“Once upon a time, I Chuang Tsu, dreamed that I was a butterfly flying happily here and there, enjoying life without knowing who I was. Suddenly I woke up and I was indeed Chuang Tsu. Did Chuang Tsu dream he was a butterfly, or did the butterfly dream he was Chuang Tsu? There must be some distinction between Chuang Tsu and the butterfly. This is a case of transformation.”

-Chuang Tsu

Do You Believe in Magic?

One day, in a moment of extreme crisis, I, Joshua Putnam, found healing. It was on the Mall, in Washington DC. We were protesting the exclusion of Gays from the military, shortly after the first inauguration of Bill Clinton. The AIDS quilt was spread across the lawn in front of the Washington Monument. It went on and on for blocks, acres. I sat there remembering all of my friends and lovers who had passed away. I had so much grief in my heart at that time.

I cried.

When I finally looked up, sitting across from me was my dear friend, Rebecca. Our eyes met and through my tears, I saw Rebecca was crying, too. She was crying for the people remembered on the quilt. She was also crying in sympathy with me.

She was crying because she loved me.

So we cried together, until another friend brought us tissues to dry our faces. Afterwards, we all were able to laugh together again.

In that precious moment of contact I experienced the healing power of love in a way that was, for me, so profound that I have never thought of it as anything other than magical, miraculous.

There is no power in the universe that is stronger or subtler or more profound that the power of love. This may sound trite, even banal to some. For me, when I allow myself to feel at all, I feel that nothing could be more obvious.

It is a natural impulse of all bright and active minds to seek after explanations. The human heart loves to surrender—to be one with the infinite—but the human spirit loves to wrestle with God. Mystics, shamans, philosophers, artists, healers and scientists, along with most “ordinary” human beings, have each in their own ways reached towards understanding how physical reality gives birth to consciousness and how consciousness, in turn, affects physical reality.

Underlying this most basic question, are more specific questions about the different geography of the spirit world and, more broadly, of reality itself; to what extent does it exist within our consciousness? To what extent is it conscious of us?

Also, are there other forms of consciousness, not dependent, as we are, on physical structures in the brain? Do angels really walk among us? ,

Chuang Tsu’s quote about his dream of becoming a butterfly, after which he was unsure if he were a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man, is a hieroglyphic for the truth that we can not say with certainty whether or not the universe we are conscious of exists outside of our consciousness of it at all. As philosophers have pointed out, we cannot be certain that we are not “brains in vats” living in some computer-generated artificial reality. We also can not be certain that the universe is more than one second old, that it did not just now come into existence exactly as we find it, including all of us and our so-called “memories”.

The fact that we can never know, with certainty, the limits our consciousness, should be a cause for celebration. It is an open invitation for us to dream bold and beautiful dreams. Every human endeavor begins in the imagination. As a poet once said, “only those are truly happy who have desired the unattainable.”

Still, wanting to make “progress,” we agree to work with certain assumptions. We agree to the assumption that time is continuous. We have been here for a while and we will be here for a while. What worked today will also work tomorrow. You and I will grow and change, but the laws of physics will remain the same. Up will be up and down will be down, as much for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren as they were for our grandparents and great-grandparents. For them, love will be as much a miracle as it has been for us.

We orient ourselves within time, space and culture. We give ourselves a foundation to build upon.

A fundamental but frequently overlooked precept of logic is that there can be no logic without postulates. All reasoning starts from assumptions. Even scientific reasoning, which purports to be superior to other forms of reasoning in that it verifies and modifies its assumptions after testing them against physical reality, depends upon assumptions, including the basic assumption that there is a physical reality at all.

Both science and “common sense” depend upon the assumption that physical reality exists and is constant in shape and texture. Magic proceeds from the alternate assumption, that as the Buddhists say “the universe is a projection of mind-only”, or as the nursery rhyme says “life is but a dream.” Magic proceeds from the understanding that there is no limit on what we can dream, even dream into physical existence.

This is how the pyramids came to be. This is how all of human culture evolved. This is how reality evolved and is still evolving, how we are still evolving. Time is not only linear. Space is not only “out there.”

