15/10 BEYOND THE WORD AND THE FOOL Pt2

Part Two

TEMPLE artefact #007

MIND – do you?

Let’s turn our gaze from the macrocosm to the microcosm inside us all - consider the wide-open Withinfinite; the interior dimension with which we are all familiar from our daydreams, night dreams and the moment-to-moment self-engendering commentary that relates and edits the accumulating experiences of our lives into some meaningful narrative, contradictions and all.

Consider how the simple addition of a conscious observer, in the form of YOU, ME, or US, transforms our allegedly blind clockwork cosmos into something much more than mere physics and chemistry.

Add consciousness and the world becomes pregnant with potential, possibility, wonder, terror and awe. Our need to comprehend their deepest nature makes even the rocks sing, makes silicon calculate and talk. Our avid attention makes the stars give up their light in a spectrographic blush. Our acknowledgement of a beauty and organization that would perish and pass un-noted, unrecorded, un-ennobled without us brings the whole immense superstructure of the universe to life.

Without going so far as to suggest everything is waiting to talk to us directly - in a wise-ass New Jersey accent, one hopes - it's not too far-fetched to suggest that everything has something to tell us. Everywhere we look, there is something to learn. A fractal, infinite profusion of potential subject-to-object relationships yielding the kind of knowledge about our surroundings that we love to harvest and preserve. The kind of knowledge that brings Meaning to our lives.

The complexity of our neural architecture provides us with access to a sophisticated holographic conscious self-awareness which enables us to “stand back” and “look” at ourselves from a “distance” that is purely conceptual. Our self-awareness allows us access to higher dimensions – we can see ourselves in the mirror just by closing our eyes. We can age or de-age our faces. Using our “mind’s eye” we can see ourselves from above, in a crowd, from space. We can look back in time and imagine, then make, the future.

Seeing patterns in apparent chaos seems to give us immense pleasure.

MEANING – is there?

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than can be counted, locked in a drawer, kissed or beaten into unconsciousness. Not everything we know to be real is amenable to weighing and measuring.

We speak not of supernatural entities, for which we can offer no proof of existence outside our prodigious imaginations and capacity for invention; instead we refer to far more interesting ghosts which, immaterial though they may be, are irrefutably real.

We may conjure up, for instance, the prominent ghost in William Shakespeare's blockbusting Hamlet. Not the wraith of Hamlet's dad who turns up all inciting-incident and vengeful-like in the first act but the genuine non-material presence which haunts the play and illustrates my point.

I’m talking about the meaning of the text. The “soul” of Hamlet.

In our undeniably mechanistic Universe what is the weight, in ounces, or tons, of the meaning of Hamlet?

The truth is that not one of the many “meanings” of Hamlet can be squeezed, frozen, heated, photographed or used as a tool to construct a table and yet it’s impossible to deny that this entity – this “Meaning of Hamlet” exists; the Meaning of Hamlet cannot be exorcised by Empirical Science by dint of lacking mass or velocity.

What then is the nature and substance, the “objective reality” of the meaning of Hamlet?

Real enough to incite vigorous debate, it exists only as cousin to the phantom, companion to the Bogeyman, sidekick to Will O' The Wisp. The meaning of Hamlet, while undeniably and demonstrably a real “thing”, is also an intangible, which can, despite its non-material status, exert an undeniable influence on human minds and lives. Some enthusiasts might devote a lifetime's career to the examination and explication of this utterly immaterial “thing”. We may hesitate to call these scholars parapsychologists or ghost-hunters but their quarry can no more be touched than the spectres of Borley Rectory. The prey they hunt is no more substantial.

In other news, it's safe to say that while a zealous handful may or may not have given up their lives for the meaning of Hamlet, armies of millions have undoubtedly perished in defense, or in the name, of "God", an equivalently hard to punch, kiss, or shave abstraction.

God too is hewn of the same substance from which we have fashioned the meaning of Hamlet, the idea of Freedom, or the Rights of Man; which is to say that God is made of something very like nothing at all except a profound, culturally-ubiquitous agreement to acknowledge this mysterious, powerfully-charged nothing which can nevertheless effect change in the material world and which still uses all too-physical bully boys to do the work of its venomous militant wing.

