The Bones of a Magical System

The Fear of Questions

The conscious mind applies its order to a preset biological template or framework upon which we layer learned structure. Each of us uses this template to understand and build our reality through language, diverse cultural beliefs, and daily experience. We stretch this over the vast unknown and attempt to choose acceptable truth, avoiding discomfort and damage to the structure we have built. The conscious mind likes explanations for everything, and whether they’re true or not isn’t as important as having them. We feel better when there’s a believable reason for everything, and we are taught from a young age to seek order.

Well, order and being right. The perception of being right is very important to the conscious mind. Not just being sure we’re right, but the need to be right. This is why most of us become very attached to our opinions and beliefs. Ideas of judgment and order are fed to us through emotions. Our invested attachment to what we believe starts early.

Before the framework of language to layer our memories on and use to express ourselves, we develop an emotional understanding of good and bad, right and wrong, an internal gut reaction to the joy and anger around us. This shapes the way we see and order our world as we grow.

The conscious mind, once an understanding of language begins, finds comfort in linear thought. We use language to mark the progression of time, to use as a construct to separate and hang our memories in some semblance of order. Stories rise from this, and make it possible to retell, even restructure, our memories. We consider this not only a good thing, but use these reworked stories to define and present ourselves to the world.

The if-then of a rationalized world becomes a comfort, a way to avoid uncertainty. Language helps us impose a personal order to reality, causing us to ignore or discount the void and the unknowable potential from which we rise. The randomness, cyclical loss, and lack of logic the void represents, causes us to fear it, along with the answers that float up from it.

Your subconscious, on the other hand, is wordlessly working through all the conflicting order you do not disbelieve every day, sorting things into fragments of images, thrown together. It sorts while you sleep, to determine how new information blends with and shapes what you already accept as true. This bubbles through our language framework to become archetypal stories we construct by ordering our words to reinforce what we have decided to believe.

The Threat of the Effortless Answer

A maintenance man once said, “I’m not sure I understand everything I know about this.” He was referring to electrical wiring, but his humorous phrase caused something to click and a question arose. Do we need to understand to know?

The answer floated up quickly, no, without explanation. He didn’t need to understand how, for his wiring to work. He knew it would work, and just needed to follow the steps. The problem is, once the piece (the short answer to the question) is accepted as true, instead of moving on, our conscious mind can get lost in the details, finding a way to make it fit our narrative. We get caught in the proofs needed to appear correct. The logic that reinforces this constructed system has become important to us . The structure makes us feel safe and must be preserved.

An entire argument begins to form, a dissertation of many pages about the difference between understanding and knowing. This becomes a well-argued point instead of the intuitively known one word answer. What is the threat here, the thing the conscious mind is not realizing?

An answer, floating untethered to a proof or narrative, means there may exist an undefined pool within each of us where answers rise, responding to a question, without explanation or containment. This is a scary concept in most societies. There are questions we explain away, frown on, punish, or dismiss as invalid. A society’s foundation, layered concepts each culture applies and collectively agrees is true, cannot be threatened without consequences.

War has often been the result of ideas that threaten cultural structure. People will fight for a way of life, or a set of ideas, if they believe in them. The rightness of these ideas is not as important as belief, the avoidance of doubt. Our learned structure is just that, a set of stories we tell each other about the way things are, so we will believe certain things, feel safe, and in charge.

The biggest threat to our stories is proving an accepted truth could be false, just a hollow idea. Unfortunately, everything is an idea and becomes hollow when it’s not backed by belief. All the ancient mythology in the world used to be alive and vital, when folks believed in it. Decisions were made and actions taken, based on the stories we told ourselves. We look back on some of these decisions in horror, wondering how a group of people could be so cruel and wrong about something. It is a guarantee our future selves will do the same to us, because ideas are just that, and everything is cyclical.

The Confusion of the Conscious Mind  

The conscious mind internalizes details of societal order, accepting them to fill us with agreements. We do this with the whys and hows, the nuts and bolts, trying to tear reality apart. We disassemble to understand the details, so comfort, and the feeling of safety and control can be maintained.

This is where our conscious mind is comfortable, focusing our attention on the explaining and understanding of things. It tries to explain our world through judging and ordering the things that rise from the wordless potential. It also dismisses or attacks anything that doesn’t fit or challenges our chosen narrative.

That’s why we have different cultures, different tribes, different groups of conscious minds, agreeing to a set of behaviors that, from outside, appear to be constructed safe houses for dealing with aspects of reality. As a result, each culture ignores, downplays, or attacks some aspect of reality that conflicts with their current belief structure. This approach inevitably leaves itself open to cyclical collapse.

A Modern Twist

The algorithms of our social constructs play on this need of the conscious mind to feel a part of a group. We need to feel right (proving our opponent wrong), in charge (controlling our future), and vindicated (righteous justification of behavior). We find our group, and tune out any information that conflicts with the structure of belief we have chosen to accept.

This tribal approach has led to an us versus them team think. Unfortunately, much conflict in human history, every dehumanization, and every justification for the dark actions of terrified righteousness have started with this type of thinking. We need to stop believing we have the answers, doubt what we know, and accept that others know things we don’t.    

There is a vast undefined, from which we all rise. Instead of accepting we aren’t in control and enjoying life, we choose to become proactive, to do something, to get wrapped up in the details, even if it’s wrong. A fear-filled part of us needs to define our world, to create busy work, a place to focus our attention. We disassemble, study, and build a narrative defining things and how they work, instead of accepting life and each moment’s joy.

Instead of order rising from chaos in a cyclical dance, our modern reality takes ordered concepts, layering them upon previously understood order. These complicated, Dr. Suess-like structures have led to the wonderful and terrible things we enjoy, but all these complex rules and constructions still have their basis in fear. We are, each of us, tiny spiders of self-awareness, building furiously in an attempt to prevent the slightest glimpse into the void, a void we all return to in the greatest of cyclical dances.

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