I’m agnostic and quite skeptical, but lately I’ve been thinking that I need to bring some kind of magic back into my life. Otherwise everything is so rational and boring. Anyway, reading this I realised that what I’m missing is being in touch with the subconscious. So, thank you for naming what I’ve been feeling
You might find it reassuring to realise/remember that you engage with magic constantly, because magic is at the core of human experience. Some examples of this include:
* Making a wish on your birthday candles (or a shooting star)
* Cursing at someone if they cut you off on the road
* Daydreaming about anything (such as someone you fancy, a holiday or even replaying a conversation in your head and how you wish it had gone)
* buying a lottery ticket and using your special numbers
* Saying “sweet dreams” to anyone, or “bless you” when they sneeze
As a practicing witch AND agnostic (meaning I have a skeptic’s brain about a lot of people’s claims of woo), the best way I have found to invite more magic into my life is to treat it with the respect my 5 year old self gave it, which is to say that I let myself believe in it wholeheartedly because it’s more fun than not.
But also, magic is fundamentally about noticing what lies in the liminal spaces, whether that’s through material awareness or intuitive feeling. My son used to be fascinated by how I could click my fingers and make the traffic light turn green.
How do you do that?! he’d ask in wonderment.
Magic, I’d reply.
Eventually, he insisted I tell him the secret of it all, so I explained that if you counted three seconds after the other light turned red, you could say exactly when your light would go green. And yes, I told him, it’s a trick. I’m not making it happen - but I know WHEN it will happen, because I’m paying attention to the thing other folks aren’t looking at.
The root of all magic, even in the most faithful “I absolutely believe in magic” witchy kind of way, is energy because energy is the connecting force of everything single thing in the universe. If you put an apple inside a sealed lead box and leave it there, over the course of billions of years its molecules will break down into energy and reassemble itself over and over again into every possible physical matter we’ve ever seen and many we have yet to see until eventually it turns back into an identical version of the apple it began as. Energy connects every single that that has ever existed or ever will, and magic is about looking beyond what we SEE and noticing what else is there.
I invite you to spend every night this week with this little pre-bed exercise. Stand in front of your bathroom mirror or similar, look at yourself with love and intention and say, “I may be a skeptic, but even science tells me this body carries the remnants of stars. I can feel them glowing in me, casting light formed billions of years ago from the very first moment of their birth. This light is where I find my connection to magic, and to everything that ever was or ever will be.”
You might feel silly at first, but just focus on how the words make you feel and where they buzz in your body. Breathe the feeling in, and let it move through you. Do this every night for seven nights, and see if it makes a difference! I would be very curious to hear an update xx
A bit of mundane magic never goes amiss! If you’re open to it, I recorded a podcast series on exactly this topic in 2021 after a year of lockdown severely dampened my spark. It’s called A Year Of Magical Living ✨
Jasmine...good entry into understanding how we understand the future. You describe well the tapping into the collective conscious and constructing future insights through personal contact with many others.
I add that this is one but importnt slice of Received Information. Our bodies and our minds living in the greater consciousness, are living antennae perfectly capable of receiving much more than what we think is contained in our brain bucket. (ref. Bucky Fuller).
One of my favorite books is one by Dr. Leonard Shlain (father of Tiffany)...ART & PHYSICS. In it he shows that Art has often presaged science by decades, if not by centuries. Artists are particularly good at accessing received information (I am also an artist).
I have used the power of received information for over forty years running my consulting company working with iconic brands, highly successful companies and leaders, major universities, as well as cities and communities. When investor groups introduce my company to work with their portfolios of companies often say... "I don't know how they do it. It sometimes looks like magic but it always works, so listen to them".
This is a big and important topic that most don't know exists and deserves further exploration. Keep carrying the message. I love following your important work.Dan Beam
“We’re all using different instruments to locate the same signal.” Yup. I think you can get to the signal without talking and interacting with a lot of people too.
“All of us who are in the business of deciphering the future do the same thing. We make ourselves sensitive enough to feel the invisible energy in the air, and we give it language. “
That is something that I always felt as strategist but never put into words. Amazing article ✨
I love this lens as I’m a future thinker who uses probability, astrology, and narrative as different modalities of future casting. This is the first time I’ve seen that intersection coherently explained. Staying tuned.
