the oldest of schools

you can find a spark of hope in this world by seeing that things around you are not as fixed as they seem. in a way, the appearance of rigidity and fixed-ness is revealing. the fact that it is so easy to manipulate financial markets, a big, large, thing that has been around for a few hundred years and that impacts billions of people; that it can be shifted with a tweet, a press release, a leaked email. the network of experience has a fragile quality that has to be shored up and maintained with care. but it’s heavy.

it is not meaningless, empty observation to see how thoroughly enchanted our world is. it’s real, it’s active, it’s reading.

to focus your vision through the thin veil woo-woo types like to talk about is risky business. those of us not practiced in this style of sight are trained to think we have both feet firmly planted in the cold, grey, rational, concrete world of reality. taking a step towards something else, doing that is heavy work too. our loyalty to the rational world hinges on a shared understanding of what it means to be sane. the irony is the whole thing is unstable anyway, hello! that’s why it needs to be propped up!

there’s a description of reading in How to Read a Book (Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren) that describes in very practical terms, a method of observation that i am learning as necessary for this kind of sight: “... we can say that reading and listening are the same art—the art of being taught. When, however, the learner proceeds without the help of any sort of teacher, the operations of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than on discourse.”

in the book they are specifically discussing the difference between learning from a teacher and learning from the world. of note, they describe ‘nature’ as synonymous with ‘the world’. there is a whole thesis resting on that ‘or’.

it took me a while to understand this: the opposite of ‘either / or’ thinking is not in the ‘either / or’ itself, but it is allowing a mental and emotional suspension from deciding that these are the only options. it’s wondering or asking about what is presenting itself, in the world, right now. how, whatever it is that you are look at, is made and it’s made-stuff. in between, in the slash, is questioning the malleable nature of our experience and being open to finding out about it. this, i think, is practicing the art of being taught. and yes we have our biases and assumptions but even then it’s being taught about those too.

practiced over time, exploring might take on the form of ‘magical consciousness’ described by Grant Morrison in an essay called Pop Magic!

“Magical consciousness is a particular way of seeing and interacting with the real world... a percep­tual shift which gives real world transactions the numi­nous, uncanny feeling of dreams. Magical conscious­ness is a way of experiencing and participating with the local environment in a heightened, significant manner, similar to the effects of some drug trips... [this] can be practiced until it merges with and becomes everyday consciousness.”

and that sounds like a nice idea. the theory i’m testing out is that this state of practiced consciousness has a practical bent to it. the active effort to block this level of awareness is the heaviness. for many of us it’s just easier to accept the stuff at face value, even if we know better. my specific interest in magic at work is because the imaginary world of the office or work place is where we spend the most of our time overworking at creating the cold, grey, concrete realities.

too few spiritual types address the fact that magical consciousness, maintaining the art of being taught, can be traced back to Indigenous ways of knowing. i wonder if this is why pop spirituality (no shade to the title of Grant’s essay above) really exists; to steal and repackage Indigenous knowledge to simulate ‘numinous, uncanny feelings of being in a dream’.

seeing magic in our day to day world is practicing the art of being taught. this art is one that ancestors, our line ancestors and land ancestors, knew very well. pop spirituality works on the level of our mundane world to actually block this way of knowing, because we can’t be in touch with our ancestors, through their wisdom, without also being aware of what happened to them. if we’re aware of what happened to them, we then have to be aware of what has happened and is happening to us.

Photo by Kevin Bonilla on Unsplash.

next post will be about imagination!