Yeats tells us, "the borders of our memories are as shifting as the borders of our mind, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself." In this contemplation, we consider how that relates to horses, trauma, and the mysteries of remembering something that hasn't happened yet.

Dangerous Magic 4: Principles of Magic—Horses, Time, and Precognition

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 inquired a little further into Yeats’ first principle of magic, and then we picked up the second. I intended to pick up the third principle this time, but something happened during the recording of the last contemplation that seemed synchronistic, and which then led to thinking that maybe we should inquire a little further into the second principle of magic, which has to do with memory.

The second principle of magic outlined by the poet William Butler Yeats goes like this:

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

Memory . . .

Something happened as we spoke about memory last time. Maybe I should first acknowledge that, As philosopher in residence at a wild horse sanctuary, I live in the barn with the horses who need special attention.

Horses belong in wide open spaces. Horses do not belong in barns or stalls unless medically necessary. The fact that humans keep huge numbers of horses in confinement without medical necessity gives yet another indication of how out of attunement with reality human beings have gotten, and how we have all gotten locked in a pattern of insanity.

The horses here get as much space as medically and logistically possible, and a few do stay in the barn where I live when there is a special need.

In the early hours when I record these contemplations, the horses usually stay quiet. But at the end of the last contemplation, we concluded an inquiry into memory that involved some potentially strange phenomena.

Among other things, we considered the possibility that the memory of trauma might somehow stay with us, and that it might also stay with a place. Magic teaches us that memory doesn’t hide behind our skin, and that we ourselves are interwoven with Nature, and so Nature too carries our memories, including the memory of what our ancestors may have done in ignorance, and what our friends and the wider community of life may have undergone.

Given the long history of the human and horse relationship, it seems potentially synchronistic that as we tried to conclude that inquiry, touching as we did on trauma, one of the horses began banging very loudly in the barn. It was unusual for that early hour, and after the recording stopped, so did the banging. Though occasional banging does happen, it’s not usually so loud. It’s audible in the recording.

The synchronicity here involves a few elements. For one, the day before recording that contemplation, I had been reading about the period of time when humans applied conquest consciousness to the wild horse herds on Turtle Island. Powered by factories and machines, and fueled by ignorance and greed, human beings put perhaps 2 million horses through mass slaughter, for dog food and for meat that was sent to Europe.

In thinking about the extermination of horses, sound played a big part in the experience for me. We could try and imagine the way vast areas of Turtle Island once thundered with the powerful gallop of millions of horse hooves, and we can contrast that with the silence of their absence. None of us will hear that thunder.

And we can only imagine the clamor of wild horses kicking at the walls of railroad cars as they travelled from the west to Chicago where they would meet a brutal and undignified end.

I thought a lot about the sounds of those horses, and so when the horse in the barn, who is a good friend of mine, began kicking so loudly, it immediately evoked this eerie memory of extermination and horses trapped in railway cars.

My friend Aragon was once a wild horse. She’s still wild. But she deals with the human world gently and intelligently. She does protest at gates of any kind, and she sometimes tries to climb them. She herself is not sick, but her friend Rio is, and that’s why she’s in the barn. She stays close to him, and attends to him. It’s touching to see.

Once, when I had to help Rio take his medicine, Aragon tried her best to herd him to me. Rio is very skittish, and he naturally wanted to avoid me. But Aragon seemed to understand the whole situation, and seemed intent on getting him to stop moving away, and instead to let me approach. She was trying to help. There have been many times when it was clear that Aragon knew what I was thinking. That’s magic. The borders of her mind and my mind shifted, and we became liberated into a larger ecology of mind, a shared space of freedom and creativity.

Anyway, when she banged on that gate so loudly during the recording, it seemed to sound out the memory of her ancestors, and of human ancestors too. Again, I had been reading about the extermination of wild horses just the day before recording, and the weight of this event affects the karma of everyone in the dominant culture. I felt it all echo in the soul as Aragon banged away. A magical consciousness allows us to sense that Aragon banged on that gate when she did because that sound would ring out in my mind as a kind of memory, as a calling, as a reminder. The word mindfulness, a word that has become common in so many places, comes as a translation of the word Sati. That word carries the connotation of memory, of remembering.

