Dangerous Magic Part 7 of 7: The Patterning that Creates and Connects

Dangerous Magic 7: The Patterning the Creates and Connects

n. patedakis

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of Mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In this episode, we continue our contemplation of magic from the wisdom, love, and beauty archives.

We left off with the idea of patterning, and some questions of spiritual common law, such as, What is the difference between the way human beings think and the way Nature functions? What is the patterning that connects all things? What is the meaning of the phrase, We are a patterning of primordial awareness?

Patterning. Isn’t an object. In fact, we suffer because we turn our patterning into objects. We mistake primordial awareness, which is open and spacious, for something solid.

We treat the manifestations of patterning as objects, rather than as a dance of patterning, a dance of pure relationality, which we ourselves are——intimately.

Our participation isn’t questioned. It can’t be, but we do live as if there could be a distance.

So patterning isn’t an object. We aren’t objects. And we’re not really subjects either, Since the notion of the subject goes together with the duality of subject and object.

People speak about pattern thinking. Cognitive scientists understand that pattern recognition goes altogether with intelligence. But if we are pattern thinking—not a subject capable of thinking about patterns, but patterning itself as thinking—then what is our real intelligence? What is patterning, in the deepest spiritual sense?

To get at the nature of patterning is not so easy. We could imagine relationality that constellates and even constitutes what we call mind and what we call matter.

Our experience of knowing—and remember, that’s pervasive . . . We talk about knowledge, like it’s some abstract thing, but everyone navigates the world by what they think they know. We’re constantly knowing things.

And it’s fascinating to me how often people think of philosophy as abstraction, and yet the people I meet are loaded with abstraction. Because we can’t live without philosophy. And indeed philosophy tries to get us out of our abstractions and into real life.

And part of the way we keep LoveWisdom at a distance is to say, “Well, it’s all heady and intellectual and abstract, and it goes over my head.”

Meanwhile, that’s how we live: Heady, abstract, and outside of ourselves, so to speak, at a distance from life. We’re living over our head. And LoveWisdom means coming back down—into reality, into experience.

Our experience of knowing, looked at in a relative way, arises as part of a vast and integrated, knowing that weaves together, the whole of creation—certainly the community of life on Earth—and possibly the cosmos, if we have the vision to sense that as a possibility

This weaving or knitting—and Bateson uses the word “knit,” and he referred to what he called “the pattern that connects”.

Something about a pattern that knits together all the knowing, or the knowing knits together all of creation—the thinking, mind knitting together the whole community of life.

Now, we mean something cosmic when we’re talking about patterning.

We’re actually laying out a bit of a pattern, so we, we might move around a little. Stay with it. You’ll see the patterning it. It might begin to emerge. We don’t want to think we understand it too quickly.

We’re just trying to ask how we could begin to understand it really.

And we want a Cosmic perspective. We’re looking for visionary LoveWisdom here. And what we’re talking about is very relevant to life on Earth, but “Cosmic” comes from the Greek word cosmos, which is an ordering.

The roots of philosophy or LoveWisdom in Greece grow from a feel for the ordering of life—that life is not some mere “chaos”. It’s not unruly, even in its wildness, but it’s a Cosmos.

So we could say a sacred creative ordering arises, as what we see and experience. Or, we could also say that a sacred creative of ordering gives rise to all things, or constitutes them, creates them.

Cosmic vision—which is visionary LoveWisdom—can reveal this sacred, creative ordering. And we could refer to the sacred creative ordering as logos, as the Dao, as the Good—that’s Plato’s term for it—we could refer to it as

the Great Mystery,

the Creator,

the Dharma,

pratityasamutpada,

Wildness,

Sacredness,

the Divine,

we can call it what seems most appropriate, what gives it reverence and also seems to evoke the feeling for us.

We can call it God or the mind of God

or call it Sophia.

It appears in many guises. It’s called by many God names and Goddess names, because we have a feeling for its sacredness, for a kind of divinity in it, a wonder. And that’s all part of the magic that we’re trying to get at.

But what we notice as we consider different ways of talking about this, and we look at Bateson, Jung, Pauli, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, and countless others—they seem to point to a patterning that pervades all things, “guiding alike the flight of the Sparrow and the life of the Sage.” That’s how the philosopher Erazim Kohak puts it. I like that line, the patterning “guiding alike the flight of the Sparrow and the life of the Sage.”

We can sense this in a scientific mode, of course. But dominant culture science seems too young and immature. It’s too partial and limited, to grant us any significant access to the deeper meaning of patterning that would really inform our lives and would help the community of life—help us and the community of life.

