Magic versus Magical Thinking, a Practical Guide (Part 2): Of Origins, Migrations, Memory and Nostalgia

 

Of all the various types of magical thinking, this particular variety is among the most frequent—and the most dangerous:

If only we could return to the way things were, everything would be all right.

If only that could possibly be true, in any way shape or form! This expression of longing, however, is most often the result of incomplete, in some cases manufactured, memory. 

Here is an example of what I mean. That collection of “books” that comes to many of us prepackaged in a single volume called The Bible, with all its errors of translation and transliteration, gaps, glosses and bridgework, contains in its first book not one but two creation stories. (As an aside, there are actually many other creation stories throughout the entire collection. Look to the Psalms, Hosea, Isaiah, Job, Proverbs,  Jeremiah, John and, of course, Revelation.) Most people who have read Genesis from start to end conflate the two stories, so that they become a single narrative. (The same thing happens with the Jesus birthday stories of the gospels.) What I mean to imply by mentioning this is that all such stories are afterward stories and not true accounts of any reality, particularly, as in similar stories from other cultural heritages, when anthropomorphism is applied to planets, stars or birds from the sky, ants and worms from below ground, or the fish in the sea. If you ever read any Greek mythology, even the most watered down versions, you understand what I mean. Said another way, we may have lived through our beginnings, but we were not there at our beginning.

As alluded to in the previous essay, people long for settled place and a sense of belonging in the midst of change and upheaval. This is not what the experience of living dishes out. 

The photo above was taken by me at the V Bar V Petroglyph Heritage site in Sedona, Arizona. Created over a long period by tribes identified today as Sinagua, this is a storyboard that could be applicable to many groupings of people, anywhere in the world, except that this particular storyboard is a product tied to a particular place and a particular time (roughly 1100 through 1400 CE). The storyboard is an almanac, depicting among other things seasonal changes and migration patterns that area dwellers followed. Not much, naturally, is known of the specific peoples who contributed to the storyboard; “mysteriously disappeared” is always the explanation given, but what we must read into that is a prolonged period of drought and/or invasion by unfriendly or warring tribes, as well as the ravages of colonization; anything might have triggered human migration from the area. What any person might be able to read (given a basic background in world mythology and South Western symbolism) on this magnificent stone cliff is the story of people in constant seasonal migration. During winter, groups would follow the herds of elk and other creatures, which would roughly end at the Spring thaw, at which time the People would shift their operations to rivers for fishing and collection of reeds for fashioning baskets, fishing traps and other useful items. In late Spring, the People would remove to flat or terraced fertile areas near water, in sheltered valleys or in the shadow of buttes, to plant, gather and build up stores for the winter. Throughout the area, there are fine examples of cliff dugout and masonry buildings, all of which were abandoned, for whatever reason.

At the site, we were given rough information by a white Forest Service docent, and then also an Indigenous Representative came (we were lucky; tribal representatives are not always available). People asked questions about the various symbols. The tribal Representative both knew and did not know. I remembered experiencing this shifting sort of vagueness on a decades previous trip to Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, where a question was asked about symbols in murals on the walls of the Mission Church. 

There are very specific reasons for this shifting between knowing and not knowing. First of all, there is a palpable, even visceral cultural memory of the violent ravages of colonization. Acoma was violently taken over by the Spanish, who then forced Christianity on the indigenous. There was a lot of resistance; one aspect of resistance to oppression is the presence of native symbols, discretely placed, under the radar. Telling strangers about that is like giving away personal identity. Secondly, because migration has always been a way seasonal way of life, and climate shifts play a huge role in that, many of the indigenous who live in a certain area now may have come from somewhere else; the tides of time and assimilation have sometimes washed away specific local cultural memory. 

