If you’re inclined to explore the various strands of Buddhism, you’ll get to do a lot of meditations. Many of them involve putting yourself into a tricky posture and visualising divine beings of amazing appearance and awesome powers. Each of these godforms has a mouthful of a name, and a whole rigmarole to go through before you get to the point, which is to experience benediction, grace, or some other spiritual payoff.

The gods vary widely in terms of what they look like and their job responsibilities, but the meditations to commune with them are remarkably similar. In fact, there are identical rituals of meditation or prayer to be found across the spectrum of religious worship and magical practice. Voudun. Hinduism. Mystical strands of Catholicism. Ceremonial magic. The belief systems vary considerably, but all feature practices that require participants to take on a posture of supplication and to visualise an entity bathed in glowing light, who grants divine nectar or other treats to the worshipper.

Why is it that so many different forms of belief, in cultures throughout human history, utilise that specific framework to achieve an altered state of consciousness? Believers of whichever sort tend to concentrate on the meaning they ascribe to the experience, overlooking connections between the rituals of their own faith and practices followed by other belief systems.

If these patterns are universal, relating more to the functioning of human neurology than the ideology of any particular faith, then surely they can be experienced in their own right, rather than because of the role they play within a given orthodoxy. Find out for yourself:

Some people will do that exercise. Others will have read it and dismissed it. Or maybe you read the words and assume you know what I mean. You don’t. It doesn’t work that way. Words are only symbols. The reality they represent will always be more than and other than the way we can describe it.

Start playing with life in that way and you’re beginning to get a feel for the world of the modern magician. Except many of the people who take that approach to exploring reality won’t ever mention words like magic, since the word has so many unhelpful associations:

Siegfried and Roy in a Las Vegas spectacular, dry ice and doped-up tigers.

David Blaine, in a t-shirt and on the street, filmed handheld so you know it’s real, just like the news on cable, didn’t he date Madonna?

Weird Al Crowley, clutching that pointy hat hard to keep his brains from dribbling out. ‘Mr Crowley’, you know, like Ozzie sang about?.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer; tuckshop wizard Harry Potter; some of the Vertigo comics you’ve read -- and pretty much all of the ones you haven’t.

So, maybe we shouldn’t refer to magic. Instead, let’s talk about:

• an attitude of playful curiosity and preference for personal experience over anyone else’s descriptions, whoever they happen to be and however well respected and time-served those descriptions are.

• a thoroughly postmodern sensibility, drawing from a whole spectrum of belief systems and disciplines to cut up and fold into new models of reality. Martial arts and McDonalds. Sex and science. Buddha and Bart.

• language as a vehicle for tranceformation, RAMraiding Burroughs and Chomsky and spitting out subvertisements from behind the wheel get there sooner than you, fink for yourself.

…Which delightful blend of Seussian logic and insouciant nonsense (this much in every cup!) segues neatly into the word and world of Grant Morrison, or will well enough…

Listen. There are different ways to do this. We could just go through some of Grant’s comics and point out some of the ways that he refers to magic. The use of Peter Carroll’s writing way back when in ZENITH. Tarot imagery and whatever else might be lurking in the elaborate interiors of ARKHAM ASYLUM. A cabala of stuff in KID ETERNITY. But all that would do is give you some facts, the way they do it in school. And you know what Grant thinks of school, at least if you were some kind of conscious when Dane McGowan blows his up in the opening of THE INVISIBLES.

There’s a difference between information and knowledge. Which will mean a whole lot more to those of you who did the Bart Simpson meditation than anyone who just read the words. (And which you can still do right now, seeing as the rest of this article will still be here waiting for you whenever.)

Anything that allows you to have an experience outside your model of reality will expand your sense of what reality can be. Keep having new experiences and you’ll soon realise that there’s a whole bunch of stuff out there to play with, regardless of what you’ve been taught to believe is ‘really’ possible, and at any moment likely to overwrite your current version of what-it’s-all-about with something greater. If your name is Grant Morrison, you might want to find ways to communicate your ever-evolving sense of reality in the comics you write. Welcome to Hypertime.