And that’s why Bateson himself, who was a very committed scientist, very scientific thinker, but he repeatedly emphasizes the aesthetic. And in some ways, he seems to have preferred the company of even anti-scientific people. Bateson—this committed, atheistic scientist—acknowledged the potential value of an anti-scientific mind, and even a religious mind.

And we can recall that he lived at Esalen—that’s a new-agey sort of place, if you’ve never heard of it, in California, not too far from where I live. You can look it up.

He seems to have preferred what he felt were the minor insanities he might have encountered there, and which we might see in certain religious beliefs, he seems to preferred these minor insanities to the major insanity gripping the dominant culture—including its science.

So that’s why we kind of bump up against something if we just try to consider magic scientifically, even though we should. We have scientific evidence for magic, and we have scientific ways of beginning to think about it. But our science is immature, I think it’s time for a paradigm shift. And we say that—we don’t realize that’s a very significant thing to say, and that we haven’t fully metabolized the last major revolutions that we’ve had, the recent ones.

David Bohm also tried to touch on this from a scientific perspective or with scientific sensibility and clarity, but with also a sensitivity to the spiritual and philosophical dimensions.

In a way, Bohm became more a philosopher at the end of his life than a scientist, but he did keep doing serious research. His work is still being taken up by serious researchers.

And Bohm wrote that the new quantum context calls for a new kind of description.

Just that. Again, we haven’t metabolized that. The new quantum context that we live in calls for a new kind of description, one that gets us beyond the duality of the observer and the observed, which we remain trapped in.

And this is crucial for understanding magic.

And Bohm is saying our culture hasn’t really gotten to this yet. Bateson agrees.

And we cite these people as careful scientific thinkers. Because, immature or not, science still serves as the gold standard of knowledge in our culture.

I criticize science in many ways in my own work—did that in the academy and still do—but I’m not going to ignore the relevant science on any subject matter. We need to deal with it.

And there is a cogency to dominant culture science. It reveals certain things. That doesn’t mean it’s not also immature, incomplete, and fragmented.

Bohm’s work tried to help us get at those aspects that it does reveal, those aspects of reality where it seems to be cogent and helpful, and, also Bohm tried to help us think forward to better ways of knowing and being, living and loving.

We can have a better science—which in fact might be a more magical science. It might be more like magic.

Science could become a practice of magic.

And we could also say that maybe traditional practice of magic was part of the science of indigenous cultures.

Bohm tried to help us see that the very form of the experimental conditions and the meaning of the experimental results go together as a whole.

And that any attempt at analysis into autonomous elements misses the point and covers over the lessons we need to learn.

We habitually separate the observer and the observed, and this distorts reality.

Magic means giving that up, giving up this habit of separation, this distortion of reality. Magic means the end of distorting our reality and seeing reality as it is. And thus, we can see the great challenge magic presents as spiritual practice, because many people who practice magic still have that duality in place.

Magic itself defies the duality, but the magician who has not become a Sage, keeps the duality in place consciously or not.

Bohm, understood that wholeness could not become an object knowledge.

Knowledge typically functions by having an object. That’s how we know. We, I know horses says a person, you know, we know horses, we know how to cook. We treat the horse like an object automatically

But if the cosmos fundamentally arises as a wholeness, then we can’t make it an object and know it as we know things like the Pythagorean theorem.

And indeed we can’t even know a horse or a lover or our child or any other being process moment or situation that way. We can’t do it. And yet it’s our habit—Our karma

Karma just is this mistake—and its inevitable consequences.

How do we wonderstand differently, understand differently, live differently? How do we know horses and each other and the whole world differently?

That’s the question of magic, the question of the magical consciousness, and it’s simply perplexing, this question is just perplexing from within conquest consciousness.

We really have to admit that this should be perplexing just as Martin pointed out. As Yeats said, we don’t really know what we’re talking about here,

but to help us move toward it, David Bohm did what Jung did, what Bateson did, what others have done . . . He made an analogy with pattern.

Bohm said that metaphorically, the cosmos is like a magic carpet. Okay. Well, he didn’t say a magic carpet, but he said it’s like the pattern we might find in a carpet. And he pointed out that when we go to speak about the pattern itself, it makes no real sense.

It has no real meaning to speak about the parts of the pattern and to refer to them like separate objects, interacting with each other.

But we live like that. We live as if the world is separate objects, interacting, and Bohm wants us to sense patterning and wholeness.

If we focus on the pattern, the pattern as a whole, not parts, that creates a profound shift—eventually, when we realize it.

The shift happens in relation to the fact that part of a pattern, isn’t a pattern.

Take a silly example. We can talk about a checkerboard pattern, but one black square is not a checkerboard pattern. The pattern is a pattern, not a collection of parts.

We might assemble the parts into a pattern, but the cosmos is not an assembly of parts shipped in from somewhere and put together.

