Years back, in a discussion of my first
book "The Return of Magic," Isaac Bonewits faulted me for downplayng the
notion of magic as a way of making things happen. I'm unrepentant,
and I realize that for some who might turn to this course it's enough to
have you turn off your browser.
So let me try to explain as well as I can.
Initially I was more interested in the possible survival of a witch tradition that linked to pre-Christian times than in the reality of the things that such people might believe. Soon enough, though, things happened that seemed to fall outside the normal categories of cause and effect. I've written about some of this in my earlier books and I do not try to repeat the stories in this one. Let's just say I was convinced that I had stumbled on a world that by scientific standards ought not exist.
At the same time I could not buy into the fairy-tale vision. Jung's idea of synchronicity did allow me to fit all this into a larger picture, and it was by going into Jung's work more thoroughly that I managed to develop a few key ideas that have been the basis for most of my writing. The most important was the very paradoxical notion that anythng going on was the result of treating symbols as though they have a reality of their own even though the basis for this is nothing but human consciousness itself.
Here I adapted the idea from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, mentioned by Jung and exploited by writers such as Timothy Leary, that all the bardo visions were but projections of our own minds--and yet they are real. For a Buddhist this is not too difficult a proposition, since in the metaphysical starting point for Buddhism our own personal minds are no more permanent than the illumination on a TV screen when power is shut off. For the Buddhist, if consciousness is a flow that allows all events to occur, then there could be as much variety in available imagery as there are possible programs to watch on that TV.
The jump I had to make was actually suggested by William James in a lecture in which he attempted to summarize his own conclusions after years of research into the reality of spiritualism. He listed several hypotheses to account for the events recorded: fraud and misinterpretation were obvious, but ruling these out there could still be more than one way to make sense of things. That "discarnate entities" were real was one, of course, but there was also the notion that they were indeed projections from ourselves (ESP and PK, in modern lingo) and there was the possibility of a cosmic "silly putty" (my phrase, obviously) that could become these things. I liked this last because it fit in with Castaneda's concept of the nagual. In such a picture the rules of magic (which are almost invariably rules for working with symbols) can be seen as semi-empirical techniques for shaping this "silly putty."
Let me review the working hypotheses from the book:
And these are the corollaries:
Throughout my writing I try to downplay
the role of actual belief while still insisting on an as-if attitude that
simulates it. The distinction matters. For the believer, not
having things work out can be disillusioning (and here think of all the
familiar rationalizations offered when prayers seem not to be answered,
especially the one that saysGod does answer our prayers but sometimes says
no). In my peculiarly agnostic vision, things not working out is
no more unusual than not being able to create a great work of art on cue.
For the believer, there better be the afterlife and all the rest.
For myself, the effort to create meaning is maybe enough on its own.