Unfinished — still a work in progress
Mysteries & Magics
A long list of loose threads to pull upon
Contents
- Introduction
- Mysteries
- Magics
Introduction
What’s all this about?
Welcome to my semi-organised pile of musings.
This is my instinctive response to those fleeting moments in life where I wonder whether what I’m seeing actually adds up to our explanations. Beneath this is my ongoing and naïve attempt to uncover some of the big-picture nature of our existence.
What follows below is mostly an exercise in mental play; in thinking creatively. It’s not about being intellectually mean or trying to appear clever. You won’t find an ultra-serious, rigorous study in the paragraphs that ensue.
Instead, if you choose to, you’ll find a loose and open-minded collection of thoughts that are hopefully fun to pick up and toy around with.
My lofty goal is to bring us ever so slightly closer to some understanding of this life we’re currently living. I promise I won’t bring up the multiverse or whether this is all a simulation1.
And who knows if we’ll get anywhere closer to the truth. But if you’re reading along, either way I hope you enjoy! Preamble over. Let’s dig in.
For the curious
It’s far too easy to explain away just about anything.
Sometimes the answers you receive might be pretty dull and unsatisfying. They seem to be lacking something you can’t put your finger on. Hundreds of years ago if you’d asked a question, you may have been hit with some variant of “because God wills it”.
Such was the Zeitgeist. The society of yesteryear had deemed that the acceptable response. Hard to fathom today, but it was once really so.
Happily, we have slightly better answers now, but they’re often still a little superficial when you start scratching away at their surface.
For example: why are rainbows formed?
“Because it’s sunny while it’s raining”.
Sure…
The deeper answer, it turns out, is beautiful and remarkably complex.
My point is, superficial and incurious rationalisation is where inspiration goes to die. It closes down doors. It discourages us from building up the genuinely useful habits of curiosity, creativity and mental play; of pulling threads just to see where they lead us.
Instead, please be generous. Perhaps try and humour a few of these ideas—even if they sound like nonsense at first. Who knows, maybe you’ll start agreeing along the way.
There were no instructions
To begin with, it’s worth remembering that we all just sort of landed here. We’re improvising as best we can. There’s no introduction, tutorial or scoreboard.
Because of this, it’s worth keeping our certainty and our hubris in check. I recommend being open minded, just not so much that our brains fall out.
It’s a silly comparison, but I still remember something about the original Super Mario game for the NES. The very moment you pressed ‘New Game’, you just sort of… fell out of the sky. Then an evil mushroom started 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 phenomenological—whenever I notice that things on the surface just don’t quite add up. It’s as if something more is going on that we haven’t yet found a wholly watertight explanation for.
This approach isn’t perfect; it certainly has its flaws. But noticing has always been our starting point for explorations that have taken us to higher places. Newton noticed the apple.
Perhaps, like a donkey staring at an iPad, our species just isn’t intelligent enough to directly comprehend the true nature of reality; the big picture may simply be too complex for our noble ape minds.
Alternatively, there may be whole dimensions of scientific exploration that we’re able to grasp but have 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 of course be exciting and we’d love to see it.
But since we’re lacking this groundbreaking discovery, I feel like there still may be sufficient clues that can give us a valuable sense of what’s really going on. If we just gather them all together in a pile and stare at them really hard. Maybe.
In 1500s Italy, Copernicus and Galileo weren’t able to directly observe the solar system from a clear, static vantage point. Instead, they had to observe indirect 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 via inference.
That’s why I keep this semi-organised pile. Each section opens up a question, giving you a thread to pull on. Perhaps one or 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 and Dreaming
Sleep
We spend one full third of our lives asleep.
Not just us—all known animals sleep in varying different ways. It’s clearly vital; we would sooner die without sleep than without food. And yet we don’t seem to understand it very well at all.
This strikes me as odd. Given the prominence of sleep and its vital importance for life, you could imagine we’d have whole universities dedicated to furthering our knowledge of the phenomenon.
By comparison: the average human spends 33% of their life asleep, and less than 0.1% of their life at the dentist. Yet we seem to have a plethora of dental universities, publications and conferences, and practically nothing for sleep. We just don’t seem all that interested.