Obviously, that concept makes no sense. The cosmos is a whole, and we can’t ship in parts from somewhere else and put it together.

Nature here on Earth is like that too.

Even to talk about assembling something in accord with a pattern means the pattern has its own life and is always already a wholeness.

So too with Nature and the way Nature actually functions, which stands in contrast to the way human beings think.

There we have our spiritual common law again: The difference between the way human beings think and the way Nature actually functions.

And we have to differentiate here between thinking in patterns and patterning itself as thinking.

Human beings can think in terms of patterns. In some sense, intelligence has to do with pattern recognition—in the sense that we recognize or become aware of patterns, and also in terms of re-cognizing them—rethinking them.

But intelligence ahs to do with patterning as thinking, not the application of patterns to things.

Boehm invited us to see how quantum physics illustrates some of these things so clearly for us.

We perceive a pattern and call it an electron, and we see patterns of behavior of the electrons and call them experimental results. And the pattern we think we see we also call a theory which we then use to predict further patterns. But all of this is fragmented.

We mistakenly speak of

an electron

and an observing instrument

and experimental results,

and an observer

and the observer’s theory and way of knowing.

That’s all pieces, fragments.

In fact, it arises as a single patterning. The experiment arises as a single patterning.

The cosmos is a single process that appears to unfold in multiple locations.

When we poke at the pattern the way we habitually do, we pull out elements . . . we call them parts . . .

and in the process we ignore and even cover over the fact—the primal fact—of that overall patterning,

and we therefore reaffirm our ignorance by trampling on the pattern.

We make a world of duality and fragments rather than realizing this wholeness, and when we ignore the pattern we trample on its relationality, it creates degradation in the world.

Magic just means recognizing this primal fact and beginning to work with it skillfully.

If we were looking at squares, we could speak all day about their size and color. We could take precise measurements. But we’d miss the pattern. We wouldn’t talk about a checkerboard pattern. We’d be talking about parts.

And obviously the patterning of life involves far more subtlety, nuance, complexity, sophistication, and profundity than a checkerboard pattern.

So it makes it maybe all the more tragic, maybe also somewhat unsurprising, that we might miss it. And we start obsessing about the parts.

As Bohm realized, our primary emphasis now—especially if we want to heal ourselves in the world—our primary emphasis must become the undivided wholeness.

Magic involves the practice of patterning—participating in this wholeness, in the wholeness of pattering, rather than abstracting pieces and parts.

Magic is this practice of undivided wholeness. And again, we go back to Gary Snyder’s words . . . He writes that, “To resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild, we must first resolve to be whole.”

But our habit is abstracting pieces and parts out of the pattern, treating them as objects, treating them as separate from us and our own mind.

That’s why we’re resistant to magic: Because our karma predisposes us to see things as separate from us, separate from our mind and body and soul. By karma, we mean our personal and collective practices, as well as our history, our ancestors. In practice, we make a world in which things are separate from us. Magic says they aren’t.

And we can think of our typical way of knowing is something like one part of a pattern pointing to other parts of the pattern, but without any sense of patterning—

especially not in an active sense of patterning. we shouldn’t speak of a pattern, really Bohm is talking about a pattern, but we treat that too as a thing.

patterning is activity.

And when one part of a pattern treats itself like an isolated thing, not an interwoven process, but a thing, and points at other parts of a pattern, which it also treats us isolated things,

the patterning gets totally lost.

Magic dies,

sacredness dies.

The inherent flow of meaningfulness gets thwarted and people suffer.

That’s what we’re saying.

If we are woven into the fabric of reality, If we arise as the interwovenness of the patterning of reality. And we point at some supposed part and say, that’s a flower and some profound sense we’ve gotten things incredibly wrong—most, especially if that is what we focused on, being able to do in terms of our practice of life.

we practice in a way that points to flowers and sees them as objects. And it’s automatic.

And yet the truth is that we ourselves all together with everything that we could point to, all of that is a patterning—alive and a love.

We are the whole together

together with the patterning as the flower,

the threads of the flower go right through us.

If we picture it as a woven pattern, and we imagine a pattern with a flowering bush, with butterflies and honeybees around it, and trees nearby, and a river too, then we could imagine a single thread running through the flowers, some bees, some butterflies, the trees, and the river.

And so in the statement, “That is a flower,” patterning points at patterning ignorant of its self-sameness, it’s non-duality of unity and diversity, its existence as interwovenness—not as an object or subject, but as a patterning, with threads running through you and the flower and the butterflies and the bees, and all the rest.

There’s no flower

There’s flower-and-bee

and not just flower-and-bee, but flower-and-hummingbird-and-bee-and-tree-mycelia-soil.