The notion that the way we were is better than way things are now is a lie we tell ourselves when we feel unmoored from rootedness by the vicissitudes of an ever-changing world. The truth is, people want to feel rooted and complacent, but the reality is people cannot live that way for very long. The lands and cultures, the economies and governances are in constant fluctuation. There has never been the stasis our soul longs for. Snapshots of a carefree childhood are an incomplete knowledge of what it took for our parents to bring us to adulthood. Nietzsche called nostalgia a form of nihilism. In Will to Power, he wrote: 

A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning.

As I know from the practical experience of bringing up twins, nothing stays the same. Just at the very moment you come to understand one stage child development and how to manage within it, the next stage crashes like a wave that you are completely unprepared for and ill equipped to deal with, except that you must.  When I now see cute little kids walking to the park, it tugs at my heart, but I wouldn’t want to go through those first five years of childrearing again, at the age that I am now. 

As the sage named Jesus told a man called Nicodemus, everyone must be reborn again as from above. Nicodemus responds with a ridiculous question, offered on purpose, as in a Socratic/rabbinic dialogue, “You cannot mean that a person is to reenter his mother’s womb and be born again.” The sage responds metaphorically, “No one can enter the kingdom of the Divine unless they are born of water and the spirit.” By this metaphor, I take it to mean that, of course, there is no going backward, there is only forward movement and momentum toward a change in perspective, a maturation of understanding, enlightenment.

The desire to go backwards, aside from being impossible, is completely unnatural. As the survivors of the Surfside Condominium disaster could attest, as much as one might long to return to a place once known of as home, it might well no longer be there. The desire to go backwards is, to some extent, an expression of rage at being forced to adapt. 

But, we are intended to migrate, both physically and mentally, through the seasons, and through every stage of life. As T. S. Eliot relates in that famous poem of his, which echoes the sentiments of writers who came before him:

In my end is my beginning.

Magic versus Magical Thinking, a Practical Guide (Part 1): Of Recipes, Rites and Action

 

In the beginning, when people were evolving, power was present in the place where one found oneself—by power, I mean the inherent dangers of a place, such as raging waters, sheer cliffs, and roaming gigantic flesh eating creatures. Survival, in such places, came to be seen as a certain sort of blessing, and the people who seemed to have better survival tools (or rather who seemed to make better choices) came to be revered. Some of those revered people, when asked to what they attributed their success at overcoming adversity, might have said something like, “I owe it to the benevolent spirit of the place,” by which they might have meant that they had learned by experience, trial and error, how to make good choices in a hostile environment. Indeed, some people are better suited to survival in certain places than others, and this can only be the result of an education by experience that teaches a type of discernment when it comes to making choices, especially when the unexpected happens. Such people, when they die, become the stuff of legends, and sometimes the legends of such people become so famous, they are turned into demi-gods.

Another scenario related to hero worship is the worship of forces of nature, such as water, air, fire, quaking earth, and the like, seen and unseen. Survival of the fittest when it comes to forces of nature is also an aspect of the power of place, where the unexpected happening can limit or endanger chances of survival.

Yet another scenario related to worship is the reverence of any thing or being that produces food. In such a scenario, corn is reverenced, wheat is reverenced, cows are reverenced, and so forth.

I will say that none of these models of reverence is inherently incorrect; these are all valid examples of reverence and respect. With reverence and respect to the powers of place, to the life-giving powers of food produced in the natural world, to exemplars of right discernment and choice, one is able to learn from past example, build on that with innovation, and survive, even to the point of producing offspring that carry the species forward in time toward newer innovation.

I will now identify an aspect of these primitive forms of reverence that I believe to be incorrect: magic.

This is not to say that magic and magical moments do not exist or that they are irrelevant. Magic is very real; it may be the most real thing there is. Magic goes back to the power of place and the power of the unexpected. Magic is an experience, an awesome and unexpected result. The error comes when people believe they can recreate a magical experience by performing a litany of rites, instead of living and experiencing, learning. The error occurs when people do not, as the heroic exemplars of the past did (or may have done), use and build on the knowledge acquired through experiences of surviving the powers of place and the unexpected to make choices, then accept responsibility for inauspicious outcomes. 

