A cough and a blink

By the time I was fourteen I had been performing magic for a few years and felt very ‘at home’ doing it. We were now living near the South Coast town of Brighton and I was a proud member of the Sussex Magic Circle. This was an oddball collection of magicians who met every other Thursday in a small hotel on the waterfront. We swapped stories and tricks and generally indulged our mutual love of magic. The president was a large and dull man named Stan. Stan was a mind reader or as it is known in the magic world a mentalist. I learned a very important lesson from Stan, whenever Stan was about to do the dirty work, or ‘work’ as it is known amongst magicians, he would cough. It wasn’t a big cough, just a little dry cough, but the moment you heard it you knew something had happened. This was the first time I really noticed the mechanical nature of a fellow human being. It became a fascination to me watching Stan perform his mentalism, just waiting for the dry little cough that signaled his guilty action. Month after month I watched him perform and cough. How could anyone be so stupid that they didn’t know that they were giving the game away by a small mechanical habit? Two years later when my first real mentor was teaching me my first real magic I got a shock.
“Nicky every time you link the rings you close your eyes!” said Ken. I quickly argued that this wasn’t possible and went over to the mirror to see if this was so. I ran thru the routine but never noticed any closing of the eyes at key moments. He is wrong I thought, then I realized the reason I couldn’t see my closed eyes was because my eyes were closed! It was like a light bulb turning on in my head. The reason we don’t notice mechanical reactions is because they are mechanical. Years later when I was to read Mr. Gurdjieff’s description of the mechanical nature of Mankind it made perfect sense to me. Whether it was Stan’s cough or my closed eyes we didn’t notice it because our actions (and especially our reactions) were mechanical as soon as we stopped thinking about them.
If we couldn’t see what we were doing it was because our eyes were closed or we were to busy coughing. There is a Zen story of a Japanese master who would ride his donkey around the village at a great speed searching for something. If any one asked him what he was looking for he would reply that he was looking for his donkey. It is generally interpreted to mean that when you use your nervous system to search for the ‘truth’ that your truth is the nervous system you are riding on and searching with. As a magician you spend many hours standing in front of a mirror trying to make the impossible look not only possible but ordinary. It takes a long time to observe the coughs and blinks that give us away. When you discover the little things that give away your mechanical nature then it leaves you open to observe the BIG things that we also do. It was a great lesson in being a magician and a truth that I would explore and understand more when the time was right.