Escaping the Positivity Trap

There's an ongoing debate on the subject of positive thinking, which seems to have been raging for years. On one side is the camp which - broadly speaking - suggests that one can fix any multitude of problems in one's life if one changes one's outlook; the other, that such a position is naive at best, and tends towards a kind of victim-blaming narrative.

Both sides of the argument are, as always, not entirely wrong, nor entirely right. My personal feeling is that the truth of the matter lies somewhere in the synthesis of the two; in this post, I would like to hash out a few of my thoughts on the matter.

The pro-positivity crowd offer numerous solutions to life's problems, which on the surface seem to be mostly about thinking happy thoughts. The likes of Oprah relentlessly promote this strategy - that one can fix all, or almost all of one's problems simply by changing one's outlook. These can come in many guises - ranging from from daily affirmations, encouragement to smile, re-framing one's life experiences, meditation, and the ever popular "cutting negative people out of your life".

Glurgemonger-in-Chief  Doreen Virtue, to nobody's surprise, offers "Daily Guidance From Your Angels"; the equally crap-saccharine Louise Hay, of You Can Heal Your Life fame, has similar "Power Thoughts"; as does, inevitably, Deepak Chopra, the only man in existence who seems to understand less about Quantum Physics than Peter Carroll.

If you read any of the above and felt a sense of general revulsion trickling down your spine, you're not alone. One has to wonder if the advice is meant as a cure for depression, or merely to sooth the minds of those suffering from what Freud called "common unhappiness". Ask anyone who has ever suffered from clinical depression, and you'll quickly find out that these kinds of positive encouragements are worse than useless; indeed, they are often listed as being some of the worst things that can be said to a depressed person. Not only do those spouting such positivity seem to completely misunderstand the nature of depression - which is perhaps thought of less as sadness, more a profound feeling of meaninglessness and futility - but by giving such pieces of advice, even well-meaningfully, there is a tendency to shift the blame for one's circumstances onto the individual.

Even if one was to argue that psychological factors are the primary cause of depression (they aren't), the demographics of mental illness point towards extrinsic social factors as being a contributing cause. Even for those not suffering from depression, it is no great leap of logic to suggest that being part of a disadvantaged population is likely to reduce one's opportunities in life, and cause a greater exposure to stressful factors. For ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, women, the economically disadvantaged, and those on the LGBT spectrum, the simple fact is that the oppressive structures of society as it exists today are ones which act externally. No amount of positive thinking is going to change the pay gap between men and women, for example; no amount of smiling is going to prevent the trauma caused by governmental persecution of the most vulnerable (CW: sexual assault).

For this reason, there has been a great amount of backlash against the positivity movement, much of it justified. It could even be said that positivity is for "Rich White People" - a soothing balm for the worried well, who are not harmed by structural inequalities.

But that's not the whole of the story. As much as we rail against the cult of optimism, there are some small grains of truth at the root of all the mindless positivity; indeed, it clearly works for some people, one way or another. As much as it is argued that, as in the joke about the anarchist and the lightbulb, it's the whole damn system that needs changing more than the individual, if it works, then it's useful.

Let's take a two common examples of Positivity Advice and dissect them a little:

Happy Yoga - Mindfulness and Postural Feedback

Often touted as the psychological panacea that society needs, mindfulness is a form of meditation that involves deliberately moving one's attention away from one's thoughts, generally focusing on bodily sensations or on breathing. There's a lot that can be written about the effectiveness of meditative techniques for psychological and personal development, which I shall save for another post. The most crucial thing to note here is these techniques are, at least until one is very well practiced in them, merely a "pause button", most effective at helping reduce the feeling of being overcrowded by thoughts. Similar claims are often made about the efficacy of yoga.

