I mean, for me, the whole turning-point in my thinking about magic was when I realised that the only place this has to happen is inside your head. And that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I think we have a problem in that we live in a materialist society – I don’t mean “everybody’s a bread-head, man”, I mean that we believe that the material world is the only one that’s important, the only one that exists. Despite the fact that believing that requires thinking, and science can’t actually explain how we think. It’s the ghost in the machine, forever outside the province of science. You can’t reproduce a thought in an empirical laboratory experiment, so you cannot properly talk about thought. Thought is a supernatural event which we all experience every minute of the day.
The world of ideas is much more important than the material one. I mean, what’s more important, the reality of a chair or the idea of a chair? I’d say it looks like the physical world is actually predicated upon the intangible world of ideas and the mind. It looks like that’s the more important territory. Okay, so let’s treat it literally as a territory. There might be ways to explore it, ways since time immemorial that people have used to explore it. Drugs. Meditation. Some unpleasant ones like scourging and fasting, which never sound like much fun to me. Lots of ways that people have found over the years to get themselves deeper into this mental space.