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Recently I was ad-libbing an explanation about connecting to the transcendent, using a metaphor that turned out to work rather well, and that I thought I would thus reproduce here.
Think of a television set. Hook your television up to a satellite dish or cable, and you have immediate, crystal clear access to a wide array of channels. Setting it up might take a little time, but the instructions are at least available, even if they might have been translated back and forth between Chinese and English a few times. Generally speaking, most people with some small amount of technical skill should be able to pore over the manual for a little while and soon be experiencing instant access to the wealth of information being broadcasted.
Now imagine you have a television set, but no satellite dish or cable, or even an aerial, and no access to these parts ready-made. Assuming you know roughly how a television set receives signals, which not everyone does, you’ll have to construct your own aerial, making a crude pair of rabbit ears out of wire and cabling them up to the television yourself. If you even manage to achieve this minor electronic feat, you’ll have to spend a good amount of time playing around with this setup before you can get anything even resembling a snowy, vague picture, twisting the ears about and tuning the television. Finding the optimal positioning of the rabbit ears will probably require a lot of trial and error; you may not know exactly what you’re doing and why certain things work, may be running on intuition and a small amount of knowledge about radio signals. Eventually, assuming your rabbit-ears configuration was put together correctly in the first place, you may be able to pick up one or two local channels. Poorly.
Of course, you could also construct a satellite dish, from scratch. But most people wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to do so, and simply coming up with the plans might take years.
The person with the satellite dish and the person with the rabbit ears are tapping into the exact same thing. The signal is out there, in all its surround-sound, high-definition glory. But one set of people– in this case, one world– has far more limited tools with which to access it.
This is the difference between the transcendent in the ideal– magic as it works in other worlds, magic as people want it to be in the here and now– and the transcendent that we currently have access to. If the pictures and sounds coming from the television are equivalent to the manifestation of the transcendent in physical reality, then in worlds like the Suikoden world, we have the equivalent of satellite dishes or cable; entities that provide a direct connection between the physical and the transcendent, that consciously navigate in and are aware of both worlds. In this world, we’re limited to crafting our own tools with guesswork, refinement and a lot of patience. In this setup, mental discipline seems to be quite an important component; it’s the refinement stage of the process, the equivalent of tweaking the rabbit ears by minute amounts over time to find the absolute optimal configuration, and also be aware of how it works so you can get back to it if they get bumped out of shape.
This is a process that requires effort, even for the skilled. Most people, presented with a television set that of its own accord did not display a picture, knowing nothing about aerials or cable and not knowing that the broadcasting system existed, would assume that all the equipment is good for is displaying an unchanging snowy image. Similarly, when people expect magic to come immediately in bright flashes of light and sound, and receive at best the occasional flickering wisp amidst a sea of what seems like nothingness, they become disillusioned. Once in a blue moon the signal will surge strongly enough, or we’ll accidentally shift the set closely enough to the source, that our sets will display a picture for the briefest of moments– an experience of touching the profound, a string of coincidences. But when you’ve been stuck watching snow for the past twenty years, it’s easy to write the flicker off as something at best impossible to replicate, and at worst illusory. Just remember that whether you have a satellite dish or you have to make your own rabbit ears, the signal is out there. The broadcast towers do exist.
This is an interesting article that I think all those interested in the combination of morality and videogames will appreciate, less for what the article actually proposes than the questions it raises.
The proposed system (having Xbox “gamer tags”, little descriptors appended to your name on Xbox Live from what I can tell from the description– I’ve never actually played an Xbox 360 game– reflect your moral choices in game, thus revealing to the community the actions you’ve chosen to take) is an interesting idea, but I very much doubt that sort of “social sanction”, as the article calls it, would achieve anything. The gamer community, particularly the portion of said community that notices things like Xbox Live, is by and large a group that projects and revels in a fairly aggressive facade, and is extremely critical of attempts to “nanny” it. Furthermore, such people are often extremely vocal about how “they can tell the difference between reality and fantasy”, partly due to ever-increasing furore about how videogames are bad for children, and largely reject the idea that their in-game actions can be held accountable to the same standards that their actions in this world are.
Of course, this is the issue this proposal is trying to challenge, but it’s not going to be achieved this way. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if, such an idea having been implemented, many gamers laughed at tags like “Child Killer” and “Good Samaritan” and actively set out to acquire the former for shock-amusement value and even a twisted kind of respect (in the same way that many teens see telling “dead baby” jokes as a way of appearing tough and unfazed, and therefore “cool”), seeing the latter as undesirable due to its seeming “goody-goody” panderance to a bureau of concerned parental watchdogs. I think the quote “what would you say if one of your friends adopted that philosophy and was playing GTA IV in as law-abiding a manner as possible? Would you encourage them—or taunt them?” is a revealing one here; the majority of gamers, I think, would taunt them.
It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t take into account a culture of gamers raised with Grand Theft Auto and gangsta rap, who are increasingly of the opinion that crime and violence, especially the appearance of such without actual punishment, is “cool”. It would work if the target audience were more socially conscious in the first place, the very problem the proposed initiative would be attempting to fight. In short, I don’t think this proposal would do a thing to change the way gamers think about games, and might even encourage gaming aggression as friends compete for the grossest and most grisly titles there are.
I think if we want to use fictional worlds as a tool to help people appreciate morality, the approach taken needs to be more along the lines of the suggestions in the first comment to the linked essay. (The comments to this post are all really interesting, actually.) Instead of relying on a community of gamers already used to games being morally separate from our actions in this world to make us feel guilty for what we’ve done, games themselves should be structured in ways that ask more moral questions and provide the player with a framework within which to explore them. And not even just in their plots, but in gameplay itself, which in terms of morality still lags far behind the storyline of most games that attempt to question the issue.