The old phrase about it taking less muscles to smile than to frown is, whilst technically accurate, entirely unhelpful (and misses out the fact that it takes even fewer muscles to flip the middle finger at anyone who thinks that this qualifies as advice). However, it keeps getting repeated within positivity circles, often with some kind of scientific studies backing it up. The science behind this one is a bit sketchy at best - the theory dates back to Riskind and Goatey's 1982 study on posture having a regulatory effect on emotional feedback, and Laird's 1974 study on facial feedback, which I can't find a non-pay-walled link to. 

The idea of there being a biofeedback mechanism related to posture or facial expression is reasonable enough in itself - if only due to the psychological associations that one inevitably develops with any given posture. Practitioners of yoga and certain esoteric traditions will recognize this as old wisdom; couched in terms of energy meridians or chakras is the general sense of a biointelligence which mediates between body and mental states. This could all be seen as supportive of "Smile Therapy", were it not for the fact that facial expressions are not culturally universal. In essence, it seems to boil down to determining what postures have specific resonances for you - and if any such postures do aid in bestowing a specific mood, using those. As always, experimentation and observation are key.

Arguably, this all ties into the many strange and hard-to-explain observations around the placebo effect, but that is a matter for another post. 

Incidentally, I'll here plug Steve Wilson's excellent Chaos Ritual, sadly out of print and difficult to get ahold of, for having one of the most interesting deconstructions of the mind-body-neurology link when it comes to posture.

Positive Visualizations and the Law of Attraction

So, here's the big one. As a random aside, I've been reading David Allen's Getting Things Done this week (don't judge me), and I had a sudden insight into why Rhonda Byrne's The Secret and its numerous tie-ins got things wrong. Aside from the Chopra-level quantum woo, obviously. Allow me to save you a few pounds and reveal the Ancient Secret of the Secret Masters of Secretness:

Thinking about things gets you things.

Specifically, imagining a positive outcome, gets you that outcome.

Now, it is pretty clear that this is utter rubbish. If it were true, I wouldn't be writing this blog, because I'd be too busy lying on my poolside recliner in the blazing sunshine, being served cocktails by a selection of nubile personages of various genders as I gaze lovingly at my enormous, Scrooge McDuck-worthy pile of cash. But, as with so many things of this nature, it does contain a grain of truth.

A simple explanation is that by visualizing specific outcomes, you prime the part of your brain that acts as a perceptual filter - the reticular activating system, or RAS - to focus on information that you would not have consciously perceived. Like all simple explanations, it's not entirely true - the neurology is a lot more complicated than that; the RAS certainly has a significant role in the routing of sensory stimuli, alertness, and habituation (the process by which the brain trains itself to stop noticing background stimuli), but it isn't the all-powerful mental filtration system that some make it out to be. Nonetheless, it can easily enough be observed that there is some kind of perceptual filter which determines what the conscious mind becomes aware of. On some level, whether this is a neurological or psychological filter is irrelevant; the function can be considered to be the same regardless of the origin.

There's a good amount of evidence that suggests that these perceptual filters can be primed by expectation, as well as by thoughts, beliefs, and mood. The totality of these filters makes up what Robert Anton Wilson referred to as the "Reality Tunnel". The theory then follows that if one sets up the right positive attitude and visualisations, then one is more likely to notice opportunities and the like which can lead to the occurrence of the desired outcome.

And yet, what is missed so often here is that the visualisation is only the first step - it must be matched by action. This is seemingly obvious, but is easily missed in the flurry of positivity. No matter the strength of one's affirmations, they will remain mere words unless they are acted upon. This is the Positivity Trap, the new Opium of the Masses: the idea that merely changing your thinking but acting the same will magically lead to some great change. This is one possible cause behind the observation that positive fantasies predict poor achievement - if one buys deeply into one's visualization to the extent that one believes it to be inevitable, regardless of actions taken or not taken, then one is probably in for an unpleasant surprise.

So, what then?

I'm not going to say that you should simply chuck positivity. There are some useful tools to be found buried in the woo-mines. As always, the trick is to use them critically. Positive thinking for the sake of positive thinking is an exercise in intellectual masturbation: and, more to the point, it isn't the opposite to negative thinking. There is no forced duality - after all, most negative thoughts do have a kernel of truth to them, but so do most positive ones.