And so because of the nature of the error we make, we essentially become thirsty while swimming in a lake.

Taking up conscious purposes on the basis of this error results in pervasive negative side-effects—inequality, injustice, ecological degradation. It all arises because of a fundamental error in how we know ourselves and the world, how we relate to ourselves and to all beings and ecologies.

Now, again, this should all feel perplexing. What is the pattern that connects? What is the world if it is patterning?

We could turn to an indigenous culture with a language that reflects a cultural practice of wholeness.

It would maybe give us a different perspective.

What would it be like to think so differently? I mean, how off are we? How differently could we see the world? We don’t have to say we’re just wrong.

It’s not that like, there’s nothing good in the dominant culture. Again, that’s silly. There’s lots of wisdom,

but we’re going to consider Trobraiander culture. Not because Trobriander culture is somehow perfect, but because its rootedness in certain aspects of reality that the dominant culture seems to obscure might then help us understand our confusion a little, and empower us to begin moving toward greater wisdom, love, and beauty.

The anthropologist Dorothy Lee tried to help the dominant culture understand Trobriander culture by evoking the notion of pattern—unsurprising. She does what Bateson, Bohm, Jung and others have done.

She wrote that what we in the dominant culture consider a causal relationship in a sequence of connected events, is to the Trobriander an ingredient of a patterned whole.

Note that contrast: We think in terms of simple-minded cause and effect, as if the universe were a bunch of billiard balls or a big machine. We’ve been trained that way, and we can’t wish it out of our unconscious. The idea HAS us.

It’s the meaning of original sin: Something HAS us. Though we CAN get free of it, we can’t do so by anything less than full initiation into the magic and mystery of life. We have to let the habit go, and it’s not easy to do. It’s our karma.

In contrast to a person in the dominant culture, A Trobriander thinks of causality as something that appears everywhere, not something in a linear sequence. It’s the trunk of a tree, the posts holding up a raised house, a word in a magical incantation. The threads run through everything.

To get a little more precise, we can note that, in the Trobriander language, we find no phrase that expresses the English notion “for the purpose of” or “so as to”.

Now that gives us a sense of the shift in perspective the Trobriander experience represents. They don’t have these phrases.

In fact, there is no “why” and there is no “because”.

Isn’t that remarkable? Imagine all the parents out there right now thinking, “You mean their children don’t go around asking them “why”?”

They can’t. There’s no why or because.

That’s such a remarkable thing that we really have to let it land: The language has no why, no because, no so as to, no for the purpose of.

And yet they do have a clear sense of patterning, which we could think of as the magic of the world. They have a sense of a nonlinear creative force that makes things happen.

The Why is everywhere, so we don’t have to have a word for it.

We are it and everything else is it too—and we have to realize this beyond our egocentric habits, beyond the habits of thought and action in the dominant culture.

Think about what this means. Think about the conquest consciousness of the dominant culture, which also infects most people’s notion of magic.

In conquest consciousness, we have a clear sense of deliberate, purposive behavior. We value it. We valorize it.

In Trobriander culture, that kind of behavior becomes something worthy of ethical repudiation.

That’s a stark fact.

For instance, if a person wants to court a beloved, a gift is expected—as part of the patterning of courtship. But if somehow people find out that the gift was given in order to win the favor of the beloved, the person becomes ethically repudiated.

So we see discernment in action here. And at the same time, Lee tells us there are no terms for comparison—sit with that, those of you who like to think of mindfulness as nonjudgmental awareness . . . discernment, but no terms for comparison Lee tells us, aside from two rarely used verbs, one that more or less means “it-differenting” and the other “it-saming”.

Whatever terms people use to think of standards of behavior and to evaluate behavior and situations, they have a non-comparative quality, without lacking discernment—which sounds paradoxical and should sound paradoxical.

To help us understand this strange way of thinking, Lee gives us an analogy. Any guess as to her analogy?

Knitting a sweater. Recall the Bateson used the word knit. The image of weaving or knitting, and the notion of patterning in general, thus appears in Bateson, Bohm, and Buddhism, as well as in Jung’s work, and in ecology, cognitive science, and more.

And now we find it to understand this indigenous way of knowing and being, living and loving.

Lee points out that knitting the ribbing at the bottom of a sweater doesn’t cause the making of the sleeves of the sweater,

and knitting the sleeves doesn’t cause the knitting of the neckline.

Knitting each part is not a matter of linear cause and effect, but each arises from the totality of the whole pattern.

The activity may seem to unfold in time, but it unfolds a patterning, which in some sense also already exists at each moment.

Lee tells us that Trobiranders value and appreciate pattern, and so they live and act on the basis of nonlinear thinking. They could certainly perceive lineality, but they don’t think, speak, and live on its basis.

