Queen of the Sciences

Words—usually I just use them without thinking of what these words mean or what they actually sound like or what they could sound like. Imagine if you could slow down words and slowly glide over each letter and think of the sound, the meaning, the origin, the history of the word and why that particular group of sounds came to signify something. The deeper and, perhaps, slower we go in this direction we are sure to find something shocking, a sudden shift in the current of consciousness. It doesn’t have to be words, in could be sounds on a piano, a flower, clouds drifting across the sky, or even riskier things like driving down the road where the additional edge is to stay on the road while your mind is moving. It’s that edge that seems to have to be there to make whatever we are doing vital and alive. Eve had to eat the fruit or we wouldn’t be here.

The reality is that we go to the depths in order to be firmly on the surface. A healthy flow between our daily live and the deep wells within is what can make us bloom. This is the source of mysticism, spirituality, magic and what Colin Wilson called “Faculty X” that faculty that emerges that takes us to strange and magical places. Wilson defines it or evokes it “the key to all poetic and mystical experience” and “Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other times and places…time is an illusion, so is my sense of being uniquely here, now, ‘I am not here; neither am I elsewhere’ says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.” This is a mysterious description and filled with paradox. Anything in what I call “magic” is paradoxical, non-local, non-specific, a blending of many things and yet it is precisely what it is—magic evokes a strong feeling of what Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences” that kind of sweep us away in some flow but not a flow where we our will is ignored but one where our will and “that” which we are flowing with is ourself. This feeling can be also described as “amazing”, wondrous, and, of course magical. This feeling has been a constant in human experience but is discouraged in our own culture while at thes same time coming out in myths, in stories, in literature, and shows. And it is that deep source within us that feeds and refreshes our body, our mind, and our soul. We cannot live without magic and while both Church and Science has tried to ban it to the best of their ability—it endures and comes out through art, TV shows, music and so on. It’s all around us in some form but we often not able to truly see it.

All moral philosophy comes fromTtheology once called the “Queen of the Sciences” not because people in the Middle Ages were stupid but because they understood a lot more about Magic as I’ve described it. Theology which means the study of first principles, the soul, essence the most real of real and Magic is always the answer and the state of consciousness that will be able to even ask the question. Once we have a sense of this “state” of being that is the real study of Theology because it always means, also, the study of eternity and the multi-verse as physics is beginning to all it.

Whether you approach it through direct experience, contemplation, drugs, trance states, dreams, prayer, the arts does not really matter. With Magic/Theology nothing other than conscious perception matters. If you understand what that perception is or even have some sort of intuition about it you don’t have to “understand” it or “figure it out” because the more you try to go in that direction the further away from Magic you go. Description can only be a crude map to the realm of Magic, the realm of the divine. Most deep mystical traditions across culture agree that you cannot know what we have called Magic through reason—it would be like trying to fly by flapping your hands. Many people who are unable to go in that direction yet have pretensions of wisdom are upset if they are told that there is no entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven through creating a thought construction but what an ancient sage called “the Cloud of Unknowing.” At best, the mind will allow you to find a place in a camp outside the walls where maybe you can meet some people or a set of experiences that can transport you into the Kingdom, usually through a number of winding but exciting roads or, on rare occasion you land there like Eckart Tolle experienced:

It’s interesting that stepping out of thought was actually triggered by a thought. At that moment, consciousness looked at the thought “I can’t live with myself,” and I realized there are two here—“I” and the “self I can’t live with.” And then there was another little thought: Who is this self that I can’t live with? But there was no answer; that was the last question. And then it didn’t matter. This peace had changed my perception of the world of form too, of the external world. When I woke up the next morning, everything was beautiful and intensively alive and peaceful.
(https://www.eckharttolle.com/article/Spiritual-Awakening-Of-Eckhart-Tolle)

So the “right” mental thoughts or mental constructs can at the right time and place shatter our illusions of duality as it did with Tolle—this basic insight has been explained in similar in several spiritual traditions and are always available to us if we are willing to question deeply and once we struggle with these questions strange things begin to happen.

But this “enlightenement” journey is usually a long struggle because the primacy of the executive part of our brain, the ego, has to change and this is enormously hard for people living in a culture like this one where feeding the ego is thought of as the only legitimate goal whether that food is to do “good works” or sheer narcissism. And some of the worst sorts of ego are everywhere in the neighborhood of the Kingdom—the ego loves going through all kinds of initiations, processes, spiritual practices and the Buddha did but these, as Gautama recognized, are pointless and lead nowhere only the close examination of our lives as we experience it truly give us the answer. Certainly it is helpful to have spiritual guides, visible and invisible but ultimately it is a choice to give up our ego or not.

Only this sort of consciousness can be the true basis of a useful moral philosophy. From the great Mystery of Magic comes the laws we can live by. I think, clearly, that we are in need of a new sort of moral philosophy because the ground of that philosophy is largely missing by religions that have not been able to renew themselves but, rather, try to ignore the modern world and hope to simply not see why and how we got to the place where religion no longer makes great sense except as a kind of opiod to keep our lives from spinning out of control.

I see this in the anguish of people who have truly spiritual experiences and then try to contain them within a tradition that discourages those experiences as having, at their source, some sort of evil. It is important here to describe, in simple terms, what Evil and Good really are. Good as far as I can see are those goals, thoughts and activities that connect us—and it doesn’t matter what we are connecting to it is the act of connection, of reaching out to the world, to other people, to God, to magic, to parts of us we don’t know and haven’t integrated, and to everything. Evil is the opposite—it is those thought and activities that break connections and isolate us but also, even worse, trying to isolate and discourage other people through acts of destruction for the sake of destruction. This is a pretty sound basis for morality. That doesn’t mean loners are evil because loners are usually people who are rejected who want to connect with others. Doesn’t mean that socialites are good because they could be social in order to manipulate others or gain power.

Evil is actually quite rare. Most people who do evil things are confused, angry, suspicious, fearful and in the thrall of negative emotions and find themselves swept up by negative emotions. These emotions can reach epidemic proportions as we see in the dramatic growth of depression, anxiety increase in our society. This is why it is important to step back and look at our negative feelings. First we have to accept them and observe them in action. If I’m having a disagreement with someone and feeling agitated where is this coming from? Sometimes it is important to express it, sometimes it is important to say nothing—it depends on the situation.