Reality and imagination are forever intertwined, and it’s from their potent combination that magic is concocted. Modern scientists are often against this. Richard Dawkins has felt a vocation to keep reality and imagination apart, for the mischief they can cause when entangled. It’s rather like saying, “We know what boys and girls can get up to, so let’s segregate them, and make the girls keep decently covered, to avoid inflaming the boys’ imagination. Only in privacy and legal bond may they merge, in order to keep the species from dying out.” This is no theory. I see it on my own street, where the mosque’s prayer sessions are always segregated, and predominantly open to men only. So, dear friends, what shall we talk about: sex, religion, magic or the interconnectedness of all things?
My search for the four-leaved clover showed me how reality and imagination are intertwined. Michael found it quite spontaneously without trying. You could say the finding was proof of luck in itself, rather than heralding luck to come. But I took it further and went back on my own, trying to find these things again. The first time I couldn’t find the meadow at all. The next time I did find it. The clover was in the exact place I’d recorded so clearly in imagination. But the growing clover plants looked different. In both instances I had been misled by imagination, for in reality I had not concentrated on the visual scene with consistent attention. To construct a complete story of our exploit I’d unconsciously “embroidered”, as we say, to cover the gaps to make a complete story. My embroideries were concocted from snippets in a mental library of images, because one hedgerow, one stile, one clover plant, looks much like another. We don’t register the detail of every little thing we actually see, but generalise. This is how witnesses testify in court, with partially false memories. Even scientists are liable to do the same, unless stringent steps are taken.
Such masses of data stream into our brains, ready for us to dismiss or focus on, depending on what we find important! When I conducted my own experiments in LSD in 1971—not as a scientist, you understand!—I was struck by the psychedelic vividness of my perceptions. When specks of fluff moved busily on the carpet, wriggling like maggots, it was actually caused by my eyeballs moving, not the fluff. The drug had inhibited the processing which habitually ensures we see what’s practical to our survival, as opposed to pleasurably mind-blowing. We have an inherited capacity to look at a complex scene, such as the inside of a forest, with its trunks and foliage stretching off to the distance, and yet see the slightest movement—to aid our hunting, or the detection of an enemy, with his poisoned dart at the ready. LSD presents reality in a different way, that paralyses some of the equipment which normally keeps us safe.
We train ourselves to see what we need to see, just as a dog can be trained to sniff for drugs, or follow the scent of a wanted man.
In the busy world of maintaining a complex society and earning a living, we filter out that which distracts. When we can take time out, another world awaits: the world of poets, dreamers and magicians, where whatever is intertwined stays tangled. It’s not a fake world at all. If anything has been Photoshopped, it’s the objective world of science. Despite the interconnectedness of all things, science must disentangle the intertwined, try to separate the inevitable observer from the observed.
Bodger: A person who lives in a mobile hut in the woods, cuts down trees then turns them into chair legs using string lathes. Originates from South Bucks where bodgers used to supply Wye Vale with wood for the furniture industry. Example: “Me dad’s grandad was a bodger in Hellbottom Wood back in the day.”
a wayfarer’s notes 
Further ruminations on my “Hellbottom Wood” Google search. There appears to be no other Hellbottom Wood in the whole wide world. Even “Charlie, the Omniscient Teddy Bear of Hellbottom Wood” is owned by a musician who lives in my town (and like most young people, professes to despise it.)
Makes me feel a sense of belonging indeed.
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What we perceive of as reality is a work of our senses and the mind and you discovered with LSD the condition of either can and does change from time to time.
Persons who have tried magic mushrooms report of scenes of magical worlds that appear very real to them while the experience is on.
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Vincent,
The sky is beautiful. It seems the clouds in England float close to the ground.
Hellbottom, Foggybottom, and Bellbottom sound good, but the word order seems more like Japanese than English. The bottom of hell is more English style of word order, isn't it? You don't say Hell's bottom because hell is not a person, is that right? Do you know “Walkman” is a word created by Japanese in error?
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The possessive 's can be used whether or not the noun is a person: for example “Hell's Angel”.
The wood is a mile away from the Hellfire Caves, so-called because they were one of the venues of the Hellfire Club, so named, I believe, because the landowner, Sir Franxis Dashwood, was interested in paganism (which from a Christian viewpoint was devil-worship).
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Ashok, yes I believe that. And in the last 20 years much work has been done in neuropsychology which tells us more about how the senses and mind work together.
The point I was trying to make in the post, if I could have expressed it better, was that rational or scientific thinking is less true because it is less complete. It asks us to disregard aspects of our subjective experience in order to conform with its orthodoxies. Thus missing the point of much cultural heritage, and dismissing it as superstition.