Similarly, indigenous cultures can perceive temporality, but, left to their own ways, they don’t think, speak, and live in accord with time as the western consciousness does. In the case of time, we can go so far as to say that time as the western consciousness understands it, doesn’t really exist for maybe any other culture.

Captain Clock and Colonel Calendar have now conquered most of the world, so we find western time everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s anything more than a quirk of conquest consciousness.

And we see here again why we need to pacify our assertions that we understand all of this. We can talk about knitting a sweater, and we can talk about pattern, and we can think we understand it all,

we agree can that the dominant culture has gotten crazy,

and we think we understand sanity, and that we understand reality.

But we in the dominant culture don’t speak a language of patterning.

Indeed, our language for the most part seduces us out of magical consciousness, seduces us out of a consciousness of patterning. It seduces us into fragmented ways of thinking. And it’s no easy mess to get out of—

. . . because if language has seduced us our whole lives into patterns of thought at odds with the nature of reality, we face some deep challenges. We don’t speak Trobriander.

Nor is Trobraiander some strange anomaly.

rouswisdom.org/dw-blog?offset=: 159873

And it inquires into the nature of patterning and how dominant culture thought patterns arise from and tend toward fragmentation—rather arising from and tending toward wholeness.

In one of those posts, we look at the Blackfoot language, and we consider what the Blackfoot philosophers Little Bear and Heavy Head say about their language. And they tell us there’s no such thing as a word, not really such a thing as sentences, and no nouns or verbs in any ordinary sense. They say you have to force those concepts onto the Blackfoot language.

Such fragments make sense to a person of conquest consciousness, and these Blackfoot philosophers point that out.

omy of the Blackfoot Word” (: 2004

That title deliberately evokes a tension, because the authors want us to see that, to a speaker of English, the very notion of a conceptual anatomy makes perfect sense. Our language and culture are geared toward fragmenting things, to cutting them up.

This is the tragic shift from LoveWisdom to science and technology. It’s far easier to cut up a bird than it is to listen to what a bird might have to say to us; far easier to dissect a frog than to become a wise, loving, and graceful human being, and to live from and toward the wholeness and holiness of life.

From the perspective of Blackfoot philosophers, the notions of analysis, objects, and anatomies seems like an imperative of conquest consciousness, and Heavy Head and Little Bear want to point out something that we in the dominant culture cannot easily see, let alone wonderstand: namely, that not all people make sense of the world this way, and the world itself may not function according to such a pattern of thought.

To help us understand the Blackfoot way of thinking and how it contrasts with the thought patterns of the dominant culture, Heavy Head and Little Bear give us the example of the word chair in English. Recall there are no real words in the Blackfoot language, but they tell us that one common Blackfoot analogue to this word is an expression that has four dimensions, and if they tried to force it into English, it might go something like this: become-sit-facilitate-ing.

They warn us that there is nothing in this analogous expression which we could accurately equate with the chair as a speaker of English thinks of it, because this Blackfoot expression has to do with processes and relationships and interwovenness, not with static objects that exist from their own side.

Little Bear and Heavy Head describe a chair as a facilitating event, arising in total interwovenness with a human event. Those who know the work of J.J. Gibson on the ecology of perception may recognize something in this way of thinking.

Little Bear and Heavy Head try to think about the simple English sentence, “That boy brought this chair,” and they try to transcribe from Blackfoot into English something that might express that basic happening.

They say it could go something like this—and these are hyphenated expressions that have four dimensions—here it goes, “That boy brought this chair”: “by-way-of-transfer-move-ing that-familiar-ing young-yet-state-of-ing this-near-ing become-sit-facilitate-ing” (37). Pretty wild, right?

Something in us may want to tame it. Something in us may insist, “Well, we still get the meaning, don’t we?” But do we? Do we really get it?

And, What does it indicate when we want to close down like this? Why do we find it so tempting? Why do we have a hard time wonderstanding the difference a different worldview can make, in the most practical and intimate sense? Or why do we think we understand?

The point in part has to do with where we come from. Arguably, few if any people in the dominant culture who claim to have an interest in magic, or who claim to practice it, come from a lineage of realized teachers going back hundreds of years, let alone thousands of years.

Few if any people in the dominant culture who claim to practice magic come from a specific place, where they still live, where they lived their whole life,

a place that has known them all their life—they let that place know them and let themselves know that place,

be steeped in it, steeped in the powers that flow there, sense the coming together of power and place,

and that they knew that place, its power, and its being—who also carry those powers—

and they knew that place, its powers, and its beings intimately, in part through a language that expresses the alive and alove relationality of that place and its beings and powers.

