Essay #30:  Mind as Magician

My mind perhaps is like a pond
In which the sky is reflected,
A trickster with his hat and wand
And all his gear collected.

As generous as the sky is with the mind, the mind is not so generous with the sky.  As freely as the sky accepts all that the mind has to offer, the mind selectively collects what portions of the sky it will retain in itself or reflect.  The mind is like an emphasis or depression in the Earth where the downward force of gravity brings what flows or rolls into it.  Once caught, that which occupies the mind tends to remain or to be exchanged for other things only by a slow process of osmosis or erosion.

The gravity of the mind results from its own limitedness, its own boundaries.  Were it not an emphasis or depression that which crossed the mind would continue to flow on or roll about unimpeded.  It would be as open-ended as the sky so that all in all the Earth and sky would be a perfect mirroring.  Once upon a time, perhaps, when the Earth was all covered by ocean, this would have been the case.  But as land masses formed and seas, lakes, and ponds were retained within them, the Earth’s mirror became divided and the scope of its divisions limited into parcels only of all that the sky remained a witness to.

Metaphorically, this is how it is for the mind.  The gravitas of the mind results from its own limitedness and not—as it thinks—from its own importance or grasp of the matter.  What it selectively collects also results from its limitedness.  Likewise, its exclusions stem from the same cause.  Thus the mind’s ignorance tends to be self-perpetuating.  The same bank that encloses and focuses its awareness prevents the mind from easily seeing beyond its own field of attention.  As soon as the mind becomes an emphasis in the global field of attention—in the universal mind, we could say—it drops out of complete awareness.¹  It becomes self-defined into a mere pocket of awareness which maintains itself through an allurement over its contents.  Under the spell of such an allurement, the contents themselves seem to offer the mind a kind of universality of perspective and control.  This universality is gained, however, only at the expense of the constriction of total awareness.  Hence it can be seen to be only a pseudo universality.  It is the universality of a mind for whom orientation is more important than truth, and control is more important than trust, if only unconsciously so.  Thus, it is the universality of a mind which has become a sort of magician to itself, creating and sustaining a viewpoint or orientation which is illusory insofar as all magic is illusory.  The very same constriction that the magician places on viewpoint is also placed on trust.  Control replaces trust.  The audience is not allowed to come up and examine the stage and the pieces in any which way they please.  Rather their examination is carefully controlled to foster only the impression of universal clarity and universal openness and trust.  Here, of course, the mind is its own audience.

In fact, among the contents which the mind has gathered into its own depression or “pond” are the very tools it uses to conduct the magic show of its own allurement.  Its “wand” is just the forces of attraction and aversion themselves which conjure some objects into appearance and place others under the spell of disappearance.  Its “hat” is the mind’s very notion of its own limitedness darkened by ignorance into a conception of a source from which it may draw whatever it wishes to fill out its own story or show.  Aside from these, the mind’s other “gear” consists of various aids to artifice such as impressive intellectual feats, elaborate demonstrations of power and skill, and showy celebrations of efficacy.  These might befit Sorcar or Houdini in their finest hour as also Hitler and Mussolini, as the farthest reaches of the mind’s illusion-crafting enable despots as well as magicians to get a grip on their audiences.  There is an easy trade back and forth between a single mind with constricted vision and hundreds and thousands more merely waiting for sufficient artifice to help them shape their depressed awareness into something nameable, abiding, and still more impervious to enlightenment.

The skill of the magician in bewitching his audience is matched by the oratorical acumen of the false statesman or despot.  Words themselves under the skill of an orator become like flashes from the magician’s wand sparking powerful attraction or aversion.  And the orator’s promises to fulfill all the wishes of his hearers become like endless possible delights the magician has made his audience believe he has the power to pull from his seemingly bottomless hat.

Sometimes the magician bewitches by his nearly impossible feats of intellect.  He can always guess what card you are holding even when pulled from a stack of hundreds.  He can remember and recite back very long lists of numbers presented to him at random and for barely seconds at a time.  And he can track and locate a ball passed back and forth among a large set of cups while blindfolded and having no physical access to the cups.  These are all tricks we may have witnessed more than once.  What we are less likely to have witnessed are the ways this same kind of trick is played on us over and over again by our own minds and the minds of others.  For feats of the intellect having to do with identification, memory, and localization often depend on a hidden machinery of exclusion, simplification, and restriction.²  Thus practices of selection may pretend an openness to anyone while concealing hidden rules of exclusion.  Numerical schemes of service and distribution may promise a complexity equal to the true needs of the population but in fact reduce to a simplicity of approach that leaves many populations underserved.  Finally, creeds purporting liberal mobility to any member regardless of gender, race, class, or sexual orientation may do nothing to contravene real but concealed restrictions to social, financial, and even geographical mobility that plague members precisely because of how they identify.