Aragon sounded out a call to mindfulness.

My own lineage didn’t have much to do with hunting or even capturing wild horses. But all the Indo-European languages seem to descend from a group of people who lived in the Eurasian plains and hunted and then captured and enslaved horses. This could have been the very model of human slavery. Once humans had enslaved the horse, both the thought and the means of enslaving other humans became clearer. Horses make it possible to attack and dominate other humans in new ways—indeed, they make it possible to attack and dominate all sorts of beings, from sheep to trees.

In thinking of the extermination of horses here on Turtle Island, we touch on much more than that, because their extermination goes together with the extermination of wolves and bison, and stretches back to the extermination and even extinction of large species like wooly mammoths, and leads all the way to the mass extinction of species we see today. It also touches on the extermination of cultures, languages, tribes, nations, and the extermination of the sacred, the fencing in of the sacred, the extermination of wildness and wonder in countless ways.

Related to all of this is the fact that, also a day or so before the recording, I made a serious but informal book proposal to the founder of this horse rescue, a book which I told her had a secret title. I’ll let you know the secret title: How the Horse Can Save America. We wouldn’t call it that, but it’s a useful secret title.

What I mean by that title, really, is how the horse can heal conquest consciousness, because what we call America is just the leading edge of that pattern of insanity.

The horse represents a portal to all the insanity of the dominant culture, going back thousands of years, and the horse still touches all the major issues, right here in the present—issues like poverty, racism, capitalism, ecological breakdown, and so on. It’s all there.

Speaking about horses brings us into the territory of dangerous wisdom, because the horse is dangerous wisdom embodied, dangerous wisdom, love, and beauty walking around in a majestic and dignified form.

Symbolically, archetypally, and in their very sacred presence, horses defy conquest consciousness.

Horses so profoundly defy conquest consciousness that even people who love horses get confused and nervous around them. People who love horses often ignore their own incoherence in relation to horses and to the world that horses invite us to discover and create.

And even people who love horses participate in their continued oppression.

Indeed, we all have a responsibility for the karmic wounds of the past, the memory, the memory of what human beings have done to the horse, through the horse, with the horse, how we have used the horse to oppress, how we have used the horse for violence and aggression, and how we

put violence and aggression onto the horse even now. And again, this includes people who proclaim love for horses currently today.

I wanted to say this much in honor of Aragon and her kin, all her ancestors and all her relations. We might add an addendum to this contemplation that discusses some of these matters further. But Aragon’s call to mindfulness did not just bring horses to mind. It also brought mindfulness of further aspects of memory, and I do think horses would like human beings to find magic again. So, in honor of Aragon and all other sentient beings who wish for us the discovery of magic, the realization of magic, let’s think further about magic and memory.

In general, if we want to understand our past, we can see it in the horse, and if we want to understand our future we can see that in the horse.

If we want to know the memory and future of horses, we can look at the grass. If we want to know the memory and future of grass, we can look at horses. And we can look at humans too. Horses are the memory of grass and of humans. Humans are the memory of horses and of grass.

If we want to know the magic of horses, we can look at the grass, because horses conjure the grass. If we want to know the magic of the grass, we can look at horses, because grasses conjure horses. Mind, memory, and magic. They go together.

The interwovenness of these, and the interwovenness of past, present, and future, seems like a good place to continue our reflections.

Yeats gives us a conceptual view of magic, and concepts can cover over mysteries rather than revealing them. For instance, let’s say the first two principles again:

(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.

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

Here, Yeats makes a conceptual distinction that all of us habitually make. We tend to think of memory as its own sort of thing. But we might begin to think that we cannot have mind without memory.

We might think of information on the one hand, and our use of information on the other. Storing the information is memory. We may even say that storing and retrieving information is memory.

But the image of storage and retrieval that so many of us accept seems to have some problems. For instance, let’s say we rent a storage unit. We put some books in there. One day, we need those books. So we go and retrieve them. We can only say we retrieved them if we actually go and get the books.

