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· A Bare Wall · Magic Show

Opening to the Magic

Not too long ago I fell in love. We enjoy falling in love, because it dissolves our usual boundaries and puts us in an altered state. There is something real about this altered state and something distorted. What is real is that we're not confined to our usual ego boundaries and so we feel things more intensely, more intimately. The problem is that the "fix" is temporary.

What we like about falling in love is the same thing many of us like about mind-altering drugs, fantasy, and spiritual practice. We like getting out of the box. If you've read this far, you have some idea of what I might mean by this phrase. The box is the structure we live in. For some people, the box may be a suffocating structure in their life, perhaps a job, a relationship, the military. That's one level. A more fundamental level is that of the psyche, specifically the ego structure. It is our bounded consciousness.

Imagine how clumsy it would be for two people wearing physical boxes to embrace. That's the level of obstruction we're dealing with in most of our relationships. We are working around all these deficiencies, ego needs, defenses, sensitivities, and rigidities. How can we get close with all of this in the way? Of course most of the time we pretend we're not in boxes. We push up against each other, trying to ignore the hard edges that are there.

There are times when these boxes are temporarily dissolved. Some of the methods for achieving this are dangerous. Unless the person is good and ready, it's no good to blast the box to smithereens. A premature dissolution of the ego structure can lead to psychosis. Other times experiences of dissolution are helpful. They give us a taste of what it is like to not be in our boxes.

But a temporary transcendence is, in the end, only temporary. If we want to have really naked contact with life, we have to dismantle these awkward structures we carry around. This is where psychological and spiritual work come in. Psychological work initially helps us repair our boxes. We heal our injuries, and our box becomes more streamlined. A smoother contour replaces what was jutting out before. This allows our hugs to be a little closer. The deeper we go in psychological work, the more of the box we dismantle. If we go all the way (few psychotherapies are geared in this direction), we can become quite free.

Spiritual work generally begins from a different direction. In certain forms of meditation and mindfulness practices, we become more aware of our box, yet the focus is on not identifying with it. We become aware of the box by stepping out of it. Other forms of spiritual work attempt to bypass the box altogether and help us to see what we are without this box-our deeper essential nature. This nature doesn't need a box any more than consciousness needs a body. It is unbounded and undying, limited by neither space nor time. Spiritual work thus puts us in touch with what is eternal and universal.

Many people are beginning to recognize that it is best when we use psychological and spiritual work together. Psychological work alone can leave us with a better box but not really aware of what is inside the box. Spiritual work alone may help us know our inner nature, but too often it ignores the real difficulties of carting this thing around. Outside our moments of transcendence, most of us are still living in this structure. We may fool ourselves and believe we have no box when this is not the case. We can even take spiritual experiences and incorporate them into our box. How clever!

By doing both psychological and spiritual work, we learn how to live with less ego and more intimacy. Which brings us to the subject of magic. Magic is a word I use to talk about a certain way of experiencing life. Magic is the sense of "Wow!" It is enchantment with reality. Not consensual reality as we generally know it, but the mysterious inner nature of things-what I call the Shapeshifter in the article, "Magic Show." [link]

We are drawn to magic. I'm not talking about pulling rabbits out of hats, although that can bring a similar sense of wonder and delight. I'm talking about a core enchantment with the infinite possibilities of life and with the magical, mysterious way it works. Anything that extends our usual conceptions of what is possible brings with it some of this sense of magic. Science fiction and fantasy novels, virtual realities, certain occult practices, psychedelic drugs, even falling in love shifts us out of our routinized ways of thinking. The veils are parted and we see more possibilities; we become closer to the source.

So when my new lover speaks about the "magic" in our relationship, I am aware of several levels on which this might be happening. The least attractive is the level on which we fall in love with someone and project all of our idealizations onto them. This can certainly create the sense of possibility, but it is an unreal one. We are relating to a fantasy, not a reality. In a sense, we see the other person as the absolutely perfect box, the one that will make our life ecstatically happy.

A second level of magic comes with the temporary dissolution of the box. In my case, the intensity of our initial encounter was sufficient to blow away many of my usual defenses. We were naked with each other, and nakedness brings a sense of intimacy. If this is the source of the magic, it will be dependent on not reconstituting our boxes, or if we do, constantly clipping away at them.

The third level, which is an extension of the last, is that our relationship feels magical because my partner experiences in me an opening into that place of magic. It is not that one box nestles so nicely into another (that can create comfort and coziness but not magic), but that I am not a box. I am an openness, a doorway.

I am not sure what kind of magic this relationship is about yet, but I think that if I can use it to remind me of the richness and mystery of Being, if I can remember that magic is everywhere and every when, then falling in love will have served a sacred purpose. May it do the same for you.

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