Whose universe is it?

In the last week or so, a collision of two books has got me thinking about the nature of reality and how we relate to it. (Jack Barrow’s The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil, Jo van der Hoeven’s Zen Druidry, if you were wondering). For the magician, the self is the centre of the universe, and the will / imagination can direct said. I’m a long way from being an expert, but as I understand it, holding that belief is rather necessary if you want to go about doing magic. Now, on the Zen side, Jo points out there is one universe and we’re not the centre of it and if we can learn to see ourselves as part of the flow we’ll be able to get along a lot better.

I find both ideas compelling, and after some serious pondering I have come to the conclusion that these things are probably both true. One universe where you are not the centre, another where each of us the centre of his or her own universe and able to shape it by force of will. The life we live, the way we experience things, the choices we make – come down so often to our perceptions and beliefs. If I believe the universe is out to get me, I’ll see proof of that in every setback, and will resolutely ignore the opportunities that came with the setbacks, potentially to my own detriment. If I believe that I am divinely inspired with a special job to do, I’ll look around me and see proof of that in every rainbow and cupcake that comes my way. We see what we want to see.

What’s probably least helpful is bumbling through life without any deliberate choice about how to engage with the world. I don’t mean a ‘go with the flow’ attitude here, I mean a total lack of engagement with anything. The kind of blinkered view that makes it impossible to connect outcomes to actions, to predict how what we do today might shape our options for tomorrow, and to be able to see how other people’s motives might affect things. I’ve encountered that kind of wilful blindness, that refusal to see how what we do influences what we get, often coupled with an inability to imagine that other people are different from us, want different things and react in different ways.

I’m not sure it entirely matters what your relationship with the universe is. I am utterly convinced of the importance of having a considered approach to living and being. Even if that doesn’t fit into an existing idea about how to do things. But then, I’ve also seen so many human relationships conducted with no consciousness of cause and effect, or the implications of difference, too. Things work better when we pay attention to them, think about them, and do not take them for granted.

I am the centre of my own little universe. I am also aware that everyone around me is the centre of their own little universe too, no one of these any more important than any other, all of them able to influence how my bit of reality functions for me, all of them potentially influenced by what I do. Perhaps it could be a lot simpler than that, but I find this perspective works enough for me, so it’ll do for now.

Dancing down the knife edge

I’m not sure if this counts as magic, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week… It’s not exactly a case of going with the flow because that suggests submitting to where life seems to be taking you. I have found that when I’m going the right way, coincidence, serendipity, luck, call it what you will, helps me put things together in ways that take me forward. When I’m not going the right way, it’s like walking through mud and climbing over slidey walls on a regular basis.

I have yet to pin down a good working definition of ‘right way’. I know it doesn’t automatically correspond to my assumptions about what I should be doing. I don’t really believe in an external conductor of reality who wants me to do some things and not others. Which mostly leaves me feeling that I have no idea what this really is or how it works. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that it does exist, and does work because I’ve dealt with it so many times. If I am going the wrong way, its all uphill and grindy and miserable and nothing works right. If I go the right way, things fall into place.

Not that the ‘right way’ can be defined as somehow easy. Its often mad
and challenging, hence the title. My best description of what it feels like to be going the right way, is to be dancing down the blade of a very sharp knife. One slip and it’s going to hurt like hell. The right way is more like tightrope than a path, and often seems to depend on putting together things that really I have no right to assume will come together. I had a period of this around leaving my last home and moving to the boat, and I got everything I needed sorted in the necessary time frame, and I danced the knife blade all the way. Losing my nerve results in the fall and the inevitable cuts. I’m reasonably convinced now that blind faith that I *can* both find and dance down the knife blades of reality when required, is pretty much essential for actually doing it, which means if I’m overwhelmed with depression or anxiety, I’ve got no chance. I won’t dare the knife dance, but the not daring tends to bring more of the grind and the uphill struggle. Apparently my life does not come with an easy option, or if it did, I missed the turning a very long time ago. Dance the knife, or push boulders up mountains… both are exhausting, but the knife edge is wild and exhilarating, and gets me places I should not get to be.

