Magic, Miracles, Mind And Mindfulness

Around 1991 I took a trip to Bombay, Bangalore, and Uti in India. My mission was to have a closer look at Sai Baba, an Indian guru considered a holy man, said to be capable of performing miracles. Apart from his alleged ability to cause paralyzed people to walk again, his signature routine miracle was the materialization of ash called ‘vibuti’.One ‘paralyzed’ woman appeared once a week on his ‘show’ as she would be wheeled in a wheelchair onto the stage and after a few of Sai Baba’s hand gestures, she would ‘miraculously’ be able to walk. During my time there, I satisfied myself that he was a clever magician, who used his magic for the purpose of activating positive healing beliefs in his followers. In his research on the healing and toxic effects of positive and negative beliefs, also called the placebo and nocebo effects, Herbert Benson had long ago scientifically established what humans have intuitively known for thousands of years, namely, our psyche’s powerfully regulating effect on the organism’s energy flow. Beliefs can heal or break us.

Remembering my Sai Baba experience, I also remembered a part of me who at the time was secretly hoping to find evidence that the laws of physics are not always applicable. Many years and quite a few wrinkles later, I remember the power of the human imagination to want to transcend the shackles of physical embodiment by trying to find corners in the universe that suspend the laws of physics. The hope is that disembodied existence is free of pain, suffering, and death, and that we may be able to gain access to some mysterious corners of the universe where anything goes. Barring that possibility, what is left is the power of the imagination to disidentify us from the narrow self-definition as an individual sense of self imprisoned in a mortal body. For eons, humans have achieved that through art, religion, and meditation.

Coming back to magic, apart from being entertaining and delightful, I also have a curiosity and fascination about its deeper significance within the context of trying to elucidate consciousness and shed some light on what we are really doing in mindfulness meditation. Magic is powerfully awe-inspiring, and for a good reason. But to understand that reason we need a closer look at what it really is. I became particularly interested in the work of Penn and Teller, juggler and magician extraordinaire, and the whole body of knowledge around this art. Before I continue, let’s set the stage by taking a short break and watch this almost 4-minutes long video.

I suppose there are a few factors worth considering in trying to understand our fascination with magic. In magic, we watch something we know is impossible occur in front of our very own eyes. That in itself can inspire us to ponder the seemingly impossible in our lives as a way of broadening our horizons, examine our conditioned limitations, and fulfill our dreams. Magic activates our energetic potential in the form of beliefs that can challenge our narrowly constructed prisons about reality and inspire a transcendence of our limitations.

After a magic trick, we are left amazed, puzzled, curious, restless, almost like having a pebble in one’s shoe, wondering how what we saw is possible. The knowledge of impossibility is mixed with the experience of actual occurrence, and that tension between the two cannot be resolved unless one becomes a magician. Our minds can reach in different directions: As with Sai Baba, we may attribute to the person performing magic miraculous, superhuman, metaphysical, and transcendent powers, in which case we may also identify with the possibility of having such potential ourselves we could perhaps tap into. We may also marvel at the magician’s skill and simply enjoy the magic’s entertainment value.

Would miracles be as cool as we imagine? Somewhat, maybe, but not really as much as we may expect. Whenever people claim evidence of miracles, they occur like lottery wins – completely randomly without rhyme or reason. Besides, I have also never seen any credible reports of a reputable scientist’s presence, which could confirm or refute the miracle. Finally, when unexplainable things occur, and they do so routinely, we tend to loosely call them ‘miracles’, when in fact we are not able to grasp nature’s and the universe’s full potential. We tend to see the physical world as far too restricted in its enormous potential for creating the most amazing phenomena, and we also tend to misunderstand science as a knowledge discipline, when in fact it is a doubt and question discipline. Just because we cannot explain something does not mean it is potentially not explainable. Nature and the universe are simply so vastly more complex than we can ever imagine, that science can only grasp a sliver of its reality.

Just to make sure we understand each other: I assume that the laws of science constantly evolve with our growing knowledge, that they are inescapable, and that phenomena science cannot explain are either not yet explainable but eventually can be, or they are outside the method and purview of scientific inquiry altogether. For example, the meaning of Hamlet cannot be found through scientific means. By the same token, when events seem to defy the laws of physics, it is all too easy to dismiss them as miracles and thereby impeding our quest for truth.

