I have to choose a master for magic. I’ve been putting it
off, because even though I came here because of the magic, I find I don’t quite
believe in magic in a literal sense. I don’t mean magic like what Allen does,
that’s obviously real, but that’s also not what I mean by magic. I mean
something that’s impossible. I want there to be things that are possible that I
didn’t think were.
Allen says I can organize my studies around that, around not
knowing, around finding ways to be surprised. I like that idea, but I can’t
figure out how to do it or who to do it with. Kit says I don’t need to believe
in magic in order to do it, for the same reason I don’t need to believe in
electricity in order to turn on the light. And that makes sense. And I’d love
to work with Kit, I really would. Not only is she beautiful and all of that,
not only is my friend, but she’s obviously brilliant and I’d love to…be part of
that. But the thing is, I understand that part of the magic she teaches
involves acting as if certain things
are true, spirits and energies and correspondences and so forth, and I’m not
sure I can do that.
Honestly, Charlie doesn’t help with that. He’s so focused on
getting to know things as they are, receiving their nature without projection
or bias. I don’t see how I can work on getting to know, say, a white oak tree,
as it is without projection, and at the same learn to act as if it is
metaphysically masculine, or whatever.
And do I really want to have two masters who are allergic to
each other?
I need to choose a healing master, too, and that’s simpler.
There’s no special conflict there, I just need to do it. I’d been feeling torn
between emergency medicine and Reiki, but that’s more or less just me making up
my mind. I had been thinking of herbal medicine, since I’m working so much with
plants anyway, but Joy sets too high a bar. She considers herbalism a form of
doctoring, so to be an herbalist you need to do something equivalent to med
school or she won’t let you graduate. I don’t really want to get into all that.
I don’t really want to be a doctor.
You don’t have to be a doctor to do emergency medicine or
Reiki. Both of them are things you can do as a non-expert while you go about
the rest of your life. You don’t have to go to med school.
Emergency medicine would be a really useful skill to have,
and I certainly believe in it, but I’d have to become an EMT and ride an
ambulance for a minimum number of hours and I really don’t see how that would
work with the other things I’m doing here. I can’t imagine Charlie, or anyone
like him, riding an ambulance. It would be too loud, too busy, too fast. So,
more or less by default, I’ve chosen Reiki. Anyway, I like the fact that I
can’t figure out how it works.
Both Karen and Joy teach Reiki, but I’m going to go with
Joy. I’ve asked her. She does a workshop every Tuesday after Philosopher’s
Stone Soup is over and you can go and practice and receive treatments and you
can drop in and out as time permits. In Reiki, there are three “attunements”
that supposedly adjust something in your soul to allow the energy to flow
through you or something. If you get the first two attunements and do a certain
minimum number of hours of practice and you can graduate. I wouldn’t say it
sounds easy, but it sounds doable. It sounds like something that will fit in to
the rest of my studies. I don’t have to believe anything, or act as if I
believe something. I just need to have an open mind.
And, talking to Joy about all of this, we got talking about
magic. She teaches a form of ritualistic magic like Kit does, but she also
teaches something called “manifestation.” She says this is what lies at the
heart of all magic, but it’s a different way of accessing it. Basically, if you
want or need something, you make room in your life for it and you follow your
intuition. You pray, you take practical steps, you think positively, and you
make room in your life for whatever it is. You put yourself in the way of good
luck.
Do I believe in this manifestation? Yes and no. I don’t
believe in any cosmology that would explain it being possible. I do believe in
miracles—God does things sometimes that don’t normally happen. I was raised to
believe in that, and I still do. But I don’t believe that God can be coerced by
magic. By definition, miracles are things humans can’t make happen. And I don’t
believe miracles happen very often. Getting a string of good luck or succeeding
at something you didn’t think you could doesn’t mean the creator of the
universe is intervening in your personal life by manipulating traffic lights or
SAT scores.
At the same time, I have been fantastically lucky in a lot
of ways. I do things, I walk into the front office of this school and it turns
out to be exactly the place I want to be. Is that sort of thing really random?
What is random? Can’t there be some kind of gray area between the things we can
influence and the things we can’t?
I keep thinking about what Ollie told me Allen said to that
dying man he saw as a chaplain in the hospital. The man was in a bad way, for
obvious reasons, and Allen made a hatchling chick appear, by slight-of-hand,
right there on the hospital bed. The man hadn’t known there was a bird in the
room, and Allen asked him if he was so sure about everything else he thought he
knew. Might there be a second bird in
the room? Or miracles? Or Heaven?
Do you know so much about the world that you are sure you
can’t make yourself lucky?
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