Magic - Just Because We Can't Explain It Doesn't Mean It's Not Real

Do you believe in magic? Have you ever seen real magic, or what some people might call a miracle. . or is magic just a trick of the mind?

This is @ecotrain's Question of the Week. So let me jump to the end right away, and answer: YES, most certainly!

Now, to illustrate my whole-hearted and definite reply, let's take a step back and dissect the idea of "Magic".

Getting Magic Tricks out of the Way... for Now

If I mention stage magicians, who pull rabbits out of hats, I'm sure the immediate reply will be... Oh no, not THAT kind of magic! Really why not? Is it because stage magic is intentionally supposed to be a trick of the mind?

So let me modify the notion by removing the show from the stage. Imagine the same entertainer, but standing at a bus stop, wearing flip-flops and sweatpants. If he were to take off his baseball cap, and pull the same rabbit out of it, I'm sure the people around him would react much differently than if he was standing on stage, wearing a tuxedo. While everyone knows that stage magic are make belief tricks to entertain us, seeing something unexplainable out of its usual context can frighten us. What if it's real??? Well really, what then...?

What We Cannot Explain

So let's imagine a different scenario. Let's say (stretching our theoretic imagination) someone is completely unfamiliar with a remote control comes to visit. You press a button, and boom! the music comes on, the garage door opens, and the TV screen starts a slideshow of your favorite cats. How did you do that? this perplexed person might ask, not being able to fathom that there is a simple explanation for what just happened.

Going the other way, we could also imagine a self-driving airborne car that knows where you want to go, even before you say or do anything. In the same way to the remote control, there is a simple explanation, which we all accept even if we don't understand the how exactly technology works. But we use words like "simple science" or "basic electronics", and have faith that even if we don't know, there is someone out there who does. And in any case, there is nothing supernatural about it, at least for us. For those who are unfamiliar with our technology it may seem like magic, and to us it will seem like they just became victims of a mind-trick... not unlike at a magic show, actually.

But What About Actual Miracles?

There are countless stories of how alleged supernatural events altered people's lives. Some had weird premonitions that turned out to be true. Others were cured of terminal illnesses, or went through sudden radical transformations in their deeply set behavioral patterns. Some of these stories sound like they jumped out of a sci-fi or mystery novel, and yet there is a physical basis for them, though they lack any convincing explanation. Getting our heads around them, we grasp at notions of divine intervention, alien meddling, messages from the future... or simply call it magic.

Could it be, though, that the explanation is just as simple as that of the stage magician's hidden rabbit, or the infrared sensor making the remote control work? The only difference is, we are not familiar with that technology (let alone the details of how it works). It would be presumptuous to think that our technology is at its most advanced level ever, or that ours is the only technology out there. In this sense, magic is only a mind-trick if you let yourself be tricked by it. And it stops being magical or mysterious once you accept ... well, that it's real.

Can We Do Our Own Magic?

I'm sure we can. If there is some "technology" out there, we don't need to fully understand it in order to make use of it. In fact, I'm convinced we are already quite busy doing just that, whether we realize or not. Our minds are powerful instruments.

Let's take making wishes as an example: You blow out your birthday candles and make a wish. You imagine it, picturing it behind your eyelids, and want it to be real. Eventually it actually comes to pass. Wow! How did that happen?

Well, by visualizing it, you caused certain electrical vibrations in your brain, emitting electrons towards the right target atoms, which in turn had an effect on the world surrounding you. Or maybe, by concentrating on your wish, certain light-beings living all around us noticed it, and since they liked what you wished for, they interfered on its behalf. Or, it could also be that since you wanted it so bad, you made yourself say and do things that directly or indirectly caused it to happen.

Whichever explanation we pick, (and none of them is better than the rest, or it wouldn't be unexplainable magic) the point is that thinking / wishing / hoping / praying does have an effect on the world. How do I know? I don't! I just accept it as my experience of reality. By the way, I have no real personal story of experiencing something unexplainable, supernatural, or magic-like. However, this world with all its facets would seem awfully strange, if we could explain all the weirdness around us.

So go ahead, rub your crystals or your shamrocks, pray to Jesus or the Giant Head, and practice the magic you don't understand. Because even though we have no idea how or why, it certainly does work.

All images are from Pixabay.