…as part of a breathing, living whole.

I woke up today with an unusual thought on my mind: that of how completely and continuously we are integrated with our environment through the simple act of breathing.

Why do we breathe? It seems to confer organisms no particular advantage that they must rely on aerobic metabolism to survive. We could have come into being a different way. Yet every living creature I can think of relies on some variation of this basic process: the intake and expelling of air, water or some other substance as a sustainer of life.

To breathe reminds me of how inseparable I am from the world around me. It is not even just that “I” rely on this world to live; the very life processes that go on in my body rely on the action of outside elements, such as oxygen. Cut off completely from all that is external to me, I would die within, quite literally, a matter of seconds. The simple act of breathing renders “my body” part of one giant body; for if our body is all that is inside a certain boundary, how can the constant flow of oxygen into my lungs and bloodstream, and carbon dioxide out therefrom, not be considered “part of my body”? Which part of my red blood cells is part of me: the whole, or only that part that does not consist of oxygen from outside?

As I see it, it’s all part of my body. If the oxygen is “less my body” because it enters and leaves so quickly, are my skin cells, which rapidly die and are replaced, or the blood cells themselves, which live for an average of four months, also not my body? It seems to me that breathing is one way in which the fact that we exist as part of a giant networked organism is conveyed to us.

Maybe eating is another. Though it can be argued that a lot of the food we eat is taken from nature nonconsensually, some food is created specifically for the purpose of supporting life. Consider, for example, the fruit, which, unlike some plants that defend themselves from predators by tasting unpleasant, secreting poison, or dressing themselves in barbs and thorns, is specifically designed to appeal to the senses and to nourish the animal body, and which is in many cases cut off deliberately from its body (the tree or bush) when in a perfect condition to be eaten. The fruit, of course, and the consumption thereof, is an essential reproduction strategy for the plant; the seeds contained within survive their trip through the animal’s digestive system and pass unharmed out the other end, far from the host plant and already surrounded by their own natural fertiliser.

Sounds unpleasant, I know, but it works for the plant, and it keeps the animal alive. It’s hard to argue that the fruit was not invented by nature for the purposes of being eaten by animals, and thus is an entirely guilt-free food. We are meant, at least at this stage in evolution, to interact with our environment through eating, and to this end nature has given us sweet-tasting, nutritious foods that fulfil their purposes, both for the plant and for the animal, only when consumed.

Think again of the function of the fruit, too: reproduction. When an animal carries a fruit within its stomach, it acts practically as a surrogate mother for the plant. It’s quite unusual, when you think about it, and another example of the intricate interconnectedness of all life. We are, in many ways that we don’t even recognise, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, to many other things on this planet, in this universe. Many factors aided in our creation, and we will aid in the creation of many other things. That’s not just fluff: it’s simple scientific fact. Yet it is also a wondrous thing. Why should we not marvel at it?

God created Adam and Eve, not Jonathan and Da– oh, wait….

(…I just typed that as “Adamn and Eve”; Freudian slip much? I think it’s pretty clear where the majority of Christian denominations think I’d be going. )

This is not the essay the title might be leading you to expect: I’m not about to argue the case for Jonathan and David (or Ruth and Naomi, for that matter) having been a Biblical representation of loving homosexual relationships. Many have done that before me, many have done it better, and in truth I’m not even sure where I stand on the idea that Jonathan and David were non-platonic, nor is it really of huge concern to me. (I have read some of the evidence, and I do admit that the majority of the sane evidence seems to point to them having been a romantic and sexual couple, but as with trying to determine the true meaning of anything written in a culture vastly different from our own, it’s not conclusive.) What is clear even if one takes the story in the most conservative of lights, however– even allowing for all the ridiculousness involving a passage translated in most Bibles as “they kissed each other” being papered over with the obviously fake “they sadly shook hands”*, and talk about distorting the supposedly infallible word of God, by the way– is that they were two men whose bond of love for each other surpassed their love for anyone else in their lives. 1 Sam. 18:1 tells us that “the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” In 1 Sam. 20:4, “Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David, saying, ‘May the LORD seek out the enemies of David.’ Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own life.” And so on, and so forth. You can look it up yourself.