Anaesthetic, our magic formula for sleep (technically comas) is also poorly understood. We know exactly how much to use, all about its mitigating factors and effects. And yet the core mechanism by which it actually puts us to sleep is, again, unknown.
Those moments when we are half asleep, half awake seem to provide a very special kind of thought, one which is looser, more in touch with our unconscious selves and more freely-associative.
I often wake up in the middle of the night with solutions to the hardest problems I’ve been grappling with. These come to me fully-formed, like a gift.
And sleep can play havoc with our sense of time; a short nap can feel like hours, or a deep sleep like a few seconds. Even a 10-minute nap can leave us feeling completely discombobulated for the rest of the day.
After a deep sleep, it can viscerally feel as if I’ve been far away. Sometimes, I get the sensation of rushing instantly across vast amounts of space to crash land back into my body, almost with a thud.
Given that my body has travelled precisely nowhere, I find this very odd. Maybe sleep causes us to temporarily leave our bodies?
Dreams
Dreams are surely the most mysterious part of sleep.
Apparently we dream regularly but forget most of them. Our memory of dreams may stick around during the day, or instantly get wiped just a few seconds after waking up. Even the way that we forget our dreams (which we knew vividly only moments ago) is quite unique.
Our unconscious seems to play a role in what we see; the language of symbols and metaphor appears to be a common theme throughout peoples’ dreams, whether they carry a personal meaning to the dreamer, or speak more widely understood human themes (such as flying or encountering death).
This makes an amount of sense. I’ve heard it said that symbolism is the language of the unconscious. And that the unconscious is the much larger, hidden part of our psyche—the part of the iceberg that sits below the waterline.
Other dreams can be much lower stakes. While some might seem prophetic, others feel like we’re just replaying versions of waking life over in our heads: perhaps it’s something we noticed, or heard someone say during the day but never fully processed at the time.
Nightmares are their own special case. I’m fortunate enough to have had very few of these throughout my life. Some people I’ve known suffer through several every night. It’s possible that these are effectively eruptions from the unconscious; when pressure builds, our worst suppressed fears and traumas might rise up to the surface to haunt us.
Sometimes these even seem to break through the mental/physical barrier. Many of us have been known to sleepwalk or sleep talk on occasion.
Either way, there is something fascinating about the calm, dark, quiet part of the middle of the night. We seem to enter a very different state, somewhat wilder and less controlled than you’d find us in during the daytime.
Time & space
How we experience time
Our experience of time can be so subjective; to me it feels like something we’ve poorly understood. It is clearly linked somewhat to our mental state—we all know that time flies when we’re having fun, yet drags to a near-standstill during difficult periods.
The phase of life we’re in also seems to play a role, as does novelty. A year as a child lasts forever, as does a full day in an exotic new location. But huge swathes of time can seemingly fly by as an older adult: “where do the years go?” we may ask ourselves.
I suspect that our experience of time is linked to the way our memory works. If you watch someone recalling an event on the day, they’ll be able to discuss its fine details with ease (e.g. how was the traffic?). But ask them a month or a year later and their recollection will very often have softened; only the key details remaining.
We seem to delete most of our lives—at least the boring parts. There seems to be a compression and caching mechanism at work, not unlike the way we manage memory and data in computers.
The speed at which we pass through time also seems to vary. Different forms of life seem to experience time at different tempos; their respiration, heartbeats and reaction speed all seem to be noticeably faster or slower than ours.
As a rule of thumb, smaller life seems to live faster: birds, rodents and insects. Their lives can be as short as an afternoon. Conversely, larger life seems to pass through time much slower; elephants, blue whales, and so on.
Another time-based mystery is that many of us seem to have an internal clock with surprisingly high levels of precision. Most of us know what it’s like to regularly wake up just moments before an alarm we’ve set. It’s as if we know. You could easily argue that this is evolutionary, perhaps we’ve evolved to feel the rhythm of the day (the year, the seasons) on some low and unconscious level.
My personal gut feeling is that time might all exist at once. Like a record we’ve put on and are experiencing in real-time and in a forward direction. We could be discovering life in real-time; already predetermined, yet we still don’t know what’s coming next. How could we possibly know that this isn’t the case?