Miracles can be defined as the unexplainable defiance of the laws of physics as we know them, and by assuming the notion of miracles as an explanation, one relegates the unknowable to the realm of the pseudo-knowable: “Oh I ‘understand’ now … it is a miracle!”, which means of course that one doesn’t understand anything more than before the miracle. One maintains the illusion of knowing while projecting it onto the screen of the unknowable, which gives only short-lived comfort and even mitigates the power of reality to generate states of deep insight and awe. At best, assuming supernatural powers from an external source can help us let go of narrow identification with a limited sense of self, open up and become receptive to unexpected influences that may be of benefit. Beyond that, by farming the magic of the unexplainable out into a miracle, we deprive reality of its real power to inspire, and ourselves of the opportunity to find truth, thereby allowing the unexplainable phenomenon to amount to no more than an unlikely moment of grace we have no control over anyway. To explain magic away as some kind of metaphysical occurrence is a form of intellectual laziness.

To my mind, the real power of magic is to be found in a very different movement of consciousness – in one’s grounding in the fact that it is skilled trickery. The implication is that our brains are skilled tricksters in the way they manage to fool us into believing what’s untrue and not seeing what’s true. We are so fascinated by magic because we know that what we see is impossible, and yet we experience it directly. In other words, we experience the impossible, which inspires our internal sense of empowerment. We know that the laws of physics are inviolable, yet at the same time, we are unable to see through the elaborate trickery, which in the end is always penetrable, predictable, learnable, and applicable.

The core idea here is that fascination with trickery, with how easily we can be so profoundly fooled, is in fact a fascination with our human nature and the nature of mind. Through magic we are directly confronted with how on a daily basis we unconsciously lie, cheat, swindle, deceive, distort, delude and create illusions – in short, magic forces us to examine our relationship to truth. More often than we usually suspect, our experience of mind is like the unexamined smoking routine Teller performs. Have you noticed how after having seen a magic trick, your mind keeps obsessing about how such trickery is possible? In other words, magic puts a pebble into our shoe of consciousness, making it impossible to ignore that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’, and we haven’t as yet been able to figure out what that is. It is crucial to avail ourselves of this impulse to investigate when we begin to realize how much of what we experience is magic performed by the brain and the mind.

Human nature at its very core is ‘the Denmark’ we are talking about. On a daily, moment-by-moment basis we willy-nilly create both illusions and delusions we are unaware of, and then, both fortunately and tragically act upon them. Such is the nature of human consciousness and the way our brain wires us. When we act on delusion, things don’t turn out that well. As I have written elsewhere, we are far less the authors of our lives than we imagine. To a large extent, by the time we believe we are making a decision to act, that decision was already unconsciously taken beforehand by our organism. This is in part good news and ensures survival as we don’t need to think about increasing our heart rate when we run, the fortunate aspect of algorithmic automaticity. The less fortunate aspect is the ‘magic’ by which our bodies experience some kind of pain and we then completely convince ourselves of an utterly deluded reality such as having cancer for example. The way we can spin the most incredible stories that have no base in reality, and then be completely convinced of their truthfulness, is ‘magic’ at its best. Getting to see through our mind’s trickeries is magical in the sense that it liberates us from many self-imposed prisons of our own construction.

Meditation may sound superficially simple, but like Penn and Teller’s video on the analysis of the smoking routine, so often what we see is not what we see. A closer look at the art of meditating or the ‘meditation routine’, if you so will, reveals complexity, skill, and wisdom not visible through cursory glances. True, honest mindfulness, the kind of dedicated, serious, and skilled examination of mind that reveals the ways we create our life’s reality, is like magic – an elaborate awareness skill that leads directly to the core of human existence in an unfathomable universe.