One should not attempt to annihilate all negativity with positive thoughts - this is the swift way into the Positivity Trap. Having the vision of a positive outcome is useful - it allows one to gain a certain degree of clarity, by which to direct one's actions. But this must be tempered by a degree of realism, and, of course, backed up with action - whether on a physical, or a psychological plane.

The Book of Jugs: Behavioural Conditioning For Fun and Prophet

Content warning: discussion of techniques (towards the end) which could be classified as deliberate self-harm

What do drugs, World of Warcraft, speeding tickets, Facebook, and Aleister Crowley have in common?

No, whilst "things the Daily Mail disapproves of" is technically correct, it's not the one I was looking for...

Here's a clue:

 

Operant conditioning (hereby referred to as OC) is a particularly interesting bit of psychology, which emerged from the works of noted pigeon-weaponiser, saxophonist, and Chomsky-baiter B.F. Skinner. It can be distinguished from classical (Pavlovian) conditioning in two ways: firstly, because it describes the ways in which a single pattern of behavior can be altered in isolation, whilst the later describes the way in which a stimulus, not a behaviour, is associated with a consequence; and secondly, because it's more about pigeons than dogs.

OC makes a number of assumptions about animal (and, indeed, human) behaviour which may or may not be accurate: the main one is around the ultimately mechanistic origin of many behaviours. However, ignoring some of the somewhat spurious logical-positivist offshoots of Skinner's works, and the consequent endless arguments over free will, it becomes relatively clear that - at least in a subset of cases - OC can work. Adopting a certain amount of theory-agnosticism, I will focus on the effects and uses of OC, rather than whether the underlying assumptions are strictly true.

The mechanisms by which behaviour is changed can be broken into three main categories: Reinforcement, Punishment, and Extinction. The first two are then broken down again into Positive and Negative subcategories. Reinforcement is considered to increase the likelihood of a behaviour; punishment to decrease it. Positive interventions involve adding something - pleasant or unpleasant - whereas negative interventions are considered to be removing something. Extinction, on the other hand, refers to the process which occurs when a behaviour which previously was reinforced or punished no longer becomes associated with any such outcome, or where the outcome becomes sufficiently disconnected from the behaviour.

For example:

• Positive Reinforcement: I go to the gym. I reward myself with coffee. I go to the gym more.
• Negative Reinforcement: I pay off my debts to the mob. I don't get my kneecaps broken. I pay off my debts quicker.
• Positive Punishment: I drink too much. I get a hang over. I drink less.
• Negative Punishment: I have a cigarette. I put a pound in the Quitting Jar, the contents of which will be donated to Westboro Baptist Church. I smoke less.
• Extinction: I go to work, hoping to be paid. I don't get paid. Eventually, I stop going to work.

There is a certain amount of cross-over between reinforcement and punishment, depending on how any given example is worded; for example, I could consider having my knees broken a positive punishment for not paying off my gambling debts, rather than it being a negative reinforcer. The difference is somewhat academic - it boils down to three simple premises, that:

Pleasant outcomes encourage a behaviour

Unpleasant outcomes discourage a behaviour

Unexpectedly pleasant or unpleasant outcomes reduce the degree of encouragement or discouragement.

Numerous factors influence the effectiveness of reinforcements. Humans are pretty terrible at making long-term cost-benefit analyses, so more immediate consequences are generally far more effective than delayed ones, for example; likewise, more extreme consequences generally are more effective than less extreme ones.

There are two interesting observations which spiral off Skinner's research, and which are somewhat intertwined. First, consider the problem of contingency: when a consequence occurs consistently following a behaviour, the behaviour is quickly modified, but should the consequence later become inconsistent, only occurring following a proportion of instances of the behaviour, it will soon become extinguished. Conversely, if a behaviour only triggers a given consequence on occasion, it takes longer for the behaviour to become learned, but likewise takes longer for that behaviour to be extinguished should the stimulus stop.

