HISTORY, SCIENCE, AND MAGIC
JUNE 21, 2011. You can take any object, event, or structure and look at it as the end result of a cause-and-effect relationship, or you can see it as a spontaneous creation in this very moment.
The first way is a pattern that gives rise to societies.
This first approach also becomes an investigation that has no end or conclusion. Of course, that fact has never stopped anyone.
Cause and effect investigations (history, science) satisfy the user that some sort of progression exists, an emerging exists, a fruitful tree of knowledge exists—and why not? It’s a style, a fashion, a long-running point of view. It has payoffs, once you assume you are in a continuum of great value. In a real sense, historians and scientists are actors. They know how to improvise inside a continuum and dredge up new discoveries. That’s the style of an historian, a scientist. And if such a person goes through a number of struggles and false starts to arrive at a gem of understanding, that, too, is part of the role. It works. To say Einstein was an improviser would be taken as an affront by most physicists, but so be it.
To see an object, structure, or event as a spontaneous creation of this very moment, however, is something else again. This perception has vastly different “production values.” For example, the pen sitting on your desk ceases to be a solid that is born out of the causative action of tiny particles in motion. Instead, it is a vivid and instantaneous presence which has no reference to time.
It could just as easily not exist as exist. Right now.
There is a flexibility about it, in that sense.
The hard line between either and or, between yes and no, disintegrates.
There is something wavering about it. And that something has to do with you, not the object. A clue is being passed to you.
YOU COULD CREATE THIS THING.
You could do this spontaneously, instantly. You could also make the pen on the table vanish.
What seems like a beautifully elastic holiday, during those seconds or minutes or hours when you are in the present moment, when nothing else matters, has another layer. An upper edge.
Which is:
You could create that space and time. You could create. You could imagine something else entirely. You could improvise, on the spot, other spaces and times. You could see through the stage flats of present continuum-reality into a silence.
This is one of the things I mean when I say the road of magic is the road of art.
FUTURE is an infinity of infinite possibilities. Or to look at it from another angle, imagination is the imagining of imagination.
No limits.
Every significant myth propagated by humans has a submerged dimension, and its translation opens up future, imagination, and the creation of realities beyond this continuum. For instance, each sign of the Zodiac—which itself is a time wheel—finally reveals a preoccupation with altering the ordinary sense of time. Aries stands in a vessel whose prow is out ahead of cause-and-effect, Taurus launches a frontal campaign against the tightly held assumptions about continuum, etc. So in a more profound sense, the Zodiac is not about what will happen to you; it is about what you will do with time.
From this perspective, the religious adoration laid at the feet of the universe is nothing more than a distraction from making magic.
The alchemists had an inkling about all of this. They wobbled on the edge of realizing that Quintessence, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir, was imagination.
And although modern science departed from this path, there is another kind of possible science that flows from what I’m illustrating. It is a vastly powerful subjective approach, whereby machines and devices and technologies are invented that operate FOR THE INVENTOR and for the inventor alone.
He is no longer trying to unearth what is possible within the constraints of the so-called objective continuum. He is building vehicles for himself. Success in this endeavor has implications beyond his personal use…but the inventor and his universe certainly expand beyond their former conception with each breakthrough.
One message from this: the universe we all pay lip service to, the jointly adored corporation, can transfigure and thereafter function as a service provider to the scientist of imagination. It can feed into his personal theater. It can eagerly do so, as if it has waiting for such a moment to show its deeper aspect.
Was Tesla working along this line? Regardless, his myth, like all myths, suggests such a welcome prospect.
If we had 100,000 truly subjective scientists on this planet, brilliant and tireless improvisers, we would see changes in the continuum that would be as stimulating as watching fish walk out of the sea. The energies liberated in the process would consign the precious Law of Conservation to a shelf in a small-town museum of curios.
“Stop messing around with that! You’re the only one who think it’s real!”
“Beautiful. That’s exactly what I’m aiming for. But to the extreme. And by the way, when I get extreme enough, you’ll experience quite a surprise.”
“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”
William Blake
Rather than accepting the proposition that the observer changes what he’s observing—a passive formulation—opt for this: the inventor changes what he invents. He spontaneously accommodates it to himself. In this radical sort of science, a different theme is expressed.
Actually, it turns out that the subjective and objective categories of experience contain shades of meaning. A scientist can range back and forth between them, discovering and inventing, inventing and discovering, taking apart physical reality, imparting something new to physical reality, back and forth, without thinking about it. This is what the alchemists were exploring. To say they made a few contributions to the emerging “real” science is to miss the point.
In the end, it’s all imagination.
JON RAPPOPORT