Tag: neoplatonism

Include

Magick is the experience of truth.

Sounds more like mysticism than magick? Well, it applies equally to sorcery. Suppose we evoke a demon to obtain the perfect chalice for our altar. The result arrives by experiencing the truth of the demon having sourced the chalice for us. (We could have just searched for a nice chalice online, but instead we gave ourselves an actual experience of a demon finding it for us.)

Having recognised that magick is the experience of truth, we may then want to refine this into more direct and simpler forms of truth.

So: what is truth?

Its hallmarks are inclusivity, wholeness, unity.

A popular notion of truth is of a correspondence between an idea and a state of affairs. That is, the unity of the idea and the state of affairs. Unity is what is engineered in an act of sorcery: the synchronicity between intention and an outcome. What is omitted from the “correspondence” model of truth, however, is truth that cannot be formulated in an idea or does not depend upon a human being thinking something: in other words, truth that might be described as absolute or eternal.

The truer something is, the more it can incorporate and the less that falls outside of it. Of course, this is a very poor way to think of it because – evidently – it would be even truer to include also whatever is not a thing and also whatever fails to include anything.

Ultimate truth is that which includes everything. Platonists called it “The One”. The One is so utterly damn inclusive it even includes what is not itself – that is, the Many. In a non-dual experience this is what becomes apparent: our individual experience is the Divine yet – at the same time – only a part of the Divine.

“Avoid monism. It is lazy,” suggests Douglas Batchelor (2020: 37’32”), advocating animism as a better approach: “everything is conscious” (Batchelor 2020: 37’52”). An alternative, then, would be that there is not one consciousness in which everything participates, but everything has a separate consciousness.

The problem with animism is what constitutes an entity. If a tree has consciousness, then how about its branches, twigs and leafs? What about the molecules in the tree? How about its atoms? Do these all have separate consciousnesses? If not, then it is false that everything has a separate consciousness; if so, then how is the tree an entity when its parts are different from it?

With the One and a hierarchical relationship between the One and the Many, Platonism offers a theory of participation that makes sense of this. The Platonic Academy endured for hundreds of years, attracting great minds, so it seems unlikely that its doctrine is truly “lazy”.

What does seem lazy is the notion there is no such thing as truth. After nearly thirty years I went back to university for my therapeutic training, enduring the same postmodernist nonsense that had been there in the 1980s. But the lecturers were now the same age as myself. “Haven’t you found a way out of that crap?” I wondered.

However, the idea that nothing is true, or that no idea has a greater claim to truth than any other, is indeed more true (because it includes more) than the idea that only a certain thing is true. Postmodernism was more inclusive than the metanarratives that preceded it, which insisted on only a certain way of seeing the world as true. If truth is gold, then postmodernism discovered gold everywhere, but simultaneously put it at risk of being valued as worthless.

Postmodernism had evidently hit the buffers when the likes of Trump and Putin could clearly be seen appropriating its relativism to achieve their ends. Suddenly truth was back in fashion among liberals who had previously championed postmodernism: “Truth is more important now than ever” was the slogan of an anti-Trump New York Times campaign (New York Times 2017).

The current culture wars are due partly to the attenuated death throes of postmodernism. It is perhaps easier to imagine we are now “post-truth” (which is really just more moribund postmodernism) than to ditch the correspondence conception of truth and move towards an inclusivity model. Magick, which offers methods for the direct experience of truth, could have an important role in a progressive response to the crisis. But the magickal community is, of course, riven by the same tensions afflicting wider culture. Many are responding by clinging to either postmodernism or traditionalism.

The inclusivity model implies that all participate in truth, but not equally. Participation is increased by including more of what has been omitted. An example of these dynamics is presented by Alex Tsakiris, host of the Skeptiko podcast.

In almost every episode, Tsakiris challenges the secular materialist paradigm of human beings as “biological robots in a meaningless universe [for whom] there cannot be a moral good or bad” (Tsakiris 2021: 11’48”). For Tsakiris, materialist science wilfully ignores contrary evidence (such as near-death experience), and is so nonsensical that its dominance must indicate some kind of hidden agenda: “Science, as we know it, is best understood from a conspiratorial framework” (Tsakiris 2021: 52’16”), he suggests.

But consider the secular materialist view in comparison to the non-dual experience: Do we have a sense of individual free will within the non-dual experience? Is there still a sense of being a human individual? Is the non-dual experience helpfully describable as good, bad, or meaningful? Approached from this direction, perhaps secular materialism and the non-dual experience are less far apart. As a description of reality, secular materialism maybe does not do so badly. It is perhaps an honest attempt to transcend the ego by highlighting how small and insignificant it is on a cosmic scale. But it performs this badly, because what it omits is any relationship between reality and individual consciousness. The relationship is one of participation. In contrast, the non-dual experience is that direct participation.