In other words, we could put it this way. Imagine a full-service storage facility. We don’t have to do the storing. We just hand over our stuff, and they promise to secure it, keep it safe, then retrieve whatever we want, whenever we want it.

So, we go back a month later and say, “Please get the Complete Dialogues of Plato.” If the person comes back with a slip of paper that has the words, Complete Dialogues of Plato written on it, we’ll look at them like they must be joking.

When you try and remember your mother’s face, do you retrieve a face? Did you store a face?

Let’s say someone has breakfast, and they eat sourdough bread with olive oil and honey and they drink a cup of tea with it. If we ask them what they had for breakfast, they will tell us, “Sourdough bread with olive oil and honey, and a cup of tea.” They don’t reproduce the food for us.

If they were strictly an input-output machine, strictly storage and retrieval, they would need to have been fed the sentence— “Sourdough bread with olive oil and honey, and a cup of tea” in order to properly retrieve that sentence. But this person didn’t eat a sentence, and they didn’t even look at those words. They ate the food. Memory doesn’t retrieve the food itself, nor does it retrieve words. Rather, the person tells us what they ate.

If the mind functions holistically, then, even though we can find cases of damage to our bodies that create rather specific problems in functioning, we don’t necessarily have some specialized faculty for memory. Mind and memory go totally together, and if we could remember absolutely nothing at all, we wouldn’t have a mind.

This helps us understand another conceptually misleading notion, namely that the body stores memory or that the body carries trauma. On the one hand, that can seem incredibly helpful to think about. On the other hand, we’re just moving things around without recognizing that all attempts at localization will ultimately fail. Magic involves the skillful recognition of the nonlocality of mind, including memory.

We can just as easily say that trauma is stored in the culture at large, in the collective conscious and unconscious, and in Nature too. The horse carries our trauma, and people actively put their ignorance and suffering into the bodies of horses and countless other beings.

Conceptually, we could speak about perception, and think of it as the present. We can speak about memory and think of it as the past. And we can speak about inference and think of it as the future. We may indeed find some specialized mechanisms that facilitate these, but our thinking about them shouldn’t veer into localizing them. They only make sense in the context of a holistic, dynamic ecology of mind.

Only a whole process—an ecology of mind—has the capacity to think, to sing, to play, to hear stories, to arrive at insights, to heal and transform. Where we draw the borders of that ecology depends on philosophical assumptions, not on real gaps or joints we will ever find in reality.

In terms of our experience, the philosopher Edmund Husserl noticed the interwovenness of past, present, and future when he examined the experience of listening to music. If we think about something like listening to a song we love, we can recognize first of all that we don’t stay in the present moment as if the present moment could exist cut off from past and future. If we could only hear the present note, we wouldn’t perceive a melody. We would just hear a series of notes.

When we listen to a song, we experience it as a song, not as a series of notes. We don’t experience a series of now moments. The present note comes totally interwoven with the notes that just played, and also with our sense of the notes to come. That’s obviously how we experience things like syncopation and surprise in music. But it’s integral to any listening experience. People can speak conceptually about not having expectations, but without the interwovenness of the future in the now, we wouldn’t have our ordinary experience. In all likelihood, almost everyone who speaks about not having expectations has many unconscious expectations, and merely deludes themselves.

The philosopher Derrida used this analysis as the basis of a critique of our habitual mind, the habitual mind of the dominant culture. Husserl himself didn’t seem to acknowledge the full weight of his own analysis. Derrida tried to do so.

He essentially said, Husserl’s analysis shows there is no present independent of past and future. If we try and find the now, we can’t find it independently of past and future. When we speak of the so-called power of now, we may have lofty notions in mind, but if we were a little more honest, we might realize that we are simply speaking about the power of a different way of relating to past and future.

Of course, as we noted in our last contemplation, the mystics speak of a fourth time. They had noticed all of this long before Husserl and Derrida. And they had noticed much more, because Husserl and Derrida give no indication of experiencing a fourth time, something beyond the cycle of past-present-future. Entrance into the fourth time would also alter our experience of past, present, and future. We might even come to see time as an illusion.