And we are not alone in here.

Some powerful dreamers, people like Martin Luther King, Jr., can change the shape of reality for entire cultures, for the entire human species. Others can do an equally profound job of reaching out, of touching, holding, loving and healing, but they do it on a much more personal level. There is so much genuine magic in love, both in the giving and in the receiving of love. When another human being is able to see us for all that we are and to accept us and love us exactly as we are, it frees us to do the same for ourselves, for them and for the world. An awareness of magic afoot in the universe enjoins us to walk softly, not only on the grass, but even on the stones. For even the stones are alive. Even the stones can be our teachers if we but listen to their song.

Do you believe in magic? This question bothers me, as do similar questions of “faith,” because it presupposes a belief in belief. I believe that beliefs are based on assumptions. I believe that it can be useful to assume things, but I don’t find it useful to label my assumptions as beliefs. It’s more than that, though. I don’t find the world belief to be fluid enough, juicy enough, playful enough to touch the realm of magic, the realm of dreams becoming real. Magic, like love, touches the head and the heart, the body and the soul. It is not just an idea. It is not just an experience. All we are and all we are conscious of is only part of magic, which reaches far beyond us, to what we have been and what we are becoming.

I believe that a key ingredient in magic of all kinds, from Astral projection to bringing hope and love to the broken-hearted, is the ability to suspend disbelief, to play freely with reality and unreality, without preconceptions and expectations. It is much more important to suspend disbelief and approach the inner and outer worlds with an open mind and an open heart than it is to assume any particular attitude or posture towards the world. This is the essence of “holding space,” the foundation of unconditional love.

“Do you believe in magic?” is a slippery question, because it is a question most often asked by people who have already made up their minds. When my materialist friends ask it, there is always a hint of mockery in their asking. They want to hear about my experiences with synchronicity, communion and transcendence in order that, in their minds at least, they can debunk them. When my more psychic and spiritual friends ask the same question, they are equally certain that the spirit world is as real, if not more real, than the world revealed by our mundane senses.

Yet the Wicca religion, like many magical traditions, is founded on the idea that the challenge for us humans is to walk “between the worlds.” There is real magic in being able to blend and balance the reductionist logic of material science and the transformational artistry of spiritual practice. There is also great power in being able to see the limitations of both these worldviews. As has been said so often before, “the map is not the territory,” “the menu is not the meal,” and “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

The most magical things have happened to me when I simply surrender myself to the flow of life and stop trying to understand it all in one day.

The healing moment that I experienced on the Mall in D.C. was presaged by a miraculous moment of healing synchronicity. Several months before that, while visiting San Francisco to spend some final days with a former lover who was dying of AIDS, I wrestled with the darkness in my life. Only six months prior to that, my girlfriend of over 5 years had committed suicide. I, myself, was finding it difficult to remember the things that make life worth living.

Fortunately, my many beautiful friends showed me such compassion that it helped me to move on. On this particular day I was visiting an old friend, Edward, and my brother, Sam. We took a drive out to Land’s End, a gay nude beach at the extreme end of Golden Gate Park, where the city meets the Pacific Ocean. The sunlight was beautiful, but the day was cold and the ocean, as usual, was even colder. We were alone on the beach, except for a homeless guy warming himself by a small fire he had made,.

I looked out at the ocean and I felt her spirit rise inside me with the waves. I reached out with my spirit and asked that I might be given whatever it would take to make me happy again. I had no clear idea what that might be.

At that moment, as I sat there asking, I heard the ocean clearly answer me. I heard a voice that seemed to come from outside and also from deep within and the voice said “yes.” My heart opened and I was overcome with gladness. I took off all of my clothes and walked into the waves. I emerged feeling cold but cleansed in body and soul. Although my experience at that point was entirely internal, subjective, I was certain that my prayer had been heard and had been answered.

The next morning, I flew back home to Boston. As soon as I got home, I dropped off my things and headed into Harvard Square. Almost as soon as I got there, I saw this woman playing the flute. Somehow, we started a conversation and today, some 13 years later, we are still friends. Later that day, I met my friends Damian and Rebecca for the first time. It was Damian and Rebecca who were with me that day, just a few months later, when I cried on the Mall in D.C.

