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I'm older than the Goth movement, if you can believe that. Had it existed when I was in secondary school or at University, I would have gone Goth. I was pretty much straight in secondary school. At the university, I became what was called by some a "Freak." Freaks differed from Hippies not in appearance
but in attitude. Hippies had some some sort of philosophic agenda
that they were pushing, if only by example. I have described my introduction to personal violence and pain in earlier writings. As a child, I had a hobby that eventually dovetailed with that. I was an amateur magician. I had a decent act, and fairly nice equipment for someone who had to earn all of the money to pay for it himself. I read the Tarbell Encyclopedia of Magic. I still have the first three volumes. I also read "The Expert at the Card Table." By incredible good fortune, a world-class magician spent the final years of his life in my hometown. He had a small magic shop, and gave free classes. He taught up-close magic, with an emphasis on prestidigitation. I learned from him how to hold a card in my hand and show both sides of my hand to someone, moving the card from front to back as I turned my hand. I learned how to "force" a person to pick the card that I wanted them to, as in the many variations of the "Pick a card, any card," trick. Magicians are not supposed to give away secrets, but I am confident that you won't believe this anyway, so I will tell you how it's done. If I fan out a deck of playing cards in front of you and say, "Pick a card, any card," while you reach out to pick one, this is how I get you to take the one I want you to have: I push it into your hand. Yep. It's that simple. The first time I did it I thought that the person I was practicing on was patronizing me. He wasn't. I had to repeat the test with about a half-dozen people before I believed it really is that simple. It was an eye-opening moment for me. It taught me a fundamental truth of how aware people are about what they are doing, and how much free will they actually have. I just push the card into their hand and they think that they freely chose it. Magic is largely a matter of manipulating people's perceptions. It's also a matter of altering your own perceptions. My father was a fan of an old magazine called "Fate." It was dedicated to the exploration of the occult, in supposedly objective articles. By reading that magazine, I learned how to see into a crystal ball (I didn't know it at the time, but that was when I first learned how to meditate). I tried Astral Projection, but it didn't work for me. A lot of things did work, however, like conscious, or controlled, dreaming. I was an adolescent, and I believed. That gave me an advantage over an adult trying to learn the same things. Before I go any farther, I should give the standard caveat that I may or may not have any idea of what I'm talking about below. I will discuss some things that, if you try them, could hurt you severely. So don't do any of them. Near the end of elementary school, I read a book that purported to explain how Yogis perform a lot of their tricks. Some of it was accurate; some was not. I experimented with the techniques that I could. It explained, for example, how a person can walk barefoot on a bed of coals. It turns out that skin does not conduct heat all that well, and that if the coals are smooth and your weight well distributed, all you have to do is walk at a smooth, even pace, and the coals will not burn your feet. There is not time enough for the heat to be transferred from the coals through your skin. When I studied Thermodynamics in grad school in Mechanical Engineering, I checked this as well as I could using the data available, and it turned out to be correct. I may have had bad data, but it seems plausible. The important thing (the book said) is to not get nervous. If you get nervous, you will sweat. If you sweat, cinders may stick to the bottoms of your feet. That can hurt. I have no idea if that is true or not. Do the souls of our feet even sweat? I learned how to stick a needle through my arm. It turns out that we all have a spot on our arms, above the elbow and to the inside an inch or two, where there are no nerves. Once you can find this spot, you can push a needle under the skin at that location, and then slide it under the skin (the muscles below the skin do have nerves). I had lots of fun demonstrating that in my High School classes. Then there is fire eating. The simplest trick is to strike a match, place it on your tongue and close your mouth. Then you open your mouth and remove the still-burning match. This is straightforward. While you strike the match you make certain that your tongue is well coated with saliva. Heat travels up, so you want your tongue resting on the floor of your mouth when you put the match in your mouth. The saliva protects your tongue, extinguishing the flame that is in direct contact with your tongue. When you close your mouth, the flame loses a lot of free-flowing air, so it shrinks. Basically, it decreases to the point that it does not hurt. When you notice that it is starting to get hot, you open your mouth and remove the still burning match. Wow! Magic. No. Thermodynamics. When I was a freshman in college, I saw a movie. It was either "Lawrence of Arabia," or "Khartoum." Khartoum is about General Gordon, who was every bit the nut case that Lawrence was, so it's easy for me to get them confused. There was a scene (my memory is hazy on the details) in which the protagonist demonstrated how he could place his hand above a candle and not suffer from it. He demonstrates this, holding his hand for a lengthy time over a burning candle, chatting casually while doing so. Afterwards someone asked him what the trick is to feeling no pain while doing the candle stunt. His response was something like, "The trick is not to feel no pain. The trick is to not let anyone know that you do feel pain." And we are back to perception again. This
was another trick that I mastered. It still hurts, so the other trick is to
learn to gauge when to pull your hand out before the skin blisters.
Burn blisters are extremely painful. Again, don't try this at
home. You are reading the musings of a man who is severely lacking
in good judgment, who is permanently disabled from doing incredibly
stupid things, and if you actually believe me, and try this yourself,
you can become severely injured. I have a lot of respect for bikers. Those crazy bastards will do almost anything. The candle trick can buy respect in a place
where respect is very important. The trick is to not let anyone know how badly it hurts. Just smile and pretend that you are immune to the pain. That is the power of perception. What other people perceive to be real is real to them. You can control what people perceive to be real. All it takes is confidence, nerve, and an ability to control yourself. That, plus a little bit of knowledge, for that little edge of an advantage. It doesn't take much of an edge to perform miracles. The ability to keep a straight face is frequently enough. ©Jon Norland 2008 Jon Norland has a bachelor's degree in Physics and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. He was also accidentally entered into a graduate program in English Literature just by showing up and taking classes one year. He was born into a military family, raised as an Air Force brat, and has never stopped traveling. He is currently in the process of moving out of his current house, which he has lived in for five years. He admits this is a lifetime record for living in the same house. He spent the decade of his thirties wandering around the old West, seeing it before it disappeared. He feels it is gone now. He has worked as a wilderness surveyor when he didn't need money badly, and as a construction engineer when he had to put together enough money to take a winter off to ski or go to school. Jon has spent most of his adult career writing software of one kind or another. He is currently disabled. The proximate cause was a paragliding accident, but feels he would have ended up disabled by now anyway as he was born with a bad back, which has made a lifetime career of finding new ways to disintegrate. According to Jon, The only good thing that has come from being disabled is that he has discovered a knack for writing poetry. Pain is an old acquaintance of his, but never a friend. |
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