Life and Awareness
There is often a desire to draw analogies between the “magical” and the “scientific” ways of describing the world.
It has even become respectable to speak of a “universal” description and to reduce Magic to leptonic flows, electromagnetic fields, and the like.
Risking sounding like a reactionary, I will nevertheless repeat that, from the traditional point of view, there are currently no prospects for a synthesis of worldviews and none are in sight. Scientific and magical, technocentric and anthropocentric descriptions of the world have long since diverged, and many words in these systems already mean different things.
A simple example is the attitude toward the very phenomenon of Life.
“Everything around us is alive,” say the Magi. “Nature is divided into living and non-living,” insist those inclined toward the natural sciences. Each thinks of the other: “fools, they don’t understand obvious things.”
The problem, however, is simply what counts as life.
Science calls a system alive if it is capable of growth, reproduction, and self-regulation. And it is perfectly clear that, say, a stone does not possess these properties and therefore, of course, is not alive.
Magic sees a system as alive if it is capable of awareness, understood in the broadest sense. Imprecise understanding causes misunderstanding of the phenomenon of awareness. Usually, “awareness” is taken to mean active waking self-awareness. But then it seems that Magi should not consider a deeply sleeping person alive. Yet awareness is assigned many degrees of gradation — from the residual awareness of minerals, through the vast consciousness of the gods, and finally the Mind of the Absolute. It is precisely the superconsciousness of the Absolute, passing into its opposite — the deep subconsciousness of the immanent environment — that forms the stream known as the Flow of Life.
Such misunderstandings occur everywhere, yet even from the example given it is apparent how fraught with error is the careless mixing of concepts from different worldviews.
The magical Myth calls awareness the elements reflecting in one another of some elements in others. Since all being is one; everything contains all, and discovering everything within everything is recognized as the basis of life. In other words, the Myth holds that we are aware beings. This means that the purpose of life is awareness, born of our interaction with ourselves or with that which we consider the object of awareness. And if we can become aware of something new, expand and deepen our awareness, but do not do so — we fail our most basic function. We are troubled if we lose the ability to walk, or to see, or to hear, and at the root of that trouble lies the sense of a narrowing of our awareness. Yet when we narrow our own awareness — for some reason we are less disturbed by that, and this is self-deception and obscuration. Just as one who can walk should walk, one who can see ought to see, so one who can be aware ought to be aware.
Reflection is a tool for self-knowledge, a tool of a system’s self-knowledge — from the individual up to the Absolute’s supreme self-awareness. By knowing its parts, reflecting within them, the One reality realizes its potentials, since the result of such reflection is the revelation, the actualization of the system’s particular potentials. To be aware is to discover something new, to discover in oneself something new by studying one’s interaction with that which at the moment is the object of awareness. The detecting object qualities within the subject expand the subject’s self-conception of itself, and in a sense, reveal the unity of subject and object; and as the mind grows more synthetic, unity steadily expands, ultimately realizing universal unity.
It is in precisely this way that the myth describes the meaning of the world process — elements reflecting in each other and their mutual realization, which leads to greater realization of reality’s potentials.
In principle, I don’t think the difference between science and magic in the broadest sense is actually that significant. In the future, it seems to me that a synthesis of science and magic is possible.
Well, only in a very distant future 🙂
It seems that both the magical and scientific worldviews have one goal – to provide an accurate map of the world. The problem is how quickly true knowledge spreads and how rapidly maps of the world lead into dead ends. And here one can throw stones both at pseudoscience and at vulgar magic.
There is Einstein’s riddle, and then there is Enmerkar’s riddle: it’s clear that the world is eternally alive, but what is the consciousness of a stone?
Ah! Steiner: “The stone has a form; the animal also has a form. The stone rests in its place. The animal can move from place to place. Attraction (desire) compels the animal to change its location. These attractions serve the very form of the animal. Its organs, its tools are developed according to these attractions. The form of the stone is not composed according to desires, but by a will free from desires.”
Which element do you relate yourself to, if at all? I, for one, am always – earth. And I love any stone. ))) And, you know, they love me too. ) What more can be awareness? )))
I decided that breaking my head in vain is pointless, so I went and listened to the stone.
And I have long been fond of stones. And there’s a ‘habit’ – to collect stones. Recently, one from the past, and another from this summer appeared to me – unusual ones. Both from extraordinary places. One from Crimea, from Cape Aya – called Jopin Eye, and the other from the foothills of Mount Vitosha, lying under a hundred-year-old eucalyptus – Heart of Boyana.
I went, looked, touched. And you know what they tell me? – Why, dear, what have you done! Why did you take us? You didn’t ask, didn’t think.
One says: I miss the sea, the waves, the others like me.
And the one shaped like a heart – suddenly I remembered that there was another nearly the same heart lying nearby.
I pondered on my habit. I felt like returning my stones to their place.
What was that?
This is life
Very interesting. I don’t know you, of course, but for example, I know myself, and that no one is born with complete knowledge. Because of your comment, I looked at all my important stones and discovered that they were given to me by an Indian at the market, a child on the road, they were brought simultaneously from different mountains, and two friends. And there was another way of obtaining, I usually bring some stones or gifts, nuts for example, to the place myself. And one of the stones appeared after such an event. No one gave it to me. I just learned if there was something for me, and it somehow turned up after some clearly strange phenomena.
For me, Maria, the question isn’t about the method of obtaining. Sometimes, when something is given to me, or offered, I don’t always take it. The question is – why? Speaking in the terms of this blog – is it a desire or a whim?
And another thing. I love when after a person or their traces there are no remnants or when their traces harmonize the place.
In my case, it was not a desire or a whim but a gift and an exchange. I thought that this was clearly articulated, and the possibility of any personal interpretation was maximally removed. It works for you, but I have it differently. Due to that statement, I looked at how it is for me. So, thank you)
Although in the morning, for example, I was intrigued by the thought that desires can be hunts or dreams. And the achievement of the former leads to awareness of reality, while the attempts to obtain something ephemeral without actions lead to the development of illusions and the loss of power. In this regard, I note that any of my desires, for which I made efforts for realization, brought results. Which are quite functional, although they are quite alive, those designated stones. And any action at all. For example, I have an amusing experience of leaving the context of a rather successful career. So looking back, I spent 10 years on completely different things that interest me now. But that was a story I loved and played honestly and gnawed it to emptiness. And there were plenty of gifts. Just the goals were not material.
In ordinary life, ordinary people also seriously adhere to magical notions. For instance, among students of an art school, there was a saying: ‘Ask the paint (trees, paper, brushes, canvas, etc.) what it wants.’ ))) Co-creation, so to speak. )
Thank you, dear Enmerkar. This article was a wonderful confirmation of my conclusions and feelings. (I do not adhere to the worldview that gods are aliens, giants are Martians, Jesus is an extraterrestrial inspector, and that we are essentially followers of the “cargo cult”)