I was actually talking about this recently with a friend; how practically the only RPG I could think of that implemented, to any extensive degree, a battle system where if the intent was not to kill the person you did not fight was Final Fantasy 4, way back in 1991. It makes sense: the battle system of RPGs is meant to at least roughly mirror what happens in the plot (we’re walking through a treacherous forest full of wolves! Guards are attacking! The Big Bad is threatening the town and we must stop him!), so if the opponent is one that, outside of the ritualised combat of the turn-based battle system, you wouldn’t want to see killed, then you stand your ground or find another way. Yet since then, “every battle must be fought for as hard as you can, except in scripted cases where you’re not meant to win at all” has become so ingrained into our concept of RPGs that even if we do come up against an opponent we’d rather not hurt, we usually fight, because holding out usually gets you killed. And it’s usually the right choice. The few battles in subsequent games where you do have to just defend come as such a shock to our systems as gamers that we are thrown by them, almost always make the wrong choice at first, and have to replay. Even Suikoden, arguably a moral bastion in the world of RPGs or at least one of the few series that does repeatedly raise the question in a non-superficial way, has us running around slaying human guards with abandon.
The random battle system in RPGs is a staple, but as a legacy hangover from tabletop roleplaying (which itself in many cases has moved on), it’s really not necessary. Nobody plays RPGs for the thrilling battle system, and for most gamers it’s in fact just a source of frustration. And furthermore, it encourages us to strike down every creature that crosses our path and provokes that little swirly screen, be they fluffy bunnies, peaceful forest elves, endangered species or human soldiers. After every battle, we’re rewarded handsomely– with money, items, experience, and a cheerful victory tune. And there’s no other way to get these things, necessary to progress in the game.
It is impossible to play a pacifist game of Suikoden, or indeed any RPG. If you run from every battle, pretty soon you’ll find yourself up against major bosses that you have no chance of beating at your level, and your progress ends. So to restore peace to the land, you have to mow down hordes of various creatures, the repetitive, even mind-numbing structure of the random battle system encouraging you to see them not as other living beings but as frustrating obstacles. It’s a wonder there’s any land left to save (or at least any people who care about its saving) when you’re done, really.
Incidentally, I think social accountability might work in games, as one commentor said, if the social pressure is coming not from other gamers, who are unlikely to apply such pressure in the direction it’s needed, but from the characters in the game themselves. Obviously you can’t be too heavy-handed with this, since a character who constantly angsts every time he commits a crime will lose audience sympathy, but one could have the characters we identify with and those who surround them pass commentary on the actions occurring– without preaching, but still making clear that these actions have consequences for people in-game, including people we care for. Even if gamers don’t feel overly for the characters, it’s difficult to play any heavily story-focused game without investing some sympathy into the people around you; as aforementioned, people don’t play RPGs for the battles, they play them for the plot, and what use is a story if you don’t care about what’s happening in it? I think one of the most effective uses of this, personally, could be having a morally problematic action indirectly lead to the death of a character, especially if it’s made clear in hindsight the link between the two, and especially if the character is well-loved (though this doesn’t have to be the case; “random” civilian deaths should be important, too).
Also, this article, written in response, both unsettles me and I think reflects the feelings of many gamers, sadly enough. I can appreciate the mindset of someone who doesn’t feel either way about killing in games because they consider it a “game goal” and not a cruel act; but when you have someone talking about wanting to experience “the thrill of evil without consequences”, liking the opportunity to be “masterfully brutal in a way that doesn’t actually harm me or anyone else”, and “the fun [...] in doing atrocious things in games”, I feel that some priorities should be re-evaluated.
It’s clear from her statements that she has no intention of committing cruel acts in person. That’s not what I feel uncomfortable with here. It’s the fact that anyone who actively enjoys dwelling on “the thrill of evil”, consequences or no consequences, probably wants to examine why they feel that way. If it’s not that they really want to harm people, what attraction does this toothless evil hold? Why should atrocious things be fun? If you’re a good person with strong moral priorities, what enjoyment could you gain from being “masterfully brutal”? It’s not enough to say we will act as moral people while still thinking immoral things. If there is anything appealing about the idea of cruelty, even in this defanged form, such that it can appeal to people independently of whether they wish actual harm, then we as a society should be taking steps to remove that appeal. It serves no purpose other than to confuse those who wish to be moral, and encourage those who don’t. (This is a controversial statement, I know, and not everyone will agree with me, but it is how I feel. Whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, dwell on these things, and all that.)
I am, for my part, enjoying the fact that morality in games is the hot discussion topic of the moment, though. Gamers like Leigh aren’t sure whether to credit or blame BioShock for sparking off this series of debates, but my feelings are squarely in the “credit” camp. It’s an issue that’s long gone unquestioned, and one that I do think needs to be tackled.
Recently I’ve had the “pro-life” (as in, anti-abortion) argument come up in conversation, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what the ideal, the moral, behind it actually is. As I’ve mentioned before in this journal, my feelings on abortion in general are ambivalent and largely unformed, but if the mother’s life is in danger I support it over allowing a baby to be born into the world motherless and an individual with an already-formed life, loves, attachments and concerns to die. To let an already existing person die so that another person might come to be– well, that’s a cycle of life that occurs naturally all the time, and certainly has its place, but I don’t believe in encouraging it prematurely. There’s more to a life’s being precious than the fact of simply being alive, even if that in itself is a dearly valuable thing. Of course, I’m aware that that is only my opinion, and that there is no right answer, no choice that will not cause harm, when it comes to the decision between saving a mother and saving a child.
But my feelings aside, and I’ve said this before but perhaps not in so much detail, as it wasn’t the topic at the time– the “pro-life” movement really is not. They’ve essentially appropriated the phrase “respect life”, in much the same way as the religious right has appropriated “family values”, and yet they don’t respect “life” at all; they respect a very specific subset of life. Pro-life campaigners aren’t interested in the lives of mothers. Nor are they (as a movement; I obviously can’t speak for the individuals involved) interested in the lives of starving people, homeless people, prisoners of war, cancer sufferers, children beyond the age of zero, animals, plants, or anyone or anything except, well, fetuses. If you’re going to appropriate such a huge phrase as “respect life”, if you’re going to claim “pro-life” as your ideology, then in my mind you should be demonstrating a concern for just that value, not your specific narrowed-down interpretation of what that value ought to mean. And frankly, if your idea of respecting life involves considering the lives of all the other aforementioned groups inconsequential, not only do you have very strange concepts of “respect” and “life”, you have a very strange ideology in general.
