Last night I came into the living room just in time to catch the last few minutes of some psychic thriller in which the good guy was mindreading the intentions of the bad guys, so he could save the world. Or at least the blue-eyed blonde woman shivering helplessly at his side.
It reminded me why I don’t like so much of the popularised nonsense around wicca or magic or playing at having supernatural powers that manifest on command and always at the right moment in the crisis.
Colonising the minds of others, pretending or believing that we can ‘read’ their private thoughts or detect things they don’t want known, is morally a very unhealthy activity. Just as the skin on our bodies sets bodies apart from one another — we don’t spill into one another, we don’t leak into one another’s pores or veins — so we need an understanding of boundaries and privacy.
When we claim we can ’see’ a broken or dark aura around somebody or feel ’strange emanations’ coming from them, we need to look very hard at our own motivations. We need to understand why we are trying to frighten ourselves or others by imputing invisible power to others, what may be vengeful in our claims, what it may say about our fear of strangers or difference.
Many of my intuitions have been mistaken. I always note those mistakes with interest because very often the error has to do with negativity or fear on my part. Many of my first impressions about others have been wrong. I have projected old fears or ignorant prejudices onto quite innocuous and well-meaning people.
Once most of Europe was dominated by suspicion and prejudices, the dislike and distrust of people who had a certain skin colour or hooked noses or one eye green and the other brown, or a disfiguring birthmark. Even today, certain people with deformities are seen as ‘cursed’ or ‘unlucky’ and the sign of the cross is made or passersby spit on the ground as they move away from them. There are still witch hunts in Africa where widows or pubescent girls are blamed for natural disasters like drought or landslides and put to death.
The thoughts of others are none of my business. That is one way to set a boundary. To pry into the private life or ’secrets’ of a another person is wrong. Even if you feel that person to be an ex-lover who has harmed you or the woman who ’stole’ your lover or someone who may be harming your children. To study the layout of tarot cards in an attempt to ‘discern’ the intentions of another is wrong. To read zodiac horoscopes in the hope of predicting what will happen to somebody else tomorrow so that you can scare or impress that person with your psychic prowess is morally wrong. It may also be an idiotic waste of time and quite literally wrong, in that your guesses are likely to be way off beam. Intention, why we place emphasis on some dynamics and not others, counts for a great deal in what we give attention to and learn from as we move through daily life.
Imagine if you had others doing this kind of second-guessing around you all the time. It would feel as if you were being stalked, an abusive invasion of your privacy, and yet that is what passes for much of Hollywood’s depictions of psychic mediums. Psychic freaks who exercise power over others because they ‘know’ things that these unfortunates do not even know about themselves.
The gifts of intuition are rarely ‘psychic’ in the crude sense. Most of them come from long and careful observation of, say, plants. That is why I can glance at red spidermite on the underside of a begonia’s leaves and know what is wrong with it immediately, and how I should put it right. To somebody who is not a gardener, that looks like magic. The way a small child thinks his mother has second sight because she knows he stole biscuits from the pantry and that is why he has no appetite for supper. Mothering is a kind of magic, but it is also rational loving attention. I can tell by the shift in register in a close friend’s voice that she has fallen out of love. That comes from years of listening.
Watching a fellow passenger on a plane twist her hands in restless anguish, I might wonder if she has a phobia about flying or is travelling home for a family funaral. I can feel sympathy but I do not know what the trouble is unless she chooses to confide in me and. And it is none of my business.
There are many secrets I wish I had not been told. The telling may have brought relief to the one sharing guilt or remorse, but I do not enjoy having to keep such secrets and know what I have learned about the cruelty and selfishness of human nature. I would not set out to discover those secrets by telepathy even if I could do so. Telepathy is rare and oddly random or insignificant to the person picking up unsought phrases or numbers or images. And it comforts me to know that my own modest but embarrassing secrets stay with me and are not readily available to strangers on flights or in crowded shopping malls.
Boundaries. Most of us who are not teenage witches enamoured by Charmed or Medium already know most of this stuff. But the temptation is always there, to regress to the world of magic we first believed in as small children, full of ogres and giants and fairy godmothers waving wands. Stories of revenge and good versus evil and rewards of golden apples or silver slippers and living happily ever after.
We all have to grow out of fundamentalism at some point, to appreciate myth as symbol and not reality. And that otherness remains Otherness for a reason.
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