Recently – as in about 3 hours ago when I was on my trusty bicycle – I started wondering about whether there is any such thing as real magic in the world, and the power of belief in magic.
Back when I was a wee teenage lad I got hooked on Dungeons and Dragons (and subsequently AD&D when it was released), and part of the game involved picking a god to worship and converting others to his/her belief. As the game lore went, the more people who believed in said god, (or demi-god, or major diety) the more powerful they became, because of the power that belief generated. In the game if you were successful in converting enough people and did enough deeds for your god, you had a chance to be divinely rewarded with some item or bonus that was outrageously cool. Now while I never was actually bestowed any of these sacred gifts, it nevertheless motivated me to try on odd occassions in the hope that the dice would go my way on a roll.
I do wonder if it could be the same thing in the wider scope of existence. For instance, take Tolkien’s, The Lord of the Rings. It is arguably the most widely read fantasy novel ever published, and has amassed in its wake an army of fans that on some level believe in this world that was created. Take me as an example, while I am wholy accepting of the reality that I operate in on a day to day basis, during the times of my life when I am reading the novel TLOTR, I lose myself completely in its realm, and I come to think of the characters as real. So is the power of the book that it creates a belief that it _could_ exist. I know I’m not alone, and I’m not even close to being a hardcore fan. I don’t even have to describe one, because even people who haven’t met one have an idea of what your real hardcore Tolkien fanatics are like! (Crazy bastards!)
But what if all of this power of belief actually does mould reality? Before you say I’m crazy, I’m actually not. In a quasi scientific film that came out a while ago called, What the Bleep Do We Know, there was an experiment that some researchers did using water and peoples emotions. They showed that a water drop will actually change its shape when it is subjected to different types of human emotion. While I’m not going to go into that particular experiment here – and you can take it or leave it as you feel – it does at least offer the possibility that there is some force associated with our awareness. If you extrapolate that to a global scale, where you take millions, maybe billions of people who all share a common belief about something, doesn’t it stand to reason that reality would shape itself to that view?
If that were true however, why doesn’t Gandalf walk through the front door of my office, wave his staff and make all my work disappear, before giving me a ride on Shadowfax to Gondor for a few hot nights with some beer wenches? Cause that’s a reality I’d like to see happen. Well you know, I just don’t think it works that flagrantly. That’s a perverse violation of our existing reality, because in order to create TLOTR reality, this one would have be sundered! And sundering realities probably isn’t tolerated on some cosmic level because it upsets the order of things higher up. However, that doesn’t mean that TLOTR doesn’t exist, it just means it exists somewhere else, and we’d have to find a doorway to it.
Like with magic!
The scientific amongst you will say – magic is only a phenomenon of physics that is not yet understood. Once it is understood, it will no longer be called magic, but a law (of physics). To which I would say, yes that is true, and it isn’t because magic is really a great paradox; it is really acheiving that which is impossible through belief. Which is something physics will never accomplish, because physics only deals with what is possible, not that which is impossible. Once you cross that line, it’s all magic, baby!
In essence then, magic is really the realm of all impossibilities made possible through the force of awareness, and will. You just have to believe in them enough.
But is it real?
Andy!
You bet your ass it is!
If you want reality shaped by belief, just take a look at the protestants. Their belief that whether or not God favours you is reflected by your success in life is why we live in capitalistic societies. No need for magic to explain the power of belief here!
But I’m deliberately misunderstanding your point here.
If you define magic as that great paradox you mention, then… well, I could argue that achieving the impossible is impossible by definition, because once you’ve achieved it, you’ve proven it’s possible. Nevermind that, though.
I’d say it’s real. I’d also say it’s far less spectacular and simple as it’s described in fiction. The example I’d give would be the application of Ki in (Ki-)Aikido – you can learn to overcome being restrained by people, or throw them, with little use of force. What force you use is so little that it becomes seemingly impossible.
The fun part of it is that to a large part the trick in achieving this lies in a combination of relaxation and belief. I might go as far as say it’s not really belief, it’s a conviction – there can’t be any doubt, and because there is no doubt, you succeed.
Now I’m too analytical to keep things at that. There’s definitely an element of applying the leverage in just the right way. The “magic”, if I were to be very analytical about it, would be to let your subconsciousness figure out what the right leverage is, because your consciousness wouldn’t manage. And you achieve that through being convinced that you succeed, without having to bother to try (that takes practice though, and I suspect the practice also helps hone your subconsciousness’ abilities).
Magic of this kind, I have little trouble believing in – I’ve experienced it myself, as it were.
The water drop experiment I’m a bit sceptical about. It’s not that I couldn’t come up with plenty of fantastical reasons why it could work – it’s just that people botch up experiments too often for me to not be sceptical about experiments with fantastical results.
I could take offence……. but I won’t
Hey there, Jens.
Yeah you know, this whole thing about the how Catholics view reality is pretty twisted even on the best days. On the worst, it kills people! How that lot can even claim to be ‘rational and sane’ is living proof that mass societal delusion can and does exist. But I won’t go into that here. Far better to write a proper scathing blog entry and flog the bastards in public! I can get some negative publicity mileage out of that as well for my blog, cheap bugger that I am. However I will finish up with a last word (actually two). Catholics: idiots!
So you quantified my paradox in a very scientific way, which incidentally also applies to God and faith. As the saying goes – but I can’t remember who said it – Faith in God belies proof because once you have proved God you no longer need faith. I think the thing here is, when we talk about realms of impossible things, we are talking about things that science could not achieve, even if it was given a sufficiently large amount of time to allow for more sophisticated processes and machines. (Check out this video by Michio Kaku for a small discussion on that). For instance, I don’t ever think science will ever be able take our dreams and make them real, or create Middle Earth as a real place. But this is the kind of stuff that I think magic can do. You could be right about the subconscious applying the right levers to achieve something, like astral travel for instance, but I also think this kind of thing is an innate inability that we all have, but most people don’t develop it. It can be developed by intensively following various meditation practices, in much the same way as you can develop physical skills through training.
In the end, I think belief in “magic” is going to have a lot to do with whether you accept only a rationalist viewpoint of reality to start with. As you say, you will believe what you can experience for yourself. However you believe a lot more than that, because I am pretty sure you’ve never seen a tachyon particle before, but I am betting that you believe it exists.
(I bet you’re going to say you don’t just to make me look bad 
Similarly there is more to reality than can be experienced personally.
For myself I have a big belief in impossible things because I have a big imagination, and I’m not so rationalist. In the whole scheme of things, the world is more than the mass of it’s particles; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So I tend to think there is some force that can be manipulated to change reality as we want. But really, isn’t this the same as what we do with science?
Andy.
LOL
Thanks for that!
By the way, great job saving Middle Earth! Much appreciated!
Andy.
That’s what I like, a true believer!
Keep the faith, baby!
Andy.