As I said in the first paragraph, I am unable to quite wrap my mind around what drives the “pro-life” movement; what causes such an intense and passionate concern for a specific, small subset of individuals to the exclusion of all else. To a certain extent I can understand passionate activism for, say, cancer research or better treatment of war prisoners, because people involved in these causes often know the suffering second-hand through friends and family if not first-hand, and are aware that there’s a one-sided problem that needs to be solved. But what makes someone side so intensely with a barely-developed party, the precise experiences of which none of us can be sure of and none of us remember first-hand, over another, at least equally valid, human life?
Is it that the moral decision is such a difficult one– that there really is no right answer, and they can feel better about the fact that it happens by taking a side, convincing themselves of all the things that side has in its favour, and doggedly sticking to it? Is it that they’re so disturbed by the idea of abortion in non-emergency circumstances, and have worked themselves up so much with the gory details, that they’re unable to put aside their emotions when it comes to more ambiguous cases– that they’ve focused on babies so much that they’ve learnt to care so much more for them than for any other instance of life, and can’t switch that off? Or is it, as I suspect is the vilifying of homosexuals and the absence of interest in just about any other cause in certain religious groups, driven by the same motivation behind most wars, sports, active racism* and other instances of factionalisation and division in human society: the desire to name and attack an enemy? I’d be less likely to consider this as an option if anti-abortion campaigners weren’t so fervent about it, so inclined to propaganda and twisting of the facts, almost seeming to enjoy getting riled up about abortion in a way that, for example, lung cancer research campaigners never quite seem to get about their issue, despite the fact that most lung cancer activism is focused on a preventable cause.
*I am not attempting to argue that these three are equal, only that they are often driven by a similar need; the need to proudly belong to one group and discriminate against another. Sports are certainly a near-to-harmless outlet for such emotion, though I believe it’s important that people recognise sports as a way of channelling and defusing that emotion, and not as validation of the emotion’s purpose in society– which, in a civilised era of plenty, I don’t believe it has. That’s potential essay-fodder for another time, however.
A personal niggle: how many perfectly reasonable and otherwise legitimate words and phrases are being loaded with biased meanings by ultra-conservative religious groups. The phrase “pro-life” is one I’ve spoked about before. Another is “concerned”, particularly in the context of “concerned about violence in the media”.
It feels as if one can no longer say that violence and aggression, especially in media meant for children, concerns them without labouring under the fear that they’ll be seen as the same prudish, regressive type of person who blogs openly about the “corruption and amorality” today’s media is visiting on their children while simultaneously upholding beating them with a paddle. (I only wish I were making this kind of thing up.)
I am not in favour of keeping children “innocent”. When one starts seeing the ways of the world as something to shelter people from, one is looking at the world in the wrong way. I had a good upbringing, but I was sheltered, albeit in a different way, and it did not do me any good whatsoever. Trying to hold back children as long as possible from the fact that people die, that people suffer, that people reproduce, for crying out loud, is only retarding their development for the gratification of the parent, who wants to see their child remain a naive little angel– because they feel themselves that they have “lost” something by growing up. That is an inherently negative outlook on the world to begin with, and is not something that should be passed on to children.
I don’t wish for children’s media to be stripped of references to violence, death and hatred. Indeed, I think that blanket censorship of anything even relating to such topics, without thought of the context, does more harm than good. For example, when in American dubs of Sailor Moon several characters who were killed in the original were referenced as “having been detained”, children were divorced from the fear of thinking their favourite characters dead– and thus spared the message, “when people kill other people, it’s a bad thing”. On the other hand, Dragonball Z’s sending of the bad guys “to another dimension” was probably appropriate for a young audience; the message shouldn’t be being sent that it’s okay for good people to kill if the people they’re killing are bad. I think the idea that people can die should be faced, but the heroes should not be painted as people for whom killing is acceptable. (Of course, that is if your story is going to have classical “heroes” and “villains” at all. I certainly think more complex moral plays are appropriate for children, if tailored to their understanding, and the “hero”/”villain” archetypes themselves do contribute to the stereotype that one group of people can be termed “absolutely good” and one group of people “absolutely bad”. I think stories in which both protagonists and antagonists are both flawed and possessed of positive qualities are good for children, and people of all ages for that matter– particularly if it is emphasized that goodness and badness are not innate to a particular group, that even being “on the right side” doesn’t excuse one cruel actions and doesn’t stop one from being a cruel person if they enact those actions.)
Acknowledging that there is death and suffering doesn’t have to make your story dreary and depressing. In Fraggle Rock, the characters live in a world where they face real danger every day from a variety of sources, including the fact that they can be killed. But they also live joyous lives where every day is a carnival of music and celebration of life. It puts across a wonderful message: there are threats out there, but there are things more beautiful than those threats, and you should dwell on those. Of course, it’s not really a surprise that this series is an exemplary one; it was created with the explicit intention of making a children’s show that would bring about world peace. Despite this lofty moral goal, the show doesn’t feel particularly preachy or laboured, which is one thing that will turn children off immediately. It’s fun, well-plotted and easy to watch, and the moral context is woven carefully into the story rather than being wielded like a stick at the end of each episode.
I also don’t think the fact that something might scare children is a reason to shy away from content. I think content that glamourises violence is probably inappropriate for children to be watching. I don’t think it’s a terrible thing, on the other hand, for children to be moved by fiction. Fiction is designed to move; it should not be bland, processed baby-food. It should incite emotion, spark curiosity, and make the heart beat faster. Being exposed to good fiction at an early age will make children more likely to appreciate fiction later in life, and good fiction is that which causes one to hold their breath in anticipation, gasp in anguish, and weep with joy and sometimes even sorrow. I think a lot of parents have it in their heads that a crying child is inevitably a bad thing. I don’t think a child feeling emotions, being sensitive to the suffering of others, being attached to people (fictional or otherwise) in such a way that they feel sorrow and regret for their pain, is a bad thing. Trying to shield children from negative emotions like this will, though I’m no child psychologist, probably cause them to grow up feeling that they shouldn’t grieve when people die, that it’s not okay to weep or openly express intense feeling, that human pain is not a big deal. It is a big deal, and the more sensitive we all are to that, the less pain will exist in the world.