To assert that there is such a thing as truth, and that it is the very same truth for all, is neither reductive nor fundamentalist, because the One includes the Many through participation. This is not to say that truth is never wilfully refused, resisted, or perverted, but it does mean it is never escaped from entirely. We participate inescapably to some degree, like the postmodernist who claims “there is no truth” which, of course, is a truth claim. We leak truth even in our refusal of it.

If there were no truth no one would bother getting out of bed. Indeed, all it takes to hinder us from getting up is the feeling or suspicion that there is no truth – it instantly puts paid to any sense of pleasure or a point to life. But by offering the means for experiencing truth, for changing our relationship to it and our participation in it, magick can be an antidote.

References

Batchelor, Douglas (2020). What magic is this? Neoplatonism. https://tinyurl.com/t4o1dkrv (whatmagicisthis.com). Accessed February, 2021.

New York Times (2017). The New York Times has a new marketing campaign. https://tinyurl.com/spqsoe6q (facebook.com). Accessed February, 2021.

Tsakiris, Alex (2021). Skeptiko #486. Curt Jaimungal, Better Left Unsaid analysis. https://tinyurl.com/16y420vt (skeptiko.com). Accessed February, 2021.

 

Harm

“[M]ight it not be the case”, wonders Federico Campagna, concerning these turbulent times, “that imagination, action or even just life or happiness seem impossible, because they are impossible, at least within the present reality-settings?” (Campagna 2018: 2)

Technic and Magic by Federico Campagna
Technic and Magic by Federico Campagna

In Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (2018) he takes the bold and unusually optimistic approach of fiddling with those settings in order to configure a new reality that he names “Magic”. He contrasts this with “Technic”, which is the defining paradigm of modernity, under which “nothing legitimately exists otherwise than as an instrument, ready to be employed in the limitless production of other instruments, ad infinitum” (Campagna 2018: 30).

Campagna adopts a Neoplatonist metaphysic, defining both Technic and Magic in terms of a series of contrasting hierarchical hypostases. It is an interesting approach, but for me it does not hold. In Neoplatonism, the hypostases (The One, Intellect, Soul, etc.) are realities in themselves; it is not simply the arrangement of ideas in a hierarchy that produces reality. Consequently, it is not possible to “swap out” hypostases or invent new ones, which is precisely what Campagna does.

His assumption is that reality is conceptual in nature (rather than experiential), definable by the relationship presumed to obtain between existence and essence during a specific historical period (Campagna 2018: 110). To posit the divine as a reality in itself would be untenable within this framework: “such absolute monism wouldn’t allow for any reality as such to take place” (Campagna 2018: 125). It is odd how some of Campagna’s underlying assumptions seem to partake of Technic, our nemesis, for whom all things “are nothing more than the simultaneous activation of positions in different series” (Campagna 2018: 70).

For all the difficulties I had with this text I found much of value in it, including Campagna’s formulation of what surfaces at the point where Technic hits its limit: the unsurmountable fact that for human beings it is unbearable to be dehumanised.

Technic’s response to this protest is to re-frame it:

The current epidemic of mental illness is not presented as a symptom of Technic’s own limit […] but rather as a problem of life itself that Technic has to tackle and fix through socio-medical means […] Technic denies the existence of anything that would authentically escape it, defining it instead as a possibility that hasn’t been fulfilled. For example, life’s mortality is included within Technic’s cosmology as an as-yet-unreached (but by no means unreachable) state of immortality […] (Campagna 2018: 93)

Technic regards it as a sorry failure of personal resilience if we buckle beneath the misery of the dominant materialist paradigm, in which consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of physical processes, creating an illusion of meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe – even though no one truly inhabits this paradigm, precisely because it is inhuman.

For Technic to fix life, firstly it must show life to be broken, so life without Technic must be represented as vulnerable, as “not safe”. However, as Campagna points out, “safety is a negative concept: one is safe from a threat, not in itself” (Campagna 2018: 229). To make us feel safe, Technic must first persuade us that life is a threat. In this context the notion of “harm” is used to distract us from life itself.

I encountered an small example of how this plays out in practice as a member of a paranormal investigation organisation, whose major contribution is its Code of Ethics for paranormal investigators (ASSAP 2011). It seemed to me that during the period of my membership those running the organisation were chiefly interested in advancing a sceptical agenda. The Code of Ethics seemed to be surreptitiously serving this. Two examples: “If a client has suffered a relevant bereavement within six months of making contact the case should not be accepted”, and: “We recommend you do not come into contact with minors (under the age of 18)”.

