|
a personal soul. From a strictly magical viewpoint we are an accretion
rather than an unfolded unity. The psyche has no particular centre,
we are colonial beings, a rich collage of many selves. Thus as our
bodies contain fragments from countless former beings, so does our
psyche. However certain magical traditions retain techniques which
allow the adept to transfer quite large amounts of his psyche in one
piece should he consider this more useful than dispersing himself
into humanity at large.
Each of the paradigms take a different view of the self.
Transcendentalists view self as spirit inserted into matter. As a
fragment or figment of deity the self regards itself as somehow
placed in the world in a non arbitrary manner and endowed with free
will. The transcendental view of self is relatively stable and
non-problematic if shared as a consensus with all significant
others. However, transcendental theories about the placement and
purpose of self and its relationship to deities are mutually
exclusive. Conflicting transcendentalisms can rarely co-exist for
they threaten to disconform the images of self. Encounters which are
not decisive tend to be mutually negatory in the long run.
Of the three views of self the purely materialistic one is the most
problematical. If mind is an extension of matter it must obey
material laws and the resulting deterministic view conflicts with
the subjective experience of free will. On the other hand if mind
and consciousness are assumed to be qualitatively different from
matter then the self is incomprehensible to itself in material
terms. Worse still perhaps, the materialist self must regard itself
as a phenomenon of only temporary duration in contradiction of the
subjective expectation of continuity of consciousness. Because a
purely materialist view of self is so austere few are prepared to
confront such naked existentialism. Consequently materialist
cultures exhibit a frantic appetite for sensation, identification
and more or less disposable irrational beliefs. Anything that will
make the self seem less insubstantial.
The magical view of self is that it is based on the same random
capricious chaos which makes the universe exist and do what it does.
The magical self has no centre, it is not a unity but an assemblage
of parts, any number of which may temorarily club together and call
themselves "I". This accords with the observation that our
subjective experience consists of our various selves experiencing
each other. Free will arises either as an outcome of a dispute
between our various selves or as a sudden random creation of a new
idea or option. In the magical view of self there is no
spirit/matter or mind/body split and the paradoxes of free will and
determinism disappear. Some of our acts arise from random choices
between conditioned options and some from conditional choices
between randomly created options. In practice most of our acts are
based on rather complex hierarchical sequences of all four of these
mechanisms. As soon as we have acted one of our selves proclaims
"I did that!" so loudly that most of the other selves think they did
it too.
Each of the three views of self has something derogatory to say
about the other two. From the standpoint of the transcendental self
the materialist self has become prey to pride of intellect, the
demon hubris, whilst the magical view of self is considered to be
|