Some of the best stories for children are absolutely terrifying. Watership Down is a scary book, and in my opinion it’s even scarier as a movie, when you can actually see the blood and the frothing at the mouth and the flies buzzing around wounded rabbits as they desperately attempt to escape from the snare. But it’s also a powerful story with some good messages that has captivated at least one generation of children; and I’ve never heard of anyone to whom the story did psychological harm. I wouldn’t deny children this story at all. And as I mentioned previously, the fear of their favourite characters dying is something that motivates children to see cruelty and murder as abhorrent.
In short, I do not feel that stories for children should be sanitised and stripped of realism. I do think, however, that their creators should consider the morals they teach carefully, and not pander to the idea that children only find a story fun if there’s a lot of people beating each other up. (Children do like action and excitement, yes, but “action” comes in many forms. A breathtaking dragon flight or tense chase scene is every bit as exciting as a fight, and additionally the idea that “only fighting is cool” is self-fulfilling; if more writers produce programs where the heroes fight and paint these stories as exciting, more children will associate fighting with being “a cool hero”.) So, yes, I am Concerned about Violence in the Media. I am not, however, an advocate of blanket censorship– nor, for that matter, double standards on aggression.
I’ve been reading this article, on an interview with Philip Pullman. What strikes me about it is that Pullman says he has “the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ’spiritual’ or ’spirituality’”; yet his stories are absolutely full of it. They are soaked through with it. The His Dark Materials trilogy might be, from what I’ve recently re-read of the first book and remember of the other two (I’m preparing for the upcoming movie), one of the most deeply spiritual series I’ve read; and when I say “deeply” I mean “meaningfully, significantly”, and in that sense it is rich because the spirituality it contains is thoughtful, considered, not arbitrarily concocted, in alignment with the principles of our universe.
A lot of Pullman’s ideas have parallels in quantum mechanics, a singularly scientific subject. Yet what the books deal with is spirituality as we know it, because quantum ideas are used– as quantum theorists are using them today– to illustrate a conscious universe, a feeling universe, a universe where love is powerful and a compass can tell truth and you can talk to your soul. The question of whether the universe is conscious or not may one day– one day soon!– be a scientific question, or it may be one that science can never answer; but the idea of the universe as living, breathing, feeling will always be a spiritual one, even if it is proven. It will always touch that part of us that seeks the transcendent.
“Spiritual” does not just mean “concerned with things we can’t prove yet”. It also means “concerned with things we can’t reach or touch physically”. The former definition exists in part because we cannot prove the existence of things we can’t reach or touch physically. The latter category of things does not vanish if the former one does, and discovering the transcendent exists, or things about how it works, does not mean reducing it to a set of lifeless mechanical processes; indeed, if what we discover is the fact itself that the very universe is a living thing, how can it? If the spiritual exists, if the transcendent exists, then by its definition it is irreducible to a mechanical process without meaning; its very existence provides meaning and consciousness to the universe. An intricately mechanical process with meaning, certainly; but not without.
In short, if scientific discoveries back up the spiritual, those things will not cease to be spiritual, in that they will not eliminate the power of the spiritual to fulfil spiritual needs; unless, that is, you define “spiritual need” as “need to believe in something whose existence we cannot verify”, and I do not think that most religious people would define spirituality as something that loses its value once you actually know it’s true. In fact, I’m sure the vast majority of the religious community would be overjoyed to see a sign of deific existence, even if many of them would attempt to interpret it in terms of their holy books instead of evaluating it on its own terms. (A tip in advance, people, if the Second Coming ever happens: realise the existence of multiple conflicting holy books and start listening to the big glowy thing in front of you that you know is going to be right. I’ve heard far too many jokes about sects who’d have the reincarnation of their messiah lynched if he/she/it ever walked the surface of this earth again, and sadly the idea rings all too true to my ears. I highly doubt, that said, that any revelation about the nature of the universe is going to come in the form of a large sparkly humanoid, but that is my hypothetical perspective on the situation none the less.)
But back to Pullman. As I’ve said, his books are full of spiritual concepts; both ones based on current quantum theories, and some more esoteric ones, like daemons. He argues that he doesn’t understand spirituality, but what I think he really doesn’t understand is religion. His books are anti-religious, but they are nothing if not spiritual. He describes Lyra’s reading of the alethiometer in the same terms that I would describe searching for spiritual knowledge:
[S]he found that she could sink more and more readily into the calm state in which the symbol-meanings clarified themselves, and those great mountain-ranges touched by sunlight emerged into vision.
She struggled to explain to Farder Coram what it felt like.
“It’s almost like talking to someone, only you can’t quite hear them, and you feel kind of stupid because they’re cleverer than you, only they don’t get cross or anything… And they know such a lot, Farder Coram! As if they knew everything, almost! Mrs Coulter was clever, she knew ever such a lot, but this is a different kind of knowing… It’s like understanding, I suppose…”
“A different kind of knowing”, a kind that is more assured, more fundamental, than knowledge deduced from experiential evidence; “as if they knew everything”, a wellspring of seemingly limitless knowledge and patience; “great mountain-ranges touched by sunlight”, “sink[ing...] into a calm state” in which meaning clarifies…. these are similar to words I would use and have used to describe the very things I do and feel in the name of spirituality. This description did not arise in a vacuum. Philip Pullman does not write to me like someone who doesn’t know the first thing about spirituality.
He just doesn’t know that he knows. Because he thinks spirituality is equatable with religion. Because he thinks it must be something other than the things he makes up, that of course if there were something really, truly spiritual out there it wouldn’t be anything like the ideas that flow from his pen, despite the fact that those ideas resonate with him. Because he thinks that it is a mystery wholly separated from the workings of the world, when any true spirituality could not but be bound up with the inherent nature, qualities and forces of the world. Because he thinks that spirituality means going to church and believing in and fearing a God who will strike you down if you misbehave, and because he feels empathy and resonance with none of this. If that is what he thinks spirituality is, then he will never find it, or rather he will never think he has found it. But a man who provides us with quotes like:
But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender. . . . I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference. . . . We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if life were going to win.
is far less blind to spirituality than the average individual. He doesn’t believe in it; he doesn’t think it’s going to win. But he embraces it.
