This slice of life is my first posting for 2014. It comes from a list of 63 topics of random events or observations that grabbed my attention during the last half of this year from life as I found it. As I reviewed this list, item #45 from August 30 jumped out to me from the Wall Street Journal:

“Spells, potions and other magical services that have been offered for sale on eBay since 1995 have been banned!” Apparently the 40,000 spells and 1,500 tarot-card readings were too much of a customer service headache for eBay; complaints of bad predictions and advice I guess. http://gizmodo.com/5939139/sell-your-black-magic-elsewhere-says-ebay

Magical Services

I wondered what the term “other magical services” would include besides witches, psychics and management consultants. Metaphysical means you can’t directly touch, see, smell, hear or taste the true essence of a product or service because its true reality exists beyond physics (meta ta physika from the original Greek word for metaphysics).

In other words, metaphysical goods are NOT based on tangible facts confirmed directly by our senses, but rather on intangible ideas or notions such as speculative or abstract reasoning, love, intuition, and creative thought. This means that “other magical services” could include our day-to-day experiences with television programs and movies, politics, religion, art of all kinds, novels, strategies, visions of the future, and most weather predictions. Those wily lawyers, always wanting maximum legal coverage by using “other.”

Metaphysical Fun

Here is a fun diversion from the world of metaphysical goods. Each person has a “birth number” according to the astrological field of numerology. This number is determined by combining the digits of your birthday in a specified way that reduces to a single number. For example, a birth day of January 9, 1963 (01/09/1963) produces a birth number of “2” by adding 1963 to 1 + 9 to make “1973,” which upon adding 1+9+7+3 produces “20,” which upon adding 2+0 reduces to “2.” My personal birth number reduces to “7,” with the following summary astrological description:

7′s are the searchers. Always probing for hidden information, they find it difficult to accept things at face value. Emotions don’t sway their decisions. Questioning everything in life, they don’t like to be questioned themselves. They’re never off to a fast start, and their motto is slow and steady wins the race. They come across as philosophers and being very knowledgeable, and sometimes as loners. They are technically inclined and make great researchers uncovering information. They like secrets. They live in their own world and should learn what is acceptable and what is not in the world at large.

Detailed descriptions for all birth numbers are listed at:
http://www.astrology-numerology.com/num-lifepath.html#lp8
I have no idea who wrote these descriptions, but most astrologers I googled had very similar descriptions. Even though careful studies of astrological predictions are no more accurate than random chance would yield, reality does seem to be organized around a built-in tension between extremes of predictable order and chaotic uncertainty.

How much we choose to experience of this tension seems to define our personal bandwidth for living.