Comments
(1) .. In "Constructing God", we present a number of arguments beginning in a consideration of the Question of Evil which leads us to a notion of Deity of which, while we are uncertain as to its true nature, we may usefully think of as existing in a dream-like state out of which it it is drawn to fuller consciousness through the intense emotional bond created in the act of worship, this view being true in one sense or another. If the gods help us when we connect to them, then there would certainly be a survival advantage to being able to do so with greater ease, and so one would expect to see these archetypes present in the individual's subconscious, these instinctual mirrorings of those existing outside of one, allowing the phenomenal deity to come into existence within one's mind more quickly as one experiences the noumenal deity in one's life. (See : "Questions and Misconceptions") One would seek to connect with deity at least as much through one's subconscious as through one's conscious mind, indeed probably far more so, as it would be one's subconscious which would be the most akin to these sleeping gods in character, though obviously not akin to them in depth of intellect or strength of character. We remind the reader of the frequent call, which one can easily find in a wide variety of traditions, to invest passion in one's worship, and not reduce one's religion to a collection of dry and formal observances; where do the emotions reside?
If, for example, one reads through "The Spiral Dance", (*) especially chapter nine starting on p.139, one can't help but see what is happening: the participant in the ritual is being brought into a hypnotic state, one in which the subconscious becomes more readily accessible. To grow up in the modern West and not know that such states are often attained through highly ritualized behavior that none of those involved would normally engage in, would be difficult. For this reason, we would resist the tempting, but glib explanation some will offer for the bizarre thought processes we've seen out of many in the Wiccan community: "look, these are people who've built their religion around a belief that they can cast magical spells. How much of a sense of reality can you expect out of them?". The way they connect to their god and goddess is not the way we would do so, but some very plausible arguments can be advanced in favor of their approach, especially for those coming from their own, usually Anglo-Saxon cultural background. By setting these rituals up as "spells", they connect to something in their own cultural background, just as we do in the course of our own worship. Man may not create the noumenal deities in his own image, but he can't help but do so with the phenomenal deities through which he relates to the noumenal ones.
This, if done right, is a far more sophisticated relationship with Deity than that usually postulated in Christianity, in which one directly talks to a deity considered to be fully conscious, all powerful, all knowing and morally perfect, in no need of growth, with the worshipper blocked from seeing the contradictions this leads to by the state of denial he goes into out of the fear his clergy instill in him at the very thought of questioning his faith, this fear then being passed off as faith. Pure nonsense, we would have to say. We may not completely know what faith is, but we do know that it's not fear. Fear implies a lack of trust, and a poorly concealed insincerity behind the respect shown, as even the simplest analysis will show. (See : A Response to Pascal's Wager)
returning to where we left off ...
(2) .. Even if one were to first approach this from a simpleminded point of view, seeing the learning of the rituals as being nothing more than a matter of learning how to cast spells because one wanted power, with personal spiritual growth not being treated as an issue, a moment's reflection should convince one that this could never be. One need open no books of Philosophy to see this. One need only go down to Blockbuster and rent out "Fantasia", going to the part entitled "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". If power were passed out freely to those who neither bothered to develop self-control or understanding, and such power could be gathered in quantity, we wouldn't be here to ponder the absurdity of this or anything else, because the world would have self-destructed a long time ago.
Would the gods willingly give out power to ones such as these? Of course not. Would you teach a toddler how to strike matches? Would you hand a juvenile delinquent the keys to your gun cabinet? Knowledge and power are for those with the sense of responsibility needed to know how to use them well. Even if as petty a goal as the acqisition of power was the only reason for Man to have a relationship with the Divine, the gods, through a proprietary interest in the preservation of the world they had helped bring to life (if for no other reason) would be forced to choose to give those gifts of occult power out with strings attached, those strings coming in the form of demands of personal growth on the part of the one upon which this gift of power would be bestowed. Even a completely self-interested deity would have to do so. What is the good of being a god, if you have nothing left to rule over but rubble and ashes, to one degree or another? True, we're imagining these gods in a less than fully conscious state, but consider your own dreams. However different the self you become in a dream may be, your true, waking self has a way of asserting itself if the plot of the dream becomes a little too shocking. We would suggest that the true selves of these gods who are ever coming into being would do likewise, and five millenia of spiritual folklore would seem to support this.
One would thus be forced by the consideration of that one fragment of understanding to seek out more, if only one had as much as the faintest touch of wisdom. But the problem is, more often than not the people being attracted to Paganism have not had even the faintest touch of wisdom and much of this "magickal" approach to religion has, in context, proved unhealthy, if for no other reason, then because by giving such people the illusion which they possess that which they lack, it undercuts their motivation to accept the pain and make the effort which real growth would require.
returning to from whence we came ...
(3) .. "But what about those un-dreamlike details that stayed so consistent, in a way unlike what you saw in the other lucid dreams you can remember?", somebody asked. Here, we and Sam enter the realm of speculation but our thoughts on this are as follows: remember what immediately aroused Sam's sense of wonder? The thought that he was at once asleep and awake? Some have argued that sleep is something akin to a debugging process for the human mind. (Certainly, the lack of such has been associated with psychosis). The brain, as it wipes away some of the accumulated "bugs" in the coding inherent in the reinforcement of certain neural pathways will produce something like a collection of random neural impulses, a sort of neural white noise, if you will. Dreams would arise as the brain tried to make sense of this noise, hence the frequent incoherence of much of what is seen in a dream.
