Mysteries & Magics
A long list of loose threads to pull upon…
What’s this about?
This post is my ongoing, naïve attempt to understand the nature of this. You know (waving my hands around). Everything, I guess.
This isn’t an ultra-serious, rigorous study. It’s not meant to be. And I promise I won’t bring up the multiverse or whether this is all a simulation. Except just then.
Below you will find a loose, open-minded collection of thoughts that are hopefully fun to pick up and toy around with. My goal is to bring us slightly closer to understanding all of this. Either way, I hope you enjoy.
What this isn’t
This is not an exercise in being intellectually mean or trying to appear clever. It’s far too easy to explain away anything with a dull answer; hundreds of years ago you may have got ‘because God wills it’. We have slightly better answers now, but they’re often still surface-level deep. Like, why are rainbows formed? ‘Because it’s sunny while it’s raining’. Sure…
The real answer, it turns out, is beautiful and remarkably complex.
Incurious rationalisation is where inspiration goes to die. It closes down doors. Instead, please be generous. Perhaps play with 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 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 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 watertight explanation for. While it isn’t perfect, 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, we just aren’t intelligent enough to directly comprehend the nature of reality. We can get only so far, but the big picture may simply be too complex for our fancy monkey brains.
Alternatively, there may be whole dimensions of scientific exploration that we’re able to grasp but haven’t yet opened 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 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.
In 1500s Italy, Copernicus and Galileo 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 via inference.
That’s why I keep this semi-organised pile. Each section opens up a question, giving you 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 spend a third of our lives sleeping. Not just us – all known animals sleep in various ways. It’s clearly vital; we would sooner die without sleep than without food. And yet we don’t understand it very well at all. This strikes me as odd.
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. Those moments when we are half asleep, half awake seem to provide a very special kind of thought. More loose, more freely associative.
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.
Anaesthetic, our magic formula for sleep is also poorly understood. We know exactly how much to use, all of its mitigating factors and effects. And yet the core mechanism by which it actually puts us to sleep is, again, unknown.
Given the prominence of sleep and its vital importance for life, you’d think 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.
Dreams
Dreams are 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 vanish just seconds after waking up.
Our unconscious seems to play a role in what we see; perhaps it’s something we noticed, or heard someone say during the day. There seems to be an amount of mental processing happening. Some dreams may be considered prophetic, or like we are replaying versions of waking life over in our heads.
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 I’ve travelled precisely nowhere, I find this very odd.
Time & Space
How we experience time
Our experience of time can be so subjective. It feels like an 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 harder times. The phase of life we are 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 location.
Other forms of life seem to experience time at different speeds to us. Their respiration, heartbeats and reaction speed all seem to be noticeably faster or slower than ours. Generally speaking, smaller life seems to live faster: birds, rodents and insects.
We also seem to have an internal clock with surprisngly high 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.
My gut feeling is that time might all exist at once, already predetermined. Like a record we’ve put on and are experiencing in real-time and forward motion. We’re discovering it in real-time. It may be predetermined, yet we still don’t know what’s coming next.
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 satellies, despite relativistic effects. It’s incredibly impressive.
How we feel space
There’s a similar strangeness to how we feel space.
As a former architect, I intrinsically know that we find a domestic ceiling height of 2.4m to be quite low. Why is that? It’s plenty of space for even very tall people to exist happily. Why should we prefer 2.6m or even 3m high ceilings? We seem to have a need for spaces that are illogically 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 incredibly strange.
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. It’s very obvious when many people gather together and are running at a highly emotional state: a cathedral, an airport or stadium. The more human energy, the higher the space needs to be somehow. 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 enorous. It’s very hard to explain.
Nature
Bodies of Water
There is something special about our connection to water. Many of us feel drawn to lakes, rivers, the sea or even urban canals. They’re intrinsically beautiful, often enhancing 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 down 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 tress – 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 physical presence of others. Zoom doesn’t quite cut it. It’s missing something. We get very lonely and isolated without others around.
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.
Life and death – obviously gigantic and yet we don’t understand the first thing about what they are. At least officially.
Touch
Physical contact is very important to us. It seems to work on an energetic level. 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.
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.
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 and 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.
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.
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)?
Other
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.
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.