Topic: spirituality
Thesis: no matter your ontological commitments, you must engage with the liminal unknown, and you ought to respect it.
This essay is about magic and spirituality from the point of view of someone who prefers to think in material terms.
Magic, spirituality: who needs ‘em? You know you are a pattern of probabilistically interacting wave packets mediated by eternal, omnipresent, action-conserving fields. When you need to make a decision you base it on facts and science, on observation and experiment.
Well, I’ll tell you why you need ‘em. Magic and spirituality mediate humanity’s relationship with the unknown. What’s the unknown? Well, it breaks down into two categories:
1. The deep unknown. Quite simply, this is all the information you lack access to. Presumably, there is a lot of it. But one’s relationship with the deep unknown is quite trivial: it doesn’t affect you in any perceivable way! (Until it does.)
2. The liminal unknown. The liminal unknown is the domain of magic and spirituality. This is information that you could have conscious access to, except that it is just slightly out of reach. You are aware of it; it tickles your mind; but it is not clear enough to name. At least, not yet.
You might object: why are magic and spirituality needed to interact with the liminal unknown? We have a tool for interacting with the liminal unknown—it’s called the scientific method! If a modern human has a tickling sense of information being available but not quite definite enough to name, they respond with observation and experiment, to eliminate the possibility of the tickling sense pointing to something real; or, if they can’t eliminate, to conclude that the tickling sense does point to something real, and to bring that real thing into the realm of the known.
You might also object: why have a relationship with the liminal unknown at all? Why not just find things out when you need to, and otherwise leave it alone? This is a legitimate choice. In the space that remains, I intend to show you that the hidden costs of that choice are high.
To respond to the first objection first, the question of why magic and/or spirituality are needed, we need to talk about a load-bearing piece of the scientific method: hypotheses. Where do they come from? Not from observation and experiment—those are used to eliminate hypotheses, not create them. Certainly observation often precedes a hypothesis, but that is not what brings it into being.
The answer, as you may have guessed, is that hypotheses come from the liminal unknown. They come from the space of what is possible, but unwitnessed; suggested, but undiscovered. In fact this confirms one of the claims of the objection: the scientific method does, indeed, comprise a relationship with the liminal unknown. It also forces me into an awkward admission of my true belief: that hypothesis generation is a type of magic.
Hypothesis generation is a take-only relationship with the liminal unknown: it draws ideas from it but does not feed it, has no curiosity about it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that—the liminal unknown is not a being, it can’t take offence at non-reciprocal behaviour—but what is to be your recourse when the wellspring of hypotheses dries up?
I suggest to you that the proper use of magic and spirituality will in fact make you a better scientist, a better researcher, a better seeker. You will have more and better hypotheses, as well as more cognitive flexibility to pursue new directions. But to talk about exactly how, we need to analyze, cut into segments, and produce an anatomy of the liminal unknown.
Don’t worry—it’s not permanent.
As you might expect, the liminal unknown lies just outside the boundary of the known. What, then, is the shape of the known?
The known is a structure within the mind. It consists of all that a person believes with the highest degree of certainty. Accordingly, the domain of the mind where the known lives most fully and unambiguously is the rational domain of the mind.
The rational domain of the mind is the place of quantifications, of theorems and proofs, of absolute equivalences. It is where we engage in formal logic and pure mathematics. Those who love the rational domain delight in its sanity and consistency. Yet without consideration of other domains, the truths of the rational domain of the mind are of limited value. Even such elementary concepts as integers are vacuous without some perceived object to associate to them in the sensory world. And for this reason, for all of rationality’s power to map the irresistible implications of formal prepositions, rationality in a vacuum lacks the ability to state in a wholly satisfying way what the claims or their implications actually mean—if, indeed, they mean anything at all. For that, it must delegate to the linguistic domain of the mind.
The linguistic domain is the cradle of rationality. It is similarly structured, but its laws are murky, contextual. Grammar and syntax appear to provide a sturdy foundation on which to build one’s thoughts, until their edifice gives way and a wholly unexpected interpretation emerges from one’s words. (“If you don’t like to pull this wagon, you can shove it.”) For most, language is the domain of human life and human play. Yet language, too, is not free-standing: meaning eludes us here. The roots that hint at it trace into the symbolic domain.
