If we live in a magical way, if we know the world in a magical way, then we can know things that must remain unknowable to someone not living that way.

We might think it has to do with mere belief, as if believing in magic becomes a self-fulling prophecy. Not so. A properly philosophical practice of magic seeks experience, not belief.

The fundamental wholeness of the Cosmos makes magic possible. Practicing in accord with this wholeness allows magic to happen. Magic is the practice of wholeness.

Dangerous Magic 6: Patterns of Primordial Awareness—Conjuring, Symbols, and Self

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.

The next few contemplations have a lot of important insights to offer, and the ideas may feel really exciting at times. We have to keep a spacious mind, and watch out for either clinging to the ideas or rejecting them.

We can practice a clear mind when things get exciting or when they seem rather boring. The practice of magic is the practice of a clear mind and vital feeling.

Everything we have considered has its importance. Horses are so important that we could do no more than orient ourselves to ask the question of what kind of magic they might offer. We will have to return to them, and to other things we have touched on. That last contemplation is called “The Magic, Medicine, and Mystery of Horses” because the magic of horses may heal us, and so horses could become medicine to heal our soul and the soul of the world. Horses could heal conquest consciousness and help us reindigenize. But, for that to happen, we would have to become initiates.

The word mystic means someone who got initiated. A mystery is something we cannot understand without initiation. The horse could initiate us, but we cannot have any simple-minded notion there. We can’t think that just because we love horses and have powerful experiences with them, that if we just sit with them and listen we will become initiated fully into the mysteries of life. We live in a culture with the most limited understanding of things like initiation, psyche, the nature of mind, and the mind of Nature, and so we don’t know what we’re trying to get initiated into, let alone how to proceed.

To think about the magic, medicine, and mystery of horses will therefore take more time.

But for now, in this contemplation, we finally get to the third principle of magic that Yeats gives us, and it’s exciting stuff, challenging stuff . . .

This third principle gets at the whole matter in a different enough way that it will feel fresh to our mind, especially if we keep a beginner’s mind, and it can shed light on everything else we’ve considered together, including the horse.

Let’s review the Yeats passage. He writes,

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are—

(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.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

There we have the whole reflection on magic.

Among other things, we have so far suggested that the biggest barrier to serious consideration of magic may come to this: We have not yet accepted the scientific and philosophical principle that what we know depends on our way of knowing, or, put another way, we have not fully wonderstood the nonduality of the observer and the observed.

Putting this in terms of knowledge, we could say that, If we live in a magical way,

if we know the world in a magical way,

then we can know things unknowable to someone not living that way.

We touch on something profound, not something trivial. We might think it has to do with mere belief, as if believing in magic becomes a self-fulling prophecy. Not so.

A properly philosophical practice of magic seeks experience, not belief. And we can point out that an electron, for instance, does not manifest as either wave-like or particle-like depending on our mere beliefs. But it does manifest depending on how we know it.

If we know it only in ways that allow it to be particle-like, then electrons behave like particles, again and again and again. We have to change how we know them to see them manifest as waves.

As an aside, we can acknowledge that David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics remains viable, and it would alter how we speak about these things. But what Bohm does not contradict, and in fact what he encourages us to wonderstand, to inquire into and fully confront, is a fundamental wholeness to the Cosmos that includes the nonduality of the observer and the observed.

This fundamental wholeness makes magic possible. Practicing in accord with this wholeness allows magic to happen. Magic is the practice of wholeness.

In cognitive science, this wholeness gets recognized in various ways that extend the boundaries of thinking beyond our own skin. Magic has to do with thinking beyond our skin. Perception and action become integrated.

We could also refer to this kind of wholeness as nonlocality and nonlinearity. And we have to start there, in a general way, to think about pattern with sensitivity and depth, so that we can then think about how mind and memory might be evoked by symbols. We are trying to ask how magic functions, and we have already said that it’s subtle and profound. So let’s appreciate it in a sophisticated way, and not get loose and crass in our thinking.

Nondualit, non-linearity, and non-locality. These three go together in our inquiry into magic. We can note that classical philosophy has always had nondualistic varieties, but that non-local epistemology—the fancy term for our theories and practices related to how we know—non-local practices seems largely absent from all but Indigenous Cultures, and this marks one of the biggest challenges faced by children of the dominant culture, and any child of conquest consciousness.

