The practice of magic is taboo precisely because it draws from the experience of mind as a process that transcends the skin, and the experience of self and world as profoundly relational—which means ecological—rather than solid, or, we could say, economic.

Dangerous Magic 3: Principles of Magic—The Nature of Mind and Memory

n. patedakis

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of Mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In this episode, we continue our contemplation of magic from the wisdom, love, and beauty archives.

Last time we looked at three ways to understand magic—all of them closely related. We can think of a magical attitude or magical consciousness arising from the sense that life involves engagement. The world has no place for wall-flowers, because it has no walls. If we live in a participatory Cosmos, then we live in a magical Cosmos.

We can keep in mind that Cosmos means an ordering. If we live in a sacred-creative ordering or patterning, and if we participate in how that patterning unfolds, then we live in a magical world. Magic is synonymous with sacred-creative.

Secondly, we can think of magic as an art of awareness, or an art of attunement with what is and what might be. Magic means training the mind so that we live in attunement with reality, in attunement with the nature of our own mind, and in attunement with the Mind of nature.

And then we considered the three principles of magic offered by the poet William Butler Yeats. We will pick up that first principle now and inquire further into it, so we can move into the other two. That first principle goes like this:

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

We began considering that principle as a mother tree that might properly belong to our ecology of mind—and indeed we began to think of mind itself as more akin to a forest than to a tree in a forest.

We did that by considering the science and the LoveWisdom of mind—which are really the same thing. LoveWisdom at its best always involves an art and science of mind. Indeed, LoveWisdom differs from science in that it provides a holistic art and science of heart-mind-body-world-and Cosmos, without fragmentation.

The theme of wholeness carries through most of our contemplations—really it carriers through all of them in one way or another, and you can find it throughout the WLB blog posts as well.

Wholeness means what we are transcends the atomizing temptation that our own skin can lure us into. Magic means being so comfortable in our own skin that we no longer hide behind our skin. We become truly at home in, through, and as the Cosmos.

Last time we spoke about an essay by the philosopher Arthur Bentley. We didn’t mention the title of the essay. He called it, “The Human Skin: Philosophy’s Last Line of Defense.” That’s a delightful title. Today’s professors of philosophy seem to be hiding from a nonlocal way of knowing and being, living and loving.

But philosophy is not an academic subject. Philosophy means the way we do things. And we are talking about the philosophy of the dominant culture, the philosophy that infects all of us at an unconscious level, as well as at a conscious level.

We contemplate here the way the whole of the dominant culture hides from this, and tries to get us all to hide too. We hide behind this last line of defense as we continue our assault against the world, and against anyone we want to attack or marginalize.

The dominant culture roots itself in ignorance, and also in fear and craving. We hide behind our skin and our flag, in fear, and in craving, reaching out for the medication of consumption, in whatever form, whether digital, pharmaceutical, comestible, or whatever.

Bentley invites us to sense the crudity of our way of knowing and being, and this amounts to a tremendous irony given that our intellectualism endows us with a sense of sophistication. The skeptics in our culture speak with great haughtiness, and we all feel superior to nature with our laptops and SUVs, whether consciously or not.

When we get in our 4-wheel drive vehicle, we can thumb our nose at rain and snow, and some of us can go ripping around landscapes with the utmost human privilege, without any sense of the sacredness of the ecologies themselves, and without any compunction about trampling around in the home of other beings. If we want to ride our dirt bike or mountain bike, we will damn well do it as we please. If we want to fill in a wetland to expand our human agendas and our artificial ecologies, we will do it.

Bentley says we do all of this in a way crucially dependent on our relationship to skin as a line of defense. And we see our activity as rather sophisticated and advanced.

On the other hand, many so-called “primitive” Cultures had well-established practices for realizing the wispiness of skin, for realizing that our skin is not even like the soil of a forest, but that our habitual relation to skin covers over the very real way that we are more like a forest than an acorn, more like the Earth as a whole than like the stones of the earth, scattered and separate.

Various rites, rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, prayers, vision quests, and other arts of awareness (including a wide range of spiritual and shamanic practices) have helped individuals and cultures to orient themselves in a way that doesn’t get hooked on or ensnared by the “one authentic criterion of the universe,” this delusion of the skin.

And let us not malign skin. Skin is wonderful, miraculous, and itself quite magical. We are talking about a delusion, a style of relating to ourselves and the world.