Being a lot like dancing down the blade of a knife, the knife option is inherently scary, a lot of the time. I’m sort of reconciled to that. A bit. I’ve come to the conclusion at any rate that I am not going to spend my life pushing any more irrelevant boulders up mountains than is strictly necessary. if I’m going to have challenges, I’d rather they be wild and of my seeking, and maybe have some point to them and be able to achieve something. When I can get into it enough to really dance down the knife with everything I have, unafraid and totally able to believe I can dance the knife blade, I make stuff happen. Things come to me. Things fall into place. The book I need, lands. The right information or person finds me. It may be simply that when I believe I can do it, I become able to see all the disparate things that can be pulled together to make something. It might just be a perception issue. That doesn’t make it any less magical.

… laces on dancing shoes…

Madness and Creativity

This may not bear much resemblance to what I said at Asylum, because I was winging it, but following on from Tom’s Guest blog, some more thoughts about the curious relationship between the two.

The list of identifiably mad creative genius types, is shocking. Depression and mental instability are widespread in the creative community and always have been. However, there are also far more ill people who do not produce great works of art or literature. Being mad means not working, usually, while suicide has cut short too many lives. How different would the world be if Virginia Wolf, Sylvia Plath Thomas Chatterton and others had not taken their own lives? How much more could Poe or Tennyson have done if they’d not been fighting demons? Periods of madness tend to be periods of creative inactivity.  I don’t know if having poor mental health is more likely to attract you to artistic professions, or if the irregular hours and it being okay to not work when you can’t is a part of the correlation. Perhaps being creative runs the risk of driving you mad…

Mostly we measure madness as deviation from normality. You only have to go back a few hundred years and the people we would now medicate, were considered mystics. These days if you went into the desert and heard a voice instructing you to kill your son, you’d be taken into care, you wouldn’t be founding Judaism. It creates some interesting questions about the history of religion, too. Go into a supermarket in your Druid regalia, or your steampunk outfit and if you are the only one, people will look at you like you are crazy. Go in with twenty other folks who are also dressed up, and its instantly more socially acceptable. The impression of madness can be all about the numbers. This rather suggests that if enough of us take up the alternative, the crazy fringe stuff, we could make it normal. There are interesting and amusing implications to this.

To do anything creative, you have to think of things no one has ever thought of before. An excess of thinking things no one else thinks means dislocation from consensus reality. This alone would account for the close relationship between insanity and genius. It’s a bit of a balancing act and for some of us there is a choice. Plunging into the deep waters of awen in search of the salmon of wisdom, can be a deliberate action. Stay in there too long, and you drown. You can also chose not to plunge, to control the mind so that errant thoughts are quickly discarded. We construct our own realities and we have a lot of scope to choose and manage our own thoughts.

There’s a lovely Robert Holdstock term for people who stay too long in the magical forest: Bosky. I have been there. I write about madness. I voluntarily enter into situations that alter my state of consciousness (not drugs, brain chemistry). I am not afraid to think the wilder, more dangerous thoughts, and a great deal of my writing comes out of these journeys. However, I also know how to walk that tightrope, dancing down the edges without falling into dysfunction. I know how to stay real, when to step back from the computer and clean something, cook something, reassert regular reality.

I also know from experience that mental ill health is not creative. Depression and anxiety knock the inspiration out of me, leaving me in a dead and useless head space. Creativity actually takes a lot of discipline, a loss of mental balance does not give you that, wild flailings are seldom creative, which is why merely being a bit mad will not make you a creative genius. It may be true that some of our great creative minds took substances to help them, but taking substances will not turn you into Coleridge, or Hendrix. Vision without discipline isn’t enough.

Playing with that which seems like madness can be a very good thing. It is only by thinking of that which does not exist, has not happened, is not currently possible, that we get innovation, and that’s as true for science as for fiction. I think it’s the person who makes those journeys alone who is most vulnerable. Tell someone where you are going and when you expect to be back, have someone watch your back. Test the ideas on one you trust so you know if you’ve come back with poetry or bat shit crazy. A little more of the right kind of madness would make the world a much better place.

Breaking your reality

I’ve been through it twice, so far, at intervals of about a decade. On both occasions the breaking of my reality had everything to do with two separate individuals and the complex webs of lies they created. And on both occasions, I fought hard to keep my reality whole, because the alternative always appears so insane, unstable and dangerous. Until you escape. Both times, in the end, I went through the trauma of unpicking all the things I thought I knew, reassessing everything, falling apart, and being able to rebuild. The first time, I rebuilt on a foundation of broken trust, the second time I think I’ve come out with a more nuanced sense of things.

