A mystery is a lot stranger than that. A mystery cannot be solved, and not because it is too difficult. The point of a mystery is not its solution; the point of it is the effect it has on you. You see a mystery and you say to yourself, wow.
Marcel uses the example of a person who is ill. A doctor would be likely to regard the illness as a physical – bodily – problem, whereas a priest might say that it is the manifestation of a spiritual problem. Different though these approaches may be, they both treat the illness as a problem that we can definitely solve once we understand how cause and effect have worked in this particular case. Which is not a bad way to treat it, of course.
But the ill person might feel there is more to it than that. Her illness is, in Marcel’s terms, a ‘presence’, not quantifiable, not definable in traditional scientific or religious terms, but still there, strongly felt, entirely real. Someone with a psychotherapeutic background might be able to give an interpretation of that feeling, but, Marcel would argue, that would be yet another way of not acknowledging the feeling for what it is, of simplifying a profound mystery by dressing it up as a problem.
The shadows on the wall of your bedroom are a presence. The mind-reading magician at the market stall is a presence. You feel, for an extraordinary moment, that there is more to them than you can ever dream of explaining. They are presenting you with a mystery. Scary in one case, elating in the other, but always wondrous.
This notion of ‘mystery’ might sound like dangerously New Age-ish hogwash, and our instinctive reaction might be to steer it back towards the safe haven of a definition in terms of a ‘very, very difficult problem’. The basic promise of modern science is, after all, that there are no questions that cannot be answered. Which might well be true, but even so, there are questions whose whole raison d’être is that they are not to be answered. Rather, these questions do something for you and to you. They give you an opportunity to grow not necessarily in knowledge, but in wisdom. When a Zen teacher asks what is the sound of one hand clapping, he does not intend you to come back to him with an essay on the subject. Our world behaves a lot like Zen teachers. It gives us dark and luminous mysteries, awakening in us an inchoate feeling that cannot be elucidated either by science or spirituality, but which sets both of them in motion. That feeling is our sense of wonder.
Wonder is beyond reason and before it: it is the emotion we feel when we find ourselves face to face with a mystery. So, mystery is our first key. Before setting off on our journey, we will find the spark that will jump-start our tired old motorbike by relearning how to recognize mysteries as such. Children are good at this because they still don’t know that everything is supposed to be a problem waiting for a solution. It is a tougher call for us jaded adults.
Magicians can help us once again, for they reveal the simple and profound truth that mysteries are not always grandiose. When we think of wonder, we tend to conjure up visions of magnificent natural landscapes, of towering mountain peaks and raging oceans haunted by white leviathans. And yet mysteries can be very small. Magicians re-enchant us using everyday props (or props that look as if they are everyday props, which is even better). If a magician conjoins and then separates two hoops that look – shall we say – rather unusual, your first thought will be that these hoops are special, they are not your regular hoops, so there is nothing strange or miraculous about their conjoining and separation. But if the hoops are just plain steel ones, well, that is strange, isn’t it?
Magic works through what is already at hand, already around you and already within you.
Eugene Burger was an adept at close-up magic, working on the same old tricks with cards and coins and strings. It was his crystal-clear understanding of the necessity of mystery that made all the difference to his art. When he cut the strings and joined them together again, he made you look at them with a different set of eyes.
This is what magic can give us. Not a better understanding of the tricks of life, or even a better understanding of psychology in the strict sense, but rather, a new outlook on our humdrum daily routine. Magic teaches us that we can make it wonderful, with some training and some work.
We are surrounded by mysteries, at every twist and turn of life, but we have forgotten how to look at them. We can learn again. Enchantment never left the world: it is we humans who shut our eyes and closed our ears. The good news is that an appreciation of mystery is such an important part of us that we can bury it within ourselves, and bury it deep, but we can never ever make it go away. We haven’t used up our sense of wonder. It is still within us, within you. With the workout at the end of this chapter, we start the process of unearthing and polishing it.
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The more time I spent immersed in theatrical magic, the more I realized the extent to which it occupies a zone of creative tension between science, whose discoveries magicians turn into fodder for a show, and spirituality, whose feelings magicians want to awaken. There is a technical dimension to magic, but it would be disingenuous to deny that there is a spiritual one as welclass="underline" the very word magic, as we have seen, comes from the earliest days of the history of religion. A lot of magicians are sceptics and atheists, but rare is the magician who never thought about the spiritual implications of his illusions.
Spirituality and science, then. Now that I had found my spark, it was time to start the real journey, to explore these two crucial strands.
So I set out on a quest to meet witches, scientists and other priests.
THE WORKOUT
Before beginning the workout, please buy a notebook: this is going to be your Book of Wonder. It can be a cheap notepad or one of those elegant Castelli ones made in Italy, it does not matter. But please use an actual physical notebook as your Book of Wonder, rather than an app or a word processor. Digital technologies make noise in our mind, below the threshold of consciousness, and we want to keep that threshold free for new thoughts and ideas.
Some exercises in the workout will require you to write down your reflections: you should record these in the Book of Wonder.
Every time you do an exercise of any kind, make a note in your Book of Wonder. Write down what exercise you did, and a few words about how it went. Was it easy? Was it hard? Did your mind push back against it? Did you think it was pointless? Write down as many reflections as you can in the time you have, without censoring them: no one else is going to read your Book of Wonder, so don’t be afraid to sound silly.
If possible, write in your Book of Wonder immediately after doing an exercise. If this is not possible, write as soon as you can. Do not let a night’s sleep intervene between when you do the exercise and when you write your notes.
Please bear in mind that the workout will be much less effective if you do not keep your Book of Wonder up to date. Updating it need not take any more than five minutes, if five minutes is all you have.
In our first workout, we are going to get acquainted with the idea that mystery is a doorway to wonder.
1. The Effect We Want
Write down in your Book of Wonder three or more ways in which wonder might help you. Would you like to re-enchant your relationship? Do you want to be more creative? Are you stuck in a career you don’t particularly enjoy? Do you want your life to be more enchanted as a whole?