Magic, Science, Religion, and Spirituality


    Reading Number One


           In our discussion in chapter 14, we explored the use of magic by Perennialist-influenced teachers. It is necessary to distinguish magic from science, religion, and spirituality.

           In his introduction to Idries Shah's Oriental Magic, Dr. Louis Marin, Director of the Ecole d'Anthropologie de Paris, distinguishes between religion and magic in this way:

      "religion . . . is submission to an almighty Creator to whom we raise our prayers, and magic consists of rites intended to compel supernatural forces, whatever they may be, to do the sorcerer's bidding."

           In our effort to discover the difference between magic, science, religion, and spirituality, we will examine two additional statements made by Dr. Marin in that same introduction:

      • "We must admit that almost all the religious ideas of primitive peoples are comprised in magic."

      • "The arcana present a particularly difficult obstacle to the researcher when, as nearly always the case, the magic formulae are in the possession of an hereditary caste of magicians who regard the secrets as their special heritage. This leads to the magicians as a body deliberately encouraging the ignorance of their followers . . ."

           In his critique entitled "Seeing Castaneda," anthropologist Paul Riesman points out how we ordinarily approach the study of "primitive magic."
      "Our social sciences generally treat the culture and knowledge of other people as forms and structures necessary for human life that those people have developed and imposed upon a reality which we know--or at least our scientists know--better than they do. We can therefore study those forms in relation to 'reality' and measure how well or ill they are adapted to it. In their studies of the cultures of other people, even those anthropologists who sincerely love the people they study almost never think that they are learning something about the way the world really is. Rather, they conceive of themselves as finding out what other people's conceptions of the world are."

           Riesman's criticism of anthropologists who assume that they know reality better than the the people they're studying is certainly useful in combatting scholastic hubris. But let's turn Riesman's idea inside out and realize that our search for the nature of magic, science, religion, and spirituality in this chapter is going to result not so much in finding what these phenomena really are, but what our presumptions about these elements are.

           Our defining magic as something distinct--and inferior--to science or religion is our way of presuming that we know the nature of magic, science, and religion and that our religions involving "submission to an almighty Creator" and science involving objective experience, are vastly superior to their magic which tries to compel supernatural forces to do their bidding.

            A being with a higher consciousness, with a discernment of reality vastly superior to ours, might see what we call "religion," "science," and "magic" as phenomena of the same kind: using "rites intended to compel supernatural forces" to do the practitioner's bidding. They might see religious and scientific leaders (priests, rabbis, ministers, mullahs, gurus, researchers, professors, etc.) as castes who regard the secrets of their sect as their special heritage and as groups who deliberately encourage ignorance in their followers.

            H.C. Lea's study History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages recognizes that as one religion supplants another, "the secret rites of the superseded faith become the forbidden magic of its successor."

           

      Stewart Edward White expands this notion even further.

      "The history of all progress in knowledge is a 'de-occultization.' Fully half of the things we do daily as a matter of course would, even as recently as two centuries ago, have been considered magic, without explanation except as the product of occult forces and knowledge."


           In the West, occultist practices have been classified as falling either within White Magic (positive) or Black Magic (negative). Some extra-normal magical phenomena may be simply the application of knowledge about the physical universe which is not yet understood by conventional science. And the effects realized by some magicians may be a form of deception perpetrated on gullible people.

            Most of the rituals of magic seem to be for the purpose of heightening the emotional state of the practitioners, on the assumption that in a heightened emotional state they will be able to impose their will upon elemental forces. Within the magical circle, the spirit is evoked, commanded, then dismissed.

            The Scottish anthropologist James Frazer saw magic as humankind's attempt to dominate nature directly for practical ends, through knowledge of the laws which govern it. From this viewpoint, magic is akin to science. To him religion is humankind's discovery of the limitations of its magical powers and the appeal to higher beings such as demons, ancestor-spirits or gods. This conception is as inadequate as the earlier one we examined; religion, too, involves the attempt to dominate reality for practical ends, through whatever means available: prayers, rituals, sacred objects, or cult rulers.

            Some thinkers have tried to prove that there is radical difference between magic and science.

           "Science is born of experience, magic made by tradition. Science is guided by reason and corrected by observation, magic, impervious to both, lives in an atmosphere of mysticism. Science is open to all, a common good of the whole community, magic is occult, taught through mysterious initiations, handed on in a hereditary or at least in very exclusive filiation. While science is based on the conception of natural forces, magic springs from the idea of a certain mystic, impersonal power, which is believed in by most primitive people. This power, called mana by some Melanesians, arungquiltha by certain Australian tribes, wakan, manitu by various American Indians, and nameless elsewhere, is stated to be a well-nigh universal idea found wherever magic flourishes." 1

            Here again, these ideas will not do. If you examine modern science objectively, it contains all the supposedly distinctive features of magic. Nothing is as mystical as some of the concepts of modern science:

      • the inability to determine if a phenomenon is a particle or a wave
      • the inability to determine the precise location of a phenomenon because the observation of it affects its reality (Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle)
      • the mysterious nature of the speed of light, supposedly a speed which cannot be surpassed by any other phenomenon (Einstein's theory of relativity)

            The magical quality of the theory of relativity has been humorously expressed in a limerick:

          There was a young lady named Bright,
          Whose speed was much faster than light,
          She departed one day
          In a relative way
          And returned on the previous night.