A warning to us and a reminder, if nothing else, that some ghosts can kill people.

The decision to "make" meaning and to assign value or significance is the most Mag!cal decision we can make; meaning is what conjures something from nothing. Meaning does not objectively exist, yet we can use it to ensoul and bring inert matter to dancing articulate life.

Meaning is the untouchable uncanny stuff of which Mag!c is made. It provides Mag!c with the mercurial elusive shiftiness that contributes to its showbiz glamour, its freak show, big top aura of illusion and deception and sex. It is this quality of being real and not real at the same which can dazzle and confuse strict materialists.

I hope I have adequately explained how something can be real and powerful without being solid.

Sticking with this, let’s demonstrate how a truly Mag!cal or talismanic object can be created, using the application of Meaning, in the comfort of one’s own home.

Making a Mag!cal Talisman

Select ANY object – a stone, perhaps, a soft toy, or a painting you’ve made. Give it Meaning. There are many ways to accomplish this. For instance:

Keep it close to you at all times.

Talk to it. Confide in it. Let your tears fall upon it.

Ensure you have it with you when you start an important new relationship or re-energize the one you’re in.

Tell your new partner how much it means to you. Tell a friend or lover how much the object now means to you and let them in on the experiment.

Take the object with you on holiday, to gigs or other noteworthy events, etc.

Have fun conferring Meaning upon the object you’ve chosen to carry this power. Repetition - otherwise known as ritual - encourages meaning to stick more easily, so take the object with you every time you go on holiday, for instance. Elevate it to the status of "lucky charm".

As time passes and its use is made more specific, you will observe that the object becomes increasingly more significant, more precious and therefore more Mag!cal as time goes by. It may then transform mysteriously into a “Good Luck” totem.

Like the architect of a mediaeval cathedral you might not even be around to see just how successful this spell could become; expose the object to increasing amounts of passing time and it might become an enduring talisman, as potent as any philosopher's stone. As Holy, perhaps, as a Grail.

Pass the object through a few generations and it will acquire the aura of sacredness. In a few hundred years, its ownership might be the trigger for holy wars.

See how easy it is.

Mag!c! What is it good for?

Mag!c has many practical and non-practical uses. Here are some of them, from the most mundane to the most outlandish.

1) Mag!c offers a tried-and-tested self-help discipline which allows all of us to make specific beneficial changes to our personalities and motivations: its practice confers a powerful sense of self-determination and agency which can counter the powerlessness we often feel in the face of the world’s hurricane motion. Given that the “spiritual”, transcendent impulse appears hard-wired in the human organism and shows up in every human culture, why not indulge it with a practice that doesn’t require you to believe in any god or devil but elevates lovely, daft you, to the centre of all creation?

2) Mag!c gives us an excuse us to create something from nothing. Again, this is not a supernatural or occult feat; writers, artists, mothers and fathers, architects and filmmakers, among many others, do this every day and some of them spend lifetimes perfecting the trick. Grab NOTHING in your greedy, ugly physical fists and make magnificent SOMETHING from it!

In fantasy stories or showbiz illusions, this work is symbolised by the conjuror who can pretend to affect or distort the rules of reality by producing “something” in the form of a rabbit, say, from “nothing”, i.e. the interior of a top hat.

The Mag!cian "imagines" something in his/her head - it might be a lover, a piece of art, a demon, a god, a road bridge, a child or a screenplay, and makes it “real” by giving the idea a foothold and a way to grow or otherwise express itself in the material world.

3) Mag!c connects us to generally unremarked upon, usually ignored but undeniably higher dimensional aspects of our being.

Our skulls are made of bone – our brains are grey intricate sponges that never feel the sun’s heat and yet we can imagine how our bodies look from outside! We can imagine our own deaths. We can imagine how the room where I write looks, as seen from “above”, or the shape of our country as seen from space, and the blue radiant Earth as it looks from the moon. We can picture our galactic location, our local cluster, the voids and filaments of the cosmos, the limits of physical, eternal creation. It all fits into these tiny white-bone skulls of ours. If we wish to, we can pull back and look down upon a staggering 4-Dimensional jewel that is all of existence adrift in its 5-D liquid supercontext. We can imagine and contain vast gem-universes drifting in the 5-D amnion. And beyond. Our tiny compact bone skulls never break, even when contemplating infinities, eternities.