So with that in mind, I have a modest proposal (no, not that kind, though I can’t deny there’s a hint of satire lurking here) to make to those who would have the laws of the United States be rooted in sound Biblical teaching. Putting aside the fact for the moment that I find it abhorrent that any nation’s laws should be based on religious doctrine** rather than common sense questions of whether we can know an action to be harmful, I’d like to see a law supporting– or perhaps more ideally, the lack of a law excluding– those individuals who, feeling the bonds of intense friendship and devotion towards one another, wish to set up a household and/or be considered significant to one another for the purposes of such things as, say, hospital visitation rights, and other social and legal acknowledgements that a particular person is “close enough” to another person for that bond to be accorded serious weight. I would like to see close, serious friendships treated as a vital part of a person’s life and “chosen family”; I would like it to be acknowledged that those who share in such friendships can face serious emotional anguish if their mutual contributions to each other’s lives are not taken into account, for example in decisions of who counts as significant enough to that person to be allowed to be close to them at crucial times of their lives. I would like it if it were acknowledged that, for some people, a close friendship might be the primary bond in their lives, or at least a highly central one, and should be treated as seriously as a bond of marriage or blood. We could call it, say, the “Jonathan and David law”.***

Now here’s an interesting question: how many Christians who believe the Bible is the inerrant and unchanging word of God, and who are currently fiercely promoting measures to make their interpretations of certain parts of the Bible (such as the moral repugnance of abortion) part of a legal code, would embrace a proposal for such a law? I’m willing to bet that the majority of right-wing, fundamentalist campaigners would feel uncomfortable with this law. Some might accept that it’s Biblical, but would not latch onto it passionately; I am highly confident that very few if any of the people asked, in this hypothetical scenario, would immediately put their weight behind such a law in the same way as they do laws regarding abortion (which have a very shaky, if perhaps non-existant, Biblical basis). If they’re truly passionate about what the Bible says, though, they should. If they really want to make the word of God law in their country, they should be feeling as intensely about the rights of today’s Jonathans and Davids, about the Bible’s touching story of a bond between two men so strong that it surpasses “the love of women”, as they do about people’s rights to uphold any other principle that the Bible supposedly favours. (Let’s quietly skim over “slavery” for now.) But there are very few if any people out there who aren’t also engaged in GLBT rights advocacy who are using this story to make any kind of case. Why not? It’s right there in black and white. If the Bible is your holy book, your inerrant statement from your deity, you should be reading it cover to cover and vehemently defending every idea in it.

Jonathan and David’s story is one of the most controversial parts of the Bible today; so controversial it’s been censored by some translators. Few people want to devote themselves to embracing what it tells us, and few except the liberal ever even talk about it. Yet if the Bible is the rich, beautiful message from divinity that is claimed, isn’t it wrong to ignore, overlook or feel ashamed of any part of it? Isn’t it wrong to censor it? Isn’t it wrong to not look at the guidelines it’s supposed to be laying out for our lives and put all weight possible behind making sure that people have the right to live by those guidelines?

Again, please note that I’m far from a supporter of religion-based legislation; this is all hypothetical. But it’s something to think about, isn’t it?

*Maybe in the Harmonian translation….

**At least in worlds where said religious suppositions merely remain suppositions and not known truths. Harmonia is a theocracy for reasons that go far beyond conjecture.

***Edit: Actually, the more research I do the more it seems that Ruth and Naomi’s story is actually an even better inspiration for this hypothetical law. “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” Can any Bible believer read this passage and doubt that friends should have the right to be seen as priorities in each others’ lives?

Tuning your metaphysical television.

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.

Why, if you think you don’t understand the spiritual, it might just be that: thinking you don’t understand.

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.

There is no dark magic.

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.