Ramsey Dukes has written on how we can work creatively with our “personal demons”. He advocates a technique that he calls “consciousness sharing”. If we project our human moods and motives onto external objects, abstractions or situations—for instance, onto malfunctioning computers, the stock market or “my inability to find a decent job”—then we will have “reaped a whole universe of meaning and meta-meaning” (2005: 28).
In other words, by treating external phenomena as real and alive we heighten our awareness of them and most likely increase the respect and intelligence in our manner of dealing with them. This is where we arrive at the advantage of dealing with “demons” rather than “symptoms”. For all its lowliness, we respect the power of a demon; we recognize that if we could harness that power for other ends then it would be to our advantage. However, we are also wary of becoming too friendly with something that will damage us if not properly controlled. If we choose to regard the demon merely as a metaphor for our personal psychological hang-ups, the dynamics of the relationship remain fuzzy.
But what made the scratching noise behind the speakers? What moved the dice and shook the bed? Another advantage of a “demon” is that we are not committed to internalizing the experience, the way that psychotherapy invariably does. The difference between magick and therapy is that, for mag-ick, truth lies in experience, whereas therapy is concerned with questions of “meaning” and “interpretation”. The therapist traces the meaning of symptoms back to the unconscious, over and over again. In other words, issues on the surface are exposed as being the product of issues hidden at a lower level. It is all “about” issues. Magick, on the other hand, enables us to experience issues directly as something else—as a “demon”, an “angel”; as something other.3
A paranormal experience might be regarded as an instance in which personal experience becomes so intense, or so different or alienated from ordinary consciousness, that what we regard as “internal” spills into the “external” world. If this sounds far-fetched, a friend once told me about an acid-trip in the woods with friends, during which the trees rewarded them with ready-made staffs that dropped from the branches into their hands. When the drug wore off, they were still holding them. The inner experience and the external world had become inextricably interwoven under the intense experience of the drug.
All cases of synchronicity (a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung to describe “meaningful coincidences”) possess this quality of a blurred boundary between the mind and external reality. It prompted Jung to invent another special term, psychoid,4 to describe this level at which the mental and the physical coincide. Magick appeals to this level and aims to immerse our experience within it. Psychology shuns it with horror, associating it with hallucinations and psychosis.
Of course, there is always the possibility of natural explanations for seemingly paranormal events, and these should not be discarded where they can be determined. When trying to establish the truth of an experience it must be admitted that there are always other possibilities. Maybe it was indeed the family cat that made those scratching noises behind the speakers after all. She never did enjoy being shut inside at night. Perhaps, in her frustration, she had astrally projected herself upstairs.
Notes
1. The term was coined (1852) by English physiologist and naturalist William Benjamin Carpenter.
2. I recently read about an investigation into telepathy where one of the experimenters noticed a charming correlation: that positive results were recorded only on those days when birdsong was audible inside the laboratory (Foxx, 2006. See sleeve notes: “Thought Experiment”).
3. The philosopher Ken Wilber uses the terms “translation” and “transformation” to discuss this difference (1996: 46ff). As is well known, to change yourself through therapy takes years. This is because (in Wilber’s terms) therapy merely “translates” our issues between unconscious and conscious; Wilber’s model suggests that this “translation” is simply movement of issues within the same level of personal development. Magick, on the other hand, encourages “transformation” by presenting us with our experience as something other. Magick can provide a much faster track for self-development, although it is probably fair to admit that the effects may be more volatile.
4. “[W]e do not know whether that we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic …. They may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience” (Jung, 1936).
CHAPTER TWO
A nice place to meet dead people
For reasons that will become obvious I’ve disguised names, dates and locations in the story that follows. It was told to me by a close friend, whom I’ll call Karen. The narrative is based mostly on notes she made in her journal at the time.
It was a Sunday evening in early autumn, 2006. Karen remembers it was a warm day and that she was on her way to the building where she used a shared computer to pick up her emails. She was working on a particular project and expecting an important email that she would have to act upon as soon as it arrived. She did not relish the thought of this, and had put off checking her email for as long as she could, but now she accepted it was time to get stuck into what needed to be done.
Karen lives in Brighton. This much I haven’t disguised. She was crossing the road, near St Peter’s church, whose grubby white edifice dominates the flat area in the city centre known as Grand Parade, a few hundred metres from the seafront. She looked up and saw a friend of hers—we’ll call him Dave—who skidded to a halt on his bike.
“We both said ‘hi’,” remembers Karen, “and he looked pleased to see me. We stood and talked about things that were happening to us just then, which is how I know it must’ve been that time of year. I mentioned that I’d taken up kundalini yoga and talked about the business project I was working on. He mentioned he was into sea-kayaking. He told me this was great in the summer, because he’d bought a summer wetsuit, but he was scared of the winter because he didn’t think he could afford a winter one.”
Karen and Dave talked for about 20 minutes until Karen felt the unwelcome pull of that important email. She glanced up and down the street, wondering if there might be a café open at this time on a Sunday, but she couldn’t think of any. After they had talked for another ten minutes she bowed to the inevitable: “I’ve got to go.”
Looking back, she remembered how disappointed Dave looked when she said these words. He had been cycling towards the sea but she had not asked where he was going. After they parted, she remembered thinking it was odd how Dave hadn’t commented on her new hairstyle; she had drastically shortened her hair after wearing it long for years. All her friends had commented on how different she looked but Dave did not seem to have noticed. Also, in the months that followed, his slightly extreme use of the word scared to describe how he felt about the onset of winter lingered in her memory. But at the time, she simply continued on her way and picked up her emails.
It was in February the following year that things took a strange turn. Karen, having stopped off again to read her emails, was reminded of her last meeting with Dave. “I just thought to myself: ‘Well, it’s probably time I saw Dave again.’”
It was not unusual for months to pass without them seeing each other. They had met as co-members of an organization that ran various projects. They had both worked on one particular project that supplied a community service to city residents. Both of them had enjoyed the activity it involved them in, and were disappointed when the project’s funding