Instead, people in the dominant culture speak a language that programs them on a deep unconscious level to think of the world as made up of mostly nouns, mostly objects, fragments, parts;

to think of the world as made up of a subject-object duality;

to think of the world as a stage for playing out conscious human purposes . . .

And they act this out when they get on an airplane and fly 5, 10, even 20,000 miles round trip to attend some kind of magical gathering or healing or other self-help event, of whatever form.

It’s mostly human thinking. In other words, most of the thinking about magic in the dominant culture—or anything infected by the dominant culture—is human thinking in the narrow sense,

And magic is the thinking of much larger ecologies of mind.

Ultimately magic is the thinking of the Earth and the Cosmos.

It typically has a rootedness in specific places, rootedness in the mind of Nature, the patterning unfolding in particular places . . .

and at its highest levels it has a rootedness in the nature of mind.

Dominant culture language doesn’t seem to directly express the patterning that connects or that constitutes all the happenings of life,

and this only encourages people infected by the dominant culture to break those vital connections—and even to do so while claiming to be innovating, claiming to be working to make things better. That’s part of the irony.

And we know that on Turtle Island, people speaking and thinking like the Blackfoot and others like them . . . they lived for thousands of years—handing down magic from one realized person to another, body to body, in specific ecologies, handing down healing, handing down attunement with the patterning that connects and constitutes all things—and they did this in a manner that kept an astonishing abundance of life going here, for thousands of years.

Meanwhile, in Europe, ecologies had been degrading for thousands of years. The invaders came to Turtle Island, and they couldn’t believe what they saw. Wow. Flocks of birds like massive clouds, casting shadows on the ground for days as they migrated. Salmon in the rivers . . . you could hear them two miles away, couldn’t put a boat in the river.

And within a few centuries, it tragically collapsed, and we are left with the world of wounds that both Yeats and Aldo Leopold lamented.

This is not to say that a person born speaking Blackfoot or Trobriander or any number of similar languages automatically understands magic or is somehow enlightened. No, there can be ignorance in such cultures. In fact the language, the stories, the teachings, the initiations help the people to mature.

And so, we rather acknowledge just how much of a gap there is from that sort of starting point for spiritual life in relation to the starting point the dominant culture has bequeathed the rest of us. If you grew up in an ecology where a more skillful and realistic manner of thinking is encoded in the language, myths and stories, embodied in elders, and alive and alove in the community of life and the human relationship to that community of life, then as you move into adulthood and decide you really want to go deep, you’re in a very different starting point.

Obviously, there’s no real launching place because we are reality right now. Nevertheless, there is a developmental dimension, and we can have no idea what we’re missing if no one around us can embody it and our language and culture seduce us away from it.

It helps explain why high level teachers in some of the wisdom traditions have privately said that they cannot really teach people in the dominant culture. There are exceptions of course—some students from the dominant culture have become very accomplished practitioners in their lineages—but various teachers have said that, generally speaking, they have to water things down. Jung, knowing the western psyche intimately, predicted this.

Meanwhile, countless self-appointed gurus, magicians, coaches, and self-help experts present themselves as having realized something profound. When we look with a lot of care, we may find that they offer some important self-help and self-healing, and it can feel like magic, because we’re so desperate, so hungry.

And so while such people may feel they have broken through, and that they have found the answers or found the magic, much of it may be as far from the kind of magic we have tried to inquire into here as conquest consciousness in general is from being indigenous, or as far away as our habitual mind is from a mind fully liberated into wisdom, love, and beauty.

Part of this has to do with values, and the great challenge of living up to our own values. We value things like wisdom, love, and beauty, and magic means making those values real, living them out, and letting the medicine of those values radiate out into the world—intimately experiencing them as part of reality.

Dorothy Lee suggests that Trobrianders experience nonlinear pattern as value, and they only experience lineality when value has become destroyed, or simply seems absent. Such a remarkable suggestion—

They experience what is the norm to conquest consciousness only when value has become destroyed or is absent.

Gregory Bateson wrote in his book, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, that the book could have been called “the pattern which connects,” we mentioned that phrase several times now . . . And he says that phrase is “a synonym” for the book’s title. That’s interesting.

We can think about that in relation to everything we’ve considered so far.

We have used a verbal form of the word as often as possible—so we keep using the word patterning—to try and deal with the problems of the English language and to get out of the subject-object duality and the habit of treating the world as a collection of objects. We’ve tried to think of patterning, as an alive and alove creative activity.

And when Dorothy Lee gave us the analogy of the sweater, she pointed toward a patterning that connects sleeves to neckline, lover to gift, and all the way through.

And Bateson here says the necessary unity of mind and nature is a patterning connecting or constituting all things.

Of this patterning which connects, Bateson asks, Why do schools teach almost nothing about it?

