The Third Reality

Most people live in two different realities, which I would refer to as either the religious reality or atheist reality. The religious reality, is where people believe that the world was created by a male god, while the atheistic reality is where the world was created by pure chance. Although some people are very sure which camp they belong to, others are very unsure and mix the two different realities in their lives. This was true of two of the most famous physicists, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Both were very religious men, in fact the majority of Isaac Newton’s writings was about religion and alchemy.

There is a third reality and that is a magical reality. This is still accepted in places like Africa where people still believe in the power of witch doctors. It is also accepted in the occult and new age groups in the West but these people are a small minority and are not part of the mainstream reality.

The problem with either the religious or atheistic realties is that both make people feel powerless. The religious reality is basically fatalistic, where is it claimed that everything that happens to us, “Is but the will of Allah, (or god)”. This reality claims that an all-powerful god created the world and we are totally helpless in the face of this omnipresent power. It is true that in this reality some people seem to be able to defy the will of god, but it is claimed that this is because there is another powerful god called the Devil who make people do this. The result is that humans then become pawns in the conflict between these two all-powerful gods.

The atheistic reality claims there is not a god at all, and the world was created by pure chance, through what is called, “the big-bang theory” and life on earth was created by a chance chemical reaction and intelligent life was created by evolution. Again this is a fatalistic reality where our lives are controlled by our genes. If we have good genes then we are healthy and successful but if we have bad genes then we are unhealthy and a failure. In one well know book called, “The Selfish Gene”, by Richard Dawkins , he claims that the only purpose and meaning of life is to pass on our genes to the next generation.

As mentioned before, people who accept either the religious or atheistic realities feel totally powerless, whereas the third reality of magic gives us a possibility of empowering us.

So what is the magical reality like? Most people only know about magic from stage magicians, Harry Potter stories or stories of witch doctors. Stage magicians are only conjuring tricks; Harry Potter stories are only fantasy stories from the mind of J.K.Rowlings while witch doctors are suppose to have primitive and superstitious beliefs. Yet as we can see from the popularity of the Harry Potter stories there are many people what are greatly fascinated by magic.

Magical beliefs are commonplace in most primitive stone-age tribes. These beliefs where then attacked at first by religions like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. Then by atheistic science, which declared that magic, does not exist. In Europe there was a very violent campaign to eradicate magic completely through the infamous witch-hunts. In this brutal campaign, millions of women were tortured, hung or burnt alive, because it was claimed they were witches. Then in the 17th century through the rise of science it was claimed that magic was only a primitive superstitious belief. So magic was forced underground and only existed in occult secret societies like Freemasonry, Rosicrucian and Alchemy.

Yet at the time when it seemed magic was to be eradicated completely from the minds of ordinary people in European countries, it was to make an unexpected comeback.

In the late 18th century some doctors began to experiment with magnets as a way to cure people and some doctors claimed success in using this treatment. One of these doctors was Franz Anton Mesmer. He experimented with magnets with some success and then unexpectedly discovered he could get the same result in healing by simply using his hands without magnets in them. From this he formed the theory of ‘animal magnetism’. Although he was successful in curing people, his treatment and theories were so controversial, he had to leave Vienna, the place where he lived, and moved to Paris. In Paris he continued his treatment and it was claimed he would dress up as a wizard and even use a magic wand. But although he was a great success and was able to heal many of the rich and wealthy in high society, his methods greatly upset conventional minded doctors.

A commission was created to investigate his treatment, (which included Benjamin Franklin who was living in Paris at the time). They managed to disprove Mesmer’s theory on animal magnetism and discredited him, but in doing so they also, ‘threw the baby out with the bathwater’. Simply because they had no explanation of his great success in healing people.

Mesmer was forced to retire to Switzerland. Yet this was not the end, because some doctors were impressed with his cures and attempted to do the same, which created the practice of mesmerism. In time these practises moved out of the hands of doctors to more dubious characters like public entertainers.

In the 19th century mesmerism travelled to USA and was taken up by a man called Parkhurst Quimby. He was a stage mesmerist and had an act similar to a modern stage hypnotist. But because mesmerism was associated with healing, sick people would come to him after his act and ask him to heal them. At first he didn’t take this too seriously and just went through mesmerist healing techniques to satisfy the demands of these people. To his surprise they worked, and he attempted to try and understand why. He rejected completely Frana Mesmer’s theories of animal magnetism, and formed a completely new theory.

