I’ve got a friend who has a PhD in brain science (in fact she’s an MD too so all those ‘Doctor, Doctor…’ jokes are perfect). Her work involves scanning people’s brains to help us understand how memory functions. She once told me that she and her colleagues spent an entertaining few weeks replacing the word ‘mind’ with ‘brain’ in their daily speech. ‘Brain the gap’  is therefore the message one hears on alighting from a London underground train. ‘I just can’t get it out of my brain’  for that irritating/catchy tune such as this, or this, or this. ‘Brain out!’  as an injunction to increase attention, or ‘brain over matter’ when discussing the paranormal.

Within esoteric and psychological sciences there is a group of similar practices. There is E-Prime, which removes the verb ‘to be’ to create a language that emphasizes process rather than (apparently) static states. Then there is Crowley’s injunction to remove the word ‘I’, which he recommends (along with a bit of emo style self-harm) to his students during his sojourn at The Abbey of Thelema. And of course a whole battery of techniques from NLP.

All these processes make us more vigilant and can have far reaching effects on our world-views.

So, with this in mind (or brain), I’d propose a little chaoist variation. Take one of your beliefs and find a way of modifying your language to suggest that your normal assumptions about it may not be the case. The example I’m particularly thinking of would be when we say that we’ve met such-and-such and entity in spirit work. Or when we’ve invoked a God or Goddess, or been travelling in spirit vision. In all these cases ‘in my brain’ may be added.

For instance:

“I met the jaguar spirit and it spoke to me – in my brain’.

‘The Goddess was invoked into the High Priestess and I could really see the energy – in my brain’.

‘The Loa are really powerful – in my brain’.

‘I’ve spent many years working with a series of awesome demons – in my brain’.

Of course one might argue that such statements are just the natural return and re-valuing of the spirit model into our culture. I’d agree with that and say that its certainly sometimes important to think in this way:

Jung had a very disturbed patient who claimed to have been on the moon. Not that she thought this to be a conscious reality, although it was a dream in which she traveled to the moon. Jung reported years later to analyst Marie Louis von Franz, that his patient had indeed been on the moon. In a well known interview with this remarkable first generation analyst, von Franz commented that when Jung told her that his patient had really been on the moon, she thought that Jung was crazy. She was very rational and thought that for Jung to say that the girl had “really” been on the moon was not reasonable. And indeed, normal rationality fails in these cases.  from here

In a world which one might argue is dominated by reductionist discourses the spirit model serves to re-empower our subjective imagination. But the point for me is that we don’t need to through the materialist baby out with the bathwater. Instead we should attempt to include the spirit world in our material world. Rather than replacing one language with another we should be seeking to broaden our vocabulary. We acknowledge the metaphorical truth of the world both internal (subjective experience) and external (our sense data, including that collected by scientific investigation).

So the miraculous fact that our minds can interact with spirit entities may be described in terms of invisible imaginative worlds and also as brain events. We know this to be true because we’ve got a range of chemicals and even magnetic helmets that can induce the experience of meeting entities. Hardly remarkable since our senses give us the impression of meeting conscious entities (people) every day. So saying the ‘astral’ (which in a proper Santo Daime style should be pronounced ‘ass-traal’ ) is in our brains is nothing more than a statement of fact. Everything is in our brains and, while in a metaphysical sense we could talk about the non-local nature of consciousness and all that, a brain would seem to be an important part of the equipment. People who think otherwise could perhaps demonstrate the strength of their conviction in non brain mediated consciousness by removing theirs (with one of those nose pickers the ancient Egyptians used on the dead perhaps?) and then attempting to go down the shops to buy ten fags.

The use of  ‘in my brain’ also serves to remind us of the uncertainty of our perceptions and the fact of their partiality. I may have seen something nasty in the triangle but I saw it from a specific perspective, at a specific time and so on. Maybe such a practice would put the breaks on all those folk who spend their time conjuring spirits from the vasty deep and then banging on about their visions. Of course were I being handsomely paid like Jung I’d be happy to listen to it all, but since I’m not I often feel these stories demonstrate that speaker has become locked into one ‘reality tunnel’ (as Leary would say).

Entering a relationship with a spirit can be a powerful magic. But to be a magician is to be able to see that relationship in many ways, including as brain event. Seeing things as neurological processes does not have to be dis-empowering. Seeing clinical depression as having a neuro-transmitter component is factually accurate. It can provide us with medicines to help people and is emphatically not identical with ignoring the environment in which the depressed person is living. Understanding the brain mechanics of mental illness isn’t about  forgetting social, cultural, dietary and other factors in its etiology.

If we are to re-enchant the world then we must include all our understanding of it and not take refuge in what is can be an ego-centric subjective imaginal world. We should open ourselves out to many languages and many perspectives. Sometimes we should speak of the spirit of the mushroom, at other times of it’s chemistry, of it’s cultural history and it’s mythic meaning. And whichever language we use could always aim to contain a destabilizing element within our descriptions. Something that serves to open us up to other interpretations and remind us of the limits of what we think we know – in our brains.

JV

As magicians we should aim for at least one ecstatic moment each day. This of course doesn’t mean that a day without some full-on practice is day wasted. For Austin Spare, Peace be Upon Him, those occultists who limit their magic to symbolic acts within ceremony as missing out. “Their practices prove their incapacity, they have no magic to intensify the normal, the joy of a child or healthy person, none to evoke their pleasure or wisdom from themselves.”

So today I was walking across the 13th century bridge than spans the river where I live. It was early morning and the rose-pink sky was being echoed in the silvery water of the river at high tide. The water seemed thicker, an effect that seemed to be caused by the low temperature. Like quicksilver the river ran slow, spinning in vortices as it passed beneath the arches of the bridge. Birds were starting their day and slipping silent through the clear air. Smoke crawled from a few chimneys and  early morning cars prowled the streets.

I am located  in this landscape. I know its history and its people. I have my own memories, joyful and painful, located in this place. My breath is easy and I find myself stopping for a moment by the quay and looking out towards the old shipyard and beyond to where my river curves round to meet her sister (the river Taw) as together they unite with the sea.

I am, for a moment, transported into that hyper-reality which always, on reflection, makes me think I’ve stepped into a frame from a graphic novel. There is a razor sharpness to my senses and I am both observer and at one with the world I inhabit. I feel profoundly grateful that I am able to experience this moment.

Just before I go into the gallery where I’m working I notice how the grass beneath my feet bends. I’ve deliberately walked off the path in order to enjoy this sensation.

Yes all our ceremonial work, our yoga and study matters – but only if it increases our capacity to enjoy the normal that bit more.

Morning river

JV