And just like with anaesthesia, we might not fully grasp the nature of time, but we’re able to make jolly-good use of it. Our atomic clocks are accurate enough to let us calculate the synchronisation of satellites moving at thousands of miles per hour, even compensating for relativistic effects (how impressive is that!)
How we feel space
There are similar mysteries regarding our relationship to space.
As a former architect, I intrinsically know that we find a domestic ceiling height of 2.4m to be quite low. But why is that? It’s plenty of space for even the very tallest people to happily exist. We know that people tend to prefer 2.6m or even 3m high ceilings. Illogically, a taller space just feels nicer to us.
We seem to have a desire for spaces that are irrationally larger than us. Yet if we go too tall, we feel an odd discomfort again. A 3m by 4m bedroom but with a 40m high ceiling? That would be ridiculous and feel pretty disturbing.
It appears as if something extends above us and we can feel it. It wants the right ceiling height and we all just seem to instinctively know this.
In other kinds of spaces, different rules apply; this is obvious when many people gather together and are running at a highly emotional state:
- A cathedral
- An airport
- A stadium
The more people coming together and the higher their collective energy, the higher the space needs to be to accommodate it. Again, we all just seem to know this. Designing a smaller space wouldn’t happen—even to a layman it would simply be too preposterous.
Finally, any architect will know that, subjectively, the size of a building under construction seems to change constantly. Perhaps it’s way smaller than you thought it would feel, then suddenly the spaces become normal-sized or even feel enormous. It’s very hard to explain.
Nature
Bodies of water
There is something very special about our connection to water. Many of us feel drawn to lakes, rivers, the sea or even urban canals. People stop to take and post pictures on Instagram.
Bodies of water are intrinsically beautiful, often enhancing the current weather, or whatever light the sky is providing that day.
They can also provide a great source of solace; a walk alongside a river can help calm the soul during a period of distress. Why does it feel that way? Who knows.
Some animistic cultures believe that nature—every stone, river and tree—carries its own spirit. In some limited way, nature itself can be a form of company.
Trees and plant life
I’ve often wondered about aliens—what could a totally unfamiliar lifeform potentially be like? It wouldn’t necessarily need to have anything in common with our own lives here on Earth.
Then it hit me; plants and trees are already such an alien form of life. We’re physically built up so differently and experience time on such different scales. Our respiratory and sensory systems have almost nothing in common. And yet we all know that we’re both forms of life.
And we love our trees—we need greenery around us and feel terrible when our cities lack green thriving spaces. We even give the best ones legal protection, with fines in the hundreds of thousands for chopping them down.
Presence
The energies of others
The 2020 pandemic served as a grand natural experiment in determining how much of our lives we could replicate online via digital proxies. Almost all of our global cultural moments, our work and our friendships were flattened and transmitted over the ubiquitous screen.
The verdict?
Meh.
Zoom… doesn’t quite cut it. It’s certainly not terrible, but it’s also somehow missing something.
Despite the best efforts of hordes of well-paid software engineers, meetings with our coworkers just don’t quite hit the same when held remotely. It’s even possible to get quite lonely and isolated when working from home despite, theoretically, having endless online social contact.
We almost seem to require the presence of others physically around us. Sometimes we even go places, not to interact with people, but to just be around others. Other times we just want to people-watch. We are social beings.
My suspicion is that there’s something else, something energetic happening here that just can’t be replicated online. We can reproduce the sight and the sound of people online, but it’s clear to me that there’s still a missing mystery ingredient. Take it away and you’ll immediately notice the difference.
A similar (but maybe related?) distinction for me is in watching something live and in-person vs seeing it recorded. It’s obviously completely different; just look at the prices for live tickets versus buying the recording afterwards. We clearly value in-person experience much more highly than a digital facsimile.
Psychosis, death and felt presence
That feeling of presence isn’t always guaranteed in real life, either.
It’s very much possible for a living body to feel entirely empty due to a condition such as psychosis or dementia. This becomes especially obvious when you know what being around that person should normally feel like.
Sometimes they will even fade in and out again, like a broken modem briefly regaining and then losing connection. Suddenly they’re lucid, back in the room, you feel their presence and—only moments later—they’re gone again.
