Mysteries & Magics
What this is
This post is my ongoing, naïve attempt to understand the nature of this - the reality we find ourselves in. It isn’t an ultra-serious, rigorous study. It’s not meant to be. I promise I won’t bring up the multiverse or whether this is all a simulation. Except just now.
Below you will find a loose, open-minded collection of thoughts that are hopefully fun to pick up and toy around with. The goal is to bring us slightly closer to some kind of theory as to what’s going on here.
What this isn’t
This isn’t an exercise in being intellectually mean or trying to appear clever. It is possible (in fact it’s too easy) to rationalise away any phenomenon. Rationalising is where curiosity goes to die a quick and miserable death. Instead, I suggest you be generous. People will like you more if you learn to humour even that which (at first) sounds like nonsense. Who knows - maybe you’ll secretly start agreeing along the way.
We were never given any instructions
To begin with, it’s worth remembering that we all just sort of landed here, didn’t we? We’re improvising as best we can. There’s no tutorial or scoreboard. Some are taking this more seriously than others. It’s all… pretty open. Because of this, it’s worth keeping our certainty in check. Being open minded (but not so much that our brains fall out).
I remember in the original Super Mario game for the NES, the moment you pressed ‘New Game’, you just sort of… fall out of the sky. Then an evil mushroom starts walking towards you. There’s no cutscene or backstory provided. You’re just expected to get on with it and figure things out as you go along.
In some ways, this is what happened to us, too.
The Approach
My approach is primarily phenomenological, i.e. it’s things that I notice. This isn’t the sharpest weapon in our intellectual arsenal. As a species, let it be said we are unreliable narrators. However, noticing has always been our starting point for explorations that have taken us to higher places. Newton noticed the apple.
My sense is, there’s more to this reality than we understand. There are enough everyday phenomena that feel like they don’t fully add up. It’s as if something more is going on that we haven’t yet found a watertight explanation for.
Perhaps, like a donkey staring at an iPad, we are just not intelligent enough to directly comprehend the full nature of reality. It may simply be too complex for our fancy monkey brains.
Alternatively, there may be whole dimensions of scientific exploration that we’ve yet to open up. Areas which would help put to rest such enormous questions about the true nature of life and death, whether the soul exists, and so on. That would be exciting, and I’d love to see it.
But. Since we’re lacking this groundbreaking discovery, I still feel like there still may be sufficient clues that can give us a sense of what’s really going on. If we just gather them all together in a pile and stare at them really hard. Maybe.
Yet Copernicus and Galileo were able to uncover the nature of our solar system through inference. They weren’t able to directly observe the cosmos from a clear, static vantage point. Instead, they had to observe phenomena that pointed towards heliocentrism. They’d never been to Venus or the Sun. That didn’t matter - they pieced the picture together from a handful of clues.
And that’s why I keep this semi-organised pile. Each section opens up a question, giving a thread to pull on. Perhaps one of two of them will resonate with you and send you off daydreaming down some rabbithole.
In continuing to notice things and list them here, I think there’s room for us to start exploring common themes or connections between them. And have fun. This is only a harmless, curious exercise, and one that has surely been carried out many times before by other like-minded people since time immemorial.
Mysteries
Sleep
We don’t seem to fully understand the role of sleep. The unconscious seems to play a role in dreams — but we quickly go mad without sleep and even die after 10–12 days. So it’s necessary for life. But what is it? You might last longer without food than sleep.
Dreams
Why do we dream? Where do we go? Why does it feel like after a deep sleep, we’ve gone far away and we rush suddenly across absurd amounts of space to crash land back into our bodies with a noticeable thud? How differently we experience time when we leave our bodies during dreams — or even short naps! How discombobulated in time one feels after a 10 minute nap.
Time
I doubt time is linear. Our experience of it can be so subjective and linked to our mental state. But also I’ve seen people draw knowledge from the “future”. It might all exist at once, or be a probability state/field?
How we’re easily able to wake up regularly only a minute or so before our regular alarm clocks. There’s some wild mysterious things happening in our relation to time. It feels like an idea we’ve poorly understood.
How we feel space
Why does a 2.4m ceiling feel low to us? We do seem to have a need for spaces that are illogically larger than us.
It would be insanely uncomfortable to only grant us the space our bodies need. So it appears as if something extends above us, we can feel it. It’s most comfortable at around 2.7–3m ceiling height. We all just instinctively know this.
