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I have been reading ‘The Apophenion, A Chaos Magic Paradigm’ by Peter J. Carroll. For those that find the word magic provocative, he suggests replacing it with ‘psychological and para-psychological technology’ instead. I’ve always had a dual relationship with the word magic. In the past I’ve written stories and scripts essentially embracing magic as a part of life and have, I suppose, characterized it as a bumbling benevolence that somehow makes things either beautiful or bearable. In my late teens I came across Aleister Crowley’s, Magick, and was very influenced by the ideas while not caring for rituals of personal power designed to influence events or others. Maybe it was my catholic background or my experience with the black pigs at night but for all my rebranding of Merlin (cf my novel, ‘The Return of King Arthur’), modern magicians struck me as a bit dirty or entirely dishonest. In turn, however, I came up with an Indian guru and for a while attributed to him powers well beyond the scope of the magicians I mocked.
I wouldn’t mock Peter Carroll. He’s far too clever for that and far cleverer than me. His book is stunning. Here’s a taste of his style.
Apophenia means finding pattern and meaning where others don’t. Feelings of revelation and ecstasis usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful, or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness.
The second chapter, ‘Panpsychism – Philosophy,’ begins with a deconstruction of the concept of ‘Being’ and in it he states, ‘We inhabit a universe of events, not a universe full of things. Phenomena can give the macroscopic impression of having ‘being’ or ‘thingness’ but only because they actually consist of ongoing processes.’
Of course ‘being’ does imply doing; a doing of existence. It is true, however, that we tend to think of things existing apart from their doing. Rather than saying this concollocation and coincidence of vibrations we call ‘stone’, we imply that a stone has properties. (I must point out that in Shaivism, Shiva-Shakti, being and doing, sat and chit, are inseparable. As is ananda, bliss, but I don’t understand that yet.) For Carroll ‘being’ is a redundant tautology; doing will suffice. “I conclude,” he writes, “that I do not have any sort of ‘being’, I consist only of the totality of what I do. I proceed through time as a process.”
Dismissing ‘being’ as a ‘neurological and linguistic illusion’, Carroll proceeds to outline the consequences, in his opinion, of the solipsism of the being-doing dichotomy that include ‘the misconception of a spirit-matter dualism…and to a mind-matter or mind-body dualism…that gives rise to insoluble but illusory problems and paradoxes in philosophy, psychology, and in our ideas about consciousness.” He then posits, ‘Perhaps mind constitutes a fundamental property of matter, and all matter does mind activity of some kind and we should not regard it as dead and inert’.
As Carroll says, the idea that all ‘things’ are alive, or are possessing spirit or being possessed by spirit, is not new to mankind and indeed is close to being a definition of pantheism. With industrialization, science, enlightenment et cetera, mind/spirit and matter split and theism became to seem rather silly. Modern physics, especially quantum theory, has, because of its findings, had to describe quanta in terms of what they do, rather than what they are. Is it a wave or a particle? When it does one thing it is a wave, when it does another it is a particle. What decides what it does? Is it random, predetermined, willed?
Carroll writes: Quantum Panpsychism (i.e. ungodded pantheism) ‘depends on the idea that the basic quanta of matter and energy exhibit mind-like behaviour. Both mind and quanta exhibit a mixture of apparently causal and random behaviour.’
Mind, like being, should therefore be regarded as a doing word, as a verb, for after all we can only detect mind by its activity, i.e. thinking. If we permit all matter to do minding then we no longer have to explain how minds ‘emerge’ in complex biological nervous systems. Rather than being some epiphenomenon of matter, minding is intrinsic to matter.
On page 35, Carroll turns his attention to the construction of the Self and I would describe his description of the social defining of Self as masterly. Of particular interest to me is his observation of how much the singularity of Self is emphasised.
‘The singular self remains a defining feature of monotheist and post-monotheist cultures. It confers a greater sense of personal responsibility than our pagan forebears would have felt comfortable with.’
This saddling of responsibility on the self is bewildering to us, is it not? Even those with the stiffest of upper lips will find themselves saying, ‘I don’t know what got hold of me’, ‘I wasn’t my proper self’, ‘I was stressed,’ when they’ve behaved inexplicably. Crimes of passion can still engender sympathy and leniency. Is it personal irresponsibility, economic hardship, mob mentality, self-sabotage, moral degeneracy or deliberate bloody minded wrong doing for the sake of it, that caused the riots? Is depression an illness or a selfishness? Is obesity ignorance, laziness, or genetics? When studies show how early upbringing affects the workings of the brain, how can we possibly hold anyone responsible for anything? Do any of us know what we might think in three thoughts from now? And so it goes.
Thirty-five years ago, my guru told me (and everyone else for that matter) ‘to meditate on your Self’ and he ran a program, called an Intensive, in which he said (according to his translator), ‘I promise you an experience of the Self.’ I still don’t know what he meant. For a fairly long time I kind of concluded intellectually there was no self while continuing to experience myself as being something. Whatever I was, I thought contentedly, would die when my body did. Recently I began to reconsider this. I don’t yet know what death would be, if anything, in the hyperspherical universe that Carroll talks about but if I ever get to have an opinion, I’ll surely let you know.
An alternative to the monoself model is a multi-self model which is managed, says Carroll, with ‘stochastic’ techniques. This model I recognize and have done since I was 14. (One of my first guides being Herman Hesse’s books though he, as I recall, was dualistic in his picturing.) Only today the retiring head of Apple was complaining about the lack of polymaths. Could this be connected to the monoizing of the individual?
‘The Mono-Self type acts predictably and with restricted creativity, and has a cellar full of demons and discarded angels. The full-blown Multi-Self type can act creatively and unpredictably, but erratically and dysfunctionally if communication between the selves breaks down.’
The Apophenion is published by Mandrake.
Now back to completing my corrections to Sad Sam’s Sexual Adventures in Cyberspace. I so hope my publisher likes it.
