Chasing Quasars
Extract from Chapter 38 of The Journey Across Forever by Wayne Saalman
THERE ARE FAIRY TALES buried in all our souls and not just the ones we hear as children. We are also influenced by the ones born of our cultural influences: the people with whom we interacted during our formative years, the architectural environment that surrounded us, the stories we heard, the books we read, the television shows we happened to see, the movies that inspired us to seek adventure and to reach for Olympian heights in our lives.
Ours is a world full of stimulants. As Robert Anton Wilson writes in his book, Cosmic Trigger: “Out of the hundred million buzzing, bright, busy signals received every minute, the human brain ignores most and organizes the rest in conformity with whatever belief system it currently holds.”
Clearly, when we are in our formative years that belief system is malleable, mutable, and subject to major forms of influence. We see, we hear, we leap to youthful conclusions at every turn. We give every event, every encounter, every piece of information a personal twist or spin in our minds in such a way that, in retrospect, every aspect of those events and encounters attain a certain mythical quality that turns them eventually into storybook tales.
The same holds true when we become adults. We continue to mythologize our lives via the narratives we share with our friends and families, which is to say that what we make of what happens to us is down to what we choose to remember. At times, we embellish; at times, we choose to forget.
The key to creating positive growth, I believe, is through understanding that reality is indeed like a magic mirror and that we can actively and consciously put forward into it our best face at all times.
This, it seems, is the way to make real magic.
Real magic is not the fairy tale variety that children so love, nor is it the kind that results in fireworks that dazzle the eye and boost the superficial self.
We don’t need to be great sorcerers or wizards.
What real magic results in is a form of experiential wisdom which dazzles the inner spirit and inspires a person to become capable of conjuring a wondrous life of transcendental magnificence. The whole cosmos awaits us if only we are open enough and expansive enough to chase all of the wonders on offer, not literally, of course, but metaphorically. Those distant mysterious giant balls of energy known as quasars are flying off in every direction and can take us with them if we are daring enough to take wing along with them. After all, the imagination is boundless.
If we carefully read the work of most wisdom masters, we discover their belief that a higher power exerts a tremendous influence on us during the entire course of our lives. These higher powers can be viewed by us as impersonal autonomous forces such as the archetypes of the collective unconscious, as Jung posits, or as personal entities to which we are connected; to wit: angels, daimons or Transcendentals of some nature. However, we choose to characterize such enigmatic powers, these personal or impersonal forces or entities might be properly considered to be the allies of each of us. They are psychoid allies of the highest order.
In other words, no matter how alone we may feel at times, we are ever and always connected to a higher power, one that stimulates and exerts an influence on us, but we are also possessed of free will, which means that we can make of life what we want.
Crucially, however, what we make of what we see in any given fleeting moment factors into, and ultimately determines, both our destiny and our fate.