Especially when many people gather and are running at a highly emotional state: a cathedral, an airport or station. The more human energy, the higher the space needs to be somehow.
Any architect will know that the size of a building under construction changes constantly. It’s way smaller than you thought, then suddenly the spaces become normal sizes or even huge. It’s very hard to explain.
Nature
Bodies of Water
They have a huge energetic impact upon me. They can bring me into greater connection with my feelings and provide a great source of solace. Lakes, rivers, the sea. Even the Regents Canal.
Trees
What is the deal with trees? They’re such an alien form of life. The timeframes on which they exist are so absurd to us. And yet we’re both forms of life. We love them and we need them around us. Do they really spend most of their time in another dimension?
Magic of Presence
The energies of others
The physical presence of others. Zoom doesn’t quite cut it. It’s missing something. We get very lonely and isolated without others around.
Felt touch of others, even animals
Even animals want to cuddle. Even the weight of a tiny bird or a butterfly on your finger is somehow magical.
Live vs recorded
For some reason this makes a difference to me. Perhaps a placebo could trick me though. But I get a totally different sense of something when I know it’s recorded vs watching it live. The feeling is entirely different.
Psychosis / death and felt presence
How a living body can feel empty. How a dead body feels like nothing and no one to behold. How people with dementia fade in and out like a broken modem. They’re suddenly there, you feel their presence, then they’re gone again.
Magic of Ritual
Imbued objects
Can we imbue inanimate objects with our meanings and energies using our own intention? I feel we can. Teddy bears. Religious relics. Spaces too.
Ancient Worship
Were all the ancient people around the world just plain wrong? It seems fishy. They weren’t idiots.
Pyramids
Why do they appear all around the world? Why is their stonework so absurdly impossibly huge and perfect. Not just Egypt — South and Central America, all across Asia. We have no explanations.
Black magic
Black magic appears to be real. It’s been practised forever. Deals with the devil. Sacrifice, energies from lower dimensions ‘feeding’ on loosh. Often leading to knowledge seemingly from nowhere: impossible pyramids, rocketry, iconic music. Long history of human sacrifice. Faustian pacts. Epstein and co were deeply serious people; they wouldn’t waste their time on total nonsense.
Sex Magic
It’s clearly much more significant than the purely physical dimension. There’s a lot of nuanced energetic stuff going on, I’d wager. I think sex can cross into the astral energies sometimes. It seems to often go paired with a certain underhanded quality. Jack Parsons of the JPL was a huge believer, as were his contemporaries. Sex often plays a role in cults as well. It’s a huge driver of human behaviour and power dynamics. The small death. It’s hugely energetic.
Astrological / Cosmological
Astrology / scrying
How Mum is able to just tune in. Seeing and knowing impossible things. From seemingly anything: the Romans used animal entrails and birds in the sky, others use tea leaves or palmistry. It’s just tuning in.
Why the eclipse is even possible
The chances are just absurdly low.
The emptiness of the cosmos
It seems odd. Space is impossibly empty. Everything is unimaginably huge and far away. Seems a bit pointlessly so. Are we really understanding it properly? It feels like we’ve not yet grasped what we’re looking at. Is it really so empty or can we not see it (yet)?
Lower Astral places and people
It’s definitely there. It’s not even that far away. It’s almost parallel to our existence, and some seem much more dialled into it than others. It’s a lower energy, darker, more seedy and desperate. People can become enmeshed with these: dark beings might inhabit casinos, strip clubs, gangs, fighting events, cults.
Life and death
Obviously gigantic and yet we don’t understand the first thing about what they are. At least officially.
Music
Why can we be transported to another place, so moved and affected by sound in so many nuanced ways? How can two people play the same thing and one sounds wonderful while the other awful? “Opening the gates of magic.”
Pregnancy and parenthood
Particularly motherhood. The bond of growing and nourishing another life inside of you. Another soul. Someone who you bond with in a way that’s otherwise unimaginable. In a way, what a privilege to be able to do that.
Names
Our names are so powerful. Naming a child is a form of magic we try our best to embark on. Their choice of name or nickname matters too, can shape our self image, energy, perhaps even the paths of our lives. This magic is well acknowledged, we even have a name for it: nominative determinism.