Another strange experience is seeing the dead body of someone you once knew. I was struck at how empty it was. The person I knew simply was no longer within there; what was left behind was simply their hardware.
Magics
Magic of the body
Holding hands
Why is it that, as an adult, holding hands with someone can be such an incredibly intense and intimate behaviour? There’s probably no culture on Earth where this act would be considered socially insignificant.
But, curiously, for many people this simple gesture can easily be as intense and intimate as—or even more so than—having sex with someone. Why is that?
Our hands are obviously incredibly important to us; we use them for just about everything, they hold some of the densest collections of nerve endings in our bodies.
But, beyond that, something else—something energetic—does seem to be at play when we connect in this way. It’s certainly more than the sum of its parts.
Physical touch
We are, ultimately, just sophisticated monkeys and so physical contact with others is obviously very important to us. There are highly meaningful and deeply-rooted social aspects to this; even animals like to cuddle.
But I think there’s a surprisingly outsized effect here; something I suspect might work on an energetic level. Consider how magical it is when you feel the weight of a tiny bird or a butterfly on your finger. When a cat or a dog puts its paw on you and you can feel its warmth and its very slight weight. It’s enough to briefly give us pause.
Eye contact
This one we all know well—they’re called the “window to the soul” for good reason. We could probably write entire books about eyes and eye contact; their colours, when they seem to sparkle (or, conversely, when someone’s eyes seem dead) and how their qualities are able to change so suddenly.
We’re all familiar with how someone’s eyes are able to instantly light up upon hearing good news, or perhaps how they seem to carry the immense weight of some unknown tragedy.
We all just intuitively seem to know how to read eyes; how to spot the sultry “come to bed” look, or the infamous “puppy dog eyes”. There aren’t any tutorials online and they don’t teach it in schools; we just seem to get that knowledge for free.
Sex and sex magic
Writing about sex is rarely not-awkward. Perhaps that tells us something; it’s clearly quite a big deal to us, so much so that we can even find it almost difficult to discuss.
Well, if you’re that squeamish, feel free to jump to the next section. Who’s gonna stop you?
Getting back to it, to me, it’s clear that sex is so much more significant than its purely physical dimension. I strongly suspect there’s a lot of invisible and nuanced energetic stuff going on in the background.
I’m convinced that sex isn’t just one thing. There are very clearly different types of sex that people are having. Let’s take the two most obvious cases:
- One-night stands. A more superficial, fun and spontaneous fling that seems to often go paired with a certain underhanded quality, with people sneaking off in the early hours to do something hidden. There’s something lower energy, perhaps astral, to this.
- By contrast, there is the (now very cringe and uncool) notion of ‘making love’, which seems to be striking at the heart of something entirely different. Each person knows the other intimately, it’s more caring, more of a dialogue and less transactional.
One way of thinking about it is the difference you feel in satiation; one is like fast food—it’s quick, cheap and hits the spot when the need arises. The other is more like a wholesome home-cooked meal from someone who loves you.
As for sex magic (or ‘magick’ as it’s sometimes spelled), Jack Parsons, co-founder of the pre-NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was a huge and vocal proponent of sex magic, as were his contemporaries.
Sex often plays a central role in cults: it’s well known as a powerful driver of human behaviour and it often sits at the core of mammalian power dynamics. This all makes sense if what we’re dealing with is something profoundly energetic.
Finally, the French call the orgasm la petite mort—”the small death”. Isn’t it ironic that it’s also the cause of all life as we know it.
Pregnancy and parenthood
There is possibly no greater magic than motherhood.
Beyond the myriad of physical changes (and no doubt fear and discomfort) that come along for the ride with pregnancy, there can be perhaps nothing more profound to experience in this life than bringing another soul into the world.
The bond between mother and child; of growing and nourishing another life briefly within you is almost unimaginable from the outside. In a way, what a privilege it is to be able to go through that at least once in this life.
It’s cheating a little to shoehorn this last one in here. It’s not a magic of the body, but it relates to parenthood—the magic of naming a baby.
This is one of the magics I regularly see people engaging with, whether they’re aware of this or not. You can see expectant parents sort of fishing around in the ether, trying out new names, pairing them with a surname and perhaps a middle name or two. Energetically they all need to sort of hang together nicely.