He decided that it was the mind that cured people. He theorised it was the mind that caused people to become ill in the first place and it was also the mind that healed people as well. So he set himself up as a doctor. When people came to him for treatment he invented a reason why they were ill and then invented another reason why they can be cured. He reasoned that once he gave people the confidence that they will be cured by the treatment he recommended, then the person’s mind would effect the healing. (Strangely, even many modern doctors do something like this, in a recent survey it was discovered that a large number of doctors routinely give their patients placebo pills.)

Quimby’s work may have been forgotten as just another quack doctor except he cured a very controversial character by the name of Mary Baker Eddy. She had been an invalid for a long time, and tried many different cures and so went to Quimby as a last resort. Unexpectedly he cured her. Now, most normal people accept any cure they might gain from a doctor or healer without question, but Mary Baker Eddy wasn’t an ordinary person. She wanted to know from Quimby how he was able to cure her. He tried to explain his theory, that it is the mind that heals people, but she had a problem with this explanation, because she was a committed Christian.

To her mind he had to be a great spiritual person like Jesus Christ to be a great healer, but when it became clear he wasn’t like this, she lost interest in him. But even though she rejected his explanation at first, it seems his ideas was to have a great influence on her life, as she was to later Christianise his theories.

When she returned home things went badly for her, her old symptoms returned and then one day she slipped on the ice and badly hurt herself. A doctor was called and he diagnosed she was so badly injured that he couldn’t do anything for her. Then in her sick bed she read the Bible and in reading one passage about the healing of Jesus she was inspired to get out of bed and dress herself. When she went downstairs, the people she was staying with became concerned and said she was too ill to be up. She argued against this but during the argument she suddenly fainted and had to be take back to bed. The next morning she done the same and got out of bed and again she had to have a argument with her hosts, but this time she stood firm and declared strongly she was now completely healed.

It would take a book to tell the whole story of Mary Baker Eddy but she went on to create the controversial Christian sect Christian Science. One of the favourite saying of Mary Baker Eddy was.-

“Matter has no reality, all is infinite mind”.

One of the recruits to her new sect was a woman called Emma Curtis Hopkins. At first the two women got on very well together and she became the editor of the “Christian Science Journal”. Then Emma Curtis Hopkins found out about Mary Baker Eddy’s association with Parkhurst Quimby and began to study his teachings, with a view to do an article about him. This made Mary Baker Eddy angry as she claimed that her teachings had nothing to do with Quimby. As the result, Emma Curtis Hopkins had to leave Mary Baker Eddy’s organization. She then moved to Chicago and started her own version of Christian Science. Because she was far more open minded than Mary Baker Eddy she was willing to accept Parkhurst Quimby’s theories and from the combination of Quimby and Eddy and her own ideas, created a new movement called ‘New Thought’.

Emma Curtis Hopkins disagreed with Mary Baker Eddy over the assertion that, “matter has no reality”, and instead claimed, that matter does have reality because it is the reality, we have created.

From Emma Curtis Hopkins teachings came three organizations called, Divine Science, Unity and Religious Science. These organizations were not as dogmatic or rigid as Christian Science, but all of them accepted the premise that it was our thoughts that create illness and it is thought that will heal us. New Thought like Christian Science started off with an interest in healing, but soon accepted the idea that whether we are rich or poor also depended on the way we think. In time this inspired many positive thinking books from authors like Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale. Positive thinking books are still being written and sold today and have been used in both the sporting and business world. As both sportsmen and businessmen recommend positive thinking as a way of winning or becoming wealthy. As many New Though authors have discovered, if they write a book on a deeper understanding of metaphysics very few people will want to read such a book. (Emma Curtis Hopkins book “High Mysticism” never sold very well as it was too heavy for the average reader). But if they were to write books called “Think And Grow Rich”, (Napoleon Hill) or “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie). Then people will read them because such books offer, what seem to be, easy solutions to people’s problems.

In the 20th century both Christian Science and the New Thought organizations have stagnated. They are all still going but haven’t grown either. Then in the late 1960s a trance medium called Jane Roberts wrote a book called, “Seth Speaks”. She dictated this book to her to husband, while she was in a trance, and was channelling a spiritual entity called Seth. Seth was to say the famous phase. –

“You create your own reality”.

After this, many other books followed through the Jane Roberts/Seth partnership, like, “The Nature of Personal Reality”, and “The Unknown Reality”. All these books followed on with the same theme, that our thoughts and feelings create our reality. So if we choose to change our thoughts, then we will also change our reality as well. Jane Roberts continue to write books either with Seth, or on her own, until her death in 1984.

In the 1970s another famous channelled book came out called “A Course In Miracles” the trance medium concerned was Dr Helen Schucman who was a associate professor of medical psychology. The book was written in traditional Judeo-Christian terminology and in many ways is very similar to “Science And Health” written by Mary Baker Eddy. This book again follows the same theme that we create our own reality through what we choose to think.