I am not arguing that these guidelines do not reflect valid and important ethical concerns but highlighting how following them will tend to preclude certain types of situations likely to present us with phenomena that could be labelled “paranormal”. The guidelines might even seem intended to prevent the very types of experience that they supposedly regulate the investigation of. If Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair had followed this code, for instance, we would never have heard of the Enfield Poltergeist (Playfair 2011) or have the wealth of important data that was compiled from that case.

There is no doubt that recently bereaved people and emotionally disturbed teenagers are vulnerable to harm if already distressing experiences are stoked and amplified by the involvement of paranormal investigators. The most ethical course (in the sense of taking the minimal risk of doing harm) is often not to involve oneself at all. Yet death and distress are an ever-present aspect of life, and for all the obvious benefits of minimising these, at the same time something is being overlooked in the decision not to engage with them. Certainly, what is being avoided is probably unpleasant, yet it remains a part of life, regardless of our wishes it were not so.

Technic, then, can have ulterior motives for its concern with “harm”, but Campagna’s analysis suggests that Magic also has some difficult questions to answer, because if Magic does not shy from the darker side of life, but gravitates toward it with an attitude that does not award total priority to the minimisation of harm, then on what ethical grounds can Magic rest?

An illustration of the tendency in Magic to disregard harm is presented in Hellier, a nonfiction web series that follows a group of paranormal researchers whose investigations draw them progressively into the occult. It is vital viewing for insights into the dynamics of how the paranormal and the occult are currently formulated.

Hellier, the documentary
Hellier, the documentary

To investigate whether alien abduction experiences possess a non-physical dimension, the group conduct an experiment to implant a memory of abduction into a subject by hypnosis. Despite the subject remarking more than once that he does not feel safe, the hypnotist continues with the session. The result of the experiment is that the subject – who formerly did not believe in alien abductions – “has developed an intense fear of extra-terrestrials and absolutely believes that they exist” (Pfeiffer 2019: 34’38”).

The hypnotist, Lonnie Scott, has stated that he included safety protocols into the session which were not shown onscreen (Scott 2020: 8’49”), but these have evidently not protected the subject from the phobia that was the result of the experiment. None of the group comments on the obvious ethical problems in this sequence, but their interviewee, author and occultist Allen Greenfield, when asked what he thinks the experiment proves, suggests: “that these experiences can be induced by a […] sinister, insensitive, cruel human being into another” (Pfeiffer 2019: 35’25”).

It is not concern with harm but with salvation that Campagna suggests is the ethical basis for Magic. Whereas Technic aims at safety, keeping at bay the darker aspects of the world, in contrast Magic aims at “helping the inhabitants of its world to exist at once inside and outside of the world” (Campagna 2018: 230). Magic offers a way through and out, because: “salvation refers to the rescue of an entity from its exclusive identification with its linguistic dimension, and to its acceptance also of the living, ineffable dimension of its existence” (Campagna 2018: 230). Campagna notes that from the perspective of Magic “everything […] is always-already saved” (Campagna 2018: 231), but what perhaps he does not emphasise is the struggle and trauma usually entailed in realising this. Magic does not shy from the darker side of life, which Technic construes as a threat to safety, yet on its way toward its goal Magic will likely pass through what Technic construes as harm.

Clearly, harm was done to the subject of the hypnotic experiment in Hellier, and the route to salvation from there might seem difficult and less than obvious. If it could be realised from that experience of harm how memories are not the record of our experience, and how even the deepest fears can arise from something that never actually happened, then maybe this could lead to the domain promised by Magic, where we “exist at once inside and outside of the world” (Campagna 2018: 231). But how do we find our way to this place if we were not looking for it and had no inkling that it existed?

Because Magic cannot promise freedom from harm it should never be recommended by one person to another, and neither should a person be initiated into Magic without it being their choice. Yet this does not mean that Magic is necessarily harmful or by definition unethical. Ethical action from the perspective of Magic may not be about the minimisation of harm, but it is about the maximisation of opportunities for salvation.

References

ASSAP (2011). Professional code of ethics. https://tinyurl.com/y2xyg83z (assap.ac.uk). Accessed September 2020.

Campagna, Frederico (2018). Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. London: Bloomsbury.

Pfeiffer, Karl (2019). The trickster. Hellier, season 2, episode 7. Planet Weird. YouTube, https://youtu.be/tIct9UmIiRk.

Playfair, Guy Lyon (2011). This House is Haunted, third edition. Guildford: White Crow Books.

Scott, Lonnie (2020). Weird web radio: episode 45 – solo show talking Hellier hypnosis experiments. https://youtu.be/Ha08XhPTq1w (youtube.com). Accessed September 2020.