We touched on this a little in the previous contemplation, but one of the things we didn’t mention suddenly seemed worth considering, because it pushes more directly on our habitual notions and falls more clearly into the realm of the magical.

Let’s start with something a bit unmagical, in some sense. Everything about our mind involves a measure of magic. But some of it can seem mundane.

For instance, in the literature of cognitive science and psychology, we can find a common experimental protocol called priming.

Priming has become something of a cottage industry. It can yield interesting findings, and it allows experimenters to test causal hypotheses in cases that might otherwise yield only correlations.

What does that mean. Well, as one example, researchers can run experiments that show general differences in thought and perception between people from China and people from the U.S. But this only gives us correlations.

However, if we have a group of people who have lived sufficiently long in both China and the U.S., we could experimentally manipulate their perception by first priming them. What does that mean? It’s been a long time since anyone had to prime a pump, so we might not know what priming means. In this case, a researcher could show images, maybe images of the Statue of Liberty and other “American” cultural artefacts on the one hand, or they could show images of The Great Wall and other “Chinese” cultural artefacts on the other. This provides an experimental variable, and it gets us into the realm of causal explanations.

In this case, priming someone with iconic images from Chinese culture gets the person’s thought to behave in a more typically Chinese fashion, and priming with iconic images from American culture gets the person’s thought more American. In general, we can loosely say priming means something we do first to evoke something else later.

We have interest in another priming experiment, rather different from the one we just considered as an example. This one involves having people sit in front of a computer and view a series of images which they must quickly judge as either positive or negative. The participants press buttons on a keyboard to indicate whether the image seems positive or negative. Let’s say they might use the left “shift” key for negative and right “shift” key for positive.

The images come from standardized collections of images. These images have gone through lots and lots of testing, so that we can rely on what almost everyone will rate as positive or negative. For instance, an image of fresh fruit or ice cream is almost universally positive.

The priming dimension involves flashing a word on the screen just before the image. The word “bitter” or “luscious” might get flashed just before a picture of ripe fruit.

Just like the images, the words flashed also come from standardized collections. English speakers consistently understand “ugly” as negative in valence and “beautiful” as positive.

The priming of the word affects the way people rate the images, and it’s all very predictable. Remember, a word gets flashed, then an image, and then the person is asked to say if the image is positive or negative.

We expect this kind of response: If you see the word “bitter” before you see the picture of the fruit, you will take just a little longer to rate the image compared to seeing the word “luscious” before the image. When the word aligns with the image, we react faster, but when it conflicts with the image it slows us down.

Let’s go over the protocol in its basic sequential form, one more time:

1) You are sitting in front of a computer (with monitor and keyboard), and you know you are to quickly evaluate a series of images as either positive or negative

2) Before each image appears, a word flashes on the screen

3) After the word flashes, an image appears on the screen

4) You quickly rate the image as positive or negative by pressing a key

5) Then you do this over and over

Again, the reaction time is faster when the image and the word have the same valence, like the word luscious appearing just before an image of fruit. When the image and the word have different valences, it creates a bit of lag in our response time. We could formulate various hypotheses as to why, but they don’t so much matter right now.

This example seems simple enough, but let’s make sure we are on the same page about this protocol, so we don’t miss anything. To check our intuitions about how the protocol works, imagine the following illogical sequence:

1) You are sitting in front of a computer (with monitor and keyboard), and you know you are to quickly evaluate a series of images as either positive or negative

2) An image appears on the screen

3) You quickly rate the image as positive or negative by pressing a key

4) After you have already rated the image, a word flashes on the screen

5) You do nothing, and you wait for the next image

Note that step 4 in this protocol is the same as step 2 in the previous one—which doesn’t make sense.

The word is supposed to prime you. The word is supposed to appear before the image appears, so that it either slows you down a little or speeds you up. The word is the primer. It can’t have any effect if you already looked at the image and rated it, right?

If you have followed our discussion so far, then you understand why this version of the protocol defeats the purpose, and we share a mutual understanding of the basic experimental set-up. I don’t mean to belabor such a simple thing, but it’s important that we grok how these experiments work, because there are quite a lot of studies based on priming, and our discussion relies on a solid grasp of the set-up.