The symbolic domain consists of distinct sensory gestalts, of impressions: notions derived from sensory experience but not tied to any one stimulus pattern. First we experience our senses, then we abstract and isolate specific patterns from sensory awareness and bind them to a shorthand representation. Many non-human animals can do this same thing, and they use it similarly to how we use symbols when our goal is to get someone’s attention. “Predator,” they might call, or “Mate”. They have names for one another. What they broadly appear to lack is the human ability to compose symbolic calls according to a generative syntax, that is, the linguistic domain.
The source of symbolic meaning is the awareness domain of the mind. This is the domain of the mind concerned with the processing of sensory information: sight, smell, touch. It also is the domain of things that lack edges: emotions, the many-textured fabric of responses to music. Awareness contains the experiential content of symbols, but it also contains experience—some would call this noise—that fails to be isolated and captured as a symbol. This residual content contains everything that is ineffable, or perhaps simply not worth effing. And beneath awareness is the body itself, gathering information and transforming and redirecting it, making the operation of all these domains possible.
In each domain, past “awareness”, information is refined, patterns extracted. The causal link with the senses grows more remote. The rules of cognition in these upper domains are more precise and consistent, increasing the potential to synthesize and infer new information; but in order to achieve this, some information, the noise, had to be left behind. Symbolic thought must ignore what it cannot parse; linguistic thought must ignore what is unintelligible; rational thought must eliminate the possibility of double entendre.
That is the shape of the known: a structure of prepositions, sentences, symbols, and sense-memories. The liminal unknown is the shape that shadows it, in four main ways:
What lies below: “signal” versus “noise” is a value judgment. In extracting information to a more refined domain, some potentially meaningful information is left behind: the ignored unknown.
What lies above: the extraction of information is always incomplete. We are finite, imperfect beings who do not always digest our experience to the fullest extent. Derivable knowledge that remains latent: the ungrokked unknown.
What lies between: each domain contains opinionated decisions. When speaking in an American accent, stock and stalk are homophones, but in an English accent they aren’t. Meanwhile, in an English accent, fought and fort are homophones, but in an American accent they are pronounced differently. Each mapping of information to a higher level of abstraction obscures some distinctions that, in another mapping, would be semantically meaningful: the precluded unknown.
What lies within: there is more than one way to map information at a lower level of abstraction to a higher level of abstraction: think of the illusion of the rabbit and duck. The nature of the mind is to interpret information in multiple different ways simultaneously—that is, to simultaneously create multiple different mappings, interpretations, frames, all coexisting, even if only one is apparent to conscious attention at one time. In some cases, one of these frames can dominate so forcefully that other interpretations can’t be considered. We might even deny we are capable of these other interpretations. The suppressed unknown.
There is the known. There is the unknown. There is the unknown we see but fail to recognize. There is the unknown we recognize, but do not comprehend in its full significance. There is the unknown we cannot recognize, because of how we have trained ourselves to perceive. There is the unknown we have already recognized, but refuse to admit we have recognized.
Our minds drive a constant upswelling of information as we try to make sense of the world, patterns filtering through layer after layer of scrutiny as we try to solve complex problems and make sense of our world. But active, singularly-focused probing will always fail to bring certain elements of the liminal unknown into view. In fact, when we pursue just one thing with anxious attention, the liminal unknown will only grow:
The ignored unknown will grow. Ever look for your phone when it was in your pocket? The phone pressing against your hip was in your ignored unknown. It remained there until you relaxed your attention and realized the goal of your search was already achieved.
The ungrokked unknown will grow. In ruminating about where your phone will be, new information might surface. There might be a note on your desk that says “Look in your pocket!” You read it but ignore it because it doesn’t mention your phone explicitly. In fact, as you would remember if you relaxed your attention, the note is there because you do this a lot and your past self wanted to spare you the frustration.
The precluded unknown will not necessarily grow. The precluded unknown only grows as we learn. It must be treated with caution and respect: it is the tax we must pay for learning much, that as our reach grows, subtle things can evade our apprehension in ever more numerous ways.
The suppressed unknown will grow. Somewhere in the back of your mind is embarrassment waiting to be felt, the haunting sense you’ve been here before. It’s different this time, you insist. It’s not somewhere achingly obvious. This time it is really lost.
A useful analogy that’s not really an analogy: the liminal unknown is at the edge of the known. A more disorganized “known” has a ragged edge, so there is more liminality around it. It is possible to make the edges of the known less ragged by practicing expanded awareness. Open, unhurried reflection on one’s own beliefs tends to make them more integrated: knowledge in one domain richly connected to knowledge in other domains, complex things reduced to simplifications that are just simple enough to be useful. One’s knowledge-system becomes as a whole smoother, more compact. Perhaps this condition is what we call wisdom.
