0 MAGIC WORDS Now You See It, Now You Don't (see also now) The now-you-see-it-now-you-don't hands of a magician . . . -- Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1990) Mystique: Life is an illusion. There one second, gone the next. Now you see it, now you don't. -- Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (1980) "That old magician's cry 'Now you see it, now you don't'"10 is an exclamation of wonder at the ephemeral marvels of life, marvels that many people refer to as maya (a Sanskrit term). "Maya means not so much illusion, but trickery, in the sense of play. Now you see me now you don't. Maya is the shapeshifter. You can never grasp it . . . It is so beyond our ordinary under standing that we can only exclaim, 'It just can't be true! It's some marvelous error!"11 Now you see it, now you don't describes two "magical states"12 of reality and invokes the great cycle of creation and destruction. Quantum physicists observe this cycle, describing things popping into existence out of thin air and then blinking back out into the great void.1 Physicist Evan Harris Walker notes that "It is important to understand that this now-you-see-it now-you-don't quirk of atomic reality is not a magic trick but a part of the way nature is."14 Spiritual philosopher Alan Watts explains: [T]here are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place.15 Whereas physicists developed the Big Bang theory of creation, "Hundreds of years ago, theologians developed a similar hypothesis called creation ex ni 10 Eugene H. Kaplan, A Field Guide to Coral Reefs (1999) 11 Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life (2001) 12 Michelin Must Sees: Las Vegas (2004) 1 "Electrons, it seems, blink in and out of existence, all the while. Now you see them, now you don't." -- Harry Wilson, Freedom From God: Restoring the Sense of Wonder (2001) 14 The Physics of Consciousness (2000) 15 The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)