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There is Real Magick
In the World
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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