Simply put, one person’s choice might work for someone else, but this is not necessarily the case, and is most often not. In the words of a song Doris Day sang, but hated:

“Que sera, sera

Whatever will be, will be

The future's not ours to see

Que sera, sera

What will be, will be

Que sera, sera.”

The Great British Bake Off television series delivers a concrete example of what I am talking about. At some point, all the participants are given the same recipe to prepare. Amazingly, the results are different for every single participant. Why? They are all using the same ingredients in the same weather conditions, with roughly identical equipment. Why is it that the results can be so different?

Recipes (receipts, in old style) are scientific formulae from the realm of the practical cook. Someone made a tasty dish and invited friends to dinner. The friends really enjoyed the dish and wanted to recreate it in their own homes, so they asked for the receipt, which was a list of ingredients, most often, including a sketchy explanation of how the ingredients were to be combined. The cook had been preparing the dish for so long, it was second nature, and they figured another (experienced) cook would know what was intended.

Here is a recipe from “Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus [Estes]”:

Mushroom Sauce, Italian Style—(for macaroni, spaghetti, ravioli and rice)—a small piece of butter about the size of an egg. One or two onions, cut very small. About two pounds of beef. Let all brown. Prepare as you would pot roast. Add Italian dried mushrooms, soaked overnight in hot water, chopped in small pieces. Add about one-half can of tomatoes. Let all cook well. Salt and pepper to taste. Add a little flour to thicken. 

The beef, is it cubed or a slab of meat? Small, medium or large onions; yellow or red? What quantity of dried mushrooms? What size can of tomatoes are we talking about? Do you know how to make pot roast? Is this done in the oven or on the stovetop? What sized pot to use? Any added liquid, or do the tomatoes suffice? At what temperature? For how long?

The experienced, practical (that is, practicing) cook can take that receipt, procure the ingredients, and turn them into a delicious meal. In the hands of others, “results may vary.” And that is the truth of the matter, results do vary; life is not cast by lots, nor can the turn of a card predict outcomes—that is magical thinking. 

That’s all for now. Not sure when the next installment will be, but I can say that it will have something to do with praxis, religion, reason and governance.

Random Thoughts on the Path Through Advent...

...Where a seemingly random set of observations may not be so random, after all.

—

The moment I saw it, I gasped because I know what it was and somehow understood it.

—How often has that happened to you?—

What did I see? It was an open mouth, carved into a wall, next to the front entrance of a very old building in Europe. More specifically, it was a mail slot, intended for the delivery of messages and small parcels. These can be seen in many “old world” (western) cities throughout the world, even into the Americas; the image below was photographed in Havana, Cuba. That it is a mail slot is clear, but that is not exactly what it means—that is, the symbolism of the open mouth. Generally fashioned as a grotesque or scary image, this symbolizes one of the most ancient of proscriptions: Do Not Steal. The symbolism is backed up by cultural aphorisms that run along the lines of “The righteous hand will come away whole, but a thief may be left with a stump!” Similarly, the so-called Bocca della Verità,in Rome, Italy, is a thought to represent a proscription against lying.

 While my children were growing up, literature had a very important role in our home, cluttered as it is with books and papers and music. Among their first “literary” experiences in school, they explored Greek mythology—aided by the contemporary and popular “Percy Jackson” series. This made me nostalgic: A favorite great Uncle gave me a book of Greek myth stories for Christmas, one year. I read it over and over again. The relative in question had been a classics scholar at Stanford University, and was a bookseller. This similarity in experience—mine and my children’s, decades later—gave me the feeling that most western education, for better or worse, starts with the same materials, the same essential primary reading. This may or may not be accurate, but I felt good that my children were following the same literature ladder that I had been exposed to.