One good example of this process in action can be found in road speed cameras. It is well known that many static speed cameras across the UK are "empty" boxes, with some areas only having 10% of their cameras actually active at any one time. Whilst there are numerous economic and logistic reasons behind this, it could also be argued to be a subtle method of maintaining the non-speeding behaviour of motorists. Were every camera to be normally active 100% of the time, extinction would kick in relatively quickly upon encountering a camera that had malfunctioned or been taken down for servicing. However, if only a certain, random number of cameras were ever active at a given time, it would take far longer for the extinction of non-speeding - as one would never know if a camera would activate the next time one sped through it, and would thus have to keep on one's toes, so to speak.

The second related phenomena is what emerges when a subject is rewarded and punished with zero contingency; that is to say, on an entirely random basis. Skinner demonstrated that pigeons that were randomly given food pellets quickly developed complex behavioral patterns (pecking, spinning, neck turning, and other such pigeoning things), presumably in an attempt to replicate the conditions in which the food was released.

Admittedly, research subsequent to Skinner does cast some doubt on the validity of this observation - but we may consider it, true or not, to be an interesting and potentially useful explanation for a wide variety of behaviours. The ever-fascinating Derren Brown explored this effect with humans on Trick or Treat in 2008, and showed similar effects, albeit in a much less controlled fashion. One could consider this effect to be closely linked to such things as magical thinking and apophenia.

Turning to matters more esoteric, I now want to look at one of the lesser known and more interesting texts by pioneering mountaineer and scatological poet Aleister Crowley. Specifically, Liber III vel Jugorum (CN - discussion and photographs related to self-harm, albeit not in the context of psychological distress, and allusions to animal cruelty. Contains Crowley.). 

Stripping out the usual incomprehensibilities and allusions to Higher Secrets (which, inevitably for Crowley, are all about sex), this text describes methods of gaining a degree of control and discipline over speech, action, and thought, using techniques that would be best described as positive punishment. A particular pattern of speech, action, or thought, is to be designated as taboo for a week or more, and all breaches of this taboo are to be punished by the aspirant. Crowley suggests using a razor to make a cut upon one's arm or wrist every time such a taboo is broken, and that one should record the number of breaches by the number of cuts.

These taboos are - intentionally - entirely arbitrary. Some examples, taken directly from Liber III, are given here:

• Avoid using some common word, such as "and" or "the" or "but"; use a paraphrase.
• Avoid using some letter of the alphabet, such as "t", or "s". or "m"; use a paraphrase.
• Avoid using the pronouns and adjectives of the first person; use a paraphrase.
• Avoiding lifting the left arm above the waist.
• Avoid crossing the legs.
• Avoid thinking of a definite subject and all things connected with it, and let that subject be one which commonly occupies much of thy thought, being frequently stimulated by sense-perceptions or the conversation of others.
• By some device, such as the changing of thy ring from one finger to another, create in thyself two personalities, the thoughts of one being within entirely different limits from that of the other, the common ground being the necessities of life

The aim here is not to change one's behaviour permanently; rather, it is to develop a certain awareness of one's thoughts, speech, and actions, and the discipline both to suppress such behaviours, and to punish oneself when one breaches the taboos. For Crowley, such a degree of awareness and control was considered central to all forms of magick; along with yoga, the practices here were a major pillar of his magickal system, the order known as the A.'.A.'. (commonly, though incorrectly, said to stand for "Argentium Astrum" or "Arcanum Arcanorum").

The methodology is interesting, though personally I wouldn't use a razor for the self-punishment aspect. A common suggestion is to use a thick rubber band around the wrist, which can be snapped back sharply; some Thelemites of my acquaintance swear by the electric-shock device known as the Pavlok. The exact method doesn't really matter - the stimulus is the important part.

