IRC-Galleria

1. Ideas, beliefs, principles, assumptions… all these can be tyrants
2. They can also be saviours. Thus one idea triumphs over another by liberating us until it too turns out to be tyrant.
3. ‘Free Will’ is to dodge and duck as ideas do battle around and within us. In vain, while we are the battlefield.
4. It is necessary, therefore, to detach from ideas, beliefs, principles and assumptions. Step back and enjoy the struggle without becoming its victim.
5. This can be difficult and painful. It requires us to abandon our principles (provided that is ‘the one thing that we refuse to do’) and embrace relativity. It requires us to admit that even the most monstrous human beings have probably at times nurtured intentions every bit as benevolent as our own.
6. There is a precedent for this detachment: it was when mankind learnt to detach from Nature. This was progress: the bushman is in this one respect our inferior and we must therefore learn most carefully from them.
7. Detaching from Nature, from Mother Earth, was a phase of growing up. It was necessary for the development of Science.
8. Detaching from ideas is another stage of growing up. It is time to let go of Truth and discover our Selves. It is also necessary for the development of Magic.
9. Goodbye, Mother Earth. Goodbye, Father Sky.
10. A Great Adventure lies ahead.

-Ramsey Dukes

"Magic is about bringing spirit down into matter, giving our lives meaning and producing concrete results, while religion is more about raising us up towards spirit, explaining why things happen and giving us a sense of purpose. "

RELEVANCE OF MAGIC:

EXAMPLE 1. Centuries of scientific thinking inspired technology, and technology has made our world very complicated. Scientific thinking is not good at handling complexity – the usual scientific approach is to begin by paring down the field of enquiry by eliminating or ignoring extraneous factors – and so now we tend towards magical thinking.

In the 70s I recall how we dealt with a software bug: we ran a few test cases then studied the programme or flow diagram to locate where the fault lay and then re-wrote that bit of the programme. Today’s software is too complicated for that. When my iMac refused to back-up I spent a while Googling ”error code –36” and eventually found a discussion of the same problem. one of the suggestions was ”try unplugging all other firewire devices”. I tried it and it worked. But is this so very different from saying ”for a happy marriage, don’t wear green on your wedding day”? Whereas scientific thinking studies causes, magical thinking studies correlations – as in sympathetic magic. That makes magic much quicker in these complex situations.

So, for example, if tomorrow’s news announces a dramatic statistical correlation between cancer and instant coffee, there would be a big public demand for restrictions on the sale of instant coffee, and many people would defend that in the name of science (”it’s been proven”). ”Do we or don’t we?” the argument rages in the name of science. My solution would be to immediately restrict coffee sales but make it clear that this is a magical act in order to give time for the scientists to work out the cause and effect – eg whether intant coffee causes cancer or whether incipient cancer causes people to want instant coffee.

EXAMPLE 2. Magic does to science what science did to religion – it makes it seem unnecessary or irrelevant. At the mental or cultural level, I see the general evolution of religion leading towards monotheism, and that prepares the way for science – because the problem of strict monotheism is that it actually leaves us with two things: an absolute God and this transient yet lived-in world. Science provides an answer by saying that this world is the ultimate reality. To put it in religious terms, science says that Matter alone is the First Cause or ”God” and there is only One Law and that is Physics – ie that science becomes the real monotheism, and we no longer need religion.

So science advances to explore our very souls and reveals the gulf that exists between subjective and objective reality. This explains away so much of our ideas about spirit – they are subjective delusions whereas science tells us about the objective reality that lies behind them. By doing this, science has now recreated that duality – the world we live in as actually a subjective illusion of the brain, just a reflection of the real material world that lies beyond the gateway of our senses. That prepares the way for magic, because magic says that the actual world we live in, the subjective reality, is what matters and that the objective world it is supposed to reflect is merely a useful hypothesis.

That is putting it rather abstractly – so how does this work in practice? Here is an example. Go back a few centuries and I am a man suffering a bad disease so I ask the experts – the priests – and they say God is punishing me for my sins and I must pray. There is, however, this new-fangled ”natural philosopher” who says I should just swallow 3 of his tablets a day and only drink water that’s been boiled and I’ll soon feel better. I decide to go with this guy because I like what he delivers — even though what the priest says makes clear sense, while this scientist speaks a lot of apparent mumbo jumbo about ”invisible bacteria” or whatever. So religion gets sidelined by science in this case. Fast forward to now and I am suffering aches and pains and I choose to go to a local aromatherapist who makes me feel good, even though it sounds like mumbo jumbo, and even though I read in the papers a few years ago that the real experts have done a big double blind test that concluded there was ”nothing in” aromatherapy. So science gets sidelined by magic, just as it once sidelined religion.

It’s the return of the Platonic idea: that the world we live in is but the shadow of a ”higher” reality. The spiritual folk interpret this as the world of matter is just a shadow of a world of spirit which is the true reality. The scientist interprets it as our subjective reality is just a shadow of an objective world of matter which is the true reality. In both cases the ”man in the street” is expected to consult the experts for the truth, while magic says ”just work on the subjective, that’s what really matters”.