Recall that Bentley calls this delusion about our own skin the one universal criterion of knowledge. Let’s confront the fact that we may not think of this criterion as a criterion. If someone asks us about our criterion for knowledge, we don’t normally say skin. And so we may protest that we don’t hold this as “the one authentic criterion,”

but such a protest betrays the subtlety and the unconscious dimensions of the disease, while we find evidence of its inflamed nature everywhere we look—

after all, what else do we agree upon so universally in our actual practice of life but that we can hide inside our skin, that a knower and a doer dwell in this organic capsule?

Because “philosophy” really amounts to “how we do things,” we can sense that the dominant culture, and all of us affected by it—we all suffer from a case of bad philosophy.

That bad philosophy expresses and seduces us into an incorporation of duality in the form of conquest consciousness, the incorporation of distance from Sophia, difference from Nature, disengagement from the World.

Incorporation means we take it into the body, we make it real as our body and as our embodied experience. There’s a deep meaning to the fact that the most dangerous predator in our global ecologies right now is the corporation. The corporation is the embodiment of our own conquest consciousness, inflected by things we refer to as politics and economics. The corporation hides behind its own artificial skin while tearing into the very real skin of ecologies and sentience all over the world, causing serious harm to human and non-human beings and the whole community of life.

We are not saying that corporations are somehow inherently evil, but that we must see the context, and sense mind as the mutual arising of contexts. In our contexts, the vast majority of corporations, and perhaps the very idea of corporations as we have made them real, seem to inevitably cause harm. Our way of knowing and being, our way of living and loving, makes it easy for evil to take hold of corporations and to work through them and the people they employ.

And this all comes down to skin, because skin remains the criterion we use to know what the world is, what a corporation is, and what a corporation can and cannot do, what any of us should and should not do. Corporations as corporeal—as activities in the world—they embody our delusions about our own skin. If we don’t dispel our delusions about skin, we will never heal ourselves and our world.

Therefore, in the dominant culture, we might suggest, along with Alan Watts, that transcending the skin becomes a matter of taboo—thus showing the “primitiveness” of so-called “civilized” society.

The practice of magic is taboo precisely because it draws from the experience of mind as a process that transcends the skin, and the experience of self and world as profoundly relational—which means ecological—rather than solid, or, we could say, economic. While economics in the dominant culture is filled with the most unskillful magical thinking (for instance the invisible hand), a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty has nothing to do with economic thought and instead relies on ecological thinking which we could call skillful magical thinking, and that kind of thinking represents a danger to a culture rooted in ignorance.

As Watts puts it in the preface to The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are:

This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo—our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East—in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism.

This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe.

How marvelous that Watts characterizes his sources of inspiration as “experimental,” and even “philosophy-religions” in the sense that they rely on experiment and experience, and thus they offer themselves for verification, and they demand a philosophical/spiritual attunement.

The findings of these experimental traditions so nullify the theories upon which the dominant culture is founded that they must remain taboo. Such findings exist in marginalized traditions of the dominant culture as well, and they also appear in the science of the dominant culture. They remain unmetabolized, kept at a distance by means of “the one authentic criterion” that allows us to rationalize or evade a great deal of insanity.

And, again, we have looked at all of this because of Yeats, because Yeats makes it clear that magic relies first and foremost on the fact that mind transcends the skin, and the dismissal of magic and the fear of magic amount to the same thing. We dismiss magic because we prefer to hide behind our skin, and we treat ourselves like walking capsules.

We can call this the capsule epistemology. Epistemology is the technical term for our way of knowing. We all have one, even if we never use the fancy term, because we all think we know things, and we operate our lives on the basis of what we think we know.

The capsule way of knowing gives us capsules, by which I mean it gives us ourselves as isolated blobs, and also gives us pills, literal capsules and figurative capsules. The capsule way of knowing is the medicating way of knowing, and it is the cubicle way of knowing, the SUV way of knowing, the airplane way of knowing, the skyscraper way of knowing, the fracking way of knowing, the species extinction way of knowing, the Red team vs Blue team way of knowing, the Facebook way of knowing, and on and on.

The capsule way of knowing that arises from this “authentic criterion” of our lives seems to come with negative side-effects. We might be tempted to think that this root criterion is perfectly acceptable, and that what we “do” with it creates trouble. But therein lies our confession: This way of knowing and being is the way of knowing and being of a doer, of a doing orientation to life. It’s a style of relating to the world.

That this doing epistemology pervades our activity matters, first and foremost, because we can then understand that it naturally pervades our science. It does this in countless ways, including the inclination of theory and practice toward atomization. For instance, consider how “99 listeners out of a hundred wouldn’t stop to think twice, coming across the expression ‘we put each participant in an fMRI scanner,’” while in another culture we might find ourselves coming across that expression and saying, “How odd . . . instead of studying a relational ecology, these experimenters isolated what they refer to as ‘organisms’ and put them in a dreadful machine all alone . . . Hmmm . . . valid findings in a certain sense, but not very ecologically valid, not very true to a rich, lived experience . . .”