I would love to speak to your group about what nahualismo has to say about the origins of the future.
I have lived in Mexico for the better part of my adult life—not as a tourist, as an immigrant fully imbedded in land and family.
A few years ago, I was initiated into an ancient oral tradition and trained as a master of dreams. I believe what I have to say would be of great value to you and your audience.
Hey Jasmine, I 100% agree that we have to look inward, because the signs live in us. I call this moving from “origin” and “wayfinding,” the process of creating strategy or finding your way without a map… I’m interested in knowing more about how you got into doing this type of work 🙂.
Thanks for naming so clearly that has been, I confess, the hidden if not marginal part of my future work all these years. Some of the most prescient work I've done has always begun not with the outer signal, but an inner sense that had its own telos, which creates a kind of attunement to what may actually be emerging in the external world, albeit very quietly at first.
Anyway, thank you also for the encouragement. After reading this article I feel a stronger pull toward making it a more explicit part of the work, if not *the* work itself.
Lastly, regarding this: "Why are futurism and strategy and leadership so trained on outward signals?"
An answer: because the technocratic/corporate machine demands and fetishes "data-driven" and "evidence-based", sometimes because it does so out of habit, at other times to simply tick a box that affords professional blamelessness and "rigour", even if that rigour is narrow and hollow. Further, it does so while maintaining a distrust of human intuition and anything that cannot be reduced to quantification.
This: « In all of my years of doing this work, this is what I’ve found to be true: the inner precedes the outer, not the other way around. »
Fractals. The more time I spend in nature (I recently moved to 4 acres in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest), the more I realise that through my heart-mind, it seems to all be fractals.
Fractals spiralling outwards, tendrils emerging from the tenderest of patterns and reaching up to the sun, then casting shadows in 360.
As an astrologer, I’m in the camp that nothing external is “happening” to us, but collective consciousness is also a fractal and there’s a spiral pattern that prevails and yet also has room to evolve when WE decide to evolve.
Jasmine your writing never fails to make pause. (And then want to write more too). You’re an inspiration in these times. A Framer for the Age
I’m agnostic and quite skeptical, but lately I’ve been thinking that I need to bring some kind of magic back into my life. Otherwise everything is so rational and boring. Anyway, reading this I realised that what I’m missing is being in touch with the subconscious. So, thank you for naming what I’ve been feeling
You might find it reassuring to realise/remember that you engage with magic constantly, because magic is at the core of human experience. Some examples of this include:
* Making a wish on your birthday candles (or a shooting star)
* Cursing at someone if they cut you off on the road
* Daydreaming about anything (such as someone you fancy, a holiday or even replaying a conversation in your head and how you wish it had gone)
* buying a lottery ticket and using your special numbers
* Saying “sweet dreams” to anyone, or “bless you” when they sneeze
As a practicing witch AND agnostic (meaning I have a skeptic’s brain about a lot of people’s claims of woo), the best way I have found to invite more magic into my life is to treat it with the respect my 5 year old self gave it, which is to say that I let myself believe in it wholeheartedly because it’s more fun than not.
But also, magic is fundamentally about noticing what lies in the liminal spaces, whether that’s through material awareness or intuitive feeling. My son used to be fascinated by how I could click my fingers and make the traffic light turn green.
How do you do that?! he’d ask in wonderment.
Magic, I’d reply.
Eventually, he insisted I tell him the secret of it all, so I explained that if you counted three seconds after the other light turned red, you could say exactly when your light would go green. And yes, I told him, it’s a trick. I’m not making it happen - but I know WHEN it will happen, because I’m paying attention to the thing other folks aren’t looking at.
The root of all magic, even in the most faithful “I absolutely believe in magic” witchy kind of way, is energy because energy is the connecting force of everything single thing in the universe. If you put an apple inside a sealed lead box and leave it there, over the course of billions of years its molecules will break down into energy and reassemble itself over and over again into every possible physical matter we’ve ever seen and many we have yet to see until eventually it turns back into an identical version of the apple it began as. Energy connects every single that that has ever existed or ever will, and magic is about looking beyond what we SEE and noticing what else is there.
