CONJURING THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWN

Hello readers. I seem to be going through a little bout of graphomania at the moment. Perhaps it is the rising energy of spring. What ever the reason, if you are kind enough to read this I thank you as always for your attention which I consider a gift of great value. This one is a little on the “psychedelic” side. Thank you for taking this trip with me.

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In my essay entitled The Witch’s Ladder, I mentioned a teaching of Socrates, the teaching about “sophrosne” or SOUND MINDEDNESS. There are three “knowns”. There are things that we know that we know. Things we know that we do not know, and things that we do not know that we do not know. The third kind of knowing is of great importance since it is, by definition, both the one we have least (deliberate) influence over and the place where the most powerful undoing is likely to arise from.

I have attempted to draw a connection between this most difficult aspect of knowing and the force of will. Humans have the WILL to KNOW. This WILL defines us. We among all creatures imagine a situation different from the one in which we find ourselves and deliberately bring it about (Will). The faculty by which we exercise our will upon the world is knowing. But we do not KNOW from whence this will arises. This is the first thing that we know (or should) that we do not know.

But knowledge is a trickster. We gather facts and information about what we would like to influence. But this information is the accretion of what WE have thought about what we sought to know. It did not include, and could not, include what the OTHER, the one we were thinking ABOUT, was thinking about US as we thought about THEM.

This is the second thing we should know that we do not, CAN NOT know. The world around us THINKS something about US. Thinks it KNOWS something about US. Something we cannot know they think they know. It is from what they think they know that they will interact with us. This puts us at a significant disadvantage that we would be foolish to ignore.

So there is unknowing (ignorance) at the root of our desire to know and at the extremity of what might grow from this root, the limit of what can be known, the OTHER. This is where we come to conjouration.

Conjure is an old word meaning “swearing together”. It is a pact we make with another, specifically, another in the “spirit world”. We exchange something and the spell is cast. This might seem a bit removed from the way in which most people experience reality but in truth it is the way humans always do. The situation we wish to bring about, the one that does not yet exist, resides in the world of mere potential. We cannot visit this world to know what will come of that potential once it is actualized. We must conjure the potential into actuality to meet it. Once actualized, we cannot send it back.

Reaching out to bring about a future is reaching out to another, another time, place, configuration of circumstances. We seek to embody a “spirit”. All things are animated by such spirits – the spirit of an age “zeitgeist”, of a place, even a team or a school or the “culture” of a corporation. Spirit is in all things. All animists know this. Spirits seek bodies. When we fall in love it is this spirit, this unknown behind the beloved that both deepens and confounds our knowledge. Make a list of all the things you know you love (or hate) about anyone or anything. This list will not exhaust the depth of who they are. Ask yourself what it is in you that the mystery of the other calls forth. You will no doubt be similarly confounded and provoked. Like two mirrors trying to capture one another, an infinite tunnel of reflections connects us to who and what we wish to know. What WILL rests at the end of this ever receding passage.

Here I am reminded of a poem by the 20^th century meditation teacher Shri Chinmoy entitled MY FLUTE:

Barren of events

Rich in pretentions

My earthly life.

Obscurity my

My real name.

Wholly to myself

I exist.

I wrap no soul

In my embrace.

No mentor

Worthy of my caliber

Have I.

I am all alone

Between failure

And frustration.

I am the red thread

Between

Nothingness

And eternity.

A flute, when no wind blows through it, like the infinite regress of mirrored mirrors is nothing. But from this nothing, all music and discourse arises. Will is the spirit that passes through this passage. Knowledge arises like a song but reveals nothing of its source or where it will find purchase.

This is not about hopelessness, futility or nihilism. I am not a post-modernist, I BELIEVE in truth, but only in the way one might believe in God or the beloved. I “know” them and am known by them, not as a set of established propositions, but as the music that arises from breath, the song of the singing throat where the sound says more than the libretto.

Oh conjuration of nothing by no one that births to and through each other. What am I trying to say here?

You know nothing, nor do I. We battle over truth to no avail. We simply cannot help it. But if casting doubt upon the possibility of ultimate knowledge makes us pause before we conjure. If knowing that we do not know what we do not know allows us to stare into the empty corridor which is both formed and filled by the movement of will. This is probably a good thing.

The material world is a restraining place. There is, by Jove, “a time to every purpose”, but not always this time. I am speaking elliptically about the need for a measure of humility. A recognition that we only “half create”. As Wordsworth sang:

—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

When I first read, and was moved by these words at 19 years of age I could not know how powerfully they would resonate with me now at nearly 60. The idea that the eye and ear, the organs that bring us tidings from the world, and the mind of man merely “half create” reality. Who creates the other half? What “nurse or guide or guardian” calls to us, impels our will to know them.

I object to Crowley’s idea of magik as “The art and science of creating change according to will”. This is the type of thinking that a colonialist or mere materialist would entertain. In a living world there is always an “other” with whom we collaborate or clash. Someone else who’s position matters. Magik, to me is knowing this and knowing that, like any “other” to know them, and to be known, is an ongoing process. If animistic magik means anything it means regard for this other, their knowledge and their will. If for no other reason than simply self-preservation. A man that goes after a tree with a chain saw with will but insufficient knowledge will likely meet a bad fate. Know the will that wills to know. To do this requires the space that comes from that third part of sophrosne, knowing that there are things we do not know that we do not know. This isn’t about a weak humility in the face of creation (although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing). It is about understanding that in order to do powerful, effective magik that is as free as possible from producing unanticipated and potentially devastating results, the practitioner best understand that the Wand points at SOMEONE. The wand is a tool by which the magician projects their will toward the other. But it would be wrong to suppose that the other moves under the influence of this projected will the way a billiard ball responds to a que. To project the Will toward another is to arose and provoke THEIR will which we might find projected back at us. What we seek to move moves us to seek it. This is something we need to know.

As I approach my conclusion here I realize that I have been trying to write this essay for a long time now. I have approached it from different angles and have a number of unfinished versions of it under different names resting in my hard drive. It is difficult to speak in a linear fashion about something as mobius as the relationship between knowledge and will. There are many implications that I am tempted to get into that only take me afield of where I want to go. I’m not sure why it is so difficult to say …

We are never alone. For what its worth, I will tell a little story. Each year in the autumn I hold a “séance” to call forth someone I met only once in early childhood. For reasons - this person has made themselves known to me as a “spirit guide”. She taught me something about discarnate beings, ghosts, Gods, land spirits, basically anyone without a body. They cannot see inside our minds. This might be difficult for people raised with the idea that God knows everything about us but this is what I was told. The Gods have been around for a long time, have seen the ways of people for a long time and, like a boardwalk fortune teller, can guess what we are thinking by the look upon our faces. They can GUESS, but this is not the same thing as KNOWING. They can trick us into revealing what they suspect just like anyone who knows us. But it is always our choice to reveal what we think.

What this bit of unverified personal gnosis tells me is that we are in the same position with regard to everything and everyone we know. We might GUESS that we know things about them. We can make gestures toward them, charming or even threatening, and perhaps they may reveal to us something of their interior life. But even this will not be all there is to know about them, not even all that they can, or will ever know about themselves. Like us, their Will to know arises from a blind spot, like the point in the middle of the retina where the optic nerve enters, we fill that spot with inference. And when we look into another’s eyes they look at us through their own blind spot, complete us with their inference and reflect it back to us. And this dance of mirrors is all there is to knowing, a moving tunnel of reflections that generates itself. This is what I came to say. Yet surely there is more.