Maybe we don’t know it. That might be the simplest answer.

And Then he asks a lovely question: “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? What is the pattern which connects all … living creatures?”

We could note that this is not the right way to think of it, because Bateson still relates various objects here: An orchid, a lobster, a primrose, a human. We then habitually think of a pattern connecting separate things.

He himself tried to emphasize intimacy and unity. But we could go further and ask, “What is the patterning that constitutes the orchid, the lobster, and the human—altogether?” What constitutes the mutual arising of all of these. In that mutual arising of creative patterning, we find magic.

Magic taps into the patterning that connects, or the patterning that constitutes the happenings of life, and this is how it brings about its effects.

We will need to go into that further. Our initial reaction might see that as unscientific.

Bateson was a non-nonsense scientist who in fact didn’t believe in some of the magic we have taken seriously in these contemplations—he didn’t have the science for them or the evidence.

Nevertheless, Bateson suggests that we may have to become in some sense anti-scientific to truly touch the patterning that connects, or we could say the patterning that creates.

Bateson uses the word aesthetic to designate responsiveness to the patterning that creates. We have used the term ecosensual awareness, and we have also called it magic.

Magic means responsiveness to the patterning that connects and creates, and thus it means the practice and realization of ecosensual awareness. This in turn means the practice and realization of wisdom, love, and beauty, where love explicitly includes ethics and compassion, not just empathy.

So magic demands the practice and realization of wisdom, love, and beauty, including ethics and compassion.

Bateson contrasts the scientific mind, which sees its subject matter as an object, with an aesthetic orientation that meets things with a sense of recognition and empathy. Those are the words he uses, But, again, we should recontextualize all of this, because Bateson lacked sufficient training in the wisdom traditions. That’s okay. It’s not a mean criticism of him. It’s just that The doctrine of recognition has a profound meaning in the wisdom traditions, and empathy gets recontextualized as compassion, a much vaster and more skillful space.

In any case, we touch here on the necessary unity of wisdom, love, and beauty. Bateson wants us to see how recognizing the patterning that connects has to do with the mind of beauty—and we have to make clear that it has to do with wisdom and with love.

Our practice of wisdom, love, and beauty—note that: our practice of love, our practice of beauty, our practice of wisdom—and our realization of these, means our responsiveness to the Patterning That Creates All Things in Mutuality and fundamental Wholeness

It thus also means responsibility, our ontological obligations, our obligations to the very being of the Cosmos. We take care of things simply because they exist, and because it is part of our beingness.

A more technically accurate term for that patterning that connects might be the Sacred-Creative-Ordering-in-through-as-Relational-Openness. That recognizes the sacred, the creative, and the relational openness, and the total mutuality. But it’s very cumbersome . . . we end up with this long hyphenated expression because English can become like a straightjacket for the soul when we try to practice, realize, and express wisdom.

The most simple and direct expressions in English can seduce us into wrong thinking and give us the impression we understand what we do not. We don’t yet understand. And so the cumbersome terms are not necessarily more accurate than just calling it responsiveness, mutuality, care, or calling it wisdom, love, and beauty, or calling it the sacred. We can just call this patterning the sacred, understanding it is alive and alove. The patterning is primordial awareness in activity.

We can touch on one further analogy for the patterning that creates. We go into detail with this analogy on the WLB blog, but here we’ll hit the highlights.

To understand this patterning we can think of a hologram.

Let’s contrast a hologram with a photograph. The first thing to realize is that a photograph is made with incoherent light, and a hologram is made with coherent light. Incoherent light means the photons are moving in every direction. That mirrors our own incoherence. Part of us says Yes, part of us says No. When we feel totally coherent, we feel no inner conflict. When light becomes coherent, it can do things incoherent light cannot accomplish. For instance, a laser can burn through metal. A lightbulb with the same energy cannot.

When we make an old school photograph, we have a thing called a negative. The negative has captured the photographic image. If we look at the negative, we can recognize the image. If someone made an image of a forest, we can see a forest, and we have no doubt about the subject of the photograph.

In contrast, we can make a hologram by using coherent light, like a laser, and first splitting that laser beam, shining part of it on our subject and then recombining it with the other half of the beam to make a pattern on the holographic negative. Here’s the key point: If we look at that negative in ordinary incoherent light, we will have no idea, not a clue what the hologram will look like. If we look at a holographic negative in ordinary incoherent light, we don’t know if the image will be of a forest or a pile of money.

It seems essential to let that land with us, to let the soul receive it for us and take care of it. It’s an important lesson in our analogy.

Once we shine coherent light through the holographic negative, we see the full hologram, which is not a flat two-dimensional image, but a full three dimensional image.