Less than 24 hours after my moment of communion with the spirit of the ocean, the answer I had heard to my prayer took physical form in my life.

A skeptic might say that my meeting Damian, Rebecca and Bonnie (the flute player) so soon after uttering my prayer was just a coincidence. Or they might say that my belief that my prayer had been answered made me more open to meeting the people who could touch my soul so deeply, in just the way that it needed to be touched. There is no way to prove them wrong, any more than you can prove that we are not mushrooms dreaming that we are women and men.

In any case, such arguments are irrelevant. There is no proof that can detract from the magic I experienced that day, from the magic I have experienced on so many days, with so many beautiful and wise companions.
Just the other day, I found myself on the beach once again. This time, my companion looked at me and said, “that dark place deep inside that both of us feel, it is not real.” When she said it, I felt it right to the core of my being. At the same instant, I felt a pain, a deep sadness in my heart. As before, I jumped into the ocean and as before, I felt the ocean wash me clean.

These are miracles, as certainly as are visions, dreams, incantations and invocations.

This is not to say that there is no value to debunking superstitions and other misconceptions, especially when powerful individuals are using the ignorance of others to manipulate them. In the Jewish apocrypha to the Book of Daniel is the story of “Bel and the Dragon.” In the story, Daniel confronts a king whose people have taken to worshiping a statue of the god Bel, which they believe to be a living totem of the deity. At the insistence of the priests of Bel, the king leaves a daily offering of food and wine at the feet of the statue every night. Every morning the food and drink are gone and the king believes that statue has consumed it.

Daniel, however, saw deception at work. He challenged the king to lock the temple after placing the food within. However, before locking the doors, he covered the floor with flour. In the morning, when the temple was unlocked, the king again saw that the food was gone. But Daniel then showed him that in the flour on the floor could be seen the footprints of the priests and their families, leading back to a secret door hidden in the base of the statue. So the king realized that it was the priests and their families, emerging at night and in secret, who had consumed the offering. As a result, he ordered the priests executed and the statue, which he now saw to be a false idol, destroyed.

Recently, an acquaintance named Rachel, who especially reveres the Hari Krishna sect, told me a similar story. She insisted to me that the icons of Krishna at the temple were not merely images of the god, but were living expressions of his being. As evidence, she told me a story about a friend of hers who lives in the temple. She said that this friend had brought the statue a bowl of food he had cooked, food normally made sweet with sugar. But, unbeknownst to her friend, that day he had made an error in cooking the food and had used salt in place of sugar. According to Krishna teachings Lord Krishna enjoys sugar but abhors salt.

In this case, Rachel’s friend had left the food at the foot of the idol, exactly as in the story of Bel. The devotee then left the room with the Krishna statue for some time. When he returned, he found that the food was thrown upon the floor. Rachel’s friend claimed, and Rachel believed, that the statue itself had come to life and thrown the food onto the floor because Krishna was offended by the salt in the food.

I do not claim to know what happened with the Krishna statue and the food. Not having been there, and having witnessed many truly magical things in my lifetime, I would not deign to say that I know what is possible. Still, as a child of the Jewish race and as a child of rationalist philosophers, there is a good bit of Daniel’s healthy skepticism in me. I need to experience the miracle myself before I can believe it is true.

Whether or not the statue really threw the food on the floor in disgust, I have no doubt that a statue, or a stone, or an angel, or a faerie, or a cloud, or a most beautiful friend can speak directly to my soul. To me, the ability to move mountains is less miraculous than the ability to move the human heart. That is the magic I am most grateful for having been shown. That is the magic I am most interested in learning more about.

Do you believe in magic? Do you believe in reality? Do you believe in yourself?

I believe it is not necessary to believe or disbelieve in real things. It is only necessary to hold the space, to feel the love, to pay attention, to dream. That, to me, is magic, and even more than I believe in it, I participate in it, every day, in every thing that I do.

Josh Putnam

February 23, 2007