Militant scientists claim they are doing a service by exposing the falsity of charlatans who exploit credulity.
But we could achieve the same effect more simply by urging people to trust their own direct experience.
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There are problems on both sides i.e in our cultural and spiritual heritage as well as in the scientific view. Whereas, the cultural and spiritual side undoubtedly imregnated with the doings of charlatans that exploit credulity of the gullible the scientific militants are subject to the limitations of science that is an evergrowing field. At each stage os scientific development the militant scientist assumes that science has reached the ultimate in its discovery from the time science thought tha the world was flat and even earlier, and even at the present time when much more probabaly remains to be discovered. Such militancy arises more amongst pseudo scientists rather than scientific leaders such as Einstein, Heisenberg etc. who appreciated the limitations of science.
As regards our cultural heritage one has to be careful to sift the truths from the purely imaginary or fraud as well as keep an open mind, and ultimately as you rightly said one has to rely on one's own direct experience.
My own recent speculation on the spiritual side has been on how much we do because of our own free will and how much is becausse nature or the universal intelligience makes us do using us as an instrument. Recently I watched a program on the discovery channel where a hunter was trapped in the Canadian wilderness for four days and about to die. At the last minute another Canadian who was a rescue expert and para medic was driven inexplicabaly to the spot and save the trapped Canadian. The rescue expert does noy understand why he took that route on that particular day after hesitating several times because in his many years of hiking in the rockies he had never taken that direction.
I viewed this as an act of the universal intelligience that had decided to save a human life and used another human as an instrument to do it. This because even in my own experience I have found that sometimes during the lowest points in one's life a mysterious divine or angelic intervention takes place to save the situation. It is as if the universal intelligience keeps an eye all the time like a watchful parent on a child playing in a park and intervening suddenly at the critical moment of danger.
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sorry for the numerous typos in the last comment. I rushed through on an unwilling keybord to key that in.
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Ashok, your typos were almost invisible. But what you have written is very important to me. You have expressed something that has been at the back of my mind, not fully understood or expressed, for several years, during the lifespan of this blog.
I shall quote from what you have written above (correcting typos in the process!):
My own recent speculation on the spiritual side has been on how much we do because of our own free will and how much nature or the universal intelligence makes us do, using us as an instrument.
Thank you for this. You have brought to the surface a buried thread in my own thought, one which the universal intelligence, I think, has been trying to express in my thought and writing.
Coincidentally, I've been going through all my blog posts for a purpose I shall explain in a forthcoming post, and found one called Writing Instrument which contains the following:
My own desire is to be a writing instrument rather than a writer, the recipient of inspiration rather than its owner. Then I can focus on polishing and structuring the words: that is the engineering part. Without inspiration there is only concoction, like factory-made food.
What I am understanding from your words, dear Ashok, is the continuous, though often hidden, thread of intent within me to be an instrument of universal intelligence: a writing instrument.
And apart from the tricky business of trying to position oneself to be an instrument, you have in your comment illuminated another point which I've been circling round in this blog, without actually pinpointing it.
You speak of Nature or the universal intelligence.
Yes. Nature is the universal intelligence. Or so it seems. And this is the astonishing thing which unites the unnamed Indian sage who first pronounced that Atman is Brahman, with the New Age practitioner who sees healing in this or that.
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I just looked up the oracle (Google) to see if I was right to speak of the “unnamed Indian sage”. I found this, which is relevant to that which I feel we have been discussing:
“The ultimate reality remains Brahman and nothing else. The Advaita equation is simple. It is due to Maya that the one single Atman (the individual soul) appears to the people as many Atmans, each in a single body. Once the curtain of maya is lifted, the Atman is exactly equal to Brahman. Thus, due to true knowledge, an individual loses the sense of ego (Ahamkara) and achieves liberation, or Moksha.” (Wikipedia, Brahman)
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Keiko: yes it does look as though the clouds float close to the ground! They often look like that here in these Chiltern Hills, but I think they are higher than they look.
But this formation of clouds is my favourite. It has the simple name “cumulus”.
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Dear Vincent, you speak as one who is close to enlightenment.
However as we already said spritual realisation is not easily described in words and has to be experienced individually. Each one of us has to climb the stairs himself using the words of other enlightened beings as vague directions.
Keiko, over the last year i was living in a Himalyan town of Nainital. The town is built on a hill around a lakeside and from the upper parts of the town one often sees the clouds below (as from an aeroplane). It is a pretty picture when one sees some of the town above the clouds and some of it below. Some paictures of the town are in my blog.
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Hi Ashok,
I've been reading your several web sites. They are fascinating. I left my comments on Sumerians. I also read your engineering site and thought the discussion on environment very interesting.