If you think you can’t understand “the spiritual”, try not thinking of the spiritual as mysticism, as some altogether alien force that you’ll surely know when you see it. Instead realise that if we live in an inherently spiritual world, then the very fabric of who and what we are, and what we interact with every day, is shot through with the spiritual, derives from the spiritual, and we would hardly recognise the spiritual apart from what we know. The spiritual is love and caring and laughter and dreams and intuitions and consciousness and conscience and beauty and fascination. The spiritual is the hope in our hearts for fantasy and magic and wonder and our occasional brushes against it, something we can delve deeper into with meditation and focus and loving-kindness and sometimes even psychoactive substances directed in the right way. The spiritual is the fact that you exist at all, the wonder of life and the universe and everything in it. The spiritual is not strange. The spiritual is the most normal thing there is.
We need to stop looking at the spiritual as “the supernatural”, at “the natural” as if it were distinct from the spiritual; as if anything that had been “proven to be natural” was automatically outside the realm of the spiritual, as if because we can prove that our emotions are chemical and evolutionary things they suddenly cease to be spiritual things. Existence has many dimensions and many facets. A lot of things have more than one meaning, a place in more than one structure. Atoms, chemicals and evolution explain one aspect of things. The spiritual covers the same ground from another angle. It’s like looking at a painting and saying “this is a painting of cows” or “this is an Impressionist painting” or “this painting has a lot of black and white in it” or “this painting captures a sense of bucolic tranquility”. None of these things excludes the others.
A couple of musings floating around in my head, today… (I’ve been reading this blog, and I had to stop to think: can they literally be said to be in my head? My thoughts on how much each of soul and body is involved in terms of where consciousness resides are a little shaky; an entry for another day, perhaps.)
In any case, first off, I saw this quote/question mentioned on a friend of a friend’s blog (actually, it was mentioned by the friend of a friend as having first appeared on the blog of a friend of one of their friends, meaning it originated on a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend’s blog, assuming no incidental closer relationship between any of the friends involved that would shortcut this chain; but that’s getting quite aside the point, now):
For the atheists/agnostics: where do you turn for moral guidance?
The person in question, being an atheist, responded as one might expect, if you’ve seen such questions put to atheists before: my morality comes from my own personal conscience, from my evaluation of the world and perception of what seems to be right and wrong based on that, from my instinct and gut feeling on such matters. But for the first time here I noticed the phrasing of the question, and realised it assumed something that, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised it assumed, but was: that those who believe in a deity derive their morality from (suppositions about) that deity.
I am a deeply spiritual person, as I’m sure anyone reading this at time of posting knows. “Deeply” is perhaps an understatement; my spirituality is intricately threaded into every aspect of my life. I’ve been described by others as spending a good portion of my waking life in a meditative state. I am perhaps one of the most spiritually-minded people I know. But I would not say that I derive my morality from my spirituality. In fact, I consider the two to be quite necessarily separate. In part this is due to the way in which I perceive the spiritual– as something fundamentally good, tending towards goodness for all, yet often operating on a timescale and order of magnitude from which it is difficult to derive laws and tenets that are applicable to the details of human interaction. Spirituality, for me, is about the workings of existence, and I derive my morality from it about as much as I derive it from science. However, given what I know about how most religious people treat spirituality– not as something to be searched for within and through the self, but as something read in a book and taken as, well, gospel, hence the phrase– I find this thought a particularly unpleasant one; particularly when it is combined, as it so often is, with the idea that a religious morality is superior to a morality derived from within.
I do not subscribe to the teaching of many religions that the morality within one’s own heart is inherently sinful and flawed, and thus we must look to a deific source for our morals. I do not believe that any of the holy books that claim to provide a moral framework laid down by God are much more than the writings of humans. I believe that the morality we find inside ourselves– and, indeed, the spirituality we find inside ourselves, by searching through our own minds and bodies, as opposed to through belief in writings and doctrines as absolute– is the only morality we have and the only one we need. I do not think a legitimate morality can come without self-examination, without cross-referencing with the self– the internal conscience, the pulls and cords of the heart. I do not think it can be lifted, wholesale, from a book. I think it is dangerous to try, and doubly dangerous to assume that such a “God-derived” morality is superior to an internal one.
I found myself idly wondering this morning: what is it, aside from personal morality, that keeps people from committing crimes? Specifically, is it social or legal consequences that offer the greatest deterrent to crime?
My vague theory is that, in practice, it is actually a fear of shame and social ostracism that keeps people from committing many (particularly smaller) crimes, as opposed to the threat of legal repercussion. For example, we would be extremely embarrassed if we were caught stealing from a store; yet we are much more likely to “steal” music from the safety of our own computers, where no one can see us (except possibly the RIAA) and in a context that society generally considers acceptable (you are much more likely to be thought poorly of for stealing a loaf of bread than for downloading a song). Some people, admittedly, might have moral objections to stealing from stores where physical items are taken, as opposed to theft of software where no physical item is actually lost because only data is being taken, but my feeling is that most people don’t think it through that much. It could also be the case that people realise that online music theft is much less likely to result in prosecution than actual theft. But still, I can’t help wondering if one of the main reasons crime does not run rampant is that people are ashamed to be criminals, rather than that they fear legal consequences; if it is interpersonal, rather than political, glue that holds the structure of society together.
I’ve been thinking lately that I have ambiguous feelings about the word “mature”, as used in phrases such as “mature content” or “suitable for mature audiences”. It’s not just that word specifically; I have similar reservations about the word “adult”, I suppose. On the one hand, I do understand the implication: that there are some audiences who are not mature enough to appreciate certain content and that “immature audiences”, as it were, should avoid it. That implication I don’t have too much of a problem with; in that sense I think the word “mature” is more appropriate than the word “adult”, since it implies that regardless of physical age one should be emotionally mature before viewing these things, and I find that to be the most appropriate way of judging who should view them, efficient though it is not.