I've experimented a couple of times with this system, using the rubber-band technique, and from my own observations, it is quite an eye-opener. One tends to initially miss a lot of taboo-breaches; over time, these become more noticeable, but equally one becomes more adept at avoiding the taboo and working around it. Eventually, it almost becomes natural; in a way, it follows the competence curve from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence, though this fades a few days after completing the exercise due to the extinguishing effect described above.

What I'm trying to say, is that magick and psychology have an awful lot of crossover.

The first is pretty much an applied form of the second, anyway...

Magick For Beginners: Elemental Directions

Being the first in a series of blatherings about topics which keep cropping up and confusing people when they look into Matters Esoteric, for the Elucidation of the Novice, the Amusement of the Adept, and the Inspiration of the Speculative Fiction Author.

As any budding witch, magician or estate agent will tell you, directions are Important. Most Western magickal traditions use some form of element-to-cardinal-direction correspondence, though as ever there is precious little agreement and endless internet arguements over which direction signifies which element. Newcomers to any magickal practice tend to get very worked up and confused about the specifics here; to what extent they can be said to really matter is pretty much down to one's individual practices and theories of How It All Works. Personally, I don't believe that there is One True Way of assigning elements to directions, though certain arrangements can be seen as being associated with particular assumptions about the microcosm and the macrocosm, and how it all fits together.

Most Western traditions derive ultimately from the Greek philosopher Empodocles, via Aristotle, in their use of elements. By this system, all matter is divided into the four root elements of Fire, Earth, Air and Water, with a fifth element, Aether (most often "spirit" or "magic" in modern traditions) representing that which is not of the physical world. Aristotle theorised that the unchanging stars were composed of Aether, as all things on earth could be seen to ultimately degrade; note here the similarities with the various gnostic and pseudo-gnostic ideas about the corruption of matter and eternal nature of the spirit.

These four elements were arranged, as seen in the following diagram, by two measures of their sensible characteristics, which is to say their heat or coolness, and the wet or dryness. This, naturally enough, produces an arrangement which sees fire as being the opposite of water, and air the opposite of earth.

There is, of course, nothing remotely sensible about the Aether

There are, of course, other schema of elements, the Chinese Wu Xing (consisting of wood, fire, earth, metal and water) being a prominent one - though it is worth noting that the wu xing should not be thought of as being component parts of the universe as the classical elements were, but rather as being representative of fundamental processes that described relationships and interactions between differing phenomena. More modernly, one might think of the elements of the periodic table; or of electrons, protons and neutrons; or of the various flavours of quarks - the underlying concept is not altogether dissimilar (and leads to the idea of Opening the Watchtower of Bottom, which should not be confused with any of the OTO higher grades...) Equally, one could consider the four classical elements to be archetypal representations of states of matter - solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma.

So, naturally enough, the "classic" arrangement of elements that crops up everywhere, is this:

(The arrow is pointing North in all the following diagrams)

Wait, what?

So, this is the standard, "microcosmic" arrangement that is ultimately derived from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, best known as the arrangement of the elemental archangels in their pentagram ritual (though, incidentally and like many things involving the Golden Dawn, the pentagram ritual is A Bit More Complicated Than That). Alex Sumner makes a few good arguements about the origin of this arrangement - that it can be tied to the arrangement of the winds according to Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, or that it is tied in to the rather obscure "Adonai Forumla" of notable eccentric and spirit-chess enthusiast Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one-time leader of the Golden Dawn.

Crowley aficionados will also recognise this as one of the sets of directional associations that are used in Liber Resh, his Egyptian-ish ritual in praise of the sun in its four stations across the sky. In a way, this can be quite easily rationalised - Air is the sun at dawn, rising into the sky; Fire is the sun at its height; Water is the sun as it sets and fades into the underworld; and Earth the darkness and stillness of midnight.

Another tradition gives the following:

What the hell's going on here?