When we contemplated Sorenson’s observations about how the invasion of conquest consciousness affected liminal awareness, we considered the possibility that western education practices and realizes a breakdown of truth, intimacy, resonance with Nature, attunement with the sacred—and we can reflect in resonance with Yeats and call this the breakdown of magic, thereby giving us a different way of understanding that term.

This breakdown happens possibly because conquest consciousness goes altogether with aggression, competition, self-centeredness, deceit, the need for medication, the pressure of time, the forcing of agendas, and so on.

This is not to say there is nothing good in western culture, or that it is only these negative things, or that people in other cultures never practice and realize delusions, deceits, fears, cravings, and other forms of suffering. The issue has to do with a basic style of relating, and we may suggest that conquest consciousness may often mean the end of magic, especially if that conquest consciousness has co-opted what we call reason to justify and perpetuate itself by means of rational arguments and rational efficiencies.

This brings us to some warnings for those interested in magic. We in the dominant culture don’t really understand magic. Some new schools of magic and mystery have appeared, and modern practitioners may have a certain amount of confidence.

But even in this contemplation, we’ll see that magic presents a lot of challenges if we seek to understand it in a full and rigorous way. We’ll make all of this accessible, but if it seems that we understand everything, then we may want to take a step back and contemplate again.

We may THINK we understand magic, but our soul warns us we do not. We see this warning in popular culture. We find a strange consistency in themes when we look at some of the novels, movies, and series about magic.

One of those themes has to do with people performing magic, and then creating unintended consequences which they themselves didn’t notice.

The naïve magician magics their agenda, so they can get whatever thing they want. It might seem like a narrow, egotistical thing, or it might seem lofty and noble. But the point is that they used magic without a full enough understanding, and they think they succeeded. They got what they wanted, and it all looks fine, and they think they understand magic.

It can take awhile before the magician notices, and it may even take someone else to come along and saying, “Hey, when you did that spell, people got hurt. You even got people killed.”

We see this theme again and again because the soul seems to want to warn us that we must not trifle with the magic of the world, or think we can control it. And the evil magician uses magic knowing that their use will cause harm. That’s the definition of conquest consciousness. If the good magicians out there want to fulfill the highest ethical obligations of magic, we will all have to learn together the profundities and the inconceivable aspects of magic.

When the soul gives us these warnings about magic, we may say, “Well, perhaps we better leave it alone.”

However, the degradation of magic goes together with the degradation of the world, in a way that both reaffirms the power of magic and invites us to consider

that we may only effectively heal ourselves and our world

if we get initiated into the mysteries of magic.

This doesn’t mean we must all become magicians in any narrow sense, but that we must all taste the reality of magic in order to heal ourselves and our world.

We have considered the way magic and conquest stand opposed . . . we have considered this in many ways in our contemplations, and several artefacts come to mind right now, which also may help us to keep in mind as we think about how magic works.

I’m not sure if we’ve mentioned this one in our other contemplations, but Gary Snyder, in his delightful and essential book, The Practice of the Wild, writes about how Cabeza de Vaca, the conquistador, reached the edge of his narrow life, and basically lost everything. He lost his way, lost all his companions, and in that state of total loss became initiated into the mysteries of life.

Initiation isn’t usually pleasant. We have to go under, into hell. We have to face everything the ego wants us to avoid. Ultimately, we follow a path of joy, a path of love, but the path can still bring a dark night of the soul.

So, Cabeza de Vaca went into this dark place of feeling totally lost and at the edge of death, and when he emerged from it he suddenly found himself able to heal people. He could do healing magic.

And this ability healed the rift between him and the indigenous people. Instead of conquering them, he began to offer healing, and they accepted it, and accepted him as a healer.

He was decidedly NOT the great white hope. That’s exactly what he had let go of. And when he let go, the power to heal came,

And then what happened? Well he finally made his way back to Mexico, and he rejoined the thing we call civilization. He became a civilized Spaniard again, surrounded by the images and signs of civilization. And he lost the power to heal—the power to heal and the will to healing that goes with it.