On the other hand, there are a number of things I dislike about the designation. One is the implication, unintentional as I know it is, that this content is, in itself, inherently “mature”; that it is both sophisticated and that it is what mature people like and appreciate, that things that do not include these facets are “immature” or unrealistic. Of course this argument breaks down in certain places; few people would argue that pure pornography or slasher movies with no other redeeming content were sophisticated, but there is, I think a certain sense that as one gets older one should appreciate this content more and not be squeamish about it, and that to not do so is to be prudish and sheltered. I could write an entire essay on this alone, but in summary of what I would say there, I think there is a huge difference between avoiding something out of a refusal to wish to acknowledge that it exists or a generic sense that it is bad to view in all circumstances, and not taking delight in gratuitous violence or sexuality for the sake of entertainment, or considering that you personally find it uncomfortable or not enjoyable to view while not denouncing it for everyone.
Additionally, in practice, it seems to me that the people who most enjoy graphic sexual and violent content are more “immature” than the average (please mark the “most” in that statement well– I am attempting to draw a distinction between people who might not be averse to viewing it and people who enjoy it almost to the exclusion of anything else, as opposed to saying that anyone who enjoys such things is immature); people who find visceral humour or cheap titillation most amusing and appealing, I would argue, are the kind who are just beginning to grow and understand what motivates them, without the capacity to frame deeper questions about the morality or appropriateness of such things. (It is not, necessarily, that I am saying that one cannot take a violent work or an explicitly sexual work and come out on the side of feeling it is morally appropriate; certainly the mere featuring of such an aspect in a work does not make it morally irredeemable; but there are certainly a lot of questions facing anyone who wishes to make such a case, and having to contemplate and answer those questions would inevitably detract from raw, immersive enjoyment of the piece, I think.)
Finally, I think the use of a blanket term like “mature” or “adult” for such works– and I know I’m not the first person to have said this by a long shot, but it bears repeating, I think– unfairly lumps together sexuality and violence as the generic Big Bad; which seems contradictory, perhaps, with what I said earlier about it being promoted as “mature”, but then society’s attitudes towards these two issues have always been conflicted and contradictory. There are a huge number of differences between these two types of content in terms of why they may be inappropriate for “immature” people to view, and I think just having one generic “restricted” term for them tends to cause people to equate the two in terms of “badness” without thinking too much about the specific reasons we consider them “inappropriate”. Why can’t we just mark them as what they are: “sexual content” and “violent content”? There surely aren’t that many situations in which one needs to specify that something generically has “mature content” that it would become cumbersome for people to say or write those two descriptors. The only reason I see for avoiding them is as euphemism; an attitude that even the mention of the existence of these things is inappropriate, which is something I don’t consider to be true, personally. Knowing that they exist is different from being subjected to detailed depictions and explanations. There is nothing about the world, in my opinion, that is inappropriate for a child to know if delivered in an age-appropriate manner, whether that be “sometimes people do bad things to other people” or a detailed analysis of the Holocaust.
For that matter, I think I’m biased towards simple, unambiguous wording of things in general. I dislike words that are heavily loaded with connotations that are invariably attached to any use of the word, even if you want to use it straightforwardly and for its intended purpose. “Mature”, with its collection of underlying and often conflicting implied meanings that say a lot about society’s ambiguous attitudes towards things that are taboo, is not, in this particular circumstance, a straightforward word.
Admittedly, I think I could probably sum up this and approximately half of my future posts with a quote from Catherine: “society isn’t good at drawing even halfway subtle distinctions”. The fact that people lump things into generic categories and then make assumptions about them based on the categories that they have chosen to put them into, rather than the individual merits (or demerits) of the things themselves, is, in my opinion, perhaps one of society’s greatest problems.
Recently, my dear friend Catherine and I have been trying to promote our photographic work a little on Flickr; we are quite proud of the images we’ve created and the messages behind them, and have been hoping to get them seen and appreciated by more people.
So we have been submitting our pictures to subject-appropriate groups, and in the process of searching came across this one.
We spent time debating whether our photographs were actually suited for this group. We had specifically created these images in order to showcase magic as a thing of light and beauty, to tap into the fascination many of us had with it as children as a thing that could fulfil all of our deep-held yearnings, and reawaken that in the adult, and the description of the group, “Women of the Darker Arts”, specifically seemed to contradict that. Ultimately we decided that it would be a positive thing to have them there in order to present an image of magic that contrasts with the “gothic and shadowy” associations it seems to have in the mainstream nowadays; but we would not consider any of the images we have created of magic to be representative of anything we would call “the Darker Arts”.
I do not think I would know, precisely, what those “Darker Arts” were. As someone who works with magic, I consider that I work only with light. Do not mistake that statement for an attempt to draw any kind of dichotomy regarding kinds of magic; I am not arguing, as some do, that “while others may use ‘black magic’, my art is of the light”. I am arguing that there is no such thing, to my mind, to my experience, as “black magic”. It is all light.
Magic is a skill that is inherently lifeful. To practice magic one interacts with and directly guides the forces of existence, and being that the ultimate progenitor of the forces of existence, the One Force behind them all, is that which can variously be thought of as Goodness, Love, and Life, magic is drawing from an inherently good emanation. There are no “dark forces”, no evil deities. Even if magic is put to a cruel end, the wellspring from which it bubbles forth is one of goodness.
In these times, it seems people like to paint magic as a shadowy art; something left of centre, hidden and obscure for good reasons, dark and disturbing– the stuff of tales told late in the evening to terrify children, edgy, exciting. Of course, this stems somewhat from the days when “witches” were considered purely evil, and burnt at the stake or ducked. Magic has never entirely lost its sinister associations, and those who find glamour and fascination in that which has overtones of cruelty, for whatever reason, cleave to that part of it. But there is no darkness, no evil in magic; magic is light itself, and this power, a gift given to us by existence, not wrenched from it, not misappropriated– for who could steal from existence what it does not wish taken?– is a beauty, a positive. And those who seek or claim to wield it for the purposes of looking impressive and intimidating, as a superficial boost to their ego or reputation, will not find much of anything magical in this world.