Now let’s say we take the regular photographic negative, the one made from incoherent light in the ordinary way, and we cut it in half. When we look at the negative, we see half a forest, and when we make the print we get half a forest.

Let’s say we do that to the holographic negative. We cut it in half. When we shine the coherent light through it, remarkably, we still see the whole forest—not half a forest, but the whole forest. And if we cut that half in half again, even though we have only one quarter of the original negative, we still have a whole image,

Whereas, with the ordinary photograph, we have only one quarter of the forest.

Why? Because in a hologram, the whole is interwoven throughout the parts. It expresses a nonduality of part and whole.

Let’s say there was a butterfly in the original scene. And let’s say that we cut the photographic negative so that the butterfly is now gone. That makes it gone. When we make the photographic print, we see no butterfly, and someone looking at the photograph wouldn’t even know it was missing.

If we make a hologram, and we cut the negative in the same way, as if we tried to cut the butterfly out of the image, we will still find the butterfly there when we shine the coherent light through it. Under incoherent light, we have no idea that the image even has a butterfly, but even if we try to cut out the butterfly again and again, we will still find her.

Now, imagine we take a photograph just before the butterfly enters the scene. Imagine a very still day. No wind. And a butterfly lands on a flower. We took one photo just before that moment, and now we take another. When we compare the negatives, they will differ in only this small way. But, with a hologram, we know that the entire negative has changed. The butterfly landing on the flower has affected the whole scene, and now she is encoded in the whole scene, the whole pattern.

We could picture her entering the scene, and think of how her every movement might immediately affect the pattern—not in time, but intimately and immediately.

Now we could picture a sage or a shaman entering the scene, kneeling on the Earth, and making an offering of tobacco to the forest. In the holographic vision, that activity affects the whole scene.

But Check your own intuitions, and look with painful honesty. Does it seem like, in the practice of everyday life, people of the dominant culture live as if the world functions like ordinary film, or like a hologram?

What about each one of us? Do we really LIVE, really practice and realize our lives in the manner of a hologram, or in the manner of a photograph?

If we are honest and rigorous about what it means to know and what we can claim to know on the basis of lived experience, it seems we have such a limiting and limited view that we don’t truly wonderstand that the presence (or absence) of the butterfly changes everything. Wonderstanding the butterfly in, through, and as the principles of magic involves opening up to the synchronicity of butterfly, the way each butterfly already ruptures the ordinary barriers of space and time. It involves a deep practice and realization, one that goes against the habits ingrained by language, education, economics, science, and even the arts of the dominant culture.

So, once again, we have to resist the temptation to say we understand patterning once we understand this analogy. We use the analogy to show that we don’t understand, because we don’t live this way. And we only seek to get oriented toward better ways of truly understanding and then wonderstanding this patterning that connects and creates all things.

This patterning is Mind—in the sense of Nature. It is the mind of nature, our own mind, and it is the nature of our mind, as well as its immediate, intimate manifestations.

To say Mind is not a thing but an activity comes as no major innovation in the dominant culture in terms of intellectual speculation, analysis, and argument, but it does suggest a major realization yet to come, a revelation and even a revolution still waiting for a better practice to bring it to fruition.

Magic as a way of knowing ourselves and the world means a way of knowing-by-being the patterning or sacred-creative-ordering that relationally cultivates or practices the whole of life onward—it’s what functions now, in, through, as us. We don’t manipulate, but we do participate, and with right intention plus deep awareness, magic and miracles can happen—Right now in our life . . . practicing our highest intentions and real awareness, mindfulness in the deepest sense, not in any facile sense.

The patterning is a play of correspondences, a dance of synchronicities, a spiraling out of archetypes by means of sacred powers and inconceivable causes—which are not “knowable” as objects, but are realizable as intimacy, as divine madness, as holy sanity.

Holiness has a place here, because wholeness, hologram, healing, and holiness all share the same root. Holiness doesn’t have to mean something religious in any dogmatic sense. It means a recognition of wholeness and healing in the world, a recognition of sacredness, and a realization of our participation in the patterning.

The wisdom traditions teach us how to cultivate a mind of beauty, a mind of love, and a mind of wisdom that helps us become sensitive and responsive to the patterning that connects and creates all things, and thus to take care of all things as integral to the patterning that we ourselves are. Magic involves the synchronization and the synchronicity of heart, mind, body, world, and cosmos. It’s the practice of the wild, the practice of ecological and spiritual intelligence.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories of magic and mystery to share, get in touch through wisdom, love and beauty.org. And we might bring some of them into a future contemplation. Until then this is dr. nikos your friendly neighborhood, soul doctor reminding you that your soul, your patterning, that connects and constitutes and the soul of the world are obviously now not two things—take good care of them.