Why? Because he was back in civilization, back in its system of signs and symbols. He encountered real doctors with their medicine bags and their ways of speaking. He doubted his whole journey and realization. He became domesticated again, and entered the split between what we call civilization and what we refer to as the wild, as wildness.

And Snyder says something so marvelous about all of this . . .He writes that, “To resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild, we must first resolve to be whole.”

We just said that magic is the practice of wholeness. It is the resolution to live in wholeness with life, to live with and as the wholeness of cosmos, to live in attunement with our own wildness, as the realization of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Wildness is wisdom, love, and beauty, not something crass. But we have made a split between Nature and culture that makes us create a world in which wildness exists in tension with culture.

In another relevant artefact, the psychologist Carl Jung writes that when he went to East Africa, he visited a small in Mount Elgon. There he spoke with a medicine man. The encounter feels rather shocking.

Jung asked the medicine man about dreams, and the medicine man said, “Dreams . . . I know what you mean; my father still had dreams.”

Jung says to him, “You have no dreams?”

And the medicine man wept. And he said to Jung, “No, I have no dreams anymore.”

What a thing.

So Jung asks why not, and the medicine man replies, “Since the British came into the country.”

Another strange statement. So Jung says, “What do you mean.”

And the medicine man says, “The District Commissioner knows when there shall be war; he knows when there are diseases; he knows where we must live—he does not allow us to move.”

Isn’t that remarkable? Why bother dreaming if the weatherman and the government and our school counselor and our life coach and the CEO’s and economists and marketing mavens can tell us what will happen and what we need to do?

In a reflection that Gary Snyder would applaud, Jung explicitly connects this to wildness. He writes, “Dreams were the original guidance of [human beings] in the great darkness . . . When a [person] is in the wilderness, the darkness brings the dreams . . . that guide [them]. It has always been so.

If you want to look that up (CW 18, para. 674)

In another series of artefacts about magic, the anthropologist CL Martin quotes indigenous people speaking about how magic went away with the coming of conquest consciousness—and they teach us a lot about magic. One indigenous person said, “the conjuror does not exist any more with us, for there is no need of one. Nor is there need for the drum.”

Another said: “Since prayer has come into our cabins, our former customs are no longer of any service; . . . our dreams and our prophecies are no longer true,—prayer has spoiled everything for us.”

And a third: “The spirits do not come to help us now. The white men have driven them away.”

Now, the mention of prayer does NOT mean, it does not mean that prayer is bad. It means conquest consciousness can distort prayer as much as it distorts magic. Magic involves the recovery of skillful prayer.

But Martin notices something else about these artefacts.

He writes this observation: Behold the strange, incantatory powers of a speech that can silence the elemental powers around it. How can anyone who wields such words ever hope to become “a part of it [all]?”

Isn’t that interesting? Magic often involves the conjuring of elemental powers by means of speech and by means of symbols—this is what Yeats is pointing at.

We may say, “Well, I’m skeptical of magic,” and Martin says, “You might be. But conquest language proves the power of magic precisely in the manner that it destroyed that magic. Conquest consciousness uses crude magic to destroy sophisticated magic—it uses crude consciousness to destabilize a more elegant and attuned consciousness, much the way that we can use a hammer to break an elegant crystal sculpture.”

Martin tries to get at this by pointing out that the Navajo people, as one example, seem to define themselves through a style of language that creates and illuminates connections between what could seem to conquest consciousness as rather strangely ordered categories of perceiving and knowing. In this kind of thinking, all beings have a living place in an equally living landscape of powers and potentials.

That leaves each soul with a sense of the totally essential need to participate in the whole, to realize oneself as fundamentally a part of it all, so interwoven as to not be a part like a cog in a machine, but at one with the whole, even while having a relative role that at times feels like a part.

And Martin is saying that conquest consciousness, by its very nature, can’t really realize this wholeness, this deep participation in the whole, which is the essence of magic. Maybe some of us can come close, but the closer we get, the more we have to dispel conquest consciousness to realize it, and those who think of themselves as having cultivated a magical consciousness must get painfully serious about searching for the remnants of conquest consciousness they will inevitably find in their own soul if only they can look with enough passion.