But, let's say that one is on the border between wakefulness and sleep when a dream hits. The not-so-random noise of the outside world is now trickling in, and is added to the material the brain has to work with, as it constructs the natural hallucination that is a dream. Further, as those who start dreaming quickly on falling asleep will tell you, dreams that seem to last for hours can sometime last but minutes, as they've found after being awakened after a very brief nap. The sense of time is distorted. Thus, we would guess that the outside input to the brain, during this half-waking dream, will seem stretched out, that which seemingly more random owing to its sudden changes becoming less so as those rapid changes are stretched out into trends, in the longer subjective time of the dream. This, we would suggest, is where that stable detail comes from: it is the reprocessed noise of the outside world, richer in detail and more enduring, relatively speaking, than the more scattered and meaningless noise coming from within the brain itself, appearing as details in one's dream.
Now, how would you describe a trace state? You've listened to a slow, monotonous and yet (for some) relaxing set of sounds, and, like those "environment" tapes one can buy ("seashore", "babbling brook", "cracking fire", etc), this will tend to promote sleep. So will the dim light in the room, and every other relaxing stimulus present. You go right up to the verge of sleep - but don't quite get there. You've artificially created the state that Sam found himself in on that morning, not really awake, and yet not really asleep, making it possible for the dream reality to become far more detailed and far more consistent than it normally would be. What one sees in the middle of the dreams that arise - the "astral plane" one "projects" onto might seem very vivid and very real, as we are told hypnotic trances often do, even though everything that one is seeing is an illusion. So convincing an illusion that innocent men have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit, based on memories "recovered" through such trances of events which never really occured.
Now, let us say that somebody who is not very well educated, certainly not that philosophically sophisticated and maybe not all that bright is taken along on an "astral journey", which begins in a ritual reminiscent of a hypnotic induction, perhaps attaining that state on the border between wakefulness and sleep, and she should find herself seeing "wonders". Just try to tell her that what she witnessed was not real! "I know what I saw" will be her likeliest response. In a mainstream American cultural context in which the ability to express oneself in soundbites is considered to be the measure of how much sense one is making, this closed-minded response is one she is unlikely to ever go beyond, because an examination of those illusory experiences would take time, time she will be unwilling to grant. As she gains a firm conviction that she has seen things that she has not really seen, her habitual assumptions about how reality should work will shift accordingly, through simple reinforcement. She may start losing the ability to distinguish between her waking dreams and reality, and a good portion on her grip on reality itself, and maybe ever her belief in reality when her dreams start becoming as vivid as those trances. It would be consistent with what we've seen in the Pagan community.
Please don't quote us on this, though, as we are none of us are neuropsychologists, and we could easily be wrong. But, based on what we have read on this subject, as interested amateurs, this seems plausible enough.
(4) .. The very experience that lead Sam to look into Paganism was a case in point. Sam found that it was almost as if his God had turned on him. When he did go to synagogue, or otherwise live as a Jew, his luck was invariably, biblically bad, and when he was completely non-observant and really non-Jewish, this invariably changed, with this pattern holding up for a few years. God, Sam felt, was clearly trying to tell him something, and even if he didn't understand them, he would honor his God's wishes, as odd as they seemed to him.
From a Time Series Analysis point of view, Samuel would point out, a correlation between observance and adversity holding this solidly for this long just by pure coincidence would be an astronomically unlikely event, and more significantly, it was an event that continued after he started watching for it. One can find almost a flase confirmation of almost any statistical hypothesis that one wishes by waiting for an anomolous string of events, and then just taking that unrepresentative sequence as one's entire data pool, because given an almost unlimited amount of time to work with, to a reasonable approximation, one would expect to see almost any sequence of results make its appearance eventually.
Look at it this way. Suppose that somebody claims that he can influence the roll of a pair of dice. Feeling skeptical, you call him on this, and he says that he will force the dice to come up "boxcars" (6 and 6). He then tosses the dice a few dozen times until a pair of sixes comes up, and announces success. Even though the odds are against a pair of sixes coming up on any given roll, how impressed are you likely to be by that? You shouldn't be at all, because with a long enough series of rolls, it was almost certain that he would eventually roll "boxcars". Assuming that the hypothesis is false would not render the results especially unlikely.
But let's say that he announces in advance that he will roll boxcars on his 35th roll - and does so. That might be a little more interesting, especially if he can then repeat that performance, because instead of leaving use dealing with the probability of an otherwise improbable event occuring ever, he's committed himself to it occuring on one specific moment, tying his alleged verification of his hypothesis (that he can influence the roll of the dice) to what is no longer a sure thing, should the null hypothesis (that which holds that there is nothing interesting for us to find in this experiment) hold true.
This is why, in the context of the true, rigorous empiricism that goes into scientific research, the statistician insists that the data analysis techniques be developed before the data is collected: if one grants oneself the freedom to design it after the fact, when one knows what the outcome is, one can create the illusion of something meaningful by constructing one's methodology in such a way as to highlight what is nothing more than a meaningless random fluctuation. With that thought in mind, as we approach the much more intuitive, less rigorous realm of quasi-empirical metaphysics, we place an emphasis of that which we observe after we've selected the belief we are in doubt about, not that which we observe beforehand.
(5) .. See footnote 3.
(*) written by Starhawk, ISBN 0-06-067535-7, published 1979 by Harper and Row