Comics have long cannibalised science fiction and science fact for concepts to spice up the adventures of their four-colour stars. Look at IRON MAN, whose flying boots were somehow powered by transistors in the 1960s when transistors were leading edge science. Since then, Tony Stark -- the millionaire industrialist who dons the Ferric Avenger’s armour -- has experimented with stealth technology, space suits, and whatever else has defined the state of the art at the time that the comics were created.

Bad writers use science as a source of plot devices and gimmicks. Villains used to zap heroes with ray guns. Now they infect whole populations with nano-technology viruses. They still wear shitty costumes and get locked up at the end of the story.

Good writers utilise their preferred brainfood as a means of communicating something more sophisticated than how our heroes won the punch-up this time. Philip K Dick is the master of this within science fiction -- his ideas about identity and reality could only be expressed in a genre that takes the impossible for granted. Grant Morrison shares Dick’s outlook in this respect, among others.

Grant uses big bizarre notions from the frontiers of physics and medicine, marketing and neurolinguistics, MTV and information theory, and plenty more besides, to create ideaspace for readers that would be nigh-impossible within the cosy parameters of mainstream fiction. And he does it for Marvel and DC, the two publishers whose output over the last few decades defines the medium as far as most people are concerned.

OK, comics don’t get the readership they used to, but Grant quadrupled the circulation of JLA in his time on that typically moribund title, and I’m looking forward to whatever he’s planning with X-MEN. Making bold and radical statements within the inky confines of a small press magazine is easy. Morrison is interested in playing on the world stage, as befits someone whose work consistently demonstrates a belief in positively changing mass consciousness.

There are lots of ways to look at what happened when you did the Bart Simpson Meditation. (You did do it, right?) Here are a few:

• the meditation demonstrates what the human organism is capable of when you begin to learn to use your senses and neurology.

• your belief that something interesting would happen when you did the exercise hypnotised you into experiencing a state where something interesting did indeed happen.

• the meditation creates contact with an entity which cannot be directly experienced by humans, which appears to us according to our preferences and/or conditioning as, eg, Buddha, Virgin Mary, or Bart Simpson.

• the ritual is a means of experiencing your Higher Self or Holy Guardian Angel -- an aspect of yourself that exists beyond spacetime.

• not a damn thing happened, and why even finish this article when the writer keeps having a go at you for not doing that dumbass ‘exercise’, which looks like it’s ripped off from Robert Anton Wilson or one of those Neuro Linguistic Programming frauds. It’s bad enough when Grant goes on about that stuff, but at least he writes some neat comics.

• insert your own theory here:

We have ideas about who we are and how we are, and rarely stop to think about whether those ideas make any kind of sense, or whether different ideas might serve us more usefully. Experiments in cognitive psychology confirm again and again that our brains are wired to look for patterns. When we’ve found one that fits well enough, we’ll hold on to it, however shitty it makes us feel. Never mind that there might be 50,000 more enticing alternatives. Just give us one that makes some kind of sense, and we'll hang on to it. Not only that, but having found it we’ll hang on to it in the face of irrefutable counter-evidence, because we can filter out anything that we don’t like. So we stick with whatever it is we’ve decided makes sense, and we know it makes sense because we can put it in words that follow one after another in a logical sequence and that must mean we’re right, right?

Freud’s legacy stares at us from a thousand daytime talkshows as mothers and daughters are reconciled under the teary eye of a blue-suited host.

"I thought I liked Deep Space Nine for its convincing extrapolations of current technologies, but now I realise I needed tales of father/son bonding to connect with my own dad."

Eminem whimpers about the wrongs his ma has done him, while --

Mrs Mathers gets a right of reply with her own rap riposte.

Seventy fee-paying strangers nod when a soft-voiced woman with silver hair informs them that within each and every one of us is an Inner Child. None of them stops to ask whether it’s nearer the kidneys or the pancreas, but --

"Would that be an Inner Martian, or an Inner Venusian?"

These are some of the myths we live by today, the common currency of a culture awash in therapeutic concepts diluted to homeopathic strength by the mass media. What if they were wrong? What if the person you are isn’t just defined by your genes and parenting, and that you can be whatever you want? What if Fred Durst hasn’t actually got any issues to confront, and all that bluster is no more real than a cartoon character?

Choose your own myths. That’s what much of modern magical thinking amounts to, and it’s a current that runs through Grant Morrison’s work.