Finally, we make take note of that kind of bewitchment which depends on mere show. There is an understanding among charlatans that lies are more likely to be believed the more lustily they are delivered.  On the world stage we are familiar with politicians who have built careers out of making a show of efficacy rather than from efficacy itself.  The mind falls prey to this trick because it feeds its general appetite for allurement.  The boundaries it has built around its awareness are not true but alluring for themselves and for what they contain.  Likewise, personalities who are able to make a show of themselves and their pronouncements reinforce the mind’s taste for whatever it has latched onto and for what keeps it in place.  Such politicians know better than to be too specific in what they are suggesting.  Just to offer enthusiasm for what may be called the mind’s inherently protectionist nature–or perhaps ignorant self-patriotism–is usually enough to stir up a following.

Corrupt leaders make use of all these tricks, and many more, in wielding their power.  Yet it is because such tools of artifice are already installed in the willing minds of their hearers that such leaders have a chance to gain a following.

This illustrates for us that the path to true liberation for any society lies first and foremost in the individual awareness.  As that awareness dissolves the boundaries between itself and the next, it paradoxically comes to see that what it thought it was protecting was not its own after all.  And what it thought it was protecting itself from it has already been fully affected by in the form of the adjacent self-same awareness (“other person”) who has experienced it if not embraced it.  The leader whose message is to divide and defend one group from another is seen to be recommending we divide gold from gold or silver from silver.  Or if it is true that some silver is bright and some is tarnished, then his message would have us take silver from itself and reduce its worth rather than see it as ultimately whole, internally uniformly bright, and inherently able to shed its tarnish and become fully illumined.

As we said, it is not easy for the mind to rise up, peer over the comfortable edges of its awareness, and discover the broad spectrum of experiences it has been excluding.  One common impetus to do so is disaster, that is, when things fall apart.  Just as natural disasters like earthquakes and floods can break down the banks of rivers, ponds, and lakes, so too the life trials that befall the mind can cause it to overflow its banks and flow thither and yon into uncharted territory.  All of a sudden, anonymous “other individuals” traveling on a bus or sitting at a lunch counter in a restaurant can be seen as brothers, sisters, and extensions of ourselves.  Maybe an earthquake does it.  Maybe a medical diagnosis received minutes earlier does it.  Or maybe what does it is a long period of dissatisfaction with the status quo and a sudden determination to see one’s way through to a vision for a better, more peaceful world.  Whatever the impetus, the mind wakes up to a higher vantage point.  It sees itself as magician, as despot, and as more than magician and despot.  It catches a glimpse of life outside its own tricks and treacheries and begins to ask more seriously what it is gaining and what it is losing by maintaining them.  It begins not merely to act like a pond but to see itself acting like a pond and therefore to participate in an awareness which is more “sky-like” and heavenly.

 

Notes:

1. Thus the specificity of the mind exists in inverse proportion to its awareness. The larger the awareness of the mind, the less specificity there is in what it contains. When the mind is fully aware or enlightened, there is no longer any specificity within it and its awareness matches and perfectly mirrors that of the sky once more.

2. These are good examples of machinery of the mind’s judgment that remain partly or fully hidden in the shadows.  The ways that individuals and collectives prop themselves up as superior to others are many and diverse, but they all have this in common:  that they purport to know something about themselves which distinguishes them and entitles them to their position, while in fact it is what they are ignorant of and do not know that perpetuates division from others.  A pretense of openness, service, or liberality becomes more and more dangerous the more it conceals the flaw in the assumption of superiority that lies stubbornly beneath it.  Thus even social outreach programs which purport to serve disadvantaged populations run a significant risk of worsening matters by palliating that sense of superiority and hence further insulating it from the deep divisions that stay shadowed and in need of being dissolved.  Only in direct proportion to the awareness which traces all branches of division back to a unitive root can social problems begin to truly be solved.  Not through any level of patronization, but only through total identification with the disadvantaged will we be able to see our way through to the wise management of “social ills.”  For then, all of the Earth’s resources that are currently dammed up by banks that mirror those hemming in individual consciousness or mind shall be allowed to flow freely again.  What social ills would not be dissolved by the sheer magnitude of the Earth’s generosity would be assuaged under a tidal wave of compassion unimpeded by the false limiters of “my” and “mine.”