1: Magic

Like all good stories this one starts with magic. With that we dispense with the trivialities of Newtonian physics.

After two brief sentences you want to tell me that magic isn't real. Master magicians perform illusions and illusion is not magic. The laws of physics are not suspended. Magicians display sequences of seemingly unconnected events through which the mind threads a logic that insists - "that could not have happened without activation of the supernatural." Yet we know that can't be true so we are amused. And there is no lasting value beyond amusement.

And we know that the best magic stories, The Harry Potterish, Wizard of Ozish mysticisms are simply tales composed by solitary writers converting their dreams to text and video. This is the world become Photoshop. These are fantasies we hoard, within which we would love to play but can only stand beside and observe.

You challenge my assertion of magic because you want to believe in that one true thing which is not bound by the pedestrian laws of life and pain and death. You want to kick the house of cards and leave it standing. You want to smash the wine glass and have it spontaneously reconstruct. You want to deny minds can be read, time can be altered, the dead will be born again. You deny because you want the assertion to withstand your best efforts and exist none the less.

Then you cannot be blamed.

Fear not, dear heart. You will not be blamed.

What do I mean, then, when I say I must start my story with magic? Am I simply taking you on an internal journey to a happy spot in the mental picture you construct of your world?

Au contraire, mon ami.

I'm talking about miracles.

---

Some years ago I was given a book entitled, "A Course in Miracles." The premise of the thousand or so pages of "A Course in Miracles" goes like this:

a) there is a God
b) he created you to be happy
c) not happy? It's your own damn fault.

The other 999 pages of the book provide exercises and excuses for convincing yourself the world at large is simply a fabrication of the logical mind, which is, in essence, your worst enemy. The logical mind is a piece of the whole spiritual being which is you, but for some reason it has an ego the size of a small European country and believes the world exists for it, and revolves around it, ignoring the other parts of the total spiritual you.

The trick to achieving happiness and thus miracles, according to the writers of "A Course in Miracles" is to convince the logical mind that it is full of malarky. You do this by turning your entire life into your own personal morphing painting by Rene Magritte.

You see a chair and you say to yourself, "This is not a chair." You see an open window and say, "The mosquitoes coming through there only bite me because I let them." On the way to work in the morning you say to yourself, "I am only doing this because I have convinced myself I need the money."

You do this sort of thing over and over until you convince your subconscious mind it is only temporarily trapped within the confines of your human body and the universe of physics.

Thus you modify your daily pattern of thought. Then the miracles happen.

By the way, if you have a vague discomfort with this notion, according to The Course, it's because the ego of the logical mind rebels against being broken down this way.

In addition, if you develop a sense of discomfort because that mode of thought could be aligned perfectly with the DMS definition of "schitzophrenia," you should not be afraid of this, though I don't know why.

In other words, when practiced perfectly, there is little difference between the miraculous mind and the minds of those we commonly sedate with powerful medications.

By the way, the authors of "A Course in Miracles" claim to be channeling Jesus. So there's some mighty fine authority backing up their assertions.

---

I had been studying "A Course in Miracles" because it was recommended to me by a fellow time traveler. We were taking a course in the hills of Virginia at the Monroe Institute, learning to get in touch with our prior and future lives.

Possibly, we would speak to dead people, but that would just be icing on the proverbial cake. What we really wanted was salvation and having rejected the world's major religions, we'd come to the mountains to have our brains zapped by ex-military intelligence officers who had discovered, if only accidentally, that out of body travel was possible through both space and time if only the brain were zapped with just the right sounds.

The Army had some years before abandoned the program, though, and now those involved had all retired into the civilian world. They made a living by teaching common people what they had learned about out of body travel, which interested us who were yearning for any form of spirituality. And it felt patriotic to help our former warriors, and also, in a sense, we were benefiting from our own tax dollars at work.

I had just come out of a particularly strong sonic brain zapping where I felt I had ascended through the roof of the training center and met with my classmates in mid air over the parking lot. This would not have been disturbing in of itself, but my classmates experienced a similar thing during their brain zapping, and in fact could describe exactly what I had seen and said during my zapping - which for all intent and purposes was a dream to me.

And I was pretty freaked to find out that what amounted to a dreamy mid-day nap was shared by everyone in the room. I suddenly felt like I had shown up to a college calculus class in my underwear only to find that today was the final exam for the course and not only had I not studied, but I didn't even know till that moment that I was in the class.

It was then that Martin suggested I read "A Course in Miracles."

It seemed like a good idea. At that point, I would have taken up bulldozer racing as a profession if it had been suggested.

I took the book and started reading it. It was, after all, a summary of the words of Jesus as transcribed by a couple of marriage therapists in Marin County.