We will never suspect someone of lying if we didn’t know about our own capacity for lying. Mindfulness requires advanced skill training in catching our own lies, and when like a scent hound we ‘follow the money’ to the crime scene of delusion, things get messy as we enter the regions of doubt, ignorance, and unknowing. Lying has no respect for any rules of honesty, decency, morality, and justice, neither does our brain in its function of ensuring survival at all cost. When it comes to debunking the way we routinely fool ourselves, we need to know how to meet our internal fooler. Fundamentally, to unfool our own fooler is impossible unless we know how we lie, cheat, and swindle. The last time I personally checked, for example, something like 90% of my thoughts was simply unsubstantiated, even wrong, if not blatantly and shamelessly distorting the truth. This may appear depressing at first, but I know that this is part of our human condition, and when we manage to separate the wheat from the chaff and actually see the 10% truth within us, we have likely touched the holy grail of a worthy human existence.

Mindfulness can then be seen as the very difficult art of learning to hold in our hearts and awareness the experience of what it is like to be cheated. The basic question of mindfulness is to ask ourselves how we know what we know, what is true? As we sit on our cushion, are we really meditating? Who is meditating? When we concentrate, are we really stabilizing attention? Are we really embodying kindness? Are we really settling in direct experience? Are we really working with awareness? Is what we do really what we intend to do? Are we really … ?

By exploring the mind through mindfulness as students of reality, we are like scientists: We stand at the boundary between the forest of what we know and the vast frontier of the unknown. At that boundary, we don’t know what is true, nor what question to ask. We are completely in the dark and cognizant of how easily we can be fooled. It is imperative that we do whatever it takes to not fool ourselves into thinking that something that is not true is, and something that is true isn’t. This means being keenly aware of how much of a trickster our mind is. The process of mindful inquiry is like a sloppy meandering full of wrong turns, doubts, mistakes, and dead ends. You never know which path is going to get you to the right place, and tolerating mistakes is a central tenet of creating safety on the uncertain journey into the unknown. This is called experimentation. No guru, teacher, textbook, or tradition can ever be the ultimate arbiter of whether you are on the right track or not – nature is. Nature is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner. If nature does not agree with you, you are wrong! In your inquiry, you have to make sure that your methods and tools allow nature to manifest in whatever way it can to give you the guidance to where the truth lays.

The magic of mindfulness teaches us about storytelling, assumptions, deceptions, constructions, the way we perceive the world, and truth – that is, if there is truth to be found at all! Once we reach the far shores of uncertainty and the unknowable, is there truth, or do we just find life manifesting itself?

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Automaticity of the human mind

Human function, action, cognition and behavior under the lens of automaticity

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1. Left brain perspective

For several consecutive early spring days, a single, distinctive fly appeared to relish the bright sunlight illuminating my bathroom. We have grown familiar, coexisting as two entities engaged in our respective routines. I designate her as "she"—perhaps influenced by the feminine grammatical gender of la mouche (French), la mosca (Italian), and die Fliege (German)—an intuitive attribution rather than a biological assertion. She occasionally positions herself on the curtain railing above my bathtub, observing as I shower. More frequently, she rests on the windowsill, tracking my movements as I shave, and at times briefly alights on my hair for a few seconds. I have been aware of her presence throughout, akin to an inquisitive cohabitant sharing this confined space, but today I intentionally sought a deeper engagement.

She was once again stationed on the windowsill, basking in the sunlight, as I shaved. I approached closely, examining her large, compound eyes, and posed the question, “What is it like to be a fly?” Initially, my cognition activated a predictable analytical response, retrieving stored knowledge about her physiology: a head encasing a compact brain; expansive, multifaceted eyes affording a broad visual field; antennae functioning as olfactory and gustatory sensors; specialized mouthparts adapted for sponging or piercing-sucking; a thorax anchoring six articulated legs, rapid wings, and club-shaped halteres for flight stabilization; and an abdomen housing digestive and reproductive systems, concealed from view. Her exoskeleton, black with muted grey striations, bore a subtle, fur-like texture, as though she had ornamented herself for this encounter—a sizable specimen, impossible to ignore.

Yet, I deliberately suspended this intellectual framework, opting instead to engage her in a silent, receptive state. My question became more personal and changed to “what is it like to be you”? I consciously down-regulated the default mode network—the neural substrate of self-referential thought—relinquishing the ego’s persistent drive to assert its permanence. This ego, in its dualistic framework, projects constructed identities onto the external ‘other’, rendering her so alien that I might, without reflection, swat her away, extinguishing a life deemed insignificant, irritating, or even repellent by that limited perspective.