Thank you, Vincent. Cumulus sounds familiar. It's uplifting sky over Hellbottom. I love the word, by the way.
You have many interesting friends. I'm super slow reader, but I hope to catch up.
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Hi Vincent
“Thus, due to true knowledge, an individual loses the sense of ego (Ahamkara) and achieves liberation, or Moksha.”
As we have discussed it may be significant whether one sees this loss/liberation as relative or absolute. The Hindus seem to think it can be absolute.
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Intellectually, I understand what you are saying, Raymond, about relative or absolute. But I don't know about its being significant. I don't feel I am altered by what “the Hindus seem to think” or even what Wikipedia says.
And this is like reading a map. When I took the trip to Hellbottom Wood, I saw from my map that I was going west, and that the distance was about two miles. But I wasn't dependent on the map. I could derive the information from the position of the sun and my count of the paces, as delegated to a pedometer. And really, the information wasn't needed at all, except in a possible circumstance where I got lost and needed clues how to get back.
That analogy gives a pretty good representation of the significance of what the Hindus may have thunk or still think, I think!
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Yes Vincent, and to tell you the truth I suspect that anything I have to say may also not be significant.
But I do enjoy scrapping with you.
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Well it is obviously significant to you, and therefore it interests me, whether it makes us duel about nonduality or rejoice in the common cause of interfaith oneness & prayer to the known or unknown God.
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oh, my, what a FEAST! It's a delight to be home and reading when what is in front of me is such nourishment. Both the initial post and the subsequent comments are delicious!
Drawings of the visions of those who take ayahuasca show images that look astonishingly like our own double helix DNA, and some of the documented healings (such as growth of new seratonin receptors) certainly must go deep into our structural make-up to achieve their results.
To me the question is always one of what we have inhibited and decided not to see in our daily life. If we have decided to edit it out, we can unlearn that pattern and again learn to see.
Is that what we call magic, those unedited ways of seeing? Is that where the connections are hidden? My goal these last few years is to learn to 'see' in the ways of old, in the 'visionary' ways that are talked about in every culture. The problem is compounded because we use the language of vision (do you see what I'm saying?) indiscriminately to mean understanding, and that serves to block our reception of ways of knowing that don't happen in the optic nerve.
'seeing' doesn't make it so. Especially when we are agreed that what we've seen is a fraction of what was there before our brain edited it.
I like your comment that “rational or scientific thinking is less true because it is less complete” — this is an ongoing source of irritation to me. Scientists edit edit edit, then at the end of their experiments proclaim a truth that is, at best, provably true only in their artificially constructed environment. This has very real consequences when the science is tasked with determining if a chemical (for instance) is poisonous – it may be tolerable on it's own, but not in combination with other common chemicals. Scientists acknowledge this – then shrug and move on, repeating the original finding as if it were of value. It's easily examined in this context – looking at chemicals – but I believe the rule about experimental conditions is equally important when one looks at experiences in consciousness.
ohhh, there is so much richness in the comments here that I could talk for hours. Wish we could all sit together and do just that!
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I like this idea of interconnectedness.
Debussy's music has a magical quality…..he was interested in the place where nature meets the imagination.
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Hello Raymond,
Appreciated your comment in one of my blogs and have replied there. Hoping to see a blog by you as well that some or all of us could visit.
Hayden,
Great to have you back from your trip and read your thought provoking stuff
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Hi Hayden
“I believe the rule about experimental conditions is equally important when one looks at experiences in consciousness.”
Reminds me of something Zhuangzi wrote: “Knowing (intellectually) always causes the loss of something that cannot be known intellectually.”
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Vincent, As usual, I love your writing. And in this piece, I am visualizing you presenting this–I can hear your verbal voice. I imagine that you would be quite an outstanding public speaker and a joy to listen to.
I appreciate how you point out that “We train ourselves to see what we need to see…” Yes, this is so true. Your post brings a lot of things to my mind, of my own experiences. But also of our overall awareness and willingness as humans to be mindful that we make choices every moment. In my curiosity to read more about scent, I am reading more about all of our senses, and have already stumbled upon information that I take for granted. I'm still reading and digesting, but your post brings this aspect of awareness to the forefront for me.
Also, I've only skimmed the surface years ago of spiral dynamics and the work of Ken Wilber. Chances are you’ve come by them. Your blog makes me think of both. I’m not usually a theory type person, but what stuck in my brain of spiral dynamics—what I took away was this idea of going through these states—what should we call them? Levels of awareness? And once we cross over into one and leave the other behind, we still have remnants of the previous state, but our awareness expands, but as we adjust, it becomes almost second nature. I find that fascinating. Even though it may be simple. And as I write it, it does sound simple enough, but I think it’s also complicated. We are such evolutionary creatures—rather like butterflies and it seems that we have opportunities every moment to continue metamorphosing as a butterfly does. Your blogs always cause me to think and bring up memories for me and also experiences I’ve had or forgotten about. Hopefully my thoughts have come out properly.
