Whats Your Story
In my last entry (Free Lunch) I talked about the topic of “free energy”. As expected, I have received at least one response attempting to convince me of the viability thereof. This sort of response is what I always fear whenever I write about “controversial topics”. Subjects like free energy, lost civilizations, ancient aliens, whether crystals “really” emit energies that are responsible for their alleged healing virtues, climate change, artificial intelligence, etc. elicit stronger reactions than subjects like divination, mythology or theories of magik. We generally feel safer taking a “let people believe what they want to believe” attitude about matters that seem more subjective. When we talk about the meaning of a dream, for example, it is hard to argue against someone’s own interpretation of something that happened inside of their head. But when it comes to things that other people can experience, like the glass of water I let sit out under the Full Moon and what we believe about such things, people tend to feel more need to “advocate” one or another version of their “real” nature. Objective reality is more contentious than subjective because while the former is ultimately private, the latter is always public. No one can claim that you didn’t dream what you said you did, they can, however, contend that the carnelian in your pocket “caused” (or did not), you to be brave in a frightening situation.
Consensus reality has suffered a massive loss of credibility in the last half century. While there might not seem to be much of a Venn diagram between readers of post modern social theory and people who “question the mainstream narrative” about things like vaccines or climate change, but what both of these groups share is a belief in the power of narrative.
Ramsey Dukes, one of my principle intellectual guides in matters of magik suggests that when we hear what sounds like a suspect claim, instead of asking whether the claim is true, we should ask what the claimant hoped to achieve by making it. I think this is a good idea. But I also think that this is what most of us ALREADY DO. Most of us, upon hearing something that seems farfetched or even outright BS, make this judgement based on things we already know (or believe). This is largely unavoidable. Knowledge is not constituted by a series of unrelated facts; it is a complex of nested bits of information. For example, a person who witnesses a Sunrise will interpret what they see differently if they believe the world is a globe than one who believes that it is a disk. Their belief about the shape of the Earth will, in turn, be the result of who they consider a credible authority and what they think constitutes evidence. So when people disagree about a “fact” it is often the case that what they REALLY disagree on is a narrative.
Contrary to what nearly everyone seems to believe, the narratives by which we evaluate truth claims has little to do with intelligence or moral character. This is not to say that all narratives are of equal value, either factually or morally. But I am usually more interested in what claims say about the person who makes them than what the claims themselves refer to.
I am usually suspicious of any form of “fundamentalism”. To insist that the only reason that someone might believe “X” is either that they are stupid, or evil is generally a red flag for me. Nor am I particularly interested in proving the validity of my own narrative. Taking the topic of “free energy” as an example, I stated and will state again that I am pretty convinced that the laws of thermodynamics present a more or less accurate picture of material reality. But the essay entitled “Free Lunch” wasn’t about the validity of claims about free energy in particular or thermodynamics in general. This is not a blog about science, mainstream, fringe or otherwise, it is a blog about magik.
If you are new to this blog or have been reading for a while but have missed this point, I believe that ALL magik begins and ends in narrative. It isn’t like science or technology in which sufficient knowledge about, and the application of the right kind of force in the right manner, yields predictable and repeatable results. As I have said elsewhere, the material world is utterly without meaning or direction. This doesn’t mean that there is no way the material world actually IS (in fact there is ONLY this), what is lacking in the material world is a way that it SHOULD BE. There is, however, a way, or many ways, that things CAN BE. Which of these ways it comes to be will be the result of a conversation between all the beings that inhabit this material world at any given moment. This includes all living and not living entities and the spirits which RIDE them through the world. The stories we tell, to ourselves, to one another and consciously or otherwise, to gods, ancestors, land spirits, elementals. This conversation can consist of riddles, arguments, oaths, curses, words of love, threats, lies and anything else it is possible for beings to communicate between themselves. If the overall direction of the conversation is that of peace and reconciliation, this is the way the material world will be, if they are of slander and recrimination, this is how it will be. Stories determine how we live and die and even why. They will not determine IF we will. Mortality and limitation are of Saturn who stands at the gates of material reality.
When I said that I do not believe in free energy, I was not making a statement about the nature of material reality or what is possible. Ultimately it is the FREE part of free energy (or a free lunch) that I do not believe in. The material world is transactional by nature. You can not get something for nothing. Although this law is expressed in concepts like the law of entropy, which is material, the law itself is SPIRITUAL. It descends from the spirit of Saturn.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me whether free energy is possible, whether Atlantis is a myth or a real place, whether aliens built the pyramids. What matters to me is why one might insist on the truth or falsehood of such claims. Whatever is possible here in the material world, I want to tell a story in which we can live together in peace, love and understanding. For me this means having to share the world with and have humane regard for people whose stories differ widely from your own. Everyone (including me) has their limit in this regard – a story they cannot abide – this too is of Saturn. But we should at least give some thought to where these limits are, to who and what they serve and if there is a way we can reach across them and why we might not want to.