They do not have the dedication to look; they are searching for a quick fix, extravagance brought into being by a few easy chants or the burning of a candle. To them, the ritual is all; the structure behind it is not thought of, and so not called upon, even if they say a few token words to their chosen deity-image or bring them to mind. Magic is as much about ritual as weddings are about dresses and rings; they are useful in as much as they provide a mood, a context, aid in bringing on a certain mindset and making things feel appropriate and properly respected, and in that sense they are good, but no one would argue that going to a church and enacting a “wedding ritual” is the only thing involved in marriage, the reason for it, the structure behind it, and similarly the rituals of magic are not the enactment of the magic itself. Just as a marriage ceremony is performed to confirm and solemnify something that already exists, a magical ritual is a solemnity entered into to make magic feel more appropriate and provide a mindset that aids in the flowing of it. One can enact magic perfectly well without a ritual, just as one can marry at a registry office; it is merely that some people find value, beauty and an appropiate state of mind in the ritual, and so for them it is useful. It is not, however, magic.
Moreover, they do not possess the state of mind required to find magic; the love for it, the concern, the wonder. To them, magic is only a tool, a means to an end; and as birds and butterflies generally only alight on the hands and shoulders of the gentle-souled, so magic will flow to where it is loved.
Treating magic as a tool will not allow you to know the full extent of magic. Treating magic as a force with sinister, horrid origins will not allow you to know the full extent of magic. Seeking magic for power, for superficial glamour, as a quick means to a formidable reputation, will not allow you to know the full extent of magic. Only love for magic and an honest heart’s desire to understand magic will allow you to know the full extent of magic.
That said, I do not in any way wish to paint magic as an exclusive art, the stuff of cults and cabals. To those who have not experienced it and do not know how to begin (and admittedly, teaching how to begin, to those who do not have it in them already, is a little like trying to teach someone to wiggle their ears. It can be done, surely, but it takes time and dedication and triggering of connections between parts of the mind that have never been used before, and certainly much more than words over the Internet), it seems mysterious; but what needs to be internalised about magic is that it does not arise from any shadowy corner of existence, any unnatural wellspring, any dark and unusual place. The lifeblood of magic is in the world all around us. It is the world all around us. What you might call the force behind magic, for magic is the art of working with that force and not properly the force itself, is nothing less than the fabric, the energy, the life of which existence is made. It is not some strange, unearthly thing. It is what we interact with, in some way, every moment we exist, whether breathing or thinking or talking or moving– the stuff of life. It is merely a different way of looking at it, manipulating it. There is no dark power waiting to be discovered. It is the exact same power that causes you to be able to breathe in and out, causes existence to hold together. It is normal, natural and good.
Even people who only imagine magic have recorded it as such in their writings and art. You cannot depict magic without showing light, sparkles, an aura, a glow. If magic is truly darkness, why is it not impressed in the collective consciousness as an absence of light, as shadows, as an entity that absorbs and negates light in the area where it exists– instead of, even in the darkest and most gothic imagery, as glittering and shining, twisting ropes and threads of multicoloured light? It is surely not because that would be harder to draw, because shadows are just as easy to draw as light is. From a fantastical perspective, a dark cloud that seems to draw in light from the area around it is more interesting than light; we see light reflecting off and shining on things all the time, and if you attend any nightclub or modern drinking venue you will see light and smoke in various hues all around you. Yet almost universally, even the eyes of supposedly demonic creatures are not black pits or empty sockets, but bright, glowing orbs. The awareness of magic as light is within us; yet we rarely reflect closely on what this might mean.
I know that to those entirely unfamiliar with a worldview that includes magic, these sound strange things to simply state as truths, to say as definitively as if I am telling my experiences of a recent trip, or my fondness for strawberry soda. But these feelings do come from something much stronger and more solid to me than idle imaginings, fancy about how I would like magic to be. They come from the fact that I constantly experience the world through the filter of this awareness. There is not a day goes by when I do not feel I have seen something new and wondrous, however small, that has been revealed to me through means other than observing the physical. When I speak of the light of the world, I do feel that I speak from experience that gives me cause to feel strongly that this way of seeing the world has truth to it. I know in some respects I must sound like every self-declared New Age guru and proselytiser imaginable; I can only say that I believe there is a reason there are so many of us.
Has anyone reading this ever had the experience of being the opposite of dizzy?– a sudden sensation within the head that has many of the hallmarks of dizziness, has the “feel” of it, except for the part where one feels dazed and uncomfortable, instead carrying with it the sense that one has in fact become clearer, suddenly sharp after having been comparatively dazed for some time, and instead of sickliness, a sense of wellbeing and pleasantness in that direction, in the same part of the mind that suffers when you feel dizzy and otherwise feels quiet and neutral?
I think I would be better able to describe a lot of the odd little mental and emotional experiences I have if I defined them in terms of being the opposites of things people know well. There is an opposite, for example, to feeling physically sick, and it’s not just feeling an absence of sickness, or even healthy and lifeful in a generic sort of way; it is a distinct pleasantness, a comfort, in the parts of one’s body that are normally responsible for feeling sick, and not just as the result of eating good food but a more streamlined, “clean”, pure wellbeing. Being well-fed is a pleasant sensation, but it comes with a certain fuzziness, fullness, a feeling of having something else within you that is causing the positive feelings. What I describe is more like the very tissues of one’s body deciding to feel tingly with light and pleasantness, all of their own accord. It is the experience of the direct opposite of pain; which most people would say is “pleasure”, yet have you ever felt pleasure in your temples as the result of having an “un-headache”, or in your lungs as the result of having an “un-shortness of breath” (which is different from just not having a shortness of breath, in the same way that an un-headache is not just not having a headache)?
