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There is Real Magick In the World
By James Donahue
As the son of a chemical engineer and staunch Methodist parents, I grew up in a relatively
restricted environment.
I say that, because even though I was exposed to a library of books, newspapers and magazines
and enjoyed the privilege of travel and education, my training was limited to the restrictions of a socially controlled approach
to reality. There was little room left for exploration outside the realm of exact science.
In other words, if you couldn't
see, touch, taste or smell it, the subject in question did not exist. At least in my father's mind.
There was this
basic rule of science in our house for everything except religion.
In Sunday school I was expected to believe a story
about a god-man called Jesus who was born of a virgin. He was visited by three magi (magicians) sometime after he was born.
Then this Jesus grew up to do such amazing feats as cure leprosy, turn water into wine, feed thousands with three fish and
a couple loaves of bread, and, most amazing of all, he raised people, including himself, from the dead. Somehow it was all
right to believe these stories, even in the house of a man who demanded strict scientific principles applied to every other
facet of our lives.
My mother went along with the science of Dad's form of tunnel reality because in the 1940's-50's
and 60's, while we existed as a family in the same house, it was vogue to believe that science was the great magic of our
time. That was because the nerdy men with thick glasses in white lab jackets, who worked with beakers, weights, chemical compounds
and Bunsen burners, were constantly coming up with solutions for such things as growing food for everybody, relieving the
drudgery of hard work and overpowering disease.
But Mom came from simple, hard-working common stock, and she understood
a few things about ghosts, fortune telling and reincarnation. As a youth her world was filled with stories from the neighborhood
about strange lights, haunting, and other unexplained phenomena. I remember some wonderful afternoons spent alone with her
after coming home from school. I would sit in the kitchen, munching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and listen to her
stories with great interest.
Interestingly enough, my father was a science fiction buff. By the time I was in my teen
years, I too was reading and loving science fiction. I guess it was all right to imagine space travel, time travel and alien
visitations because it was all presented under the names "science" and "fiction." And most sci-fi writers backed up their
ideas with some pretty accurate scientific data, making the stories seem quite plausible.
But in the 1950s, when the
unexplained lights began appearing in the night sky, and people began calling them "flying saucers" and then "unidentified
flying objects," things started getting a little strange. The lights were conceived by many to be from ships visiting Earth
from other planets. This, of course, was only conjecture. It certainly was not a scientific fact. But the reports stirred
my imagination, and I read every book and magazine article I could find on the subject.
Also I found some stories about
such unexplained things as crop circles, a beast of the forest named bigfoot, the Loc Ness monster sightings, the lost continent
of Atlantis, and lost ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle. I poured over these articles and especially enjoyed Erich
von Daniken's popular book "Chariots of the Gods" that suggested our civilization was launched because of alien visitations
from other worlds.
In addition to these areas, my interests branched out into the field of archaeology. I poured over
books about the Egyptian pyramids, the great Mayan and Aztec structures in Mexico and South America, the ancient mound builders
in the north central United States and the strange rock formations at Stonehenge, England.
The more I read, the more
confusing things seemed to become. These ancient mysteries did not fall in lock step with the reality story I was taught in
my youth.
Then I ran into my first real ghost story. I don't remember all of the facts. I was working as a cub reporter
for a Michigan newspaper at the time. I liked the story so much I interviewed the people who owned the building, took pictures,
and wrote their story. I was dismayed when my editor threw it out, saying he refused to print such garbage.
Throughout
my career as a newspaper reporter, I kept running into ghost stories. And I couldn't resist trying to get them into print.
But it was not until sometime in the 1980s when I wrote a piece about a number of haunted historic buildings in the old Michigan
town of Lexington, that I finally saw one of my ghost stories appear under a newspaper headline. I was not surprised that
it was well received. Even though we were programmed not to believe in ghosts, I discovered that most people had a secret
knowledge about these things.
My wife, Doris, grew up in a much less restricted world. Her grandmother was a spiritualist who spent much
of her time communicating with dead relatives. Her grandfather once astonished the family when he raised a table right off
the floor. Doris discovered late in life that she has rather amazing psychic abilities of her own. She can heal by mere touch,
she can talk to fourth dimension life forms, and communicate with the dead. She also seems to be able to go into the fourth
dimension, talk to herself in the future, and in this way predict future events with some degree of accuracy.
But all
of this was nothing compared to the education awaiting us in the deserts of the Southwest.
In 1995, we sold our Michigan
home, paid all our bills, and moved to Arizona where we lived for a while with a Navajo medicine man and his wife. It was
there that we discovered various forms of native magick at work. I spell magick with a "k." That is an esoteric word used
to separate the magic of smoke and mirrors from a name for a real form of making things happen through human thought and ritual.
The
Indians were sorcerers in the desert. We watched them dance to a drum beat, and chant prayers in the night around massive
bonfires to achieve their magick. They healed the sick, caused it to rain, attacked their enemies and warded off evil forces.
We even saw evidence that they could change their physical form from human to animal figures, and then back again.
We have since delved into the rituals of
magick and found that it works. What we have discovered, however, is that all magick and divination is the result of human
right brain functioning. Everybody has the capability of doing it. And rather than a crowd of people dancing and chanting,
all that is really required to achieve the same results are a number of people thinking the same thought at the same time.
This,
if you haven't guessed, is the power of prayer. It works because we have a lot of power when several people are sharing
the same mental thought at the same time. It works because we are all gods, and God is in all of us.
We are all one.
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