Magical Approach Session Six

Session Six: Animals and Reasoning.  Things Beyond One’s Control.

August 25, 1980

Part of the difficulty arises from the current scientifically-oriented blend of rationalism.  It lies in the way in which the individual is defined.  As a species, you think of yourselves as the “pinnacle” end of an evolutionary scale, as if all other entities from the first cell onward somehow existed in a steady line of progression, culminating with animals, and finally with man the reasoning animal (with all of that progress occurring of course by chance, incidentally).

That particular blend of rational thinking with which your society is familiar takes it more or less for granted, then, that man’s identity as a species, and the identity of the individual, is first and foremost connected with the intellect.  You identify yourselves with your intellect, primarily, casting aside as much as possible other equally vital elements of your personhood.

In your historical past, when man identified his identity with the soul, he actually gave himself greater leeway in terms of psychological mobility, but eventually the concept of the soul as held resulted in a distrust of the intellect.  That result was the inevitable follow-up of dogma.  Part of man’s latest over-identification with the intellect is, of course, an overreaction to those past historical events.  Neither religion or science grant other creatures much subjective dimension, however: You like to think of yourselves, again, as the reasoning animal in terms of your species.

However, animals do reason.  They do not reason in the same areas that you do.  In those areas in which they do reason, they understand cause and effect quite well.  Their reasoning is applied, however, to levels of activity to which your own reasoning is not applied.  Therefore, often animal reasoning is not apparent to you.  Animals are curious.  Their curiosity is applied to areas in which you seldom apply your own.

The animals possess a consciousness of self, and without the human intellect.  You do not need a human intellect to be aware of your own consciousness.  Animals, it is true, do not reflect upon the nature of their own identities as man does, but this is because that nature is intuitively comprehended.  It is self-evident.

I only want to show you that the sense of identity need not inevitably be coupled with the intellect exclusively.  Your intellect is a part of you – a vital, functioning portion of your cognitive processes – but it does not contain your identity.

The natural person is understood perhaps more clearly by considering any person as a child.  In a fashion, the child discovers its own intellect, as it discovers its own feelings.  Feelings come “first”.  The child’s feelings give rise to curiosity, to thoughts, to the operation of the intellect: “Why do I feel thus and so?  Why is grass soft, and rock hard?  Why does a gentle touch soothe me, while a slap hurts me?”

The feelings and sensations give rise to the questions, to the thoughts, to the intellect.  The child in a fashion feels its own thoughts rise from a relative psychological invisibility into immediate, vital formation.  There is a process there that you have forgotten.  The child identifies with its own psychic reality first of all – then discovers its feelings, and claims those, and discovers its thoughts and intellect, and claims those.

The child first explores the components of its psychological environment, the inside stuff of subjective knowledge, and claims that inner territory, but the child does not identify its basic being with either its feelings or its thoughts.  That is why, for example, it often seems that young children die so easily.  They can disentangle themselves because they have not as yet identified their basic beings with life experience.

In most cases children grow up, of course, although in the vast overall picture of nature a goodly proportion of individuals do indeed take other courses.  They serve other functions, they have other purposes, they take part in life through a different cast of action.  They affect life while themselves not completely immersed in it.  They die young.  They are aborted.  They remain, however, an important element in life’s overall picture – part of a psychological underpainting that always affects later versions.

Ideally, however, children finally claim their feelings and their thoughts as their own.  They identify naturally with both, finding each valid and vital.  By the time you are an adult, however, you have been taught to disconnect your identity from your feelings as much as possible, and to think of your personhood in terms of your intellectual orientation.  Your identity seems to be in your head.  Your feelings and your mental activity therefore appear, often, quite contradictory.  You try to solve all problems through the use of reasoning alone.

You are taught to submerge the very intuitive abilities that the intellect needs to do its proper work – for the intellect must check with the feeling portions of the self for feedback, for support, for knowledge as to biological conditions.  Denied that feedback, it can spin on endlessly in frenzied dry runs.  At each moment, from the most microscopic levels the body in one way or another is ascertaining a constant picture of its position within physical reality.  That picture is composed of millions of ever-changing smaller snapshots, as it were – or moving pictures is better – determining so many conditions, positions and relationships that they could never be described.  You end up with a predominating picture of reality in any given moment – one that is the result of the activity of psychological, biological, and electromagnetic stratas.  One picture is transposed upon the others, and calculations made constantly, so that all of the components that make up physical existence are met, and interest to give you life.

None of that is the intellect’s concern at an intellectual level.  At a biological level, and at an electromagnetic level, the intellect, of course, performs feats that it cannot consciously know through the use of its reason.  Spontaneously, with the process just mentioned, millions of pictures are being taken also of