Everyone Is A Magician
Reading time: 6 minutes
Magic is less unusual than we think. Illustration: Placidplace
Let’s begin by taking a moment to appreciate how amazing you are. I mean, look at all the miraculous things you do every day. You use muscle power to draw in air. Yet air consists of only about 20% oxygen. Still, you, with your lungs, distil precisely, and without fail, the oxygen molecules from the air, and pass them on the bloodstream.
When your eyes open for the very first time, you can see. After birth, you can hear, feel, smell and taste. You beat your heart. You maintain your pH, body temperature, blood sugar and hydration levels. When you eat, you digest your food and convert it into forms that nourish and energize your body. You absorb excess fluids, that remain outside your blood vessels during metabolism, with your lymphatic vessels, so that they can later return to the bloodstream. If you sustain a wound, you heal it yourself. And when your faeces or urine reach a certain volume, you signal yourself to go to the toilet. You do all these and many more amazing things every day, without thinking about it. What unimaginable things are you capable of when you do deploy thought?
Image: dlsdkcgl
Oh…
Everyone knows that the human intellect is capable of both phenomenally creative and gruesome destructive thoughts and actions. As a rule, the lower our self-awareness, which refers to the faculty of having an idea why we think what we think, feel what we feel, and do what we do, the more destructive we become in our thinking and acting.[1] We are then at the mercy of circumstances, feel that life happens to us, and react predictably when our buttons are pushed: angry, anxious, withdrawn, sad, or resorting to all kinds of distracting behaviours.
Creativity, however, grows in proportion to growth in self-awareness. As soon as you become familiar with your automatic thought and behaviour patterns under certain circumstances, or in the presence of certain people, the possibility arises to start playing with those patterns. You can, for instance, imagine beforehand how it looks if you were to behave differently than usual in certain recurring situations. You become more creative and less compulsive in your thinking and acting, and that goes hand in hand with your ability to take position in the directors seat, instead of just going through life like a ball in a mountain stream.
By training your mind, you can take the director's seat of your own life. Image: AbsolutVision
The beauty of being human is that in everything we think, feel, and do, we can make a choice: for example, we can choose to consider ourselves as an object of study. Once we do that, there are countless possibilities and methods to help us along the way. Below I will discuss one method that has already benefited me greatly.
Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1102 – 1176) was the author of the foundational text The Seven Points Of Mind Training, which is a Tibetan explanation of the Buddha’s instructions on how to train the mind. This teaching reveals how practitioners can transform adverse circumstances into the path of enlightenment, specifically by developing compassion, both for others and for themselves.
Each point can be seen as a chapter divided into multiple guidelines for living, which all more or less amount to the same thing: ‘Be compassionate to yourself and others’. However, the way in which the text is structured helps us to recognize our own compulsive behaviours, and provides tools to learn to deal with them in a creative way. Later we will go into the core of this practice, which consists of learning to give and take in a balanced way. However, we first need to shortly dwell upon the title of this article.
For a balanced life, we need to be able to take and give equally. Is that the case for you? Image: shameersrk
Phenomena, events, or processes that we cannot explain by logic, we call magic. Most people cannot logically explain the processes described in the first two paragraphs of this article. Yet everyone does them. So unless you are a physiologist (and mostly even when you are), you are willy nilly a magician, because you do all sorts of things in your body – and your mind – without knowing how you do them. The seven points doctrine uses the fact that every person can perform magic, which means that every person is capable[2] of much more than he or she thinks.
As a starting point for the practice of balanced giving and taking, we regard our entire organism – body and mind – as a great transformation station into which both tangible/material and mental/spiritual phenomena enter, are then transformed, and leave us again as something else.
For example, we take in oxygen, food, and liquids from the outside world, which we transform in our inner world, the body, into carbon dioxide, faeces, and urine respectively, which we then give back to the outside world. Carbon dioxide is taken up by vegetation and transforms it back into oxygen. Faeces and urine are excellent fertilizers which, when given to the soil, are transformed back into vegetation and food. These are examples of how we transform material phenomena into other phenomena, and belong to the realm of biology.
The process of transforming oxygen to carbon dioxide in our bodies, is magical to many of us, because we do not know how we do it. Illustration: Ennaej
In the same way that we can transform material phenomena, so too can we transform spiritual phenomena, according to this teaching. The big difference is in having a choice: our biological processes are largely automatic, we do not have to pay conscious attention to them. But in the realm of psychology we have the freedom of choice to determine which mental/spiritual phenomena we want to experience and which not, by focusing our conscious attention on them. These phenomena are subjective by default; the oxygen we breathe is the same for everyone, but whether I experience pain as something benevolent or malevolent, is entirely up to me. That is why the Buddha speaks of training the mind.
In this specific training, emphasis is placed on making the choice to transform unhealthy spiritual phenomena into healthy ones. Unhealthy spiritual phenomena are for example: mental pain, suffering, anger, frustration, fear, sadness, compulsiveness, and a sense of imprisonment. On the other hand, healthy phenomena are: joy, bliss, love, peace, tranquillity, and a sense of freedom.
During the practice, the movements of breathing are used to consciously take in all the unhealthy phenomena, and then give them back as healthy phenomena. You can visualize this in the following way: during inhalation, unhealthy phenomena such as pain and suffering are inhaled. Where inhaled air is absorbed by the lungs, inhaled pain and suffering are absorbed by the heart. From there, they travel through the entire body in the bloodstream, and are transformed into healthy spiritual phenomena such as joy and bliss. So you consciously take in pain and suffering with every inhalation, and consciously give back joy and bliss with every exhalation. You become a bringer of joy.
During meditation, you can practice the principle of giving and taking beautifully by attaching it to the breathing movements. Illustration: Pixabay
This seven-point method advises that you first take in your own pain and suffering,[3] so that you can transform it into joy and bliss, which you can then give back to yourself. For this, you can also use a visualization: imagine your pain and suffering as black smoke seeping out through your skin. You then inhale this through your nose, and visualize the smoke being absorbed by the heart, from where it moves into the rest of the body.
In your body, pain and suffering are then transformed into joy and bliss. You can visualize this by seeing the black smoke turning white inside your body. Then, with every exhalation, you give the white smoke back to yourself, which you can visualize by white smoke or white light coming out of your nose and covering your entire body, like a warm blanket. In this way, you perform the meditation of taking and giving to yourself.
You will not only recognize your own imperfections, but also acknowledge, accept, and embrace them, through the conscious process of transformation. In doing so, not only will compassion towards yourself grow, but automatically towards others as well. For as the Tao Te Ching aptly states: ‘Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.’ If that is not magical, I don’t know what is.
Jolly practicing,
Erik Stout
[1] In his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm shares a particularly extensive psychoanalysis of Adolf Hitler, describing how Hitler was completely unaware of his own subconscious. As a result, he lived in a fantasy world for much of his life, and it was primarily his cunning combined with the circumstances, that allowed him to grow into the leader and destroyer he would eventually become.
[2] ‘Capable of’ is not meant here to be synonymous with ‘doing more.’ I know that my Calvinistic upbringing would like to make that comparison, but in my own experience, most situations require exactly the opposite of much doing.
[3] Of course, the meditation practice of taking and giving in the original Buddhist teaching goes much further, and is not only aimed at transforming your own pain and suffering, but to alleviate pain and suffering for every sentient being. For a more detailed description, see the bottom four paragraphs of this webpage.
How self-wise are you?
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