And names are powerful; not just the name; our initials or nicknames matter too. They can shape our self-image, the energy we give off, perhaps even the paths of our lives. This magic is well acknowledged, we even have a name for it: nominative determinism.
The magic of ritual
Imbued objects
One magic people seem to have engaged with since forever, the world around, is in making certain objects special. Whether part of a tribal, religious or secular structure, we seem to instinctively imbue certain objects with an incredible amount of meaning. In a circular manner, this can grow the level of attention (or energy) placed upon them.
In the Middle Ages, European pilgrims would regularly travel long distances to see or touch important religious relics. But it can be something much more mundane than this; a child’s beloved teddy bear or a silly fridge magnet from a holiday that is now a cherished memory.
Some objects are made specifically and only to be special—a trophy or a medal comes to mind—while some have this status placed upon them.
Over time, a relic might naturally develop its own mythology. Eventually, a special way of handling the relic is developed to ensure proper care and deference. We imbue these objects with energy and attention. And so, in some ways, they begin to develop a life of their own.
Ancient worship
It has always irked me, the speed with which we’re so flippantly able to dismiss the vast majority of ancient beliefs simply because they’re too weird to be true. I don’t think we’ve ever really been able to justify such a position.
Around the world, practically everywhere, people have worshipped supernatural deities, often related to animals or natural phenomena. They built their lives around this worship, constructed temples and performed sacrifices in the names of their gods.
It’s only recently that we’ve entertained more secular, scientific and rational viewpoints. So were all the different peoples who came before just plain wrong?
Our modern, more sensitive and inclusive approach towards history still seems to sort of assume these people were ignorant and easily fooled into believing such nonsense: “Aren’t we so lucky that we know better now?”
On their behalf, I take issue with this position. It seems lazy and intellectually cowardly to throw it all in the trash.
Black magic and sacrifice
Speaking of sacrifice, we’re heading into the darker stuff.
Another common motif we find in cultures across the world is some kind of thematic sacrifice; perhaps of food, animals or even humans. It all takes the pattern of some supernatural deity, able to exercise their power in exchange for a terrible price:
- An offering of grain and a calf to a river goddess in exchange for a rich and timely flooding season.
- A virgin sacrificed and buried beneath the new temple building to ensure its longevity as a sacred place.
- A blues guitarist who sells his soul to the devil for his talent, fame and success. The classic Faustian pact.
I find it significant and slightly worrying how often this pattern seems to naturally emerge across global cultures. I have no doubt that if humanity were to be reset, we’d stumble upon it again in no time. Is this proof that, perhaps, we’re really onto something?
One aspect I find especially troublesome is the revelations that emerged of Epstein and his lot very seriously engaged in demon worship. There’s substantive evidence that they sacrificed children to the bull god Baal. Similarly, there have long been rumours of sacrifices to a woodland owl god at Bohemian Grove. One of the most powerful secret associations in the world is called the Skull and Bones, counting several Bush family members among its alumni.
What bothers me most is that these are some very deeply serious people we’re talking about. Epstein and his like weren’t in the habit of wasting their time with frivolous rituals for fun and games.
They were engaged with geopolitics, financial engineering, war profiteering and radical human genetic editing projects. A casual side interest in amateur dramatics just doesn’t fit the profile; they were clearly committed to their beliefs and found powerful benefits from them.
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.
The lower astral
An interesting idea, a plane, like a parallel layer of existence to ours. Something energetic. One that I’ve always been able to feel.
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.
Magic of the arts
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.”
Architecture
x
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.
Total solar eclipses
It’s long been observed that it’s just remarkable how we’re able to regularly witness a total solar eclipse here on earth. The chances of our moon being so perfectly placed as to exactly obscure the sun verge on the impossible. No other planet we’ve observed enjoys such a phenomenon.
Our eyes perceive light logarithmically; even a 90% drop in external light levels is fairly subtle to us. It’s not until we experience a 99% drop or higher that we really see darkness from an eclipse. A slightly smaller moon or one of irregular shape could totally disrupt the phenomenon.
I find it too great a coincidence to naïvely accept that this is unremarkable and just the way things are.
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)?
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Well, except just this once. ↩