Magic and the Third Force, by Steffan Soule

A professional magician ponders a universal law

At the beginning of magic there are laws. Magic appears as if it breaks those laws. Or does it use laws we do not understand? People who create magic are known as magicians. Real magic occurs and can be felt when a magician presents an experiment on stage or close up. Experienced magicians know magic from the inside out and can perform it for real at the drop of a hat. I know. I was a professional magician for more than forty years, making a living performing for audiences in person from 1980 to the present day, and am now a semi-retired professional.

Magic, a term that conjures images of wands, spells, and fantastical realms, is not just the stuff of fairy tales and fantasy. It is an art form rooted in the laws of perception, psychology, and physics, yet it dances on the edge of the inexplicable. Magicians, the architects of wonder, weave together the seen and unseen, crafting experiences that challenge our grasp of reality.

But is it real? How does one know it’s fake? What is not real about a magic show? Magicians do not know how to break laws. They know how to work with laws unseen or unknown. Only some of those laws work with deception while most work by directing attention to assumptions which form associations and trigger established patterns of belief. All mental and emotional objections to the experiment are seen ahead of time by the magician, who can lead the spectator toward the disillusion of every imagined method that could possibly cause the effect of the magician’s experiment. Those methods, if known, would be the secret behind that magic effect, the real laws at work or at play for the spectator’s conclusion: “It must be magic!”

Magic is the feeling of wonder, the jolt of astonishment, the opening of the heart and mind to the unknowable. The potency of magic follows us wherever we go without our knowing because there’s more data in front of us and coming into us than we’ll ever see, sense, feel, or know. We get this experience when we look at the stars, the ocean, mountain ranges, and the moonrise or when we experience a good magic show. The magician, in many ways, mirrors the grandeur of the cosmos, drawing our attention to the beauty of the unknown and the power of imagination.

The true essence of magic is not in the trickery or the sleight of hand, but in the experience it evokes within us. It is the gasp of surprise, the momentary lapse of reason by association, the childlike joy of witnessing the impossible. Magic reminds us that there is more to the world than meets the eye, that there are depths to reality that we have yet to explore.

We have a feeling when we see magic. Our mind lets go during skilled presentations of real magic. Step by step the skill of the magic experiment is structured for the mind, to deny its solutions; and for the feelings, to experience awe. Solutions, invoked by the magician like a garden path to enlightenment, dispelled skillfully, disappear and magic results. This is when the feeling of magic occurs.

The invisible blends with the visible to actualize the magical. Magic is making happen what you imagine you will create. It is also seeing something happen that you cannot explain. It is also knowing how small we are while feeling how great.

As stated, experienced magicians learn how to take all solutions away, one by one until our minds are fried, and we must feel the impossibility and face it. Most of us love this when the magician facilitates the process conscientiously. Here is why: We tend to gain energy in our hearts and imagination when astonishment and wonder arise. We imagine that maybe anything is possible and just maybe we don’t know everything. We see we are no less than the trees and the stars, that we have the right to be here while we simultaneously feel the wonder and awe at how tiny and how small we are. We are nearly insignificant and yet our immense importance is that our impermanence gives us the grace to embrace how vital and crucial and how important we are and in every moment.

Your left brain thinks like a machine. Your right brain senses meaning, feels the connections, and sees the magnificent power of interconnectedness between us and all living things. We need both. We mostly use only one side these days, the wrong one for recognizing namaste, aikido, the Tao, the self-remembering-being. The wrong one for conscious attention focused on remembering presence with attention free to see the holy sources.

Real magic happens when we see that we don’t see. We realize we have no explanation, and our left brain relaxes to permit us to look for the meaning of the moment which, with a magical experience, usually includes awe.

Impressions of wonder, astonishment, awe, or startling or shocking moments feed our souls. Magic, therefore, is food for the soul. And that’s why the art of magic has become so useful for therapists. Unfortunately, politicians also use magic so to speak, and they mess up the practice of magic by using the methods and techniques for purposes magicians unanimously consider to be unethical.

Again, what does everyone see as fake about a magic show? Magicians are honest about their purpose upfront, before the curtain rises, while power-possessors pose as having values while using magic secretly and dishonestly. That is, unless you are a magician like me and you see right through the routines of those using methods taken from magic and applied poorly or wrongly in public scenarios.

Magicians are actors in the role of a magician. Expert actors of this role perfect techniques that most humans never learn about or know how to spot in the present moment with others.

Do we think the trick is fake? Do we think the magician is tricking us? What would we learn from our answers to these questions if we could follow one magic effect which amazed us to the end and faithfully reproduce the so-called trick for others? Study and rehearsal are a requirement for a routine to be imitated. Learning magic is an intense process involving all aspects of your multiple intelligences or “three brains” (thinking, feeling, moving/sensing).

G.I. Gurdjieff coined the phrases “three-brained being” and “three-centered being.” He directed presentations in New York with magic, dance, and music. Some of his students learned closely guarded secrets of modern mentalism (a category of magic) from him. He understood magic and taught his students to present magic with him for his audiences in New York City at Carnegie Hall in 1924. He also wrote about how to work with his methods, at the very least, in theory.

Sometimes Gurdjieff tricked his students by presenting them with choices which when investigated later were seen to involve his own personal capacity to suffer and bear the pain of appearing to be bizarre or self-serving, while in reality he was actually creating conditions for the benefit of others and refusing to gain personally. When Gurdjieff’s group presented magic under his direction, with his guidance, they told the audience they would present: tricks, half tricks, and real supernatural phenomena. 

