Science! Welcome to the party! Glad you could make it! Thanks for the wine, can I take your coat?
On a more and more frequent basis, scientists issue press releases about making “discoveries” about the behavior of particles or energies that explain stuff that healers, Witches, and Druids and been doing for thousands of years. Kind of like Columbus “discovered” America. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of furthering our understanding about the world we live in, and how we perceive and relate to it as humans with this crazy thing called consciousness. I love it, in fact. But . . . I get a little nervous when dogmatic types who deny the validity of beliefs I hold dear refuse to acknowledge any evidence of truths that can’t be measured with existing instruments.
I just read a very interesting book called Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe, by Dean Radin, who embodies a wonderful blend of scientific rigor and total openness to possibility. The book discusses several facets of what we call Magic that have been studied in laboratories and have cleared “chance” by orders of magnitude. There is something to all of this stuff that we do, absolutely. What it is, no one can quite say, and thank the Gods for that, because honestly, I think magic only works if you can believe in it, and if somebody up and proves it exists and can show how it works, well, that’s knowing. Not believing. Magic requires mystery. I totally believe that.
Fortunately, we have, at this point, no way of scientifically measuring or describing experience. Radin says,
If we bite into a lemon, we know what it tastes like. But if we attempt to trace how we know based on the signals that travel to the brain from the electrochemical sensors on the tongue, nowhere do we find what the subjective taste of a lemon is actually like.
Brain waves, chemical reactions in the brain, neurological firings and mis-firings can be measured, but not the experience, not what is happening when those physical things are taking place. Experience takes place in the mind or consciousness, which isn’t the same as the brain, no matter what anyone tells you. And experience is completely subjective.
You and I walk into a room together. You immediately pick up some energy that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. I hear an eerie hum. I don’t have the hair-standing-on-end feels, and you can’t hear the hum, but we’re both experiencing an energy that is somehow present in the room, you through your skin and me through my ears. There’s probably no way to know what the energy is without poking it, and I don’t do that unless I have no choice. So let’s bug out, yes?
Or maybe we are in two different places, and both see or hear something that triggers the same thought, and just as I reach for my phone to text, “Hey, you’ll never guess what I just saw!” to you, I get a text from you saying exactly the same thing. Something wanted us to connect at that moment and made it happen over however many miles separate us.
How does anybody explain that? We don’t even bother. We just know that the Universe works in extremely magical and highly mysterious ways, and who cares how anyway? You’re my friend, and we connected in joy and laughter from across the continent or around the globe.
There is an astonishing amount of data supporting the existence of psi and other forms of magic. Clairvoyance/audience/sentience is extremely rigorously documented, and experiments are showing results in the millions to one against chance, sometimes billions to one against chance. This is real, people are doing it in laboratories, and in their everyday lives. Most of us know someone who gets “feelings” when things are about to happen, or know that one woman who always knows what sex the baby is going to be before the baby even knows. How many times have you known who is calling you before you pick up the phone? How often do you randomly think of someone, only to run into them or get an email from them, seemingly out of the blue, within a day or two?
The universe is Consciousness, yes, with a capital C. Everything came from Consciousness. Even quantum physicists are agreeing with that. Max Planck, the father of Quantum Theory and a Nobel Laureate, said,
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
In the beginning, was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In other words, in the beginning, there was Consciousness, and that Consciousness had a thought, which caused everything that has ever happened since the beginning of Time to happen. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. Well, how about them apples?
There will always be room for mystery, I do so dearly hope anyway. At this point, nobody is trying to create a tool sensitive enough to record our experience of events. It just isn’t important enough, not measurable enough, not absolute enough, to bother with. And that is just fine with me. I’m grateful that science and mysticism are finally getting along, occasionally having lunch, showing up at the same parties and being able to have a conversation. That’s fantastic. And Science will always be welcome as a partner at the party, as long as they leave the dogma at the door.
