“How can you believe in magick/God/spirituality? Are you so naive?”
This is sort of question I do get now and then, and I’d like to address it directly.
Rational minded folks, often intelligent and scientific-minded persons, seem fond of being “agnostic” or “atheist” these days. I can’t blame them. They probably polarize off the religious right who is always going on and on about how Creationism should be taught in school. That pisses them off and rightly so. So let’s make this clear. I believe in the foundations of science. I also believe in evolution. I also believe in “God” and I also believe in “magick.”
For me, magick is attempting to harness and master the power of the subconscious mind. “God” is a principle of universal oneness–that all energy in the universe is ultimately one.
Though I’m a fan of the physical sciences, modern psychology is a joke to me. They seem about 1000 years behind what was being taught in ancient Greece! I find Hermeticism, which found its roots in Plato, and picked up steam over the years with insights from Persia, China, and India, to be a lot more useful in understanding who I am and how to make my life a better and more enjoyable place to live. Hermeticism has found modern outlets with the Golden Dawn, and later Thelema.
But don’t these types of philosophies talk about demons, angels, magick, spells, gods and the sort? How can that stuff be scientific?
It’s not scientific the same way Geology is. We are dealing with the mind, emotions, and our connection to things that cannot be tested or measured with scientific instruments. Rituals, symbols, and all the trappings of magick are effective ways of staging a drama for the subconscious mind so that it can better lead us to our desires.
Our subconscious mind contains many strange and wonderful things–some things which function as angels, or demons, for example. They can be tapped into and utilized. I do not say they have an external reality necessarily–only that from the human psyche’s point of view they have validity and can lead to change in a person’s behavior–and therefore lead to results on the material plane.
Modern science, for all its wonderful achievements, is not particularly suited to understanding and utilizing the subconscious mind. Science balks at ideas of universal oneness (unless its purely theoretical as in quantum mechanics), scorns concepts such as “spirit” and “soul,” and doesn’t seem particularly interested in making people happy or harmonious. In fact, the most notable achievement of science in the last 100 years is the nuclear bomb. Science alone is failing our world.
Magick is not afraid to tackle difficult concepts such as God. Magicians attempt to bring methodology and rationality to discussions of divinity. Nor is magick afraid to ask for joy on Earth–a magician has no need for concepts such as heaven or hell. We are primarily concerned with our own planet and how we can make it better for ourselves and those around us.
The great thinkers of old times were not agnostic or atheist. They were persons of God and science at the same time. I simply strive to be the same.
xoxo,
Izabael DaJinn
Very well put. It’s great when a magician is able to state this sort of thing so clearly; you’ve done a great job.
Joe Coviello (from my facebook http://www.facebook.com/izabael) “All those medieval hucksters really fucked it up for us still, today, too. Huh. Then that whole ‘lady with the crystal ball’ era. Meh. The anti-sentiment remains I feel. I think that is what guided science to take the sterile turn. Can you see it that way with me? It’s not really very radical, I know.
You know? If that’s not magick nothing is. Just wondering about what you meant for sake of my reference to your writing as a reader is all.”
Also by modern psychology did you mean stuff like freud and jung as most would think? or more modern yet like as in grindler and bandler? I know you weren’t saying it has NO merits … but I asked because … I mean … Milton Erickson could reputedly talk cancer pain out of chemo patients just by talking about tomatoes a certain way. Holy crap.
I do like Milton Erickson and Bandler and Jung. I think NLP is great—but when I see and hear people going to psychologists it never seems like it’s Jung or Bandler, but … just a watered down mishmash of lukewarm ways to slowly change people and make them feel good about being mainstream. Mostly it seems like psychologists are an overpaid person to vent to.
Now psychiatry…a whole other can of worms but if it was just used to treat people with extreme mental disorders it would probably be a good thing. I have no problems with people who need antidepressants as part of a regime to feel on top of life again, but overall people are trained to be too dependent on drugs.
Yeah. I see that happening myself as well. Definitely agreed in that sort of light. I’ve had similar gripes with the industry at large myself over the years.
Here’s how I feel about antidepressants. My friend came to visit CA. I he had not been on his antidepressants for a long enough to be without their effect. He smoked sativa from my vaporizer a few times a day. Not only did he have more creativity (he graphic designs), but his mood was 15x more pleasant than whatever the meds helped generate. He said he could easily give up antidepressants for sativa. Of course the only problem is that he was only visiting. Not fair … nobody even knows about it.
Kudos. Well said!