The Magician's Way

These days I am often asked the question "so what are you reading at the moment?". It's a question that often gets asked of me when I get into conversation with people about books, especially when I mention that I see myself as a bit of a writer and that I have a fiction novel in the works. Truth be told, in keeping with my relentless efforts to challenge myself over the last year and a half or so the majority of my reading hasn't really been in the area of fiction. In fact I've been suffering a bit of a mental overload from studying all manner of non-fiction "how to" books. Books about attraction, self improvement and indeed a bit of card magic too.

It's not that I feel any need to maintain secrecy that these are the food that my brain is demanding these days, but I do feel in a way that saying that I am reading this stuff communicates a feeling of inadequacy so I tend not to advertise it, at least when I'm not around people who are also passionate about their own personal journey. There's no drama or high emotion to this sort of non-fiction either.

Also, I'm told that saying to your date that you're enjoying reading "The Game" isn't going to go down well.

The Game is a good read though, especially the ever-forgotten ending; I recommend it.

In any case my usual answer has been that I'm reading "Time to depart" by Lindsey Davis, one of the Falco detective novels, and then I just hope that they don't ask me how the story is progressing as the bookmark hasn't moved in the last 18 months.

In the last week though I have read an outstanding book that fits into both the category of self help and fiction. It's called The Magician's Way, written by a guy called William Whitecloud, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It was also a bit of a new experience for me because it was the first book I have read on an iPad, an experience I was very skeptical about but I quickly warmed to. It's the same device I am writing this blog post on, and I have to say I'm a big fan.

The book is set in the present day, I think in Australia although it's never placed specifically, and it follows the journey of a man who is having trouble with his job and his marriage in his journey to discover magic, magic not being some mystical supernatural force, but rather a life attitude that can be used to find abundance and happiness in ones life. The details are kept reasonably ambiguous about many things within the book and it is clear that the main protagonist is intended mostly as a vessel through which the author can communicate a set of life principles, which are referred to in the book as laws of magic.

I am very much taken by the idea that magic really is a real force in the world, but that anybody who looks to the metaphysical is looking in the wrong place. No, magic is much more elusive, and yet far more potent. I find myself thinking back to the first few weeks of when I discovered hypnosis, when the boundaries of what I thought was actually possible seeme to melt in front of me. Indeed, I had a similar experience when I started to learn about attraction. In both cases I dared to do things that it had never even occurred to me to do before and amazing things happened.

And what's more, learning magic for a specific purpose has the interesting effect that it spills out into other areas of your life. You start to develop new habits, the world changes, and it becomes difficult to recognise who you were even a year before.

The principles, such as using your focus to create your reality, are all very potent in their own right. For example, if you focus on what your are trying to achieve, your target, you are far more likely to have success than if you instead apply your focus to the goal of not failing.

I tried exercising this principle a couple of days ago when I went out for a ride on my mountain bike. There's a track that I occasionally ride on that features quite deep ruts. These ruts are too deep to cycle in because my pedals hit the sides, so the only way to ride the path is to use the narrow bit of earth in between the ruts. It's quite a psycologically difficult situation to cycle in because it leaves a very narrow path to ride, you feel like you're very high above the ground and putting down your foot isn't going to be easy if you start to topple. So I found the experience of cycling along trying not to fall down one of the ruts in the past has been a fraught one. It could not have been more different from this time, when I mentally ignored the presence of the ruts and instead focused all of my intention on the line that I wanted to cycle. Magic!

The example the book uses, in the first chapter in fact, is a golf lesson. I can relate to a lot of it, especially as I did archery when I was still at university, another sport that depends on good technique, but for which becoming consciously distracted by technique can seriously compromise performance. I of course had a lot of this "focus on the the target and visualise" blah blah when I was being coached, but it wasn't until I read this book that I think I really started to understand what it's all about.

Incidentally, guess what keeps popping back into my mind when I'm trying to go into a hypnotic trance? Yup, I keep trying not to come back up, and guess what happens. I think there's a lot of mileage in this principle for hypnosis too.

Magicians are portrayed in the book as those who not only subscribe to the principles, but as those who differentiate themselves from the majority of individuals by not settling, rather constantly pushing themselves to follow a journey. One of the characters in the book refers to life as a journey to a magnificent palace, but that most people find a liveable hovel by the wayside and are content to make do. It's an analogy I can definitely relate to.

And that's the thing about The Magician's Way. It has this way of reaching inside of you and describing, by metaphor, thoughts and feelings that you may always have had but may never have admitted to anyone, or even yourself, perhaps constructs that are common to most people. Then it addresses them.

So I must recommend Whitecloud's book, it is one of the best reads I have ever come across.

On the day I finished The Magician's Way, reading about a man becoming a modern day magician, I had my own bizarre magical moment. I was stopped in the supermarket by one of my fellow shoppers with the words "Hey magician man!". It turned out this guy had been present when I performed some magic tricks to a group of people on a train, but bizarrely our conversation led me to discover that he actually works in the same Industry as me, and we swapped business cards. Magic indeed.

Hats

Time for another one of my observations. This time one about hats.

See, I am rather a fan of hats, but I have in the past been rather hesitant to wear them. You see, there is a certain archetype that I come across every so often, namely the quiet guy in a hat.

Essentially this is the guy who is characterised by being the one who is there, but you rarely hear his voice or his opinion, he is but a spectator to events, in the background, essentially part of the scenery. In short not the sort of person to step up or speak up in order to command any presence, rather he just keeps out of things and lets things be.

So what does he do to express himself? He puts on a hat. Nobody else is wearing a hat, hats are old fashioned and unusual, so this is his way of declaring to the world that he is different, that he stands out. The thing is though, as I see it, nothing has changed; he still doesn't take action, he still doesn't speak out, he's still that quiet spectator, the only difference is that he's now the quiet spectator in a hat. The hat changes nothing, but advertises that the wearer hopes that it will.

This is why I have always been hesitant to wear a hat. I have, for a significant part of my life, been the quiet spectator. I have been wary of the hat because to me it has always been a statement of ineffectual rebellion.

In more recent times, as I have started to demand more of myself, as I have started to push myself to live outside of my comfort zone much more often and I have felt the changes to my character I have stuck to this belief. The hat, I believe, should never be the statement, rather it should only be a trivial symptom of it, an accessory. True change comes from within, not from headwear.

So when I do don my fedora and braces for a bit of blues dancing I only do so for my own enjoyment, and in the belief that now these articles exist in the shadow cast by my outward expression of my character.