It makes no sense to put the priming word AFTER we have people view and rate the image, because it could not have a causal influence on their rating. If I rate the image before you try to influence how fast I rate it, then whatever you do to influence me should have no effect. By the time you try to influence me, I have already completed my task.

The results may surprise you. Participants responded significantly faster on the congruent trials than the incongruent ones—in other words, there was indeed a significant priming effect.

How significant? Scientists indicate experimental significance using what they call a “p” value. It means the probability that the results could have happened by mere coincidence or chance. Typically, a p value of .05 represents the threshold of significance. In other words, scientists tend to think that they need the assurance that a result has only a 5% chance of being a coincidence, and a 95% chance of being a reliable phenomenon, or else they won’t bother reporting it.

A p value of .01 indicates a higher degree of significance, and is preferable. It means a 99% chance of a reliable phenomenon, and only a 1% chance that the result was some kind of statistical fluke.

Let’s allow that finding to sink in.

The experiment was conducted by a serious researcher at Cornell, under standardized protocols. The participants rated the image first, and only after they had done so a word flashed on the screen—which at that point should have no influence since the rating took place before the word was revealed. It should be abundantly clear why no one who understands the correct protocol would countenance even running such an illogical version, let alone would anyone expect to find a statistically significant difference.

Check your own intuitions. Would you yourself have considered running the illogical version of the protocol? Even if, for some strange reason, you don’t find the result astonishing, even if you say you would be willing to entertain such an experiment in the name of science, would you really have stopped your work in the cottage industry of priming studies to run a protocol that makes no sense from the standpoint of the priming effect?

This question has less to do with values or beliefs we have about ourselves and more to do with our actual behavior.

We need to slow down here, because this example presents some significant challenges to our typical ways of thinking. In some sense, all the examples we have and will consider in this series present challenges to us, because duality has such deep roots in our thinking that any perceived threat to a duality we covet will provoke us in ways that make it difficult to keep an open yet discerning mind.

Perhaps we should consider why a threat to a duality feels like a threat to our identity. Maybe it’s only a way-deep-down sort of feeling, but if we look carefully, we may find our reaction against challenges to dualities rather sensitive at first, sensitive enough that we may want to inquire into the sensitivity itself. What’s at stake?

We will not really take a Kuhnian approach that might have us look at these findings as anomalies and ask if a paradigm shift approaches our horizon. Such an analysis, though valuable and in some ways connected to our work here, would still leave the core paradigm in place, namely the basic paradigm of dualistic thinking. All our other paradigms—scientific, religious, philosophical, artistic—rest on top of this core paradigm. We need to keep our eye on the dualities for now.

The findings from this experimental set-up challenge several dualities at once: Conscious/Not conscious, Cause/Effect, Before/After, Known/Unknown, Possible/Impossible.

We needn’t identify the exact source of the disruption.

Does this set-up provide evidence of a problem in our understanding of time? How about our understanding of memory?

Or is it a problem with our understanding of what it means to be able to know something, or to be able to act on the basis of information that could not be conscious in any ordinary sense?

It may be both, or it may be something else.

But it does seem to activate our dualistic concepts—or perhaps we can only analyze the findings in terms of these dualities.

Note the sweeping nature of some of these dualities. For instance, conscious/not conscious. Let’s allow “conscious” to mean phenomenological experience, self-awareness, or something like that. Take it in a rather simple or intuitive sense.

“Not conscious” means . . . everything else.

In some sense, it means everything else in the Cosmos, because some people will make the duality on the basis of their own consciousness (to some degree or other this occurs for most people, though these catalysts may behave differently in different contexts), and they will think of it first in terms of what they have conscious access to and what they don’t. Though we may acknowledge other beings as conscious, we may still insist that the contents of their consciousness remains, from our own perspective, not conscious.

Indeed, we may even harbor an other-minds skepticism, intellectually speaking if not practically so.

In any case, the experimenters in this protocol don’t know what’s going to happen, so they fall under “not conscious” in that sense. The computer, the chair we sit on, the floor, the walls, the air, the light, the future moment . . . all of this counts as not conscious.

