The Mystery of Consciousness

×

Expand

francescoch Getty Images/iStockphoto

Is there really magic in our world? Or do we simply delude ourselves into such imaginings, perhaps to assuage our fears or attempt to cheat fate? Is enchantment simply a fanciful mental refuge shielding us from the vagaries and banalities that sometimes populate daily existence? Challenging questions. But, while hiking the rugged Burren National Park in southwest Ireland, I was fortunate to happen upon my own answer.

That day, a light mist swirled over the landscape while I made my way up a rocky trail that climbed steeply above the valley floor. Ahead, I spotted a woman and little girl on their way down, their chatter punctuating the quiet of the Irish countryside. When the girl spotted me, a stranger, she scurried warily behind her mother, who turned and knelt to face her. I was within earshot of their exchange.

“I’ll put a spell on us,” she told the shy child, smiling brightly. “And then the gentleman won’t be able to see us. We’ll be invisible!”

Then, Mom rose and solemnly waved her hands over her daughter’s head, chanting in Gaelic. The girl stood spellbound, and when the incantation was complete, she looked toward me again, by which time I had assumed my role in this fable we were collectively creating in the wee one’s psyche. My gaze was up and away from her toward a distant escarpment that towered overhead. Seeing my eyes averted, the mother bid her daughter to proceed past me. As they neared, in my peripheral vision, I saw the lassie stop and look straight at me, but I didn’t return her stare or acknowledge their presence in any fashion. In her mind, I saw them not.

“You see, darling, we’re invisible,” the mother reassured her. “The man can’t see us. It’s magic!”

For a short time, the little girl stood mesmerized, awestruck by her mother’s magical power to seemingly shape the world to her will. As they rambled off, the woman looked back at me with a bright smile and a wink. Nodding to each other in recognition, I recalled that, through our perceptions, we humans are the makers of magic, just as we also participate in creating its opposite—the real world of nuts, bolts and balderdash. Don’t buy the notion that so-called reality is, in part, a product of our minds rather entirely that of the external world out there?

Participatory Reality

Well, consciousness is perhaps the most mysterious and least understood whatever-it-is in the human experience. And, increasingly, neuroscientists and even physicists recognize that our experience of reality is participatory—meaning it is shaped by our awareness and ways of perceiving, as well as by the external world itself. We are not dispassionate observers objectively and accurately detecting a hard, immutable reality out there.

Color, for example, is not just a property of what is in the physical world, but it is created through our senses and, ultimately, within the visual cortex of the brain. The mind takes the raw visual inputs from outside and concocts a recognizable image, a representation of reality, a kind of mental map rather than the external topography itself. And, as has been stated many times, the map is not the territory.

As such, the realms of imagination, dreams and spiritual experiences reflect another sort of reality, one far less connected to the pragmatic world that rules our daily lives. When we invest in and cultivate these magical mental spaces and states of awareness, they become more authentic, not in a way that nullifies the so-called real world, but in a way that balances and, hopefully, enriches it.

So far as we can discern, the magical does not transform or rule over the realness and limitations of the external world we inhabit, as the young girl on the Burren may have concluded. Rather, it creates its own inner reality, one that lives in the human spirit in a way that isn’t tangible or quantifiable. Does magic exist? It existed there and then in the mind and spirit of that little lass.

And that’s good enough for me.

For more, visit philipchard.com.