With this essay, I’m starting my sixteenth year of writing these monthly David’s Desks. Honestly, I had no idea when I started doing this in 2006 at the age of 61 that I’d still be sharing my “Desk” when I was 77. That these essays have continued for so long is due in no small measure to you, my faithful readers, and to your support. You have given my thoughts a warm reception, and this has encouraged me to keep going.
When I started David’s Desk, George Bush was President. We were two years away from the subprime crisis that came close to derailing the world’s economy. We were two years away from seeing the first African-American elected President of the United States. For that matter, we were one year away from Apple introducing the iPhone in 2007. While not the first “smartphone,” (IBM has the honor of having produced that in 1994), it was the first to give unfettered complete access to the Internet, in essence putting a computer in your pocket. That opened up whole new worlds of interconnection and communication, giving us the modern phenomenon of social media with all its benefits and challenges, its rewards and its dangers. And speaking of social media, Facebook opened its doors to the public the same year as David’s Desk began.
In other words, a lot has happened ever since I began writing these essays. Through it all, my intent here has not been to “follow the news” or to write about whatever current event is in the headlines. As it says in the prologue above, my desire has been to share “thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey,” as seen from my perspective. As best I can, I have tried to make each essay reflect on who we are and the resources we have as spiritual beings in touch with timelessness, resources that can then inspire the life we lead in the midst of time and the events of the world.
That will continue to be my objective.
Thinking about the history of David’s Desk (some of the earlier “Desks” were collected and published as a small book, The Flame of Incarnation), I went back this morning to re-read the very first essay I wrote. I wanted to see what thoughts had been in my head all those years ago. True to my objective, they were not tied to any particular event in 2006 but spoke to a truth about our own whole nature. I found them as relevant now as they were back then. So, I decided that in honor of starting this sixteenth year of David’s Desk, I would send you the one that started this experiment. I hope you enjoy it!
NO MUGGLES HERE
I don’t know if your family is a fan of Harry Potter. Mine is. As the books have come out over the years, we have enjoyed more and more J. K. Rowling’s engaging tale of the boy wizard and his friends. In fact, my youngest daughter and I have made a ritual of attending the midnight release parties at our local bookstore whenever a new Potter book has come out. When our four kids were younger, we would all gather in the living room and listen while my wife read the latest installment. It was fun and exciting. Rowling tells a great yarn.
In Harry Potter’s universe, the world is divided into magic-users, known collectively as wizards and witches, and non-magic-users, known as muggles. Much of the fun of the books comes from reading the author’s invention of new words and terms; as neologisms go, muggles is about as good as it gets.
The big difference between Rowling’s fictional universe and ours is that, however fun a word it is, there are no muggles here. We are all magic-users.
Now I’m not talking about fantasy magic, the kind that Harry uses or a wizard in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Stories, while fun, deceive us about magic by turning it into something implausible. We come to think of magic as wizards hurling thunderbolts and flying through the air.
But there is an everyday magic that surrounds us that is so common, even in its occasional unexpectedness, that we don’t pay attention to it. And I’m not talking about the “magic of life” or the “magic of our senses” or any other metaphor for the wonderment we can find in life.
Here are some examples. I’m about to say something, and someone else says the same thing before me. I’m thinking of a friend and she calls unexpectedly. I need to see someone and I accidentally run into that person in a store. I need money that I don’t know how to get and a check arrives out of the blue in the mail from an unexpected source.
Here’s a true story of magic at work. A friend of mine wanted to buy some special bells for her mother but could not find them anywhere. One afternoon she phoned a friend but accidentally dialed the wrong number. The person at the other end turned out to be the clerk in a gift store she had never heard of. More importantly, this store turned out to be the sole importers in the whole city of these special bells.
We call these kinds of events synchronicities, manifestations, good luck, God’s hand, or coincidences. We see the way people long married can complete each other’s sentences, and we talk about them “being in resonance.”
What all these kinds of events and experiences have in common is that something intangible—a thought, a desire, an intent—is having an effect upon something tangible. The immaterial and invisible is affecting the material and the visible. For example, one day I had to give a lecture in the city at a place that is notorious for having very limited parking as one has to park on busy city streets. It was raining, and I was not anticipating a long walk from wherever I could park back to the lecture hall. So I visualized an empty parking place right in front of the hall. When I got there, though, all the parking spaces were full, but on a hunch, I went around the block. Nothing was available, but as I came in view of the lecture hall again, a car pulled out right where I had visualized my parking place. I was able to park conveniently right in front of the hall. An invisible, intangible thought in my head had a visible, tangible consequence.
We can call this coincidence, but it happens time and again in everyone’s life in one way or another. Our thoughts, feelings, intents, desires, wishes, fears, and hopes have a way of manifesting, the invisible world becoming visible.
The evidence is that life responds to us; it configures to our inner nature, to our thoughts, feelings, and spirit. This is real magic.
Why does it do this? How does it happen? What makes this magic work and create a response? Over the centuries, people have come up with different theories: the law of attraction, or the power of thought, of imagination, or of the will. All of these undoubtedly contribute and are part of this magic. At the same time, we all have examples of when they don’t work, of when we thought positively about something and it did not happen or wasn’t attracted or when our will or imagination did not bring about the result we wished.
The point then is not that there is no magic but that it operates more holistically than we may have thought. It isn’t just the law of attraction or the power of thought or the use of the imagination. Other things may be involved, at least some of the time. And if you think about it, this makes sense. Life responds to us as whole beings, not just as thinking beings or feeling beings or imagining beings. What evokes a response at a given moment may be a mystery; we may have to do some attentive observation and experimentation to gain clues about what works for us and what doesn’t. Each of us may come to this magic uniquely, based on our particular individuality; what works for someone else may not work for us because we are different people. But what is certain is that life will and does configure to us. It does respond. Who we are affects and shapes the world we experience. We are the makers and unmakers of worlds. This is everyday magic.
Experiment with this. Try it out. It may not for you be as straight-forward as thinking, “I want that new car,” and it will appear. How magic works for you may operate differently based on your unique relationship with life, the way your interiority and inner nature relates and configures to the world and vice versa. But your magic will work for you and is working all the time. Be a scientist of your own invisible world and investigate to find out how.
The first step into using your magic may be the same for everyone. I believe it is. It consists of simply acknowledging to oneself, “I am not a muggle. I am a magician.”