We may find it worthwhile to reflect on the ways “not conscious” can get associated with “not living,” or “not valuable,” or “not able to communicate,” or some other sort of limiting notion.

Are horses conscious? Do we respect their awareness, their memory, their perception? Are horses part of our ecology of mind? Are horses and plains part of our way of knowing and being, living and loving?

Are rivers part of ecologies of mind? Are mountains part of our ecology of mind?

How about our own bones? They are made of minerals, like a mountain is. Our blood has iron in it. We are mostly water, aren’t we? Aren’t we river water, and rain water?

Many of our own so-called biological processes count as not conscious, and we may not think of them as sentient. The activity of the neurons in our brain—the fluid shifting of synapses, the release and reuptake of neurotransmitters, the steady work of ion pumps—all of this activity goes on as not conscious to us.

Nor do we have conscious access to all of the so-called “thinking” going on in our skulls. We do not, for instance, typically experience an awareness of unconscious processes that might work on a problem for days. We just get an insight.

Nor do we consciously experience all the ways our culture shapes our perceptions. We simply “perceive,” and thus the perceptual priming experiments described previously can detect differences in perception that we may not ourselves experience consciously—some we do, some we don’t, and many things fall in between.

We can find countless exceptions, but the basic notion holds—and it holds with respect to key aspects of our neuroses and psychological complexes too, though we sometimes pretend we can ignore or bracket them.

In all of this not conscious stuff, somewhere in it, somehow in it, there arises something like an awareness of, sensitivity to, or relationship with the congruency or incongruency of the image-word pairs.

That seems like one reasonable hypothesis to account for the findings. But, of course, we know better than to accept such findings. We are critical thinkers after all. And yet, we can find nothing “actually” illogical about the set-up we described. It gets its strangeness in large part from the fact that it goes against dualities we take for granted, and even our hypotheses about how to explain the results will end up using these dualities, at least pragmatically, because our language seems to have them built in. But, let us consider some of our possible reactions to what should present itself as a potentially troubling challenge to our dualistic thought (is it somewhat troubling? very troubling? not really troubling after all? why so?).

First of all, we may still want to insist that this is a statistical fluke. Even though many rational people could write up a good argument against buying lottery tickets with these odds, they may still say the experiment is, essentially, like a lottery win: Highly unlikely, but not impossible.

They analyzed the data using two models. In the first model, they assume there is something like a “true” effect size for these results, and the various experiments thus represent a sampling around that true effect size as a mean. In the second model, they assume the effect size varies across the experiments. They included results for both models, but the effect size turned out to be basically the same.

We need to make a distinction though, between significance and effect size. Finding significance means eliminating the possibility of what is called a Type I error, which means thinking you found something you haven’t. The odds overwhelmingly support the hypothesis that we have most probably found something here.

Once we think we have found something, we can ask another question: How pronounced is what we found? Effect size answers that question, giving us a statistical indication of the extent or intensity of the effect we found.

It should not surprise us to discover a small effect size here, otherwise we would experience these sort of phenomena as commonplace. They seem to be subtle, not loud and obvious.

Mossbridge and company found an effect size of .21 for both their models. Bem found an effect size of .22 across all 9 experiments. These are modest effects.

Typically, the effect size scale gets broken up something like this: .2 is considered small, .5 is considered moderate, and .8 is considered large.

These numbers represent fractions of a standard deviation, that is a deviation from normal mental activity.

It’s not clear why the effect size is consistently small, and with little research going into this sort of thing, we may have to wait quite some time before good hypotheses emerge.

In analyzing the data, Bem found that an aspect of the Big Five personality trait of Extraversion, namely stimulus seeking, correlated with heightened performance on 5 of the trials. Looking just at participants who scored high in stimulus seeking, Bem found an effect size of .43, which indicates a much bigger effect.

Let’s make no mistake here: Whether the effect size is .21 or .43, it would provide enough of an edge to run a casino—and no well-run casino fails to turn a profit.

