Do you remember Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia? In this story Mickey is the apprentice to a powerful sorcerer. While his master sleeps, Mickey tries on the sorcerer’s magical hat and casts a spell on a broomstick to help him fetch water. Unfortunately, as an apprentice, Mickey knows just enough magic to make something happen, but not enough to create the results he intends. In no time, out-of-control broomsticks are taking over and water is flooding everywhere, leaving Mickey in a complete panic as he tries to contain the chaos. Things only return to “normal” when the sorcerer comes downstairs and uses his skillful magic to reestablish peace and harmony.
The Magic of Magic
Throughout history, humans have had a profound fascination with magic—and a deep fear of it as well. Magic holds seemingly unseen and unknown possibilities that can be of immense value, yet our lack of understanding and control makes us fearful. We assign great power to it, as described in countless fairy tales, myths, and legends in which magicians, sorcerers, witches, and wizards play significant roles. Merlin, Gandalf the Grey, Glinda the Good Witch, Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Darth Vader, Albus Dumbledore, Lord Voldemort, and Morgan le Fay are all examples of great magicians, witches, wizards, and sorcerers who have captivated our imagination with visions of what is possible when we know how to work with the unseen yet omnipresent energy of consciousness.
Perhaps our deep fascination with magic is our (often unconscious) desire to alter our existing reality, to expand beyond our current state and become a much grander expression of who we really are.
Without the belief in a possibility that things can be different—even if we don’t see how—we would be stuck with what we have. This could rob us of perhaps our greatest force to evolve: our belief that change is possible from one moment to the next.
Magic helps us believe that anything is possible, even the things that seem impossible or make no sense.
What is Magic?
Mysterious, fascinating, powerful, unknown, unexplainable, supernatural, impossible . . . all these words come to mind when we think about magic.
How can we describe what magic is? Perhaps what we consider to be magic is simply that which we cannot explain within the parameters of our existing belief system. The dominant belief system emerged from and has sustained 3D reality, so anything beyond what we are familiar with—like anything emerging from multidimensionality—can appear to be magic. If we haven’t seen something before or we were never taught that something could exist, we assign it to the realm of magic and mystery even when we clearly experience or observe it. Or we try to force what is emerging from the new paradigm into the old box of beliefs and so deny magic, creativity, and ultimately evolution. Dismissing an intuitive child as an oversensitive one is an example of this.
Magic could be described as the explanation we give for something we perceive as real even though science has not been able to prove or explain it (yet) and our logic and reason struggle to accept it. The aspects of our intelligence that rely on logic, linearity, and the limitations of 3D reality may struggle to accept what cannot be explained in those terms.
What we know about magic from the movies is that it can make the impossible possible and the unimaginable happen. Moviegoers are expected to suspend their disbelief temporarily in order to enter the worlds created in storytelling and filmmaking. Consider how suspending your disbelief to perceive a new version of reality—for longer than just the duration of a movie—might expand your awareness and spark your own magical power!
Magic is another word for manifestation.
There is probably already much more magic in your life than you realize. Amazing yet unexplainable things happen all the time. Sometimes these seem magical and mysterious, but often they are things we are used to, things we take for granted and have accepted as part of our reality without realizing that they are sourced from something beyond the 3D world and linearity, making them in fact magical.
© 2021. Reprinted with permission. Modern Merlin: Uncover Your Magical Powers by Lon is available now online and in stores.