We can see the past, our dead parents, look into our gran’s eyes, and taste sweets we nibbled at when we were six, as we conjure perfumes that recall Auntie’s handbag.

All our experience FITS into our tiny heads. Like Dr. Who’s TARDIS we’re all undeniably much, much bigger on the inside. The storage space seems UNLIMITED, in fact. There is no border, or boundary, or strand to that interior landscape.

One might then propose our finite skullspace to contain a sort of 5-D tesseract accommodation – a literal, undeniable doorway to higher dimensional space. Look “backwards” at the space in your own head and you will see that this is correct.

Then consider how that space may have inhabitants! Or prior colonists and explorers!

Australian Aboriginals, as the world’s oldest continuous human culture going back 60, 000 years, talk about 11-dimensional spacetime using multiple simultaneous tenses. Western languages and philosophies lack the sophistication and vocabulary to articulate the high-level cosmologies of Aboriginal clever men.

Do Gods, Angels and Demons exist in any objective sense?

A simple experiment:

Invoke the god Mercury – in his guise as Hermes, Thoth, Ganesh, Metron, Odin, Legba, or your own personal favourite speedy messenger/gatekeeper.

Listen to music that suggests the tricky, speedy qualities of your chosen deity; Madonna’s “Ray of Light”, fast, complex jazz or drum and bass recordings, Holst’s “Mercury” from his Planets Suite, “Flight of the Bumblebee”, speed metal, gabba techno etc.

Drink coffee or Red Bull, or, if you’re more daring/more self-destructive, you may consider snorting speed or cocaine. Recalcitrant aesthetes may even prefer adrenaline. These substances will bring your nervous system into rapid alignment with the speedy qualities of your chosen “god”.

In this heightened state, you must now write a poem, an essay, a theory, or a song (if you’re a little more ambitious, you might get a whole self-indulgent album out of coke, like Oasis’ Be Here Now, or a classic record shaped by cannabis or LSD like Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). It doesn’t have to be great but if you’re lucky, or talented, it might be.

Without expectation of reward, invoke Hermes, then give a speech, or hold forth on a subject about which you are passionate. The fast-talking, bright-eyed eloquent version of yourself that you will manifest is what a human being looks like when “possessed” or “enthused” by the specific state of "speedy" consciousness our ancestors in Greece called Hermes. There is nothing supernatural about this state of mind. We are all familiar with it.

A hypothetical scientist on hand at this experiment might dispassionately record a faster heartrate. More sweat. Expanded pupils. A tendency towards talkativeness. A heightened ability to orate and create. These physical measurable responses are reliable indications of the presence of Hermes-consciousness and remind us quite simply that the specific state of awareness the Greeks personified as “Hermes”, the Romans embodied as "Mercury", the Egyptians called “Thoth”, the Babylonians represented as “Nabu”, the Celts symbolized as “Ogma”, the Hindus concretized as “Ganesh” etc. is in “possession” of a human nervous system and can be measured. Again, I emphasize there is nothing supernatural about this - and yet I’m describing gods and possession.

If we choose to accept that “god” is simply an old-fashioned and much-misunderstood word meaning “specific and highly focused coherent state of consciousness” it should become easier for even the most determined materialist to conceive of the existence of a set of formulae or actions designed to provoke and sustain focused emotions.

To find oneself in the grip of any of these primary colours of the Human Experience for any sustained time is to be "possessed" by what they used to call a "god". Consider this analogous to running an app on your phone perhaps - but I know fuck all about computers or phones, so someone else can pick that idea up and run with it!

“But that's not a god!” I hear the “skeptic” cry. “A god is a gigantic, weightless, bearded senior citizen who lives above the sky somewhere and throws thunderbolts around – everyone knows that!”

Now who’s being irrational?