Magic 501: The Dogs of ‘Because’
Once upon a lifetime ago, I was an academic. All told, I spent nearly twenty years in the academy, doing dick all other than occasionally teaching courses, collecting a degree, and using my grants and stipend to take any course they’d let me in the door of. Math, statistics, social sciences, studio art, astronomy and physics, philosophy, engineering, literature, language, and rhetoric: I got a surprisingly classical education.
I was also one of those little nerds who read books about Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which are relevant in gestalt.
It is important to be exposed to the kind of careful process of logic that academia can teach you, though academia is not the only way to learn that sort of logic. If you’re paying attention, trying to be logical or rational lays bare how loose and shallow both can be—we are terrible at understanding ourselves and worse at the sort of formality that logic or rationality requires. We also lie to ourselves quite a bit, and most of what we call logic is really the attempt to justify what we want or things we’ve done.
Logic is a bad habit you’ll have to break to do this sort of work. The consciousness is a tool, but so is reason. Not the only tool, not the only way of knowing, not the best way of knowing, just a way of knowing. If you let it, between the consciousness’ nature and the attempt to be logical or rational will tip you into a particularly nasty trap: it will have you trying to justify what you are ignorant of.
The consciousness wants to justify, rationalize, explain. It demands the pretense of consistency and, if consistency is not present, will create a narrative (lie) which makes it seem as if whatever you are doing is consistent. If discomfort is capable of changing your behavior, between the need to pretend to consistency and the various delusions enlisted by ego which cause us to fear seeming inconsistent (e.g. ‘crazy’), rationality and logic will hound you like vicious dogs, with the friendly aid of ego in the form of trying to manage yourself for others’ options of you.
You will do things you wish you hadn’t, trying to justify yourself. You will say things you wish you hadn’t, trying to maintain that consistency. You will cover yourself up in lies and delusion. Reason and logic are petty tyrants who will make you reject what you know to be real, what you perceive to be right, in order to keep them happy. You will attempt to rationalize what you are ignorant of, and in doing so, block out anything which does not fit that rationalization. Literally, what is happening no longer reaches attention because it does not fit the rationalization.
In that ignorance, you will lie to yourself as well—you don’t know because you don’t see, but you will tell yourself that you do, closing off the opportunity to see.
Trying to maintain logic and rationality will also slow down understanding and wreck creativity, and in spiritual domains it will make the magician blind. The demand that everything which happens to you make a specific sense or happen in specific ways is itself a delusion, a rejection of what is happening in favor of some imaginary world. A magician who will not or worse cannot examine anything that does not fit their preconceptions, which might contradict the various narratives of consistency they serve is a magician who can easily be overcome by other magicians. This magician is also easily lead by various spiritual entities—the magician leads with delusion, so delusion is what they are given. Spiritual entities can easily see delusion at work and recognize it as an opportunity to entrap.
Rationality and logic cannot be anything to the magician but tools, employed with care.