There are more parts of the body capable of actively experiencing pleasure and feeling alive than one might think. We think the opposite of being in pain, most of the time, is a neutral state. When we think of bodily pleasure it is in a limited sense, a surface sense, the sensation on the skin of a warm blanket or a warm other person, being tickled or kissed or caressed. We don’t think about the many organs and structures of our body that get by day to day not feeling pleasure at all; our livers, our bones, our blood cells, our connective tissues. But they are capable of it.
I was thinking today about how one of the problems, perhaps, with society is that people have difficult recognising the significance of the non-physical. I am not, here, referring strictly to the spiritual; I think that if one has the idea in mind that there is a spiritual, non-physical component to life, one might be less likely to act in ways which disparage other non-physical parts of existence, which will be the topic of this essay and which I’ll get to in a moment. However, that certainly always isn’t the case, and “spiritual” people can be as hypocritical, and atheists as sensitive and aware, as anyone. (I put “spiritual” in quotes here because I think a part of true spirituality does involve awareness and pushing through ignorance. Hypocrisy, willing or unwilling blindness, and reluctance to give things consideration are at odds with spirituality.)
There are many components of our human experience that are non-physical, ones recognised as existing by the vast majority of humans, such as the emotions and the conscience. (There is also intuition, though that walks a line between being accepted and being written off as whimsy.) While we can argue that emotions have a chemical basis and thus are technically “physical” (though it is more difficult to pinpoint from whence the conscience comes), this is not my point. Rather, my point is that we do not see their physical effects or origins.
When a physical thing changes state, we can perceive it through our senses, which we believe to be objective and to relate directly to what is before us. Though most people know that the senses can be fooled, we have enough experience with physical objects to have formulated a set of rules for how they behave relative to how they appear. We can make sense of them, and we can say with relative confidence that if we see a green frog in front of us, then the being that we refer to as “a green frog” is present, and that we can interact with it as we would expect to interact with a frog (green or otherwise, most likely). As such, the existence of a frog is something hard to write off, muddle the purpose of, pretend “isn’t really a frog”, or dismiss if the frog is relevant to us. (For example, if we were looking for a frog, and we saw this frog, we could not so easily say to ourselves any more, “we’ve lost our frog”. The frog is right there, and most sane people would recognise that and act accordingly.)
A frog isn’t an especially good example, though. Not many people care whether or not a frog is present at any given time. Let’s take a more drastic example: a knife. If we are swinging a knife around carelessly, and we hit someone with the knife, we’ll feel very bad. Even if it’s only a small cut, we’ve done damage. We’ll probably panic and rush to attend to it even if the damage is really less than it seems, all the while profusely apologising. We find it extremely hard to pierce or cut someone intentionally, even only a little. To stab someone in the arm or slash them across the chest, a wound that they will likely recover from, is something that most people could never bring themselves to do. Our visceral horror at the idea is too strong, and part of the reason for this is that the harm is visible. We know what the outpouring of blood means for humans. We are instinctively revolted by wounds. There can be no question in our minds that we have caused pain to another being.
However, the same person who would never dream of stabbing another human, who would consider that that would make them a psychopath, might easily be able to yell and scream at them and fling painful insults. Most people don’t attack their friends with knives, but almost all of us at some point have wielded a sharp word. You can cut someone’s skin with a knife and in a week or so there’ll be no sign that you’ve touched them; in a year they probably won’t even remember that you were being a little careless in the kitchen while showing off your mid-air vegetable dicing technique, and scratched their arm a little. But fling one insult and it may stick with that person for life, if they don’t take steps to recover. You can stab someone and they’ll be better in a few months, but if you wound someone’s emotional self, that damage can alter the way they think. It can be repaired, but it’s so much harder. (This statement is not, of course, meant as a condoning of physical violence. It is rather a condemning of emotional violence.)
We wield words so much more carelessly than we wield knives, but we consider it much worse to do the latter– to the point that we consider drawing blood to be “violence”, when we rate movies and television shows as being suitable for certain age groups, but we very rarely consider a scene of one person verbally abusing another to be so. We don’t viscerally react to others’ emotional pain in the same way. And I think part of the reason we don’t react is that we can’t see it– see tears, yes, outward manifestations of it, but we cannot see the damage itself in the same way that we can see mangled flesh and outpourings of blood. We don’t see the state change, cannot observe a clear transformation in another being from happy mind to scared, confused, injured mind. We see a physical wound and we shudder, because we think that someone’s very person has been compromised, their internal structure harmed. But an emotional wound is a much deeper blow, much closer to the core of the person than any physical harm could be. Our emotions are seen as ephemeral, fickle, half-there things that can easily be warped and changed as we please; an emotional wound is seen as a lighter wound, something that can be shrugged off much more easily. Yet they are far and away the most fragile parts of us. (The only real exception to this assumption seems to be sexual assault, which I think is treated– in society; in all of this essay I am referring to what I think are the perceptions of the average person, not the legal system– as much worse than regular assault specifically because of the emotional factor. However, I think the damage that arises from sexual assault is perceived to be significant only for falling into a specific narrow category; somehow, we have managed to internalise that it leaves lasting scars and horrible memories for someone to be maltreated sexually, but have not allowed that conviction to spread to other forms of emotional abuse, which is what sexual abuse, physical harm notwithstanding, essentially is. Someone who verbally assaults a person, even if the verbal abuse is humiliating and hurtful, is not seen as nearly so vile, or as having done nearly as great a wrong, as someone who sexually assaults, whether physical harm was done or not.)
If we thought that every time we said a cruel word, we were doing much worse than sticking a knife in someone, would we be more careful with our words? If we realised that the things we say to each other now might last a person’s lifetime, would we do more to recompense for the times when we are thoughtless? We all act on instinct sometimes, say careless things in the heat of the moment, and we should no more wallow in guilt over than than over having accidentally swung a knife and nicked a finger; we can make efforts to be less careless, but our own emotions are also a difficult thing to control, and we should not be too hard on ourselves if we slip. Sometimes we may say things that hurt without it being intended for them to, and that too is not to be faulted. But we can avoid, at least, stabbing people deliberately, and if we are of the mindset that we should not physically lash out because we do not want to wound, then we should not emotionally lash out, either.