And Marin is saying something else about language, He sees language as a kind of energy or power for the architecture of space. Language, most broadly defined—to include the way forests think commune or communicate, to include the way honeybees think and commune, or communicate—

language broadly conceived goes beyond establishing relations between human beings, for it seems to establish relations between human beings and the rest of the community of life. Clearly we can communicate with a horse or a dog, and they can do what we invite them to do with us.

That already seems like magic. It seems like magic when we commune with any other being beyond the habitual use of words and concepts. For instance, telepathy is magic, because we have communed with each other in a way that goes beyond habitual language, but which somehow relied on a broader sense of communion and communication.

Similarly, when Aragon or any other horse gives a clear indication of knowing what I’m thinking, without habitual human language, I may begin to experience the faint glimmers of the larger magic of horses. And notice how that demands that we go beyond the persistent infantilizing language humans habitually use around horses. It’s always, “Good girl!” as if horses need to be pulled into the conquest framework of praise and blame, and must be treated as children. That kills magic or at least vastly restricts it, and the presence of conquest consciousness in any form will limit the experience of magic we can have with a horse or any other being.

But we may also commune with larger ecologies of mind, not just another being—

and that becomes a clearer and clearer experience of magic, because vaster patterns get activated. That sort of magic appears, for instance, in a synchronicities, which ruptures the ordinary boundaries of the skin, ruptures the boundaries of space and time. Magic always involves larger ecologies of mind, and magic always ruptures the ordinary barriers we make around ourselves and things in the world. That’s part of its wildness.

Martin admits that all of this is perplexing. For any of us in conquest culture—even if we want to believe in such things, even if we have experienced them—we should also see it as perplexing, and look deeper into the mysteries

We see in these examples that the despoiling of the sacred and the magical is a despoiling of the Earth—the kind of despoiling we should sense as forbidden, in accord with the philosopher John Locke’s notion of what the divine does not allow us to do with its creation—and it brings an ugliness to the World—that ugliness Yeats laments in the passage on magic.

We can develop a sensitivity to this. But at first, we may be blind to it—or we may repress our vision.

Aldo Leopold wrote also wrote about this, in his own way. He wrote that

Any serious philosopher would say the same about LoveWisdom: To study any Way of wisdom, love, and beauty—with heart—makes us sensitive to wounds and the wounding in every direction.

Much of the damage inflicted on the soul remains repressed and unconscious, essentially invisible to the general public, who may not want to hear about it, even though we all suffer from it. I see this in clients all the time, who start to get resistant if we draw too close to something the ego doesn’t want to let go of or doesn’t want to face. And we certainly see it in the political and economic circus of the United States and the dominant culture in general.

The absence of magical consciousness or ecosensual awareness goes without our conscious notice, and everyone walks asleep yet frenetic along the edges of a threshold they do not perceive and are seduced to ignore.

We can become sensitized, and we can notice a missing wildness, a missing magic and mystery, a missing sacredness and meaningfulness—and we can notice an invasive profanity, even as we continue to seek the sacredness of the World, and even glimpse aspects of that sacredness, in a recognition that makes this spreading degradation all the more horrific.

So many of us simply do not know what we’re missing, even if we suspect, even if we become sleepless, agitated, stressed, full of self-doubt and self-loathing—because we have forsaken what we are and what the World is. That’s the source of much of our western self-hatred.

Of course the culture tells us to think something’s wrong with us so that we will spend our money seeking the solutions, and we’ll lack the confidence to stand up to the pattern of insanity.

But we may find another dimension there. That deep religious guilt and self-criticism also relates to what we have done to the world and to each other. It’s okay for us to face up to a real need for atonement, for making things right, which means an end to beating ourselves up and a beginning of rejuvenation. Magic can help us do that. And we’re asking how magic works.

In the same essay we just quoted from, Leopold writes about the round river.

One the marvels of early Wisconsin was the Round River, a river that flowed into itself, and thus sped around and around in a never-ending circuit. Paul Bunyan discovered it, and the Bunyan saga tells how he floated many a log down its restless waters.

No one has suspected Paul of speaking in parables, yet in this instance he did. Wisconsin not only had a round river, Wisconsin is one. The current is the stream of energy which flows out of the soil into plants, thence into animals, thence back into the soil in a never ending circuit of life. . . .

