Lunch, Ponyo, Awesome

Today, mech_angel and I had lunch with oletheros and crossbonesdj, and an absolutely wonderful time was had by all. Great to meet them, in person.

Before that, I think I finally managed to figure out a "So What" section of my Dragon*Con presentation; a reason for anyone to give a damn about magic and Western Esotericism. Which, by the way, really isn't "Western" esotericism, at all, so much as it's a stolen amalgam of many disparate occult traditions, put together and called "New." Which is a pretty Western idea, I guess, so we'll leave the name.

That goes in the presentation.

Anyway, after all that, and going to the Lowes, the ridiculously crowded Farmer's Market, and then home, we went to see Ponyo, and I was, much as I'd predicted, filled with an overwhelming sense of childlike wonder and awe. Absolutely gorgeous film, and you should see it soon. So cute, so sweet, such a perfect little children's film, animated gorgeously.

Saw material from Where The Wild Things Are, and I realised that I am going to cry duing that movie. Possibly a lot. Not because I'm sad, but because it's So Very Right. It shows danger, and wonder, and imagination, and instinct, and thought, and childhood, and power, and taking all of these things into you, knowingly. It is, in short, everything I want children to know, presented faithfully, truthfully. It hits me, hard.

And that was today... How are you?

"How Does Magic Work?"

Many types of magic rely on the cultivation of certain mental and emotional states in either the individual or groups to interact with what is seen as the overall conceptual substrate of reality.

The combination of the "correct" (howsoever you want to define that) states of mind and being with certain words and actions (which, in theory, can be said to only act as a focusing tool) produce a crystalization of new ideas, or a radical reconceptualization of what forces go into the operations of this reality.

I am starting at the "assumption" that the universe around us is valueless, formless until concepts are brought to bear on it. Until we build a conceptual framework (mathematics, philosophy, physics, radical biology, etc) and dress it in language, reality has no meaning.

From there, as we manipulate our concepts and understandings of the forces that generate "reality" (through ritual meditation, spell casting, ritual sacrifice or interaction, or simply learning and reinforcing what we "know" to be true), we come to accept and expect certain types and tokens experiences and actions as having an effect on the world around us. But, in the case of magic, these will change with expectation, perception, internal mental configuration, intuition, natural proclivities and preferences, as well as external forces such as gravity, light quality, inertia, and even other mental states.

What I am trying to say is that, even for one magician, effects may not be repeatable, because things like state of mind or "brain-state configuration" can affect the outcome of the work. If your mind changes, enough, then no, it doesn't work. But something else probably does.

How? Take the purely physicalist tack. This is not what I believe is going on, but I think it's one that might work for you. The interactions of the brain are just high-level representations of various physical patterns. Research supports that, if we repeatedly seek to train ourselves to be aware of something, in or through our physical bodies, then we become accustom to it, and expect or "know" it's existence, even when we don't experience it directly (sometimes Because of its absence.) See: the blind boy who developed sonar; man who made himself sensitive to magnetic field fluctuations for the purposes of navigation; people learning to use and understand what they were seeing in a microscope. It would bundifferentiated Stuff, because to be truly objective is to be completely removed from interpretation, personal investment, and conceptualization, all of which are the only states which give form and meaning to what we see and experience.)e strangely simplistic to think that, intentionally or not, our actions and the configurations of our brain-states don't cause fluctuations in the other direction; the only question is what, if any, gross results can be intuited from our actions and "thoughts."

(Parenthetically, it seems to me that the end point of an "Objective View Of Reality" is a return to an
But, so we work to train ourselves to be aware of the correlation between our brain-states, our actions, and certain effects in the world; between how we "feel" about something, what we do while feeling that, and what results we see, either immediately, or "sometime down the line." But the brain-states and the actions don't always match. You don't always feel or think the same way about actions you perform, and, when your feelings and thoughts are a necessary component of the work, at hand, that can cause either a weakening of effect, or a complete failure in performance.

Now, brain-scans are possible. We have had that technology for years and years. But can you scan the brain of someone performing a ritual designed to have gross external effects, without their knowing it? Can you monitor the various areas of brain-activity in a supposed "telekinetic," without them being aware of it, and that awareness being a constant factor in their performance?

I think, fundamentally, we still differ on what counts for input, in a system, and what "lacking in sufficient data to in any way support the claim made" means.

Or, here's this one:

1) Conceptually and theoretically, every action we perform, every set of thoughts we have, every dream and half-formed desire contributes to an overall model of reality from which we operate to continue to build a model of reality.

2) What we use to build that model can and must be pulled from those things which exist within the model.

3) Thoughts, emotions, desires, and "wishes" all affect the "physical world" if only by the way they colour our actions, and what we seek to make the world, through politics, design, creation of art or other physical works.

4) The active manipulation of emotions, thoughts, etc, can affect the "physical world."

Ultimately, my point is that we don't know anywhere near what we think we know about the universe, regardless of what the methods of science teach us. The fact of the matter is, everything we see and experience could only be thus because, for the multiverse, it is Tuesday, and this is the multiverse's Tuesday Tie. The externally observable world may be one tenth of that which is generating itself, and we simply don't know how to see 100% of how reality works, yet, if we ever will.

I have seen and experienced emotions influence reality. I have seen "magical" work, done on behalf of an individual, have precisely the intended outcome. I have created beneficial situations from nothing, and been at the centre of bizarre "coincidences." Everyone has.

I've also seen magic do nothing in the face of what Is. I've seen people in intractable and intolerable situations stay there, no matter what they or anyone else do. I've seen things that, on the surface, had some kind of coherent systematic point or purpose turn to be completely meaningless. We all have.

Magic, and here I am speaking for me, and not my "circle" is everything I've talked about, here. It's none of these things. It's bits and pieces of all of them, recombined and broken down, and reintegrated. But that's the universe, that's Views of concepts which we find Useful in a certain type situation, but not others, and not always. That's Theory and Method, for making sense of and operating within the world in which we live, and the results are not always reproducable, verifiable, or even singularly quantifiable, over a long period of time. Their value and meaning are different things, at different times, from different perspectives, and How they mean what they mean is something determined by the individual doing the asking, if at all.

And that's why I said "Maybe Magic Doesn't Do It For You." Maybe it is not one of the many, Many lenses through which you gain any useful information about the world, but that's okay. It is a lens through which many others operate and through which they come to new modes of thought and conception about the world, and seek to make it "better." It's also a mode into which people lock themselves and dogmatize, and only succeed in making things "worse."

But my point is, while scientific rationalism seeks to be a catholic system, I don't think it has to be, or can be. I think there are necessarily things in this reality which defy a rational scientific mindset; combinations of emotions, experiences, and actions which leave a far more primal impression on people than can be done justice by appeal to scientific methodology. The language and mindset of science aren't as useful for gleaning meaning and use from them, as other terminologies.

So the question of "how does magic work" is a question that will, necessarily, have different answers depending on what kind of magic you mean, who you're asking, what they know, what they believe, when you ask them, and if they even have, in their minds, an externally explicable framework for communicating that to other people.

I'm talking about meta-magical/systems theory, and that's completely okay, because even the differences in "truths" can teach us something about the nature of the reality that allows for this. But scientific rationalism only allows for one over-arching Way The World Behaves, and I just don't see it as being the only thing that's true.

Though, paradoxically, in itself, it has to be. Kind of like how YHVH is the One True God, and you shouldn't have any others Before Him. After Him, however, is a-okay.

Starting to ramble. Time to roam.