If you’re not the person you thought you were, who would you like to be? Reinvention is a recurrent theme in Morrison’s writing. Check out FLEX MENTALLO, KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND, DOOM PATROL, THE INVISIBLES.

Self-transformation is the essence of magic. Alchemy is a metaphor: it’s not lumps of inert matter being transmuted. It’s us turning from lead into gold. Grant’s run on JLA ends with the WORLD WAR III storyline. It’s just one of the times he’s told that story, as Superman and pals are joined by a whole host of people who woke up that morning to find the universe bigger and more wonderful than they had allowed themselves to believe. In the vocabulary of comics they become superheroes. And comics can be a metaphor as much as alchemy is. Especially when you can use words with the facility that Grant does, and you’re conversant with how language keeps us entranced.

• if superheroes can be metaphors, what are they metas for?

• if it’s possible to experience an altered state by hallucinating Bart Simpson, what does that suggest about the power of imagination?

• if ideas can shape reality, then what isn’t possible?

Hypertime. That’s what he called it at DC. And it’s there in MARVEL BOY too: "the endless, infinite worlds of the Superspectrum: the immense rainbow of realities where everything you ever imagined is just as real as everything else and all at once". Drug-fuelled utopian rambling, or something more? You, the reader, decide. But what if the things you read started to become true in your life? What if you could write things, and they happened? What would that mean?

The idea that we create our reality is often parroted by people who’ve read books like The Celestine Prophecy. If you’ve hung round dopebores for any length of time (the duration of a Monster Magnet CD is about enough) you’ll have had that conversation about how, like, what we think is what we are, that we’re all one vast cosmic entity experiencing itself through the eyes of all living things, before someone lights up a joint and talk turns to pizza and Hong Kong Phooey. Basically, it’s like being in a Kevin Smith movie before the edit. It can be enough to put you off epistemological exploration for a very long time (again, Monster Magnet CDs make a useful temporal unit).

What if you were trapped in a movie you didn’t like? You could walk out the cinema. Or you could rewrite it, or find a new director. Depends on how you want to use the metaphor. Which is pretty much the situation Grant Morrison found himself in writing THE INVISIBLES. Let’s do this bit quickly, since you’ve probably come across it before:

1. Grant identifies with the character King Mob, even shaving his head to look like the superspy leatherfiend.
2. King Mob goes through a bad time in the story, getting captured and having bacteria eat his face.
3. Soon after, Grant Morrison ends up in hospital with a serious bacterial infection, and a bunch of other unpleasantness that closely parallels what he wrote for King Mob.
4. Lightbulb moment. Grant decides that he might as well write some good stuff for King Mob. This includes hooking up with Ragged Robin. Months later, Grant meets a woman who looks just like her. And so on.

At which point we’re once again back into the intersection of fantasy and reality, and the potential of the mind to create your life. Personally, I see this as a key element in Grant’s life and work. The brash bitchy Grant whose typical approach for so many years was to take the piss is no more. In his place, a superpositive agent of change, whose manifesto can be experienced both in the pages of his comics and at www.grant-morrison.com where the MAGIC FOR MUTANTS essays provide a no-bullshit practical primer in the art and science of magic, Morrison-style.

Grant isn’t alone in experiences like the one outlined above. Ken Campbell, maverick actor, writer, and director, has described similar stories. Campbell is the man who brought Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s ILLUMINATUS trilogy to the stage. Wilson is a big influence on Morrison. Some years back I attended a talk by Wilson in London in the same week that the KLF reached number one. Nice timing: the KLF took their name from ILLUMINATUS, which mixes fact and fiction in ingenious ways to propel the reader into new ideaspace. Another interesting example of what happens when ideas that started as being fiction take on a life of their own, especially since Bill Drummond of the KLF was involved in the stage version of ILLUMINATUS.

Robert Anton Wilson is also a friend of, and trains alongside, Richard Bandler, who got the ball rolling in the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming…the study of which Grant recommends to anyone interested in learning ways to make life more magical without ever having to wear a pointy hat or gut a chicken. I went to a seminar that Bandler and Wilson presented a few years ago. A theme running through it concerns the ways that we create and maintain our realities, regarding which Bandler comments in an aside:

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