to go to the grave without bearing a few marks of the life they lived.

Health is not measured in the lack of scars, but in the ability to function with them.
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Deep Thoughts, Day two

A: White man's privilege is something you discuss in a college class on racism. It doesn't exist in the real world. I mean, I never got a 10% Caucasian Male Discount at the dinner. While corporate leaders are often male and white, I don't have any on speed dial because of that. I thought the number of benefits I personally got out of maleness and whiteness were pretty much non-existent.

When I came to Austin from Michigan, I traveled back roads - little winding two lane things cutting through fields or hills, woods on one side and a field of cows on the other. I steered clear of the freeways as much as I could manage.

At some point it hit me that I would not be doing this back road route if I was black. I figured a black man traveling alone in this farmland would get stopped now and again where I didn't. Sure I might not have gotten any trouble (though I would not be surprised by a speeding ticket for 3 over). But even if I had been treated fairly, I wouldn't be there. I would not have felt safe in rural America, and I wouldn't have gone.

And if I were openly gay I would have been concerned about violence. Or even .... if I were a woman traveling alone, I would not have left the freeways. I'd stay in well lit areas, keep my nose down and try not to attract attention.

But I am a white male, and I look pretty normal to the guy behind the counter at the road side convenience store. I take a look at a map and realize whole big chunks of it are open to me that wouldn't be, otherwise. Yeah. I get it. White man's privilege.
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