MAGIC OR MAGIC?

Many people will tell you magic doesn't exist. They'll say it's credulous superstition that only children, people centuries dead, and the feeble-minded believe in. They'll ask how anyone can believe in magic when they know about science. To which I can only answer: How can you NOT believe?

Because Science and Magic are not different, or exclusive. Science has not disproved the existance of magic. Quite the opposite, it has proved it. The main problem is that people fail to realise that there are TWO things called magic, and they are COMPLETELY different.

There's the "magic" that people DO believe in: Stage magic. Conjuring magic. The magic that is simply an intricate trick. In the past, it also included "magic potions", "mystic herbs" and the like. This is the magic long since disproved by science: The Magic of knowing more than the other people.

Think about it objectively: Imagine a man from 200 years in the past brought into the present day. He'd see doors that sense you coming and open for you. He'd see vehicles moving with no animal pulling it. He'd see images appearing on blank screens, and hear people's voices coming from a small box. We know that things like infra-red detectors, hydraulics, combustion engines and electronics are not in the least bit magical, but you'd never convince him of that. Because he'd be seeing things happen that he cannot understand, so he would call it magic. And he would be incapable of understanding, so would be impossible to sway in that argument. We know it isn't magic, but would be able to easily convince this man that we were amazingly powerful magicians, because we know how to do things he cannot possibly ascribe to anything but supernatural powers. But ARE we the magicians he would believe us? No, we are simply people in a more knowledgeable society.

So you can easily see that totally unmagical things are often thought of as being magical. It was a convenient explanation in less enlightened times for any event not understood. But just because it is called magic, you should not confuse it with actual magic. Nothing is more annoying to a true magic-user than having someone say "This totally unmagical thing has been proven to be non-magical, therefore magic does not exist". It's a nonsensical argument when I put it that way, but you'd be amazed how many people put it that way: People talk about science showing us that magical potions are merely drugs, that the properties of crystals come from magnetic interactions rather than mystic ones, and so on, and they're quite right. But true magicians don't claim these things to be magical, so it's an irrelevant argument. Science has disproved the magic that is not true magic. It's not the magic that involves the harnessing of your spiritual energy to make changes. That's TRUE magic, and it's very different.

For one thing, you can't use magic to have easily-visible manifestations. You just can't. You can't use magic to knock down buildings, turn lead into gold, throw energy bolts around, or do any of the OTHER stuff you see in the movies. Magic is, in purely empirical terms, very weak. But it's like the displaced pebble that leads to an avalance, or (more accurately) the butterfly that flaps its wings and changes the course of a hurricane. It's a way of using small amounts of non-physical energy to have subtle changes on the physical world that lead to the bigger changes. In many ways, it's a kind of "controlled chaos", turning the randomness of the world to your favour. Magic just isn't about raw power.

Having said that, I invite you to consider something. Magic is mental energy. Anyone who's studied psionics will know that some people believe that "magic" in the physical world is the harnessing of the energy generated by the brain. So consider these facts:

• Your brain receives one third of the blood supply of your body. That means it uses up half as much energy under normal conditions as your ENTIRE body.
• There are around ten billion neurons in the human brain. That's 10,000,000,000 cells. In total, your body contains 1,000,000,000,000 nerve cells. An average firing of a nerve cell is 110mV. That's approximately one tenth of a volt. That means that if every cell in your brain fired at once, it'd generate one billion volts of electricity. If every nerve in your body fired at once, it'd generate one hundred thousand million volts of charge. It's an established scientific fact that if you inject someone with a chemical that causes all the nerve cells to fire at once, they die. Of electrocution.

So if anyone ever tells you that even if it is possible to harness the power of your brain, it's hardly got any power to harness, you might want to mention a few of those figures to them.

And to back up what I said about science proving the existance of magic... well, anyone who cares to read up on the subject will know about that. A random number generator on top of a shelf way too high up to be seen, yet is still somehow read by people who claim to be able to leave their bodies. People telling you what cards you've drawn, or are about to draw, from a deck of cards: Remember the scene at the start of "Ghostbusters" with the two volunteers trying to guess the cards? That experiment has proved dozens of people to be able to consistently pick the correct card WAY more times that anyone can attribute to coincidence. There's evidence everywhere about magic. Scientifically-gathered evidence. So to all those people who believe in science over magic: Science has PROVED the existance of magic. So either scientific methodology is right, and magic exists. Or scientific methodology is wrong, in which case everything we know scientifically is wrong, and the world must run something un-scientific, i.e. magic. You can close your eyes to the evidence, you can debate it, but you can't deny it. Magic is there.