Saturday 10 May 2014

The Magic of Awareness

     Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and couldn't remember which direction you were facing in the room, then all of sudden the problem corrects itself and you realize what's going on? Have you ever been in a vehicle traveling around a city or the countryside, and you thought you knew where you were. Then all of a sudden, you came to a place that you definitely recognized, and it didn't coincide with what you thought. In that moment your perceptions 'snap' back to reality as if you traveled through a hidden worm hole. Experiences such as these can be bewildering, and the act of recognizing what's actually going on can feel like magical. In fact it is this phenomena that magicians take advantage of in their performances. These examples demonstrate just how powerful our brain really is and how it literally creates our  every experience. The main point is this: anything outside of our awareness does not seem to exist; when something does enter our awareness, it 'pops' into our personal worldview.

     Each one of us has a particular understanding of the universe in which we live. Our understanding is based on our experiences, and those experiences are the basis for the partial conceptual model universe that is in our brain. As we go about our lives, we continually update this working model. However, our model also influences what we see when we go about our lives so we do not always see what is "really there". It is as if a person spent their whole lives wearing pink colored goggles. If they wore them from an early age, they would simply believe that they colors they have always seen are just how things are. For everyone not wearing tinted goggles, it would be apparent that they really don't see the objective truth. In order to see what's really there, they would have to remove the goggles, and this, in essence, is the situation of us all. Metaphorically speaking, we are all walking around with pink goggles that bias how we interpret the world simply because we are animals. Our perceptions are colored by how we understand things to be.

     We cannot perceive that which is outside of our awareness by definition of the word awareness. Our awareness is only made up of a small slice of all the available information in the cosmos, and there is an infinite amount of information to possibly know. Our awareness can be conceptualized as a circle. Anything outside the circle does not seem to exist to us. Something may enter our awareness and we see it for a period of time. When it leaves the circle, if we did not overtly notice it, it ceases to exist. This is more significant in terms of understanding how things work. When we are unaware of how something works, then it will seem to us like magic. Most of the inventions of science would be perceived as magic to people even a couple hundred years ago. If one has no idea of how a remote control works, then a remote basically seems like a magic wand.

     This same concept is actually how 'magic shows' work as well. There is a greater scheme than we, as viewers, are aware. The magician leads our awareness through a serious of logical steps. When we come to the finale, our past experience makes us ready for one thing to happen, but it doesn't. Instead, something else occurs. It doesn't make sense to us. If the magician executes his performance well, what the audience experiences is really something that feels like magic.

2 comments:

  1. great article! i love this one, and that picture answered a life of questions i have had about magic... my brain definitely always tricks me.

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  2. Thank you very much Jordyn!

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