This is derived from a couple of sources, most notably traditional astrology. Agrippa listed this arrangement in his Second Book of Occult Philosophy; it derives ultimately from the position of the cardinal signs of astrology (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn respectively, working counter-clockwise from Fire in the East, following the order of their rising above the Horizon from the Spring Equinox). The Golden Dawn also used this in their hexagram ritual in certain circumstances (primarily when within the Vault of the Adepts); it could be said that this arrangement represents macrocosmic forces, rather than microcosmic ones - those forces which are of the stars, rather than extant upon the earth.

A somewhat more obscure, used by some Thelemic authors including the wonderfully-named Rodney Orpheus, uses a model based on the fixed signs of the zodiac that derives from another one of Crowley's rituals, Liber V vel Reguli. For reasons that may best be described as "perverse" and "complex", this places the viewpoint of the magician as being upside-down in the centre of the ring of the zodiac, facing Taurus (Earth), which is assumed to be the East. This results, naturally enough, in Scorpio (Water) being placed to the West, and the apparent direction of the zodiac as running clockwise; Leo (Fire) thus ends up in the South, and Aquarius (Air) in the North:

Just to make things more confusing, by Thelemic convention East does not actually refer to East, but rather in the direction of Boleskin House, a property on the shores of Loch Ness which was once owned by Aleister Crowley (and later by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame). Interestingly, Boleskin burned down a few weeks ago, a fact which will likely launch a thousand increasingly ludicrous conspiracy theories. In practice, this means that using the above arrangement results in a variable position of the four elements depending on where one happens to be on the globe, which could be argued was quite intentional on Crowley's part; Lon Milo DuQuette suggests in The Magick of Aleister Crowley that the counter-intuitive placement of the elements in the Reguli ritual was designed to deliberately disjoint the magician from the old geocentric model of the universe that is intrinsically implied by the Golden Dawn's microcosmic arrangement, in favour of a heliocentric arrangement in which the magician identifies with the Sun - a perennial theme of Crowley's philosophy.

Most Wiccan groups tend to use the Golden Dawn arrangement but rationalise it in more naturalistic ways; considering that most of Gardnerian Wicca is an assortment of GD/OTO rituals with the serial numbers filed off, with a certain amount of Old Gerald's sexual pecadillos scribbled in the margins and then gradually crossed out by various editors and revisionists, this is hardly surprising, but that is a rant for another post entirely.

Other pagan traditions use a variety of different arrangements; one of the most common is the system used by Robert Cochrane's Clan of Tubal Cain, which has been adopted by various practitioners of non-Garnderian traditional witchcraft. This system is, ironically, the closest to the arrangement that is implied by Aristotle:

There are various interpretations of this arrangement, the most common of which is to consider North to be representative of celestial realms, being that the Northern celestial pole is consistently above the Northern horizon, and the South being representative of the chthonic underworld, the Southern celestial pole being below the Southern horizon. The nodes of Fire and Water are assigned to the points of dawn and dusk, and can be seen as representing the birth and death of the sun.

Most or all of the above applies best in the Northern hemisphere. There are differing schools of thought around the application of these theories in the Southern hemisphere - some authorities, usually of the Goldeny-Dawny-type, argue that there should be no difference, as when one is conducting a ritual which uses the elemental correspondences, one is not actually in Basildon, or Alice Springs, or wherever, but in the metaphysical space implied by the Temple - and so the energies that one is dealing with are archetypal, and based on tradition. Others, particularly the more earth-focused pagan traditions, argue that if one is connecting to the energies of the Earth, location is far more important than any archetypal form.

I would generally advise keeping an open mind on the whole issue, including whether or not any of this matters one jot. Which, when you think about it, is a fairly good maxim for everything when it comes to magick.