The pitfall of such an education is that it makes assumptions about current generations based on the expectations made on former generations—not to mention that it can serve to limit free thought. Think about it for a moment: Academic writing is not always about presenting new and independent thought, rather it is about building on the thought (and even insisting on the same pathways) of all past generations. Every thesis and dissertation must be supported from the literature that came before it, even if previous literature is erroneous, sometimes owing to a lack of breadth, or carries implicit biases. Or worse, excellent writing of past generations is used to support and lend authority to terrible ideas. Original thinkers can break out of the mold, but not without a fight that includes vigorous viva voce challenges.

I’ve often said to my children, as they worked with reading and writing, exploring universal themes that crop up, “All words are built on all words.” That is to say, our universal life experience themes crop up in every literature and are translated into or expressed through different languages from every region worldwide in every generation. 

We started by naming, and from naming, we moved on to practical cooperative communication, thence onward to storytelling. Naming might be a solitary event, but practical communication and storytelling is a communal experience, where context and meaning are conveyed in a group setting. Original meanings can become clouded or distorted as communities become larger or disconnected, owing to migrations, greater distance between localities, greater urban density, and other social and demographic change, evolving or merging language (e.g., Spanglish), or simply the inexorable march of time. The so-called “generation gap” is a descriptive phrase that clearly defines what I mean. When I ask my kids to call me, I always say, “Dial me up.” I actually enjoy the eye rolls this anachronistic expression elicits. Childhood for my kids fell on the cusp of the tilting point away from film cameras to digital and moved seamlessly along in a very rapid innovation leap from cellular flip phone to the smart phone, “a computer in your pocket.” I sometimes worry that my kids lack portions of the cultural reference lexicon I inherited from my parents and grandparents; to me it represents a depth and a history, but who knows if that even should matter to them in their changing world. 

This how the Tower of Babel was constructed: People became unmoored from past understandings as they became immersed in newer innovations and technologies. To this day, some ancient technologies continue to persist, farming and writing (albeit, less and less in longhand), among them, as well as cooking, which can be looked on as a rudimentary form of chemistry.

Given a list that includes, licorice root, ginger, peppermint and woodbine, depending on one’s worldview and place in life, one is liable to react to the collection of items differently. The list could be seen as just that, a list of spices and herbs. Two on the list are roots; the others are shrubs. Some might glance at this list and take it for a recipefor a pleasant tea; others might have used these items medicinally, while still others might think they are flavorings for use in cooking, or, at the extreme end of the spectrum, a formula for a potion, or even as tools for magic.

The literature of myth and scripture is made up phrases and formulations that occur and recur. The similarity of Judeo-Christian language formulations with those of contemporaneous Greek literature is not often acknowledged, although there are scholars who have pointed this out. Here is where the Academy can have it’s blind spots; what demarks Greek mythology and history from so-called sacred literature of other traditions, and why should they be siloed away from comparison or examined under different sets of assumptions and standards?

Ritual words, phrases, formulations, images, employed in solitary contemplation or corporate, communal celebration are intended as a multi-dimensional experience. And example of what I mean is encapsulated in a common phrase “thought, word and deed.” Interestingly, though this phrase occurs in Christian prayer books, the complete phrase does not seem to exist, the three terms together, in the biblical canon. The origin of the phrase is actually much older than Greek or Judeo-Christian literature, coming as it does from the earlier Zend Avesta, the primary scripture of the Parsi tradition.

Therefore, O Zarathushtra! …

Make thy own self pure, O righteous man! anyone in the world here below can win purity for his own self, namely, when he cleanses his own self with good thoughts, words,and deeds.

Having good thoughts internally, declaiming those thoughts outwardly in words and embodying, exemplifying the thoughts and words in action, this is what it means to be, to use another familiar ancient term, upright. This could also be thought of as therapy, self-healing, as well as therapeutic outreach to family and greater community. This is the spirit of ubuntu, a modern African humanist philosophy; every individual has a role to play in the health of the community.