The images you’ve created in your writing are lovely too and make it all stick. And also one image that this piece keeps projecting for me is the well-known image of a man looking through the universe. Do you know the one I’m talking about? It’s one of my favorite images, ever since I first laid eyes on it, it spoke to me.
I’m sure I’ll be chewing on your blog for a while…Thanks for that.
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So sorry, Vincent. My post didn’t go the first time and showed server error on my end, so when I pressed back and tried again, I had no idea it was posting again and again. Lesson learned.
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Rebb, It's OK I deleted all your deletions, so no one will see them any more.
I've heard of Ken Wilber and briefly read some of his stuff on the Web. And I think I recall something about spiral dynamics too. Would probably agree with what he writes, which is as it should be. I want to agree with everyone!—to the extent that human experience has a common base, and we are all blind men feeling the same elephant and trying to tell in words what it is, though we may be at different ends of the elephant. (I refer to a well-known Indian tale of wisdom.)
“Still having remnants of the previous state” is an interesting theme. One which has recurred in this blog over five years is the slightly different one of memory remnants. This touches on scent very much, for scent seems to be, in all mammals, the sense which best carries associations and memories. In humans, other senses can perform a similar function. I even think that my own “wayfaring” (aimless wandering) has the subconscious aim of travelling through corridors of memories, reliving the past so as to extract from it an understanding which I missed first time round.
But some of my memories provoked by sense-input go back to early childhood – four years onwards – and some of those seem to echo an even earlier existence. This provokes the teasing idea of reincarnation, though I suspect it's just a quirk of the brain, or possibly a set of memories imprinted on us genetically, just as birds for example have imprinted instincts which guide their behaviour.
I believe Wordsworth explored the phenomenon of memories which seem to be left over from a previous life in his long poem The Prelude, but I regret to say I haven't read much of it.
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Raymond, this Chuang Tzŭ cat was quite a dude. I cannot get my head or tongue round Zhuangzi.
(Why can't names be left alone? Why do we have to say Beijing? The French say Londres, not London. The Italians say Parigi, not Paris. I think it is political. Everyone wants to get on the right side of the Chinese, because it's their turn once again to run the big Empire.)
“Knowing (intellectually) always causes the loss of something that cannot be known intellectually.”
Yes, I think that is why I don't want to know anything intellectually. But I challenge Chuang Tzu about that loss. Surely it is only a temporary loss, or we are all Doomed!
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But Hayden, there is hope in what you say, and provides a corrective to what Chuang Tzu (in translation of course) appears to be saying about loss.
You say “To me the question is always one of what we have inhibited and decided not to see in our daily life. If we have decided to edit it out, we can unlearn that pattern and again learn to see.”
For in this you imply that learned patterns are not etched indelibly but Chuang Tzu's “something that cannot be known intellectually” is etched indelibly.
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Rebb, I would be a poor public speaker, and a poor private speaker too, come to that. Repetitious, boring, continuing long after the point is made, etc.
That's why I write. There is some hope there, with ruthless editing.
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Vincent, Yes, human experience does seem to have a common base. I like the Indian tale of wisdom you cited.
Scent is quite powerful. It makes me wish I had more scent memories than I do. It’s great walking down the street or going into a restaurant or whereve–and to have a smell transport us is so amazing. It’s a treat when it happens in a surprising way, rather than being brought about by purposefully going to the scent. Either way, it’s something quite sublime. As I write this, I realize too that there are also ‘bad’ memory associations and I feel for those people.
I feel similar to you in your “wayfaring.” I have that feeling too of stumbling upon memories that only lead to other– “corridors of memories.” Nice way to put that, Vincent. Of all your blogs (and I missed so many, since I joined late), the one that has made a deep impression upon my senses visually and scent-wise is your Amber blog (which I know you know). Something about it stuck with me in a way that it will probably be remembered when I see the word Amber or when I see Amber itself.
At times I have sensed in myself something of ‘an even earlier existence.’ It is a feeling though, a hunch. Something I’m happy to understand only in feeling and in the little bit I understand of reincarnation.
I will have to jot down Wordsworth’s poem. I have not read it, but it sounds intriguing.
On speaking: It would be fascinating to observe you thinking aloud. You make me laugh at how you describe yourself. I peeked at your recent blog and I am excited that you are in the process of writing a book. You may be asked to speak about it, etc., etc. What fun! But yes, with writing there is, as you say, “ruthless editing.”
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