Magical thinking

"Has the world ever been changed by anything
save by thought and its magic vehicle the Word?"
~ Thomas Mann

 

 

 

 

The Fool is numbered 0; he is nothing, a blank slate, a tabula rasa, ignorant even of his own ignorance. The Magician, second of the Major Arcana, and numbered 1, is the Fool within the Abyss, knowing himself and his ignorance and the transformative power of that ignorance. The Magician is the Fool enabled, energized, created; he is the Trickster God made manifest.

 

Where the Fool represents the seeker after wisdom, the Magician represents the awareness of things unseen. He is not the apotheosis of wisdom - that comes later - but he is on the path, because he is no longer seeking. What we are seeking, we cannot have found, or else we would not be seeking it. The Magician understands that it is more efficient to stop looking and instead focus on seeing. In Rider-Waite, the Magician is crowned with infinity, and girdled with Ourobouros: all things begin and end in this moment of awareness, this consciousness, this satori. The staff of the Fool has transformed into the wand of the Magician; the wand is raised to the heavens, while his other hand points to the earth.

 

The Magician is the bridge between the subjectively real and the transcendentally surreal; he is the Gateless Gate. He is the potential in Man, the aptitude, the capacity. Self-aware, self-possessed, self-sufficient, he is the catalyst: unchanging himself, he changes all. This is the mystery beyond reason. This is the maker and unmaker of mountains and rivers. This is the beguiler of the senses, the deceiver of the mind, the keyholder to the doors of perception. Should we trust him? That doubt is the manifestation of the Unknown; fear of the Abyss keeps us from him, but acceptance of the Abyss - Foolishness - encourages us to take the leap of faith. We take nothing in there with us; we are only ourselves, but fortunately ourselves are more than our selves, since we are parasimplices. The Magician knows this, knows us, intimately; the Magician is us, any of us, when we accept all of what we are - fearlessly, foolishly, fully.

 

The Magician represents, above all, the mystical process by which the unknowable objective is transcended to become subjectively real. This most crucial mystery is the beginning of all magic: it is the creatio ex nihilo, the divine spark without which the world remains meaningless and void.

The Great I AM

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

~ Albert Einstein

 

 

 

I had said earlier that all paradoxes are either paradoxes of the All-in-One, or of the One-in-All. I will restate that here: Identity and Persistency are the twin illusions that shape our world. It may not be clear how that is a restatement; today's discussion will begin an attempt to build that bridge.

 

We talked at some length a while back about what being means. We had said that something is in several senses, potentially several senses at once. The implication of this is that identity can mean several things simultaneously, as well.

 

Let's consider something with a fairly stable identity, as we'd naively consider it: Mount Rushmore. Chances are pretty good that you recognize that name, and that as you read it, your Cartesian Theater obligingly summoned up an image of it. You probably thought about the Presidents' heads carved into it. You probably feel pretty confident that you know how many Presidents there are up there... which ones... how they're arranged... what the rest of the mountain looks like...

 

Getting less confident, right? In fact, even people who've seen Mount Rushmore with their own eyes would probably be less than certain about those details. Even though most of the people who read this understand what 'Mount Rushmore' is, I'd venture a guess that every one of you has a subtly distinct, individual, subjective impression of 'Mount Rushmore.' So, while we can maybe agree that there exists an objective Mount Rushmore, it isn't as real to us as our subjective version. And the intersubjective Mount Rushmore is a strange beast indeed - it encompasses all these subjective versions, and the objective Mount Rushmore, under an umbrella that lets all of us recognize the same mountain (even though it's not the same mountain). What's more, without summoning that shorthand, I could offer you a vague description that nevertheless incorporated the necessary details for you to recognize the idealized Mount Rushmore. And that's before we get into Mount Rushmore as a symbol or an association for each of you personally.

 

The point is that, even with something that all of us think we know as an objectively real entity, it exists in many different ways, as many different things. Everything is both itself, and other than itself: this is the Parasimplicity Principle. The self-similarity Mandelbrot described in Nature's curves is another aspect of this: identity as a pattern of infinite recursion, Self as both self and self-concept and concepts of Self beyond the self, as many unique iterations as there are possible perspectives. Paradoxes of self-reference arise because of the essential dichotomy between the Self we are being and the Self of which we are aware in the process of Being. Russell's famous paradox - "this sentence is false" - arises because we erroneously view it as equivalent to "the sentence 'this sentence is false' is true." Truth, in this context, denotes positive Being - Being in a state of awareness. The truth that Self alters itself in the course of becoming aware of itself qua self makes it paradoxically impossible for Self ever to be truly self-aware; despite the inescapable truth that self-awareness is the hallmark, the necessary condition, of Self-being or Sein-in-der-Welt.

 

Persistency, it turns out, is just Identity viewed from another dimension - the dimension of Time - and that will be the subject of our next discussion.

As through a glass, darkly

“The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until
I knew it as such without a single doubt” ~ Rene Descartes

 

We begin, then, at the unsatisfactory base camp established for us by the arch-skeptic Rene Descartes; we begin within our minds. Descartes uneasily proclaimed a link between the world-within and the world-without, with his Cogito. He was at least as aware as any of his critics, either at the time or coming after, of the problem of committing a petitio principii - but the Cogito was the best he could do within the empirical frame he had available to him. We cannot presume to place ourselves above Descartes, who is justly lionized as one of the more important thinkers of Western philosophy; but we can tentatively observe that we have more frames available to us, and the benefit of access not only to the oeuvre of Descartes but to that of many other great minds, too. Korzybski says we are time-binding, and happily he is sufficiently correct that we can rely on him to say so rather than having to appreciate it independently.

One of the more trivial bequeathals of Descartes' thought is the concept of the Cartesian theater. This is a metaphor or model for what we might poetically term the "mind's eye," and describes the milieu for those entities that occupy our minds - all the things that I have communicated to you and that you have read awoke such entities in your mind, and all of those things existed in the same subjective sense. Subjective being has the character of arising endogenously within our minds - it is real to us, but is not directly accessible to anybody but us. Indeed, it is only directly accessible to ourselves insofar as we understand ourselves to be entities within the Cartesian theater - that is to say, insofar as we are possessed of self-awareness. All subjectively real things are things of which self-aware beings have awareness.

We could assert that there are subjectively real things of which we are not, or cannot be, subjectively aware; but that would invoke entities with which nobody could interact, and Occam's Razor tells us we need not involve such entities in our models. More importantly, we understand enough about these subjective entities that we can approximately measure their impact on us, and as a result we can advance the scientific hypothesis that subjective entities arise in the process of developing awareness of them. Thus, a subjective entity is a 'made thing' in a sense analogous to the Art we discussed earlier, and we as rational beings thereby become 'Artists of the mind.' The Art, in this instance, comes into existence only when we are aware of it, and this is an aspect of the reason why I chose to define Art to necessarily involve an Observer. We are aware of subjective entities as being the manifestations of a conscious and self-aware experiencing of the world, and in this sense we-qua-Observers intuit the agency of we-qua-Artists in the construction of that experience.

The idea that we could experience the world without either consciousness or self-awareness is a very hard one for us to grasp, because it is an idea that is from first principles not appreciable as a subjective entity. It is in this sense of a subjectively real existence that Bishop Berkeley intoned: Esse est percipi. We'll not follow Bishop Berkeley all the way back up the causal chain to the original Unobserved Observer, partly because that would be too lengthy a digression and partly because the notion of subjective existence we're discussing here is only a beginning.