We do not contemplate this example with the thought that a single experiment will overturn our notions of duality and locality. We make a duality between human and Nature, between mind and Nature, between here and there. And we conceptually separate the present from the past and the future. We consider this experiment as an example of magic, and in particular as an illustration that mind and memory are not localized, and do not depend on our conceptual notion of time. Memory and expectation, past and future, arise as interwoven.

We can acknowledge that our culture should make us feel puzzled about this experiment.

Because of the barriers we create, we put some rather hard edges into our world, edges we treat as given. When we find ourselves bumping up against something of this sort, we may want to ask if the edges come from dualities we have projected onto the world as solid.

Some of us “know” this experiment is “not possible,” because we have developed a total image of humanity and the world. And even if we find the experiment sensible, we live in a culture that has infected us with images that tell parts of us this experiment cannot work.

We are only admitting here that we aren’t fully coherent and congruent. If you are fully enlightened, then you won’t take offense at this suggestion. And unless you think you are fully enlightened, then you have an unconscious, and some of its energies and patterns arise from the confusions of the dominant culture as well as our own ignorance. This side of sagehood, all of us actively misknow our reality.

Let’s acknowledge then that this is not a one-off experiment by a rogue researcher. Some readers may know that we have a verification crisis in a few areas of our science, but here we have not only a set of 9 experiments performed by a well-respected researcher at Cornell, but also a meta-analysis going back over 20 years.

No one should suggest we can simply call the matter settled, but it does not fall into the obvious categories of suspicion—aside from the fact that the result itself pushes against our notions of what should be possible.

This experimental set-up seems to indicate that our relationship to the world is not what we think it is. Something arises in our relationship to ourselves and our world which we do not have full awareness of.

This matters a great deal. We could say that our culture teaches us ways of thought, perception, and expectation that obscure delicate and subtle aspects of reality that, despite their subtlety, nevertheless matters a great deal. We don’t seem to remember, perceive, and think with the interdependencies in our larger ecology of mind, and so we trample on those interdependencies, and our ecologies break down, which means we ourselves break down. We become less alive and alove. We become less healthy and connected. We feel cut off from the deeper flow of meaning and significance. We become possessive, aggressive, violent, confused, afraid, reactive, clingy, and so on. We stop living magically, and we get totally locked into doing our lives and pursuing our agendas.

We can define magic as the art of cultivating awareness of the delicate interdependencies of the larger ecology of mind. It has to do with cultivating and attuning. Not really stimulus-seeking, but sensitivity. We become sensitive in our activity and our perception. We begin to allow memory and possibility to arise together. We begin to connect to sacred powers and inconceivable causes.

Inconceivable causes. We see those at work in Bem’s experiment. In normal priming, we find a cause and effect relationship, in the linear sense. The priming word causes something to happen. First comes the word, which serves a s a cause, and then comes the effect, namely a change in our reaction to the image.

In Bem’s version of the experiment, we have some kind of nonlinear relationship, and inconceivable cause.

We might know or suspect that we have no firm ground to say, “This finding is absolutely not true or accurate. It is absolutely not true that we could be sensitive to and thus, in some sense, know about some relationship between the image and the word if we haven’t seen the word.”

And isn’t this an unsurprising reaction? Once we see that some part of us is unconscious, and that sacred powers and inconceivable causes live themselves through us, then we have lost the boundary of our self. We don’t know where we begin and end, we can’t ground ourselves in linear time, and hide behind our own skin, hide in our stories about ourselves, hide in a location and a time.

We might even feel the temptation to try and recover ourselves by saying, “Well, even if such an experiment does stand up to my scrutiny (which means I want to go in the lab and perform it myself), this unconscious element is still inside me.”

We should put this “me” in quotes, and we should have a laugh about how such dusty old ideas still has us in its grips.

We have already considered the rigorous, scientific view of mind in which mind arises in and through relationship, and is nonlocalizable. The old idea that still has us involves dualities, for instance between subject and object, inside and outside, thinking and not thinking, conscious and not conscious, memory and perception, present, past, and future.

“I think therefore I am” attaches to a conscious thought. This might dissolve under analysis, such that we would say, “I think therefore I am not,” because we would find the process of thinking covers over something else, something not so dualistic as self and other.