Perhaps, equally, those of us who seek after specific goals with impatient attention, who examine things only briefly and throw them away in frustration when they fail to show promise, who fretfully move from one dissatisfaction to another: perhaps those are the ones of us who are especially prone to breakdown; to collapse; to spiritual revelation. Long, spindly structures of thought formed by anxious probing are especially prone to dissolving completely, to being eclipsed by despair. And what’s left after that? What’s left is the experience of the sublime, which is, after all, merely direct experience of the vastness of the great sea of sensory being, unclouded by interpretation.
The sublime and the liminal unknown are one and the same, or perhaps it might better be said that the liminal unknown is the window through which we gaze on the sublime. But the distinction is a vanishing one: the sublime is not really seen, not apprehended and separated from its background. What we perceive when we gaze on the sublime is the impossibility of perception. A thing so vast that to “thing” it at all, to demarcate and isolate it, is absurd. A sublime state of mind is equally a liminal state of mind: a state where we are taunted by the faintest perception of what is ultimately imperceptible.
Yet it is in this state, a state justifiably called sacred by all traditions of sacredness, that we are most aware. Our minds are made pliable; we witness our myriad potentialities. We are quick to laugh; we feel humour in the deepest possible sense, because we see the transience and permeability of all that is beautiful and, instead of being moved to despair by this, we are moved to dance, to be fully and acutely aware and expressive of every degree of our freedom of motion.
It is all proteins and particles.
The possibility of sublime states suggests also the value of being open to sublime states. In a life of total resistance to the liminal unknown, such states are only accessed by mistake: intense stress, a bad trip. But a person can live their life in such a way that the door is left open to liminality always. This is a posture of playfulness, of entertaining contradictions rather than expelling them, of permitting the home to be haunted by mischievous spirits.
This is a way of framing the need for spirituality, which is basically the practice of remaining open to the liminal. Some do this through Tarot readings, awareness meditation, energy work, star signs, art, prayer. Some will claim that fervent, sincere practice opens the path to abilities beyond what the classical mind can conceive of. The materialist must agree, insofar as the classical mind is indeed too attached to its practice of empirical analysis to be aware of the liminal unknown that stealthily harries and plagues its thoughts. However: even after regaining access to a broader domain of awareness, the materialist may still reject the stronger claims.
That leaves magic. I posit magic as: calling things up from the liminal unknown by means of attention. To flip a coin on a decision, just to find out what decision you hoped for all along: that is magic, specifically divination. Magic can also come in the form of manifesting: making a statement, and thereby calling up patterns from the noise of awareness that make the claim true.
“My star is rising today.”
“Tender affection will come your way.”
“I now pronounce you man and wife.”
It stands to reason that, in a society built on skepticism, on empirical validation of hypotheses, and on the economics of self-interested rational agents, a yearning exists within us for a mode of being that doesn’t require us to filter out so much of our awareness. And not only a yearning, but also a substantial deficiency, a deficiency of flexible, creative, courageous thinking—a deficiency that leads to decay on the societal level.
Modern materialist thinkers are, of course, all too aware of the limits of rational thinking. They are aware of cognitive bias and hyperstition and the “ugh field”. And in the fields of what I am calling spirituality and magic, the skepticism of rationalists is not absolute: there is a willingness to experiment, which, indeed, is all that is required.
Where the need for magic and spirituality is greater is in the domain of community building and collective life. Arguments from rational self-interest rarely produce productive, long-living communities. This is because communal norms are a moving target. It’s a classic information problem: by the time rationally discoursing agents arrive at a mutual consensus, the space they are working in has already shifted. Hence, a healthy community generally requires, at minimum, a model of a “shared spirit”—a vibe, a vision, an abiding presence; a distributed object of attention, liminally defined, which is always both tracking the evolution of the group and serving as a vehicle that channels individual creativity into collective manifestation.
Spirituality and magic are thus valuable tools: spirituality, to hold open a person’s awareness of their finitude and the hidden beauty of the liminal unknown; and magic, to draw information up from the liminal unknown through the casting of attention. More than that, they are part of the human constitution. Their role is to remind us that we are finite, that our grasp on knowledge is always looser than we think; but at the same time, that the reach of our awareness is almost always wider than we think. It is through the practice of these functions that we fully inhabit our own lives, engage fully in co-creative relationships with one another, and thereby negotiate the cycles of birth and death in which we are enmeshed.