In this shift, a different entity began to emerge within my awareness—not a mere object, but a presence actively relating to me, exhibiting a form of consciousness distinct yet perceptible. Her curiosity, perhaps reciprocal, prompted her to take flight and settle briefly on my hair. I remained immobile, registering the faint tactile sensation of her tentative exploration of my surface—an interaction probing my identity as much as I sought hers. The contact was transient; she soon returned to the windowsill, fixing her gaze upon me. I speculated that she might, in her own unknowable way, ponder a parallel question: “What is it like to be this massive, terrestrial organism, incapable of flight, beyond my capacity to name?” The perceived separation—me here, her there—dissolved into a unified ‘we’, marked by a tangible exchange of vitality through our shared, living awareness. Though our modes of consciousness diverge, they intersect intimately, each of us enacting existence according to our inherent capacities. Together, we participated in a dynamic interplay, a microcosm of the universe’s unfolding, so affecting that tears briefly surfaced, reflecting regret for the countless instances of inattentiveness lost to automaticity.

This encounter with such a remarkable organism illuminated a progression of awareness. Initially, I had navigated the ‘dark night of the soul’—a dualistic state of nihility, a relative nothingness characterized by existential desolation and the collapse of meaning within a self-other framework. Beyond this, I accessed a non-dual absolute nothingness, a broader mode of awareness where subject-object distinctions dissolve into a unified field of being, devoid of relational constructs. Yet, this was not the terminus; it opened into emptiness—the ultimate awareness mode, a boundless, vibrant expanse where the extraordinary manifests within the ordinary flux of daily existence. This state, achieved through direct presence with this fly, surpasses any chemically induced psychedelic experience in its clarity and depth, revealing a profound interconnectedness inherent in the fabric of life, the extraordinariness of ordinary existence. No answer could ever come close to the tantalizing peace of timeless questions.

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2. Right brain vantage point

For several radiant spring mornings, a singular, remarkable fly has basked in the golden sunlight flooding my bathroom. We have become familiar companions, each merrily tending to our daily rites. At times, she—yes, she, anointed feminine by the lilting echoes of la mouche, la mosca, die Fliege, a soft intuition humming through language—perches atop the curtain railing above my bathtub, a silent witness to my shower’s misty veil. More often, she lingers on the windowsill, her gaze fixed upon me as I shave, now and then darting to alight for a fleeting instant upon my hair. I’ve felt her presence all along—a curious housemate in this shared sanctuary—but today, I vowed to bridge the chasm between us.

There she rested once more, cradled in the sun’s warm embrace upon the windowsill, watching me wield my razor with quiet intent. I leaned closer, peering into her vast, prismatic eyes—kaleidoscopes of a secret world—and murmured, “What is it like to be a fly?” At first, my mind thrummed with the familiar pulse of knowledge: her head, a miniature cathedral of instinct; those grand, jeweled eyes unveiling a boundless vista; antennae, fragile wands of scent and savor; mouthparts sculpted for sipping or piercing; her thorax, a delicate frame bearing six crooked legs, wings that shimmer with thunderous speed, and halteres, poised like a dancer’s plumb line; her abdomen, a veiled chamber of life’s mysteries. She gleamed, black as night with faint grey stripes, her form cloaked in a gossamer sheen, as though she’d adorned herself for this tender rendezvous.

This time, like as many other times as I can possibly honour in daily life, I let this torrent of facts dissolve, beckoning her to meet me in the hush of silence. The question changed to become more personal: “What is it like to be you?” I stilled the restless clamor of my mind, loosening the ego’s tenacious hold—that brittle self, desperate to cling to its mirage of eternity, casting endless conceptual shadows upon the being before me. So remote she might appear, I could, in a careless flicker, swat her away, deeming her life a trifling annoyance, a speck of disdain. But no—a different essence began to bloom within my consciousness.