I will posit that there is a parallel consideration from the Vedic traditions: yantra (a geometric visualization tool), mantra (a chanted scripture or prayer) and tantra (the embodied practice of what has visualized and vocalized). The yantra, mantra and tantra are one and the same expression, inextricable, though individuals may respond better to one or another of the expressions.

Another parallel can be observed in the more modern Lucumi tradition, formed during the colonial era throughout the Caribbean region, with its earlier roots in West African Yoruba and other African traditions. Where the consecrated batá drums call the orishas to join and guide the congregation, call and response songs are sung to the sacred rhythms of the drums, and the related dance forms constitute a single, simultaneous flow of spiritual communication. The drums, the song and the dance together are a single, communal sacred expression, the sacred work of the people.

I recently took notice of the sak yant tradition of Thailand. The sak yant are a species of highly complex yantras, arising from what I would call a syncretic relationship between ancient animism and Buddhism. Modern Thai people view these symbols as magic; most do not understand the meanings of these yantras. These yantras make popular tattoos, which are administered by monks trained in the specifics of the mantras that accompany the yantras. This is the image I saw:

When I first saw the image, I understood it to mean energy emanating from the mindful being, which may be partly correct. The image is one version of what is called unalom, and it’s actual meaning is path to/of enlightenment. This yant has it’s own tone and can be expressed in conjunction with many mantras, but your life is the actual tantra.

Unfortunately, esoteric images like these are all too frequently treated solely as “magic”, as good luck charms by those who wear them, rather than the intended use as a meditation tool or an aspect of, to quote philosopher Iris Murdoch, “a moral philosophy” that “should be inhabited” by the individual. We can accept blessings conferred on us, but do we harm ourselves when we (1) don’t understand the meaning of a blessing, (2) don’t follow up the blessing with appropriate action or (3) knowingly ask someone else to act on our behalf, thus avoiding engagement? To quote Murdoch again, “Prayer is properly not a petition,” but these days, it seems almost exclusively thought of in that way. 

The inclination to give an intercessor, priest, monk, magician, shaman or guru that much power has perhaps given rise to every single example of spiritual materialism and idol worship that has ever existed. That superstition exists in the modern world – and is sometimes actively taught to people by an authoritarian few – should give us all pause. We cannot consign to others the maintenance of our moral character. Charms and magic do not make such work go away. This is why the Buddha did not want people to worship him or indeed anyone else.

That said, it is true that everyone has a role to play in the life of others, and that is the “seen and unseen” aspect of living. There are so many of us in the world just for that reason, I believe – so that we can be for others, to help others and support others, as a chain of support network that has no beginning and no end. 

—

During the Advent season, I enjoy revisiting the Isaiah writings in the Bible. The notion of “uprightness” stands out to me. The texts of Isaiah speak about making the crooked straight, and rough places plain. What does this mean? Does it indicate bulldozing mountains and rolling out a concrete highway for the Divine Majesty? I think not.

Rather, I look on this is a prescription for self- and communal-healing. Just as the unalom symbol illustrates the spiritual journey, each person’s conscious life is an exercise in alignment and/or realignment. How many of you remember being told by a parent, “You’d better straighten up your act”? I believe this is exactly what is intended; we are the crooked places that need to be straightened and smoothed and tidied as we move through all the stages of our life, and only we can do that work. When we “straighten up our act”, we become more mindful, and thereby become more open to the Divine, and hopefully more engaged and connected to what is happening in the world around us. 

—

The season of Advent has now come to it’s conclusion. We are either ready for what comes next, or not. The shortest day is now concluded, and the Dedication has begun. 

Is your home ready to receive a Holy Guest? Are you upright in thought, word and deed? Is your pathway aligned so the Guest can reach you with fluency and ease, and celebrate fully with you?

In this changing season, may we all move from darkness to light. May we help one another along the narrow roads, tidying and straightening as we go. May our mindfulness and care for one another be the only gift required to make us whole, and may peace visit you and remain with you, now and always.

Amen.