            We have been unable to discover any clear differentiation between magic, religion, and science. Each of these terms has been used to refer to humankind's attempt to understand and control its known world. Each involves belief systems, hierarchical rankings, rituals, and heresies. The heresy of religion is magic (occultism, alchemy, spiritism, or what-have-you), while science claims that questioning of its mechanistic, materialistic world view constitutes heresy or psychosis.

            With few exceptions, modern science is taught as if it were the "received truth," with no indication that its principles are merely hypotheses.

      "When I learned my basic Darwin in high school--and new-Darwinism and new genetics in college--I learned it as dogmatic truth, as I might have learned a religious catechism. Not in the sense that no physical evidence was adduced--there was enough of that--but in the sense that no alternative theory of the evidence was ever introduced, no critical examination of assumptions and incongruities ever encouraged. Indeed, I was led to believe that the only alternative to orthodox biology was biblical fundamentalism and the 'creationist' movement. Darwin's Victorian antagonist Bishop Wilberforce was held up as the epitome of anti-intellectualism--without any mention that even the good bishop (while no giant mind by any standards) raised his scriptural objection to Darwin only as the last of several criticisms. The others (apparently suggested to Wilberforce by the anatomist Richard Owen) included a number of shrewd thrusts at Darwin's theory and evidence, some of which could not be parried by Darwin's defenders then, some of which still stand as serious reservations to the present day." 2

            At present orthodox religion and science hold to the materialistic, mechanistic world view, while the practitioners of magic believe that they deal with phenomena beyond the ken of science. If you don't believe that orthodox religion subscribes to the materialistic, mechanistic viewpoint, try speaking with one of their leaders about the last time someone in his church experienced a healing.

            We can say, then, that "science," "religion," and "magic" are terms used to categorize belief systems. Most often, the adherents of science use the term "religion" to refer to conventional theological groups and use the term "magic" to refer to "primitive people" or eccentric groups in this culture. The term "science" is most often used to refer to the present system of hypotheses about the world, though it is presented as objective truth and not as tentative assumptions, some of which "work" within its own framework and others not.

            In chapter three, I suggested that knowledge is gained through experience prescribed by a teacher. We live in an age when it is assumed that:

      • we are capable, in our present state, to gain knowledge from ordinary experience
      • we gain knowledge only through our ordinary senses
      • contemporary science is the sum total of our present knowledge

            The current practice is to use the terms "magic," "science," and "religion," in a pejorative manner: science and religion are good; magic is bad. Or, for the practitioner of magic: science and religion are delusions; magic is "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." 3

            In certain eras specific thinkers used the terms "magic," "science," or "religion," to refer to a kind of knowing which differs from the current empirical method of sense experience and mathematical ordering.

      "The 'Hermetic wisdom,' as it has been called, was in effect dedicated to the notion that real knowledge occurred only via the union of subject and object, in a psychic-emotional identification . . . rather than a purely intellectual examination of concepts." 4     
      Since the terms "magic," "science," and "religion" are currently being used primarily as means for invidious distinctions by sectarians of various stripes, it's necessary to reserve a word which can refer to this other approach to knowledge. Using "spirituality" to refer to this special specialized search for knowledge we can distinguish it from the other terms:

      • science thus becomes the current world view based on the conception of knowledge as materialistic, mechanistic, and empirical

      • religion is the accumulation of theological dogma and ritual

      • magic is the assumed search for extra-normal phenomena through the exercise of heightened emotions

            What is this contrasted approach to knowledge that we are referring to as spirituality? The acquiring of understanding through actual participation in the reality.

           We should never attempt to take conceptual possession of "Brahman" (God) or '"sat" (consciousness), to concretize these realities, to conceive of them as an "Id" or as the "collective unconscious." The intellect fragments reality, objectifies it, wants to take possession of it. We must reawaken a long-forgotten power in ourselves with which to regain a comprehension of all-inclusive knowledge.

            As we develop this dormant perceptive faculty, we will no longer want to take possession of anything. We learn to allow "ultimate reality" simply to occur, in the pristineness of its mystery. Our task is to endure it as such and keep ourselves open to it. We lose any ability to understand if we seek to manipulate "ultimate reality" by means of our concepts. We have to revivify our heart-sense to become clear-visioned. If we refine our spiritual constitution, then "ultimate reality" grants us its truth.

            The appropriate human approach is reverent silence that is prepared to "hear." Buddha two and a half millennia ago exemplified this noble silence as the only behavior worthy of the real truth. That is why we must try to subdue our loquacity, lest we dissipate "ultimate reality" with mere talk.

           By "ultimate reality" we refer to that which permits the mysterious arising of being out of non-being. This arising occurs as an illumination within our consciousness. Western thinkers think of "consciousness" as a kind of intellectual receptacle in which a human subject stores the ideas it forms of external and internal objects. Consciousness, however, has nothing to do with a "subject" or with a "mind" and their psychological functions. Consciousness is the non-objectifiable occurrence of the primordial, emergent, opening-up illumination. We can only experience the ultimate truth about reality as contentless lighting-up and an arising into being.

      1 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion

      2 Theodore Roszak, Unfinished Animal

      3 Aleister Crowley's definition

      4 Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World