This is going to sound nuts (and it should) but I believe in magic.
Well, kind of. I should qualify this, lest you think I’ve finally gone completely off the deep end.
When I say “magic” I am talking specifically about the use of meditative states and ritual thinking as a means of programming the lizard brain. The lizard brain is the System 1 mode of thinking we are all familiar with from Kahneman’s work. It operates below the level of conscious thought, on the basis of heuristics and intuition. Kahneman’s System 2 is the mode we operate in when we are consciously reasoning.
Suppose we think of System 1 and System 2 as different types of computers. How would we program them?
System 2 uses a “higher level” language based on formal logical relationships (or should, anyway).
System 1 is another matter. System 1 does not speak in formal logical terms, by definition. It’s closer to the hardware. System 1 is crude. System 1 is primal. It speaks something like assembly language, whereas System 2 uses a more abstract, object-oriented schema.
I submit to you that magic is the language of the lizard brain.
The lizard brain responds to basic impulses such as hunger, fear and lust. The lizard brain responds to symbolic, emotionally charged language and imagery.
I submit to you that we can reprogram the lizard brain (or at least hack it) through the use of conditioning techniques via emotionally charged states.
I had been meaning to read up on magic, specifically chaos magick, for some time. I was intrigued by references to it by some otherwise quite rational and clever individuals I follow online. To my surprise, when I finally cracked open Peter Carroll’s Liber Null, I grokked the basics immediately.
I think there are two reasons for this intuitive response:
First, I have spent most of my life engaged in various forms of creative writing. Fundamentally, there is not much difference between chaos magick and creative writing. Or any creative process, for that matter. It all reduces down to the focused transmission of ideas and emotions through the manipulation of symbolic systems of representation.
Second, for the past couple of years I have engaged in a fairly regular meditation practice. Meditation changes the way you perceive the world. There are lots of books about how and why that works (I highly recommend The Mind Illuminated). I’m not going to rehash the mechanics of it here. The point relevant to this post is basic meditative practice helps you learn to view your thoughts and emotions as objects.
The changes are subtle at first. Personally, I would start to “catch myself” when my emotional state would change. Maybe I am in line at the grocery store and I start to get annoyed because some numbskull can’t use the self-checkout. Increasingly, I am able to consciously short-circuit that mild form of anger and its physiological symptoms. This is pretty mundane and uninteresting. I mention it because it’s probably something you can grok even if you think I’m completely off my rocker with most of this.
Here’s where things start to get magickal.
Once you begin to see your thoughts and emotions as objects it is not a huge leap to begin to manipulate them as objects. I am fortunate not to have intense psychological trauma in my past. But I definitely have unpleasant memories. Meditative states have a habit of bringing those unpleasant memories forward in a vivid way. It’s precisely the kind of thing that happens when you unleash the lizard brain. With some very basic, very mainstream guidance you can begin to work with these thoughts to lessen their intrusiveness and unpleasantness. This is simple, uncontroversial stuff like internalizing and projecting forgiveness of self and others.
We can call this meditation. We can call it magick. We can call it prayer. We can call it performance enhancing visualization. No matter what we choose to call it, it’s all the same thing.
Oh, by the way, we can invert some of these things if we want to get a little more woo and think about the nature of black magic. If you believe you can transmit positive energy, or create positive associations, using these techniques, there is nothing stopping you from doing the same with negative energy. My sense is that the dark side of things initially seems super cool to people who have not actually practiced these techniques “cuz power” and whatnot. This is a bit like a kid finding his dad’s gun.
There is a whole cosmological discussion to be had about the nature of darkness and evil and why they are inherent in existence. Waaaaay beyond the scope of this post. What IS relevant to this post is that if you start hacking around inside the lizard brain with a focus on the darker aspects of your human nature, and emphasize feeding and manipulating negative energy, you may not like the kinds of thoughts, feelings and “forces” that begin to manifest in your life as a result. It is not at all implausible to me that this could cause serious psychological damage. The degenerate form of meta systems thinking is psychosis. You should take that statement seriously.
So if you read this and decide to start experimenting with this stuff, I suggest first checking out this post on potential risks by my Twitter friend @liminal_warmth. Messing around with the plasticity of your brain is not something to be taken lightly. I do not want to be responsible for encouraging anyone to experiment with stuff that unintentionally leads to a destabilizing existential crisis or a psychotic break, and at this point I don’t feel I can improve upon Warmth’s summary of the relevant issues.