Scientists have done experiments with pairs of “individuals” but, as far as I know, only Joy Hirsch and her team have pioneered inquiry into relational beings engaged in relational activity (what we might call relational dynamism, a study of the dance of life).

Similarly, Dr. Neil Theise offered a critique of what he refers to as “the cell doctrine,” the assumption that the body is made up of “cells”. He refers to this as the foundational doctrine of Euro-American medicine and biology. It is not that the cell doctrine gives us nothing or renders a senseless interpretation of “biological” “phenomena,” but it also reflects and perpetuates knowing ourselves in atomized pieces, and by means of the intellectualist and psychologist fallacies, it continues the process of overwriting our own experience.

Just as we don’t experience ourselves as a brain, we don’t experience ourselves as a collection of cells. And the cell doctrine can thus interfere with our capacity to experience ourselves the ways wise ones and sages in other cultures have experienced themselves. For instance, we could experience ourselves as a flow of energy, wind, or something like what certain Asian cultures refer to as chi, ki, lung, or prana.

Because of the cell doctrine, approaches like acupuncture, which works with the flow of chi/qi, can get relegated to the fringe, and the more holistic approaches to medicine practiced in the Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese traditions become a matter of “alternative” approaches.

We obviously want “science-based” medicine, but those who most militantly argue for it rarely seem to question the current paradigms that have a hold on dominant culture science,

and the dominant culture in general doesn’t reflect wisely, compassionately, and beautifully on the meaning and nature of science itself.

“Science” is a concept, and we need careful reflection on it.

Magic is perfectly scientific in the most essential sense, as is philosophy.

While on the one hand we could see some of what we’re talking about as mere details (in other words, we don’t need to think we must all “convert” to Tibetan or shamanic medical and healing practices),

on the other hand we do seem to have here a crisis of worldview, and we cannot seriously think that healing, wholeness, and profound health and well-being are the focus of dominant culture science and medicine—or if we claim those are the focus, we cannot seriously think dominant culture science and medicine have the most ideal approaches, and that we could not do better.

In any case, Plenty of serious scientists and philosophers encourage us to see our apparent individuation or separateness as highly relative and, from some perspective, delusory. Not only Einstein in his famous letter, but many other scientists might see things this way as well.

Einstein’s letter has become fairly well-known, but worth reviewing here:

Dear Mr. Marcus:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

With my best wishes,

sincerely yours,

Albert Einstein.

The context of the letter is that Mr. Marcus’s son had died, and he sought counsel from the great scientist. Perhaps ordinary philosophers and spiritual figures had failed him. In any case, we can sense here a living LoveWisdom at work: Seeing through or cutting through our supposed limitedness often gets framed as a Great Liberation, a Great Peace.

Magic in this sense has to do with mutual liberation and genuine serenity and wonder.

We focused so far on the first principle of magic, as outlined by Yeats: That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another. We could call this the ecology of mind, and we can think of magic as a practice of liberation into larger ecologies of mind, for the purpose of mutual healing, mutual nourishment, and in general the mutual accomplishment of life, the co-creative evolution of life and the Cosmos.

We could say that magical consciousness is ecological or spiritual consciousness. That doesn’t mean everyone who believes in magic is also ecoliterate or that everyone who is ecoliterate also believes in magic. Rather, it means that any serious consideration of magic or ecology raises the bar on both sides. Those interested in magic engage in spiritual materialism to the extent that they do not go all the way to the edge of their practice and engage with ecological realities, and those who think they know a thing or two about ecology may have cut themselves off from deeper insights if they simply refuse to inquire into the true meaning of magic.

Yeats himself referred to the possibility of thinking of this flow of minds, this ecology of mind in the widest possible sense, as a single mind or a single energy. This has to do with the fundamental wholeness of life, the wholeness of the Cosmos itself. Reality has no gaps. And we can also appreciate a fundamental nonduality of unity and diversity.

The notion of wholeness is essential. On the Wisdom, Love, and Beauty blog, you will find a series of posts on wholeness called Hologram, Ecogram, Mandala. It deals with some of the challenges of a holistic view, and it too offers scientific and philosophical perspectives that help us to understand this first principle of magic.

Depending on our background, we may have to think quite carefully and rigorously about this first principle. If we are honest, it’s a lot to take in, and we should not accept it blindly. Once we do begin to sense the cogency and reasonability of this principle, it opens us to the other principles.