A presence unfurled, no longer separate but alive with me, awake in her own cryptic grace, her curiosity a mirror to my own. Suddenly, she soared, settling upon my hair. I stood statue-still, captivated by the faint tickle of her pilgrimage across my scalp, a gentle quest into the enigma of my existence. The moment was ephemeral; she soon returned to her sun-gilded throne, gazing back at me. Perhaps she mused, too: “What is it like to be this lumbering, wingless colossus, a riddle beyond my silent tongue?” The gulf between us—me here, her there—dissolved into a luminous we, tethered by a pulsing filament of shared aliveness. Our ways of knowing diverged, yet entwined, each of us threading life’s arc with singular devotion. Together, we spun a strand in the vast loom of the cosmos, a dance so piercing that tears brimmed in my eyes, lamenting a lifetime’s moments lost to the fog of unawareness.

In that tranquil void, beside this astonishing fly, I brushed against an abyss beyond sorrow—a stillness forged in the crucible of the soul’s dark night, rising into the infinite embrace of nothingness. From there, it was but a tender plunge into the world’s embrace, a surrender that let peaceful nothingness blossom into vibrant emptiness—a radiant field teeming with the miraculous veiled in the everyday. This quiet epiphany, outshining the wildest psychedelic odyssey imaginable, unveiled life’s timeless poetry: unspoken, extraordinary, woven into the ordinary cadence of days. The nameless question remains.

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Searching Everywhere But Where It Counts

Forgetting that we have a mind.

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October 12, 2024

Before you worry about symptoms such as depression and anxiety and how to improve or get rid of them, before you get your blood boiling arguing with people who can't deal with anything beyond their own viewpoint, before you develop and become ensconced in your own opinions, before you vilify who disagrees with you, before you shake your head wondering how seemingly obvious facts cannot be agreed upon, before you assume you have no blind spots, before you despair that crowds never learn from history, before you become bitter at humanity's collective stupidity, before you get passionate about religion, mythology, and archetypes, before all that, wouldn't it make sense to inquire into the source of all of it - these symptoms, views, opinions, thoughts, actions, distortions and, frankly, miseries?

While it does not take rocket science to realize that the source of it all is the embodied human mind, for most, embarking on its exploration is at best a big challenge, at worst insurmountable, non-sensical or incomprehensible. How many times have you heard nonsense like “I don’t believe in psychology”, as if the existence of the moon were a matter of belief? How often do patients enter their physician’s office complaining of being anxious or depressed, and are sent home with a prescription without one question that would try to understand how their mind creates such suffering? Many people, including professionals who should know better, live and act as if they had no mind.

The mind is the source of all subjective phenomena and experiences, and we are astoundingly unaware of it. Our mind’s task is to ensure survival and the propagation of our species, not to ensure we live our best life. To this end, it needs to be efficient, rather than concerned about maximizing its potential. Efficiency results by pairing down information processing to the bare minimum. Embedded in the way mind functions are mechanisms that cause reality distortions, delusions, wild beliefs, and a profound obliviousness of one’s own ignorance. Whether we like it or not, our mind drives our lives like our heart pumps blood through our veins. The universe's natural processes have caused us to evolve that way, and for better or worse, we are stuck with a mind that functions sub-optimally as it creates profound reality distortions that seem at first blush to have successfully allowed us to multiply and propagate towards earth dominance. In the long run, however, it turns out that humanity may end up stampeding dangerously close to extinction. To thrive both individually and as a species we must come to terms with our rather dangerous mind and train ourselves to use it beyond its basic survival mode by accessing its inherent potential evolution has graciously also built into it. That takes work, training, effort and patience.

Our human mind provides the capacity for reflection. The mirror reflects what’s in front of it, meaning that as reality beams itself onto the mirror’s surface, the mirror beams it back to us as an image we can then examine from the outside. Notice how what gets examined by looking at the mirror is not reality itself, but an image of it. Our brain provides a similar process in the form of consciousness, whereby it maps reality in a virtual form we then can observe and manipulate. However, while the mirror reflects reality exactly as it is, the virtual reality consciousness creates is not only a map of reality, but that map is modified into a new creation. The brain as mapper functions as our central relationship organ that enables us to reflexively develop a relationship to reality and ourselves by having access to a virtual, mapped and modified reality we can ponder and manipulate. This is how we are self-aware.