There are few things more frightening than finding that your reality doesn’t work. However, when you think about it, so much of the reality we inhabit depends on trust. It depends on things we have all agreed are true, exist and can be used as points of reference. Language, countries and economies are all part of our belief system. There’s a process at the moment not unlike saying ‘The Emperor has no clothes on’ in which we’re collectively reassessing the value of money markets, wealth made out of fantasy, and considering that the uber-rich might not be all that good for the rest of us. Bloodless revolutions can be dramatic and uncomfortable too.

I wonder what it was like for the devout Christians of the Victorian era, having to deal with Darwin, and the possibility that their book might not represent literal truth. There are still those who just won’t look at the evidence and who hold to the belief, and their relationship with the rest of reality gets ever more strained and problematic. There must have been plenty for whom Darwin brought deep, personal crisis. We’re asked to do a lot of trusting – of governments, scientists, lawyers, big businesses, media and medics these days more often than religious folk, but it is no less a belief position that keeps it all chipping along. We depend on the realities other people help to make, and sometimes those are very faulty indeed.

Most of the UK is in drought, my bit is being battered by torrential rain. We’ve had years of less predictable and more problematic weather already, but we’re still reluctant to think about climate change. For everyone whose notion of reality depends on car, reliable water supplies, all the electricity you can dream of and the freedom to consume more than you can afford, climate change is madness. Going there, recognising it, would require of our culture something not unlike a nervous breakdown. It’s going to hurt like hell.

I have leaned, in my personal life, that no matter how familiar and established a fictional reality is, when you are dealing with lies and illusions, it just doesn’t work. The effort required to bend and re-shape things into other things, so that your dysfunctional reality holds together, is vast. Every piece of evidence that doesn’t fit has to be reinvented. Experiences that contradict, must be forgotten, feelings that go against the reality, must be crushed. It may seem that we can make the reality stick, and that no other reality is possible, but it catches up with us in the end. Either we can’t sustain the work involved in holding a faith position about things that blatantly aren’t true, or we get so far removed from the rest of the world that we can’t function. Collectively, climate change will do one or the other to us, unless we deal with it. I’d like to think it’s possible to change by reasoned, deliberate choice rather than in crisis.

In personal life, the breaking of reality was an awful experience, but the far side of it is a much better place. Things make sense again. Sensory evidence can be trusted, emotions taken into account. A greater sense of inner peace becomes possible.

I’m wondering if ‘Jayne’ will feel tempted to comment on this post. If she does, it could be to ask if I’ve realised that I have been living a lie for the last couple of years. ‘Jayne’ has tried on several occasions to assert this already, but unless I’m very much mistaken, she needs to. ‘Jayne’ slipped up over the Easter weekend and made a comment that took me from suspicion about the familiarity of her phrasing, through to a reasonable degree of confidence that I know who she is.

Assuming I’m right in my guess then ‘Jayne’s ‘ hostility is necessary for her. Based on what I think I know, her situation requires her to hold the belief that I am a cruel, vindictive, heartless sort of person. It has been necessary for some time that she reads the very worst imaginable things into anything I do or say and must, therefore, cherry pick the bits that can be tweaked support her world view. So she comes to the blog of someone she dislikes for something, anything, that reinforces her perspective. I wonder what she has to carefully ignore to make her world work. I wonder what she has to pretend to like or accept, what she has to suppress within herself, in order to get from one day to the next with her reality intact. It’s no way to live. I know, I’ve been there. I try not to be too hard on her. She frustrates me, but I feel very sorry for her, and I also know that merely my saying that will poke the flimsy foundations of her world. If I am nice to her, I will hurt her. You can’t help someone whose reality doesn’t work, without causing them a lot of distress.

Sometimes the best we can hope for anyone, is that the fabulous prison-castle construction made of lies and straw shows its true nature so that it can be kicked to pieces. The walls are mostly just air. You are free to leave. It’s good when that happens.

