"Magic" is any event in which consciousness itself produces a change in physical reality. A perfect example of this is the fact your consciousness can move your physical body at will. When you decide to raise your hand and look at it and then do so, you are performing magic. Such an act is magic because consciousness itself is causing a chemical action in the brain which results in the arm moving. But what most people fail to realize is that this process extends to everything around us far beyond our biological bodies. Magic is alive and active everywhere, "bending" reality at will.
All things are constantly being influenced by our consciousness and the consciousness of others. What makes this possible is the fact that at the deepest level, matter and consciousness are two branches that arise from the same living reality. They are inseparable, growing from the same root, and like two sides of a single coin, each one is fully capable of influencing the other.
We consider it totally normal for our consciousness to be influenced by events and conditions in the physical world around us. We watch the sun rise in the morning, listen to music played on a guitar, and breathe the sweet scent of rain that splashes against the glass of an open window; countless other examples could be given. But what most of us fail to realize is that this process works equally well in both directions. In other words, the consciousness of our minds can just as easily influence the events that occur in the physical world around us due to both aspects of reality emanating from the same living root.
For the longest time science ignored consciousness because there was no way to quantify it, no way to put consciousness in a box and perform scientific experiments on it to discover its properties. As a result, most scientists dismissed consciousness as a phenomenon that has no relationship to science or the physical world.
But all that is changing now that experiments have been devised that clearly demonstrate some of the effects consciousness can have on physical matter. This phenomenon is now known as the "observer effect."
The double-slit experiment produces what is perhaps the most famous observer effect, and it is clearly explained in this video. In short, it is the discovery that if the actions of electrons are not being observed, electrons behave as waves instead of particles, but under any form of human observation, they snap back to behaving as particles again.
Similarly, this article discusses how the observer effect has been discovered in experiments where consciousness influenced the direction of heat and energy flow.
Science is finally proving magic to be real, but such experiments as the above barely scratch the surface of what is possible with magic. Books like The Secret by Rhonda Byrne widen the concept much further, giving wonderful examples of how each of us can beneficially use the power of our consciousness in our daily lives, bringing about events that make the world around us a far better place to live in by simply using magic.