As an aside, the mind is more than the creator of a virtual adaptation of reality we can reflexively relate to and have a relationship with. It can transcend self-awareness, and knowingly experience reality and awareness without the detour of mapped mirroring duality. That is the shift from observation to being, from knowing we exist in a universe to realizing we are the universe. More about that in another context.

The eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina, but you don’t see it. You have the impression of enjoying a seamless field of vision without two black holes in the middle, even though the holes are there. The brain manages to fill in the missing information to make the field seem seamless. Extrapolate that to the whole brain to realize that to function effectively for everyday survival our brain adapts our field of consciousness in two ways: It fills what’s missing to provide a sense of continuity and simplifies available information to not overwhelm you. It hides blind spots from you to provide continuity and withholds information to ensure efficiency. Both these mechanisms distort reality to ensure survival, while simultaneously laying the foundations for ignorance and suffering.

We each have many blind spots, but the core blind spot affecting us all is the proclivity to live as if we had no mind. We use our minds without realizing the extent to which our experience of reality is created by our mind. Without our conscious knowledge our brain creates the reality we experience. We don’t notice that the reality we experience is our brain’s creation. We mistake our brain’s constructions for reality. This results in a dangerous situation, in which we ignore the fact that our experience is subjectively constructed. We mistakenly believe that what we see and experience is automatically true, and because it seems true it seems real, and because it seems real it cannot be changed. Our primordial blind spot towards the brain’s constructions robs us of freedom of choice, of the power of clear view, wise discernment, and respectfully compassionate mutual understanding.

Our mind’s constructions seem so real that we hold on to them for dear life and want to shove them down other people’s throats without exploring their veracity. We get strongly identified with what we believe we know, emotions take over, and the capacity to hear each other vanishes. Identification with mind processes is the single most destructive problem in the way humans use their minds. Emotions suffocate the mind’s spaciousness to freely consider, question, doubt and explore, and before we know it, we are in conflict. If we cannot agree on facts, emotions drive us to use force to impose our views instead of inquiring more deeply into the divergent realities, and if necessary, compromising to try to resolve complexities. Force can take the form of yelling and screaming at each other, or legal and physical action.

The reality our mind constructs and we can have a relationship with, is in fact threefold. We first have objective reality, which is what happens in the universe independent of whether we know about it or there is anyone around to witness it. This reality consists of energy flow that is independent of how our brains and minds construct reality, and therefore as far from information as energy flow can get. The black death virus killed thousands of people without them knowing what viruses are or being able to see them. Although this is the easiest reality to agree upon, like in the case of flat-earthers, emotions still manage to cause distortions of objective facts.

Subjective reality is our own private experience nobody else has access to. This energy flow is entirely within as a construction by our own brain and mind. Although it is largely independent of objective reality, it is profoundly shaped by interactions with others. Even if everyone denies that I am in pain, if I experience pain, it is totally real for me. That is a difficult reality to agree upon, because seeing it from the outside requires trust and our capacity for empathy.

Then there is intersubjective reality, which is the reality of stories. This energy flow is deeply symbolic in the sense that language and stories are symbolic, therefore experienced as information flow, and a mutual co-creation with others. It is the reality that emerges through mutual narrative construction and is neither objective, nor subjective. It only exists in the interpersonal realm containing people who are willing to participate in it by accepting the shared reality. One such reality is money, but there are many others such as all collective ideas we can share. Money means nothing and has no reality unless it is shared in the interpersonal space. This is also a difficult reality to deal with, because it depends on the mutual capacity to regulate the multilayered energy flow between our intuition, our emotions and our intellect. When that occurs, empathy and clear insight become possible, allowing a degree of harmony within the intersubjective dance of energy and information flow to emerge. Any dance couple may dance a Tango, but those in conflict will not be able to present a harmonious dance.

To manage these three realities we each have a relationship with, requires a good deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation many people don’t have. Much of the time, the mind remains transparent like air to our eyes, invisible or not known, yet profoundly determining how we relate to real reality and live our lives. Like children playing in a house on fire, we remain oblivious to the many ways our ignorance of mind causes suffering and destruction all around.

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