Gurdjieff said that events appearing as magic are actually law-conformable, one thing flowing into the next. And he writes about this in his book known as Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, when one of his characters says, “…we shall soon be worthy to become nonparticipating eyewitnesses of certain of these World-laws, which for ordinary uninitiated three-centered beings are what they call ‘great-inscrutable-mysteries- of-Nature’ but which in reality are only natural and very simple results ‘automatically-flowing-one-from-the-other.’”

P.D. Ouspensky studied with Gurdjieff while searching for the miraculous and he quotes Gurdjieff as saying, “‘Doing’ is magic.”  And Gurdjieff demonstrates his understanding of magic and “Doing” when he writes in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men:

What occurred was one of those interventions that people who are capable of thinking consciously—in our times and particularly in past epochs—have always considered a sign of the just providence of the Higher Powers. As for me, I would say that it was the law-conformable result of a man’s unflinching perseverance in bringing all his manifestations into accordance with the principles he has consciously set himself in life for the attainment of a definite aim.

Gurdjieff teaches that there are three holy forces in all phenomena: affirming, denying, and reconciling, and that people do not notice the third force, reconciling. The Gurdjieff teaching has taught me how to sense the third force. Gurdjieff taught people how to experience the reconciling force through movement, music, magic, and the practice of self-remembering. He also teaches this throughout his series of writings.

From his teachings of the Law of Three, we learn how to use three to see one and to use one to see three. He demonstrated how to be present and to develop our own higher being from the intentional endurance of keeping our attention on our true self, empty of mechanical thinking, free of divided emotions, impartial to our lack, objective about our potential, and aware of incoming data. In addition to what you imagine is real magic, this practice makes real magic too—the magic of harmonious human development.

Between affirming and denying, we are reconciling. When we see we are reconciling, we can find a way to keep reconciling all the time. Or maybe we are stuck in one of the two opposing forces:

Affirming is in the mind, it is in the power of the feelings saying yes, it is in the movement of the body applying itself to the task at hand.

Denying is receptive when in relationship, and preventative when it stops the flow. It is the arena in which the ingredients for change can be contained. Denying includes the conditions affecting us, though the conditions may cause us to act with affirmation.

When a person has the ability to engage with the reconciling third force, they have a bit of magic because they can blend with reality while seeing the invisible forces creating it. When you can see a law at work that another does not see, you are in the role of the magician. You have arrived at the beginning of your magic show.

What matters for magic is the ability for us to see third force. Because we do not see it, and because Gurdjieff’s methods push us to experience it, we can assume that it is possible to become trained at seeing or experiencing third force. First force, affirming, we all know. Second force or denying is easy to understand. But how to become aware of an invisible force that is always present? Would that not be like magic? Would those who achieve this training become magicians?

Are you a third force magician already? Maybe you have noticed how you already:

Wait for the right time to bring up a difficult subject with a friend or a collaborator;

Stop the expression of false personality-based jokes, ideas, or judgments in order to make space for real communications;

Feel the sunlight as it warms the grass and embrace the grace which brings you back to the present moment in which you can remember yourself, deepen your presence and attentiveness;

Smile at the people with whom you come in contact, find some good quality and offer them a genuine compliment;

Sense a duty from inside your own being which is genuine and aims to give to others without fear;

Return to the present moment and maintain attention on seeing “what is,” without adjusting.

It requires inner work to connect with the attention to sense three forces in any given moment. When you see the third force in a situation, it feels like a bit of magic has entered the scene. You see that there are potentials for reconciliation when the reconciling force appears. Its appearance is not predictable, nor is it knowable what it will become. You can see its presence and see where it flows and then it becomes the solution that enables us to move forward. All events have third force, but when we are observing sincerely and honestly, we admit it is neither seen nor sensed.

Magicians are honest because we clearly see that the opposite, deception, is possible to track and is therefore futile to try to hide. It cannot last. It is not objective. And so magicians boldly admit when there could have been a trick involved with a so-called miracle. Magicians have the capacity to debunk or call out imbalance or disharmony. We care about real magic so we don’t want to foster false understandings in general. Just like the spectator who is not satisfied with wonder and awe, but instead prefers to figure out the trick, magicians will debunk false magic if they see it. Probably ninety percent of what many imagine to be real magic would be debunked by a trained magician. It is known that magicians are more likely to be honest than many others because they know how each feign can be traced. They know it can all be debunked. Magicians since Houdini have engaged in exposing false experts who were using magic but pretending that it is real. That pretense is unethical, and magicians agree on this without equivocation.

The magician’s craft is not about deception; it is about transformation. It transforms skepticism into belief, the mundane into the marvelous, and doubt into delight. It is a testament to the human spirit’s unending quest for the extraordinary, a pursuit that is as timeless as the stars themselves.

So, the next time you witness an expert perform a magic show, allow yourself to be transported. Embrace the impossibility, revel in the astonishment, and remember that magic is not just a trick—it is a gateway to a world where wonder reigns supreme. And for the practitioner of inner work, embrace the possibility of three holy forces while striving to become aware of how we can include all three forces at play in all and everything. ◆

This piece is excerpted from the Fall 2024 issue of Parabola, THE WAY OF MAGIC. You can find the full issue on our online store.