In this experiment, we can have a clear and distinct idea of a basket of fruit and its positive valence. “This is what I can think, this is what I can know, and this is what I am,” and we thus draw boundaries around things. Some nondual traditions offer practices for dissolving such boundaries in a way that does not lead to chaos but to Liberation. One can begin to dissolve this “I think” and this “I know” to see beyond the dualities we take as real.

We can find another kind of empirical support for this suggestion, another way to see how dualities function in us—while perhaps making space in our minds for the possibility of this thing we may eventually call a nondual dance.

We could say the same thing about the practice of magic.

In the chapter on attention in his Principles of Psychology, James says the following:

the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.

We need this education par excellence, and a wisdom-based approach—to education, to life, to art, to everything—a wisdom-based can provide the practical directions for bringing it about. And we have considered the ways this amounts to a magical approach.

Magic and attention go together. And we could say that the loss of magic comes with the rise of distraction. Oddly enough, the sleight of hand magician teaches us something about this, because they often distract our attention in order to trick us. The dominant culture is a culture of slieght of hand used to trick the soul. That’s the invisible hand at work.

In the same chapter on attention, James also claims that, “each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”

We might revise that, because “chooses” has become a term infected with conquest consciousness. Rather, by means of our attention, each of us not only constitutes our world and our Cosmos, but we co-discover and co-create it.

Indeed, many people who believe in magic leave precisely this co-creation and co-discovery out of their ethical and critical mind. People seem to think they can create their own reality, without asking any other sentient beings for collaboration. Such people express unconscious human privilege and self-centeredness, and they also restrict their own ecology of mind.

The dominant culture specializes in this sort of fragmented and fragmenting thought, and our captains of industry in finance and high-tech think they can make the world however they desire, sentient beings be damned. It’s a kind of necromancy in the larger pejorative sense, because it does depend on dead bodies, and it also produces them.

In our present situation, one could forgive the suggestion that the world itself has taken up an analysis of our dualities and our necromancy, since we ourselves don’t look deeply enough at them.

That may sound like a strange formulation, but we can make some sense of it by noticing that, in the dissolution of the conditions of life we see around us, we find there the dissolution of our version of duality. If we were not insisting on any dualities, arguably we might not see the conditions of life collapsing around us as a response. If we could practice and realize good magic, the world would appear sacred, whole, and healthy.

Jung said something very relevant here. He said

Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. . . . the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. (Aion, para 126).

Perhaps we can, at this point, entertain the suggestion that we have forced the world to act out some kind of conflict.

Confronting the collapse of the conditions of life “outside” of us became our fate—because of an inner situation not fully brought to conscious awareness and analyzed, through sustained contemplation, to its full dissolution.

What we repress remains stuck to us. We divide it in one way, by forcing it out of conscious awareness. But we have not gotten rid of it. We push things into the shadows of our soul, and the shadows of the collective soul too, but this does not make them go away. Magic remains in the shadow for some, and our self-centeredness remains significantly in the unconscious for most all of us.

The dominant culture relies on fear and craving, which means it cultivates addiction. And we all become like an addict who thinks they have their addiction under control, but we wake up one morning to find the house on fire.

We worry about our family, but then realize they left days ago.

We get outside, and on our cell phone we find a voice mail saying we don’t need to come in to work ever again.

The addiction demands our attention and eventually gets it, though sometimes we see these events as fate or coincidence: The wiring in the lamp was bad, and the company we worked for got bought out—only “coincidentally” related to the addiction we don’t want to look at. And in fact, that addiction covers over some deeper symptom that we have tried to medicate with our addiction—and that thing we definitely don’t want to see. In the case of humanity, the home and the family are vast, and our job in this life poorly understood. Still, we have done extensive damage to them.

Magic means sobriety. It means a clearer sense of memory. It means the interwovenness of past, present, and future, and entrance into the fourth time.

Magic means sobering and relaxing the mind so that it becomes a suitable vehicle for the sacred powers and inconceivable causes to function in accord with wisdom, love, and beauty.

Magic means remembering what we are, and what the world is.

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.