On Maps and Models: An Introduction of Sorts

"The map is not the territory" - Alfred Korzybski

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" -  René Magritte

"A model which took account of all the variegation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of one to one." - Joan Robinson

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted" - attrib. Hassan-i-Sabbah

"Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable." - Paul Valéry 

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them." - Aleister Crowley

"Convictions cause convicts" - traditional Discordian catma 

The obvious Magritte + Discordianism pun

As my A-level chemistry teacher used to tell me, "all models are wrong, but some are useful". The
complexity of life and the observed universe is such that, to understand it, we simplify it, reducing it to a model. There was something of a running joke throughout those lessons, that any statement could be appended with "actually, it's a bit more complicated than that..." - the orbits of electrons about the nucleus of an atom being a particularly good example.

This trend continued when I went to university to study medicine, with new and more complex models of anatomy physiology replacing those taught at school. Every previously-certain fact became an over-simplification of a more complicated truth; and in time it became obvious enough to my mind that even these new models were merely that - models, all of which were wrong, but some of which were useful.

This is but a preamble to the main point of this post - that, regardless of the objective nature of truth, we view it only through our own models, which, whilst they are never entirely accurate, may be useful.

Wandering a little into philosophy for a moment, I doubt that it is actually possible to say very much at all about the nature of objective reality. Consider the metaphor of cartography. The map is produced as an abstraction of the land which it seeks to represent, compressing and simplifying the details of the territory. But a map is made by human hands and human eyes - and it is only ever as accurate as the eye that sees the territory, and the hand that draws it.

We take data from the outside world through our senses, and interpret it in accordance with our own preconceptions. This assumption lies behind all manner of branches of psychology, from Object Relations to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and is borne out by numerous studies and observations on such things as framing effects. We do not see the world as it truly is - rather, we see a model of the world, created by our senses and our beliefs, what was termed by Robert Anton Wilson (he of Illuminatus! fame) as a "reality tunnel". Thus, to return to the model of cartography, any map that we draw is a step abstracted; not a map of the world, but a map of a map.

But this doesn't make our maps useless. Consider the maps of the London Underground, laid out not in accordance with the exact position of the stations on the surface, but more in the fashion of a flow chart. It is significantly abstracted from the surface layout, which hides certain useful bits of information (such as it being significantly quicker to walk from Paddington to Lancaster Gate than to take the underground, despite their apparent distance on the tube map), but which aids comprehension of the routes.

Though this tube map is rather awesome

We jump between models all the time, often without knowing it, shifting our frames of reference to better adapt our thinking to a particular problem. Oftentimes this is unnoticed to us - in the desire for a sense of internal consistency, we like to think that we have a fixed worldview with which we can interpret all things by, though when we rigidly adhere to a single model of our experienced reality we run into what might be called the "First Year Physics Student Problem", in which we attempt to crowbar everything into a single model without really understanding the basis of the model in which the information is first presented. This could also be called the "Internet Rationalist" or "Richard Dawkins" problem, but I digress.

Indeed, the ability to switch models is so fundamental to our ability to function as social beings, that we practically take it for granted. Empathy and the development of "theory of mind" is a good example of one of these model-switching processes: in attempting to gain some understanding of how another person thinks or feels, we place ourselves in their shoes, and create a map of their own internal map - a map of a map, a simulation of a simulation.

I ramble, but there is reason within it, and the fact that I have begun this blog with this particular topic lies here, as it gives rise to some assertions:

• That any given truth is only true within a model; indeed, all truths are defined by the model in which they are contained, and what is true within one model may not be true within another.
• That models relate only to other models; if there is some objective truth that exists outside a model, it cannot be found in any model, save perhaps in the convergence of models.
• That the "truth" of any model is secondary to its utility, which is, ultimately, a measure of how well it allows one to relate to and understand another model.
• That material that exists within one model is best understood, at least initially, by accepting as true any and all assumptions that comprise the structure of the model, regardless of their truth outside that model.
• That, ultimately, these assertions are merely another model; a map of many maps.

This should perhaps be considered the bare-bones of a manifesto of sorts, or at least a set of working assumptions that one might use to better understand the world.

In short: Magick is psychology is religion is science is art is lifehacking is spirituality is sociology is madness is mysticism, and so on and so forth.

All models are models of each other.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted to be true.