Let’s consider the second principle, a little more briefly since we did so much groundwork with the first principle.

The second principle goes like this:

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting as that of our mind, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

Isn’t that lovely? The memory of Nature Herself.

We can touch this in a variety of ways.

For one thing, we can consider the work of Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist. Gagliano has run experiments demonstrating the capacity of plants to learn, to remember.

This is nothing short of astonishing from the standpoint of localized epistemologies and brain-as-computer metaphors, since it demonstrates what we can technically refer to as extra-neuronal cognition. In other words, she proved that learning and memory do not require neurons, and so they may slip beyond the barriers we cling to.

Of course, if mind is non-local, the findings are simply a delightful part of life, and nothing particularly astonishing.

Gagliano not only showed that plants can learn, but she experienced their apparent capacity to teach as well, which she documents in her book, Thus Spoke the Plant. Being taught by a plant qualifies as a magical experience.

Extra-neuronal memory was also demonstrated—famously or infamously—by James McConnel.

McConnell trained flatworms, called planarians. These flatworms have neurons only in one half of their body, the part we would designate as their head. After getting them to learn to respond to light, McConnell then cut them in half. Planarians can regenerate their whole body. Even if you cut them into two hundred pieces, each piece can grow whole.

Obviously, if you cut off the head, and if memory requires neurons because mind is localized to the brain, then the half that lost its head and must grow another one shouldn’t remember anything that it learned. However, the half that could not have possibly retained memory (because it had no neurons to do so) still remembered.

Memory transfer was later demonstrated in rats, using brain extracts, and has been replicated more recently—a shocking result that challenges current theories. You can look up Shomrat and Levin, who replicated the finding with flatworms, or Bédécarrats who replicated it in mollusks.

We also know that the memory of trauma can persist across generations. Researchers to look for here include Dora L. Costa and Rachel Yehuda. Professor Yehuda collaborated with a fellow Minoan it seems. These and other researchers have looked at how trauma can pass through generations.

Costa and fellow researchers looked at Civil War vets. At the close of the Civil War, conditions in prisoner of war camps in the South got particularly horrendous. Looking at thousands of people, the researchers found that if a man had survived those traumatizing prison conditions, and then returned home and had a son, his son would have a 10% higher mortality rate after reaching middle age. We have no idea what other effects may have manifested in those men’s lives, since death statistics are about as solid as the evidence seems to get. We don’t have good records on their day to day well being, including things like anxiety and depression levels.

Keep in mind, if a man went to war but didn’t spend time in those prison camps, his sons would be fine. And if the soldier who went to the camps had a son before going to the prison, his son would be fine too. We see evidence here of a memory of trauma.

We can see this in other ways too, and those who think that the memory of slavery and genocide here on Turtle Island doesn’t still live with us seem to want to avoid a difficult truth. Just being born Black or Indigenous here on Turtle Island comes with a whole lot of burden. Some of that we can attribute to institutionalized oppression that still exists, even if it wears civilized and cunning masks. But some of it may have to do with inherited memory.

No one knows exactly how this inherited memory works. Waddington and Baldwin were two of the early researchers who described phenomena that fall in the general class of inherited memory. However, Waddington thought the mechanism came from hidden potentials in our DNA. In other words, nothing NEW is inherited. Baldwin thought learning could affect the process of evolution. Neither view amounts to something Lamarkian, for those familiar with all of these evolutionary theories. One can find research on these matters under names like the Baldwin effect and transgenerational epigenetics.

However, the point for us has less to do with mechanism. Once we have demonstrated memory outside of neurons, we have entered new territory. Any serious inquiry into the second principle Yeats offers us may demand a new scientific paradigm.

We should acknowledge that not only trauma, but also love carries down the generations. The pediatrician Dr. Brazelton filmed mothers holding their babies. Over two decades later, when those babies had grown up and had babies of their own, Brazelton filmed them as well. He noticed that they held their babies in the exact same way their mother had held them, even though they had no conscious memory of it.

If we stay in our capsule epistemology, we may leave this to the Freudian unconscious. But in such a moment, those mother remember together with Every stunning wild mare nuzzling and nursing her beautiful foal, every incredible wild whale mother, caring for her child. There is an incredible resonance there, nothing short of real magic.

In a more edgy example, Russell Targ shares some of his research into the magical capacities of the mind under the rubric of Remote Viewing. Keep in mind that Targ and his main collaborator Hal Putoff published in peer-reviewed journals.

One of the earliest of their published works was titled, A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances. The title itself succumbs to the old paradigm, because it relies on a nonlocal image of the Cosmos. In any case, the title gives a clearly technical vocabulary that amounts to saying Here is a research paper on ESP.