Then in the mid 1980s another trance medium called Esther Hick began to dictate other books channelled by an entity called Abraham. She and her husband Jerry had read the Seth books by Jane Roberts, and the Esther Hicks/Abraham partnership followed on where Jane Roberts/Seth left off. Although Seth said a lot about the fact we create our own reality, he didn’t say much about how exactly we do this. This then became the questions Jerry Hicks asked Abraham through his wife Esther. So from the Esther Hicks/Abraham books and recordings, we get a better idea of how exactly people do create their own realities.

As mentioned before, the magical reality allows people to empower themselves. But the magical reality is also frightening to many people, because once this reality is accepted, people can become frighten of their own thoughts or the magical power of other people.

The difficulties that can come about are seen in the early days of Christian Science. Because of her authoritarian attitude many people in Christian Science left and started up similar organizations of their own. Mary Baker Eddy came convinced that some of these people were using what she had taught them, in a negative way and were attacking her on the psychic level. So because of this, the history of the early days of Christian Science reads like something out of an occult novel. At this time her husband Asa Gilbert Eddy died and she blamed it firmly on “malicious animal magnetism” from her former pupils.

I have to admit I have been caught up in a psychic war myself. I did for a while become part of a witch’s coven and we were attacked on a psychic level by another coven. What I learnt from this, is that there is a lot of deception involved in attacks like this. Most successful psychic attacks are mostly done on the verbal level by undermining another person’s confidence and talking them into self-destructive thought patterns or behaviour. Sportsmen do it to each other all the time, as they try to ‘psyche out’ their opponent.

It is an unfortunate fact that witch doctors in Stone Age tribes have abused their power by cursing people they don’t like. When this happens, the people who are cursed becomes so frighten of the power of the witch doctor, that they think in such negative terms and end up destroying their own bodies through the power of their own minds. Not realising that the witch doctor has only the power of deception to hurt them. (Modern Western doctors can unwittingly pull off the same trick, by telling a patient he has only a few months to live. If the patient has great faith in the power of doctors he will believe what is told to him and die in the same time frame.)

It is abuses of power like this, has given the magical reality a bad name. For instance Voodoo is seen by people as something very dark and evil, but like with anything else, it is only a minority of Voodoo priests who have abused their power, that have given the religion a bad name.

Another problem people find with the third reality is that once people are told that their thoughts and feelings create their reality, they find it very hard to take control over their thoughts. So they can become frighten of their own thoughts if they come aware of how negative most of them are. Though controlling ones thoughts is not different from learning any other skill. A person who first learns to do typing or learning to play a game like table tennis, will find they are totally useless at the beginning, but with practise and perseverance they find the more they work at it, the better they become. For anyone who has never attempted to take control over there own thoughts, it will off course be difficult at the start, but it can be learnt.

A third reason that makes it difficult or people to accept the magical reality is that they find that, “with power comes responsibility”. It is normal for people to blame the misfortunes of their lives on other people, fate, God or the Devil. Yet people who accept the magical reality find that by blaming others they give their power away. People in the magical reality find that they only have one enemy in their lives, and that is themselves. This is because if they accept personal responsibility to everything that happens in their lives they become empowered, but if they try to blame others then it means they are saying that someone else has power over them.

Certainly for anyone dying of cancer the last thing they want to hear is someone telling them that it was their own mind that caused the cancer. The same would be true for someone living in poverty, they would not like someone telling them that, “it is your own fault that you are so poor”. Unfortunately this can be the attitude of many people who have taken up positive thinking and made a success of this. They then can become contemptuous of poor or even sick people claiming that they were the authors of their own misfortune. Such attitudes do tend to give positive thinking a bad name.

So for this reason the religious and atheistic realities are easier to accept, because although a person can feel totally powerless living is such realities, at least they don’t have to take responsibility for their own problems, and don’t have to blame themselves for their problems. In the end the magical reality is the reality of personal power, but it is also the reality of personal responsibility. Because if it is our thoughts that create our own reality then the only person that can change our thoughts is ourselves.

A final problem is that most of us have been brought up to believe in either the religious or atheistic realities, or to live in a mixture of both. Now, trying to live in two different realties can make life complicated and confusing. To add another reality to this, can make it even worse. This is true of anyone first accepting the magical reality because when they attempt to take control over their own mind, they discover that most of their habitual thoughts come from their childhood. And so they find themselves partly living the reality taught to them as children and the new reality they have now chosen to adopt.

So taking on the magical reality can become hard work for those brought up to believe in either the religious or atheistic realities, but it is worth it if you wish to empower yourself.