Images of the sleeping brain

In order to understand one of the founding tenets of High Magic think of a place where nothing concrete exists. Think of it perhaps as a different world or another dimension, removed from, but still very definitely a part of our world.

In this place of relative nothingness, reality is supplemented by representing it in a stylistic form comprised largely of symbols. The magician can enter here, interact with the ethereal inhabitants of this strange world in a meaningful manner, and effect actions that will eventually impact on the ‘real’ world.

He may, for example, as a result of his actions gain fresh, new knowledge and insights that will help him in his work, or, in a more literal sense, he may set in motion forces that will eventually alter some aspect of what constitutes reality. Psychotic as all this may sound, before we dismiss it out of hand it’d do good to take a look at how exactly it came about in the first place. The earliest mention of some sort of etheric representation of man were made by the Neoplatonists of ancient Greece, who believed that the soul descended through heavenly spheres to enter a physical body on earth and during this voyage was in turn affected by the influence of each planet and therefore formed what was regarded as “the soul’s spiritual envelope”.

They in turn relied on the Platonic concept of a separate, independent reality that simply exists somewhere “out there” and which we can only attempt -not entirely successfully- to discover.Far fetched as this concept may seem today, in its heyday it was as good an explanation as any for the brain’s ability to imagine things it could not possibly experience.In those early days of strictly linnear logic it was held that if one did not directly or indirectly know of something, then his ignorance of it was equally unknown to him and hence it was not ignorance at all. Thus knowledge was more a journey of rediscovery than a sojourn into the unknown. To be able to imagine worlds and planetary arrangements where no physical man had ever been, for example, meant that the etheric mind (with its inherently greater capabilities) had somehow been there before it had entered the body.

This was a concept that gained tremendous popularity when it was rediscovered and restated in 1471 by the Florentine philosopher and Medici prodigeé, Marsilio Ficino.

Working from a pilfered Greek manuscript of the Hermetica, delivered directly from Macedonia to Florence by a Medici agent, Ficino propagated the concept, of an etheric or ‘astral’ body that supplied a set of consonances between man and the heavens.

At the time no explicit mention was ever made of the body having an astral, conscious ‘double’ able to enter this etheric plane but, nevertheless, as the idea became more and more popular the seeds of astral travel were, unknowingly, being sown.

Now, astral travel, the ability of a magic adept to somehow project his mind into another plane, is a tenet that’s found at the very heart of High Magic. It requires us to believe that not only does the astral plane exist but that it can and does influence our lives in a very direct manner. Modern Freudian psychology has already cut its teeth in explaining how the associations thrown up by a ‘free-floating’ brain can dredge up esoteric symbolism in the mind and can present us with both solutions to current problems (hence Kekulé, amongst others) and also frighten us with the spectre of past ones recurring.

Jungians, in turn, have explained about the posited existence of archetypes in the brain so, that it would appear that what magicians have been swearing by for thousands of years are little more than self-created delusions. Mere ‘representations’ thrown up by the brain attempting to make sense of logical concepts when the analytical part of it has been switched off.

If things were left at that we could just say that, hey! Know what? All that recitation of mantras in smoky atmospheres is enough to addle anybody’s brains and psychologists have got it right. This astral travel stuff is just “all in the mind”. But we’ve already seen that the mind and everything in it are an inescapable part of what constitutes our Reality. We have seen that our perception of that reality can influence our subsequent actions to a positive or a negative effect. And we have furthermore seen that the way we perceive the world, the assumptions we are likely to make about it, may in fact play a large part in creating what we actually do perceive.

Confusing, no?

To avoid the logic trap of saying that what we perceive is true otherwise we cannot possibly perceive it, let us strip the concept of the astral plane of its historical baggage and examine it for what it really is.

Devoid of magical connotations, the astral plane then becomes an imaginary plane, a representational mode of our more concrete reality which contains none of the constraints (and hence all of the possibilities) of the concrete world. This, naturally means that somehow, it represents a ‘truer’ picture of our reality. One which we, bound by the physical limitations of our concrete senses, are unable to directly experience.

The magician etherically (read mentally) then, shedding these mortal limitations, enters this plane and by manipulating the symbolic representations that he encounters within it, achieves a greater understanding of the concrete world he normally inhabits. It’s as simple as that. And if it beggars belief, well it shouldn’t, for as concepts go, this one is logically sound.

And even hard-nosed mathematicians have been, quietly, entering this very same plane for many years.