Magic Can Look Like Crisis to the Ego

But is crisis actually evidence of magic?

What if all magic is, is the force that clears our mistrust? Dissolves the limits we place on Source? Clears the blocks we put between ourselves and Source?

What if magic is so alive in our lives, and we’re just mislabeling it as crisis? As…bad luck?

What if magic isn’t about manifesting/creating a dream life (as defined by the ego) so much as removing the obstacles for what wants to come through? What if magic is destructive and deconstructive - but what it’s deconstructing is the matrix of our own conditioned making?

I look back on last Summer, where a water event emergency in our apartment complex forced me to evacuate and seek shelter like a refuge with a friend.

And…this “crisis” also was the magic that helped me break the lease that I’d been trying to break - that felt as unbreakable as steel bondage. This “crisis” was the magic that forced me over the precipice of “should I move, should I stay?”

This “crisis” was a water sprinkler malfunction. A water sprinkler going off - randomly, no fire, while I just happened to be out of town - in my apartment (no other apartments had this issue!) in a building that was a brand new build with brand new everything. What are the odds? Magic. Crisis. Both/and.

With magic, you can tell wilder and wilder stories, without them feeling like you’re trying to gaslight yourself into being positive or spiritually bypassing.

What if, every situation that feels archetypal is magic? What if, we’re having more archetypal moments than we realize - we’ve just lost access to archetypal language and wisdom so we don’t know when we’re in archetypal magic?

As I learn the Tarot, I can code my life according to the cards. I can name that, for example, I’m in a 5 of Swords phase or I had a Nine of Coins experience. Or: Sunsetting moss (my previous business was called moss) was a 7 of Coins decision.

Said another way, when something is Tarot-y, there is magic afoot.

When something resonates with a particular card, we can locate that event in the spectrum of archetypal experiences. That is a magic. Because the whole deck of Tarot archetypes is deeper than conditioning, deeper than our own limited archetypal library.

That’s magic. Magic is shaking us out of our limited, narrow filters and expectations.

(Tarotifying life is satisfying.)

There was a moment where I was doing research for someone’s Human Design, and I came across Gate 51: Initiation/The Thunderbolt/Shock. The message of this Gate is: this is a person who - through shocks and life’s curveballs - develops radical faith and trust in Source and Life.

This is a person who is alchemized and awakened into a deeper sense of Self and Source, into a magical being, through disruption, through disorder, through crisis.

There isn’t a sense of initiating or creating (how I used to think about magic) but rather a skill of dancing with, speaking of the Tarot, situations that give “The Tower.”

The Tower is about existing, outdated structures COMING DOWN. About facades crumbling, about our nice societal “good, basic people” armor getting whisked away, about UNMASKING. And the tower does this with a sudden crash, a lightning bolt - there is no gradual, incremental undoing - it comes down in one fell swoop. Boom.

Gate 51 is about recognizing the truth of what is happening and what is called for without delays, responding with skill and alacrity, the superpower of adaptability. Gate 51 is about the ability to look at the ruins of the Tower and see the potential and resources for a better way of being. Gate 51 is about seeing that the Tower coming down was a blessing from Source, not (or maybe, in addition to, depends) a curse.

Christie Inge writes, “Gate 51 believes life is trustworthy because of it’s curveballs (rather than in spite of them)…. [Whatever happens] is always happening for us, not to us.”

Gate 51 is initiated into magic, the abundance and support of Source, through upheaval and crises that blindside. For this gate, crisis cultivates trust. That juicy big trust, that let’s us take bigger and bigger risks, dare greater and greater, bet bigger and bigger. Because, completely irrationally, we are certain we are held.

I don’t have this gate defined, yet the truth of what I read seared itself on my soul, like a red hot brand. Magic.

Magic is trickster-y. It comes at us upside down, backwards, giggling.

Magic’s magic is destructive. I got to thinking about this connection between crisis, and faith, and magic. And I though about where in astrology we find crisis/upheaval - we find deep, shattering crisis in the 8th house, associated with the sign of Scorpio, the planet Pluto.

But what exactly is the root of the crisis? I posit that the crisis is actually caused by the fixity of water (Scorpio = fixed water) and the magic coming to break that bond - because it’s developed into an unhealthy, outdated, compulsive pattern.

I hypothesize that our emotional brain (which is what creates our implicit and associative memories) creates these limiting beliefs (my mentor Jules Taylor Shore calls them “psychological knowings”) that feel like absolute truth to us. But they are actually born out of highly emotional events. The more emotional something felt, the more of a chance it has to move to long-term memory and to our memory files of associative memories - the “rules” we’ve created about the world that predictively help us make sense of the present. We are most attached to our most emotionally charged “rules.”

Or we get stuck in relationships because of a chemical bond, of a neural network worn deep, and long after the relationship has expired, our compulsive brain makes it impossible to leave.

And that is what magic is here to break up, break down, loosen, so we can see a different reality, different possibilities. Magic breaks down energetic and emotional and narrative scar tissue. Magic undoes compulsion, habituation, the unquestioning acceptance of “how its always been.” Magic destroys the fixity of our beliefs, limits, and stories.

And when we resist, when we want to keep holding onto the “rules” from the past - THAT’S when crisis occurs.

So - said another way - crisis is EVIDENCE of magic at work. Crisis is the FRICTION of magic and our cognitive biases and compulsions.

Magic can look like crisis to the ego. Magic can look like crisis to the small self that wants small things.

(This post was inspired by Britten LaRue’s Podcast on Mercury.)