I invite you to spend every night this week with this little pre-bed exercise. Stand in front of your bathroom mirror or similar, look at yourself with love and intention and say, “I may be a skeptic, but even science tells me this body carries the remnants of stars. I can feel them glowing in me, casting light formed billions of years ago from the very first moment of their birth. This light is where I find my connection to magic, and to everything that ever was or ever will be.”
You might feel silly at first, but just focus on how the words make you feel and where they buzz in your body. Breathe the feeling in, and let it move through you. Do this every night for seven nights, and see if it makes a difference! I would be very curious to hear an update xx
A bit of mundane magic never goes amiss! If you’re open to it, I recorded a podcast series on exactly this topic in 2021 after a year of lockdown severely dampened my spark. It’s called A Year Of Magical Living ✨
Jasmine...good entry into understanding how we understand the future. You describe well the tapping into the collective conscious and constructing future insights through personal contact with many others.
I add that this is one but importnt slice of Received Information. Our bodies and our minds living in the greater consciousness, are living antennae perfectly capable of receiving much more than what we think is contained in our brain bucket. (ref. Bucky Fuller).
One of my favorite books is one by Dr. Leonard Shlain (father of Tiffany)...ART & PHYSICS. In it he shows that Art has often presaged science by decades, if not by centuries. Artists are particularly good at accessing received information (I am also an artist).
I have used the power of received information for over forty years running my consulting company working with iconic brands, highly successful companies and leaders, major universities, as well as cities and communities. When investor groups introduce my company to work with their portfolios of companies often say... "I don't know how they do it. It sometimes looks like magic but it always works, so listen to them".
This is a big and important topic that most don't know exists and deserves further exploration. Keep carrying the message. I love following your important work.Dan Beam
“We’re all using different instruments to locate the same signal.” Yup. I think you can get to the signal without talking and interacting with a lot of people too.
“All of us who are in the business of deciphering the future do the same thing. We make ourselves sensitive enough to feel the invisible energy in the air, and we give it language. “
That is something that I always felt as strategist but never put into words. Amazing article ✨
I love this lens as I’m a future thinker who uses probability, astrology, and narrative as different modalities of future casting. This is the first time I’ve seen that intersection coherently explained. Staying tuned.
I would love to speak to your group about what nahualismo has to say about the origins of the future.
I have lived in Mexico for the better part of my adult life—not as a tourist, as an immigrant fully imbedded in land and family.
A few years ago, I was initiated into an ancient oral tradition and trained as a master of dreams. I believe what I have to say would be of great value to you and your audience.
Hey Jasmine, I 100% agree that we have to look inward, because the signs live in us. I call this moving from “origin” and “wayfinding,” the process of creating strategy or finding your way without a map… I’m interested in knowing more about how you got into doing this type of work 🙂.
The inner precedes the outer.
Thanks for naming so clearly that has been, I confess, the hidden if not marginal part of my future work all these years. Some of the most prescient work I've done has always begun not with the outer signal, but an inner sense that had its own telos, which creates a kind of attunement to what may actually be emerging in the external world, albeit very quietly at first.
Anyway, thank you also for the encouragement. After reading this article I feel a stronger pull toward making it a more explicit part of the work, if not *the* work itself.
Lastly, regarding this: "Why are futurism and strategy and leadership so trained on outward signals?"
An answer: because the technocratic/corporate machine demands and fetishes "data-driven" and "evidence-based", sometimes because it does so out of habit, at other times to simply tick a box that affords professional blamelessness and "rigour", even if that rigour is narrow and hollow. Further, it does so while maintaining a distrust of human intuition and anything that cannot be reduced to quantification.
This: « In all of my years of doing this work, this is what I’ve found to be true: the inner precedes the outer, not the other way around. »
Fractals. The more time I spend in nature (I recently moved to 4 acres in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest), the more I realise that through my heart-mind, it seems to all be fractals.
Fractals spiralling outwards, tendrils emerging from the tenderest of patterns and reaching up to the sun, then casting shadows in 360.
As an astrologer, I’m in the camp that nothing external is “happening” to us, but collective consciousness is also a fractal and there’s a spiral pattern that prevails and yet also has room to evolve when WE decide to evolve.
Jasmine your writing never fails to make pause. (And then want to write more too). You’re an inspiration in these times. A Framer for the Age