Working with Truth

Any sane person, when faced with information that doesn’t fit their world view, or their understanding of something more specific, has to consider the idea that they’ve maybe got it wrong. The problem with this – and I speak from considerable personal experience here – is that if you are being persistently lied to, it’s not easy to work out where the balance of truth is. Truth is, to me, both very important and terribly elusive. It’s so often subjective, we see the bit of it in front of us and not the wider picture, we see it through the bias of our own experiences, and through the filters of our own needs and assumptions. What is true in one place and time may not hold up in another. I’ve recently read Graeme K Talboys’ The Druid Way – which discusses the importance of Truth in a Celtic worldview. Truth, in this sense is about inherent rightness which exists in relationship, less about the subjectivity inherent in surfaces, more about looking for deeper themes and currents. I care, passionately, about being honest and living honourably. Truth, in all its complexity has to be a part of that. Having a workable world view is necessary. Having a world view that fits with the available information is vital if you want to do anything at all. You can’t act honourably when you are standing on a pile of lies. Even if the lies aren’t yours. Good choices depend on good information – on truth. Being able to trust your own judgement is essential also, because without that it’s very difficult to navigate anything. Again I speak from experience here. Judgement is based on the quality of our own perceptions, our ability to asses those perceptions and deduct information from them in relevant ways, and our ability to predict based on those deductions. Most of us do this, most of the time in a fairly unconscious way. At any point, mistakes lead to confusion. The more precise our perceptions are, the closer we come to truth and the more scope there is for honour. The more aware we are of our own failings and biases, the better we handle the deduction stage, and the more experience we have, the more scope we have to predict outcomes based on what we think we know. There are so many places this can go wrong. Insert one false piece of information into the process, and it’s doomed from the outset. It’s a precarious sort of balancing act, comparing what I think I know with anything I now learn. Is the old information right? Have I misjudged? Am I being misled? Without the confidence that we can trust external sources as being truthful, truth itself becomes ever more elusive. It is necessary both to be able to learn and embrace new perspectives, and also to know when to hold firm. How? I can suggest reasoned arguments based on assessing available information, going beyond it to look for supporting evidence from less contentious sources, getting a second opinion and so forth. There isn’t always time. How do I tell between the truth I want to hear and the one that really exists? How do I tell between the truth that is mine, and the lie someone else wants me to swallow? How do any of us? Our entire legal system depends on these questions, and so many of our day to day interactions as well. Are there inherent qualities in truth that help announce its presence? I’ve mulled that old idea that truth is beauty (Keats?) and I’m still mulling. I want truth to be beauty. I want it to have grace and elegance. Perhaps the best measure of ‘truth’ and its value, is the direction it takes us in. A truth that challenges is different from a claimed truth that mostly just destroys something. A truth that explains is different from one that justifies. The devil is in the detail, as always. I’m looking forward to hearing what everyone else thinks on this one.

Druidry and Tentacles

I’ve dabbled a bit in things Lovecraftian in my author-life. One of the things that strikes me about H.P. Lovecraft is the belief that underpins his fictional reality. There are ancient, nameless, all powerful things in the universe, they will drive us mad, and destroy us. His writing is laden with fear. This is about as far as you can get from the New Age perspective that the universe loves us, is full of light and good intentions.

There are a lot of different ideas out there about how reality works. Some of them postulate kind and giving gods, others wrathful, jealous ones. Some perceive reality as something we carefully chose before we were born, our souls planning it all in detail for us to achieve some personal goal. For some, there is no meaning, no reason, no ultimate source of good or evil, there is just life and energy for as long as it lasts.

How you understand yourself and your life will depend to a degree on how you think about these bigger issues.  Do we think that ultimately there is fairness and justice, or do we think that the gods have it in for us? Do we see love and light when we look out of the window, or do we see the inevitability of death, madness and tentacles? A Lovecraftian view of the world is rooted in despair, and a sense that all is futile. Worse than meaningless. A world that is merely meaningless and indifferent will let us get on with things as we see fit, whereas a world where the great powers are malevolent and hungry, will destroy us.

There’s no firm line for Druidry when it comes to ideas about the essence of reality. We’re a disparate lot. I’ve encountered ‘love and light’ Druidry (OBOD favours that) and existentialist Druidry – no external meaning but that which we make for ourselves. Existentialist Druidry pushes us to take responsibility for our actions and meaning, and works well. I’ll admit that’s how I tend to look at things, and I found a lot of that outlook in The Druid Network during my time there. No doubt there are plenty of other takes.

Are there Lovecraftian Druids? I’ve not met any, but anything is possible. How differently would we live if we thought it was like that? What would you do, if you believed, or for that matter knew, that reality is basically hostile and evil. Would you give up? Or would you fight harder? Despair is not the only available response to hopelessness. Just because something is impossible, doomed and futile, doesn’t mean we have to go with that. For a start, it’s a way of thinking that puts all the emphasis on ends, not on means. If the universe is evil and hostile, those small moments of compassion and humanity are not any less real. The love we share and experience isn’t any less real. Even if I believed we were all ultimately doomed, I would not value these things any less – probably the opposite.