We who are the heirs . . . of Paul Bunyan have not found out either what we are doing to the river or what the river is doing to us. (158)

That’s just wonderful. Everyone from Buddha to Bateson would applaud.

There is a marvel, a magic, a wonder—already in the World, as the World—and there is a penalty for ignoring it. The sages teach us that we do ignore it, that we are ignorant of it, just as Leopold says.

No ignorance of wonder and magic goes unpunished, no degradation of sacredness comes without a self-wounding.

How many philosophers or ordinary citizens today can say they know what they do to this river or what this river does to them? Leopold is saying we don’t know, just as Socrates, Buddha, and Christ. Christ said, “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.”

To find out means entrance into Nature and magic, it means self-liberation into larger ecologies of Mind that we can call the practice of magic and mystery.

Again, we intend no obscurantism, irrationalism, or airy-fairy foolishness. Were talking about a paradigm shift. And the liberation, the magic, has to do with a kind of attunement with what Gregory Bateson calls the pattern that connects—an inhibition of the tendency to point at parts of the pattern and take them as parts in a linear, mechanistic conception of causality,

and instead to realize a deeper, far more intimate, non-linear ordering.

So, we now really get down to the nitty gritty so to speak. We’ve touched on it, and approached it. But Yeats gives us this third principle of magic, and it holds an important key.

Yeats says That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols. That’s what we’re talking about—symbols to evoke patterning. And we’re asking, what is the patterning? We need to know about this before we leap into evoking it with symbols, because understanding the patterning explains the use of the symbols.

And the symbols are the aspect of magic we all think we know, because it seems familiar. We’ve seen movies and shows, and read books, and we’ve therefore seen and read about magical symbols, magical amulets and talismans and sigils, and we’ve listened to characters speak magical incantations, and seen them make magical signs.

We know this power of symbol—we don’t understand or wonderstand it, but it’s familiar.

How does it really work?

We just noted Bateson’s idea of the pattern that connects. We’ll get back to that, but first let’s appreciate something Jung said, He said, “We are a pattern.”

Buddha might refine that: We are a patterning of indestructible awareness. We are a patterning of primordial awareness.

Magic doesn’t happen because we manipulate symbols, but because we ourselves are a symbol, and we are a patterning. Our body is a symbol of the soul, a patterning of primordial awareness. Everything we see is like this. But we don’t relate to it that way. We can say we agree, but our behavior shows that we don’t know what we are, and we don’t know what patterning is in a deep way.

So, What is patterning?

We have to ask this question seriously, because as we inquire into things like this, as we inquire into the magic of the world and as we consider how we might really heal ourselves and the world, we will have a tendency to say, “Oh, yes. Pattern. I know what that is.” And we need to ask that impulse to relax, because the things we contemplate here are NOT what we already think, or else we’d have a different world. It’s not just that the people in the government need to think differently, or that the people at Exxon Mobile and Goldman Sachs and Google need to think differently. It’s that we ourselves need to think differently.

Gregory Bateson gave us a principle of spiritual common law when he said that The major problems of the world are a result of the difference between the way human beings think and the way Nature actually functions. We have to sit with that as if he had asked, What is the sound of one hand clapping?

We think we know what patterning is, but if we knew it in the way we are trying to get at here, we wouldn’t suffer, and we wouldn’t have the personal and global problems we have.

So we have to let go of what we think we know and ask, What is patterning?

This question is so essential to the whole future of life on Earth, so essential to the health of our souls and our soils, our lives and our loves, that it behooves us to hold this question of spiritual common law.

So I invite you for the next week to think about this teaching Bateson offers us—not merely in an

Intellectual way, but to go outside, to go into Nature and to ask, What is the difference between the way human beings think and the way Nature functions?

We will go further into Yeats’ third principle in our next contemplation. For now, some of the most important things to sit with, in addition to this question of spiritual common law, include the notion that we are a patterning of primordial awareness, and that conquest consciousness comes with a breakdown of ecologies and of magic and sacredness—that these go together, this breakdown of ecologies and the breakdown of magic and sacredness, and how this in turn offers an implication for healing.

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.