Ask any self-respecting alchemist about his goals and he or she will tell you that these are to find the Stone of Knowledge (The Philosophers’ Stone), to discover the medium of Eternal Youth and Health, and to discover the transmutation of metals.
Our modern day lives have become so cluttered with “real life” that there is little room nowadays to pause and appreciate the magic that curses event through our veins, and if you have 3minutes, I’d like to blow some fairy dust your way.
Look at a tiger, and then look at a baby. The tiger has been equipped to negotiate the world that it was born into. Mother nature has planned his sojourn through the jungle and equipped him with the tools he will be needing. His arsenal of weaponry is formidable amongst any of the creatures. Just ask Bambi. He was literally made by nature, to occupy his place in nature. Remove our tiger from his surroundings and place him in an environment he was not born into, and he’s become an unfortunate creature, in the wrong place.
The human who, when born, is nothing but a bundle of squish. No claws, no heightened hearing to detect imminent danger. Place baby into Tiger’s environment and he will probably live shorter than it would take a banana to ripen in the jungle.
We have the luxury of hindsight, and with a slight bias to being on the human side, we are probably all too aware that the real apex predator in the mix, is the cute little squishy creature we can find on the cover of a Purity bottle.
The biggest difference between the two boils down to the idea of self-determination. Tiger can’t become a house tiger, although there are some who have tried to turn him into this, at the end of the day, he’ll probably eat you on the way to his food bowl. It’s just what he does.
Humans, on the other hand, are completely malleable. We adapt to our circumstances. A human baby is like a magician. The reason we marvel at the little snot-nose in the queue at the grocery store is that in front of you, is an all-powerful creature, that literally has the power to change into anything it wants to. Given the right environment, this creature has the power to become a Nobel Prize-winning laureate or a musician, or even a crazy dictator with a Russian accent.
So where does that leave me, you might ask yourself. I’m living the rockstar life, – I have a mortgage, paying off my car, a shitty job. Heck, even the hamster wheel that I’m running on needs an oil, that I can’t afford to buy.
There’s one knot that we need to unravel on our way to becoming the magicians of our own selves. – Our birthright places us into an environment that is controlled and managed by our parents. Our view of the world is largely handed to us through the fears, hopes, and admonitions of those entrusted with creating the backdrop against which we were raised. It’s the way of the world. For us to survive the world our parents survived, we, first of all, inherit their paradigms.
The real magic about being human though lies in us reaching an understanding that we are not beholden to the sins of our fathers. You see, you can adapt, change or morph into exactly that creature that you wish to be and this is why you’re the most dangerous of all the apex predators out there.
Maybe for starters, you want to take a little lesson from your tiger friend and start to “look” like you mean it. The tiger can’t become less of what he is or more of what he would like to be, but you can. You have the magic of self-determination within you. All you need to do is decide what shape you wish to take on. Hitting the gym is a choice you make daily and it forms part of your arsenal to self determine whom or what you wish to become.. You have this great power, to tap into an image of where you want to be, whom you would like to be more like, and then you can go out and become that. You have the power in you to be anything you want to, you just have to go out and do more of that, and along the way, one day when you wipe the sleep out of your eyes, you will find yourself transformed. The responsibility is yours to choose which version of yourself you’d like to be. With great power, comes great responsibility.
Choose, act do, be – it’s a God-given right of self-determination, one that only we humans have, and often make so little of, because we’re too busy wallowing in the outdated paradigms we’ve inherited from our parents.
We truly have been given the gift of alchemy. Unlike the creatures who inhabit the jungle, we have been given the wherewithal to transform into something different, something better perhaps. I guess it took Harry Potter sometime before he knew how to use his magic. Your magic lies within you. You simply need to decide what you wish to become and with enough practice, that transformation is yours. – Like Magic