This was published in a highly regarded scientific journal. Given the journal’s reputation and its editorial standards, the editors felt the need to acknowledge the strangeness of this paper. It was peer-reviewed, and the problem was that the peers could find no fault in the experiment. The paper could not be rejected on any sincere scientific ground. Nevertheless, the editors quote one of the engineers they consulted about the paper, who replied, and I’m quoting here, “This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in even if it existed.”

This foreshadows our future consideration of the fear and reactivity to magic that we all must confront.

One of the psychics Targ worked with was Pat Price. Price had an excellent track record for remote viewing. In general, these experiments worked by having Targ go with Price into a sealed room, totally insulated so no signals could get in. Putoff and sometimes a liaison from the military would randomly select a target. They would go there. Price would then enter the remote view state, a form of magical consciousness, and he would describe what he saw.

In one experiment, a recreation area call Rinconada Park was randomly selected. Price described it as Water purification plant. He described a square pool 65x80 and a round pool 100 ft diameter. He also saw two tall water storage tanks.

In fact, the pool was 110 feet in diameter—Price had said 100 feet—and the rectangular pool was 75x100—Price had said 65x80. So he was incredibly accurate for having no idea where they were going, and thus even getting two pools, one rectangular and one round, is astonishing.

But what about those water tanks? Price added two water tanks, and called the place a water purification plant, when in fact it was a swimming park.

Well, Sometime later, Targ saw a photo of the same location from 75 years before. That same location had been a water purification plant, and the two towers had been the tallest structures in town.

Price somehow touched memory and present at the same time.

It’s impossible for the current paradigm to explain this sort of thing. It’s impossible for the current paradigm to explain how the 14th Dalai Lama as a little boy who had never been to the home of the 13th Dalai Lama nevertheless ran straight to certain places in the palace to get objects he knew would be there.

In my own life, I also had the experience of remembering objects that I knew I did not own. One of them, that kept coming up for years when I was a boy, was a magic trick I had never seen. I knew I didn’t have the apparatus for the trick, and yet part of me knew this trick. I later read about it, and realized I could not have owned it because of the apparatus required, and yet as a boy I couldn’t help myself from looking for it.

As far as remote viewing in general, Targ himself discovered something we might find as astonishing as the experiment we just considered. Years after conducting these experiments, Targ read the teachings of the Tibetan sage Padmasambhava, and he said that these teachings describe practices for entering the very state of mind required for remote viewing. In other words, philosophical or spiritual practices can cultivate magical consciousness. This is the meaning of visionary LoveWisdom.

We can all touch this space, enter it, realize ourselves as this spaciousness of awareness.

When we practice the arts of awareness—perhaps deep meditation, or a shamanic journey or trance, or a magical ritual or ceremony, or maybe working mindfully and in a sacred way with a holotropic medicine, we can go—inexplicably—into living memory of the World. We touch it immediately. We don’t go back in time but enter it now.

There is past, present, and future. Human beings get trapped in these. We get trapped in our past, trapped by possible futures, trapped in the present moment even, thinking we are being in the moment or living in the moment.

There is a fourth time, beyond these three. When we drop the other three times, the fourth time remains. We can touch how our own mindstream, millions and millions of years ago, was a different life form, crawling on its belly in the mud.

It’s not like remembering something that happened before. It’s the experience of being the living memory of the world, that the whole of the world’s memory is alive in us.

We also have prospective memory. In the fourth time, past, present and future abide not as a trap but as liberated. We now rely on our memory of the future. The World relies on the memory of what will come, or what might come. It remembers the possibilities for the future.

It’s all rather mysterious. But we work with the magic of prospective memory all the time. Right now, I could ask you to remember to be present for your life the rest of this day, to remember that you want to realize the true nature of self and reality, to remember that you want to presence wisdom, love, and beauty in every thought, word, and action.

And at the end of the day you might say to yourself, “Wait a minute, I was supposed to remember to be present for my own life. I was supposed to remember that this life matters, in each moment the truth is there. I was supposed to attend to the nature of mind and attune myself to the mind of nature, but I forgot.” Then in the morning, as you sip your coffee, you might remember, “I want to be present today. I want to remember what I am, discover and create what I am in nonduality, discovery and creation all at once.”

There is a magic in this memory into the future. You and I could cast that spell, the spell of awakening, the spell of primordial awareness coming alive and alove.

That’s good magic.

That’s enough for the second principle. We will consider the third principle in our next contemplation.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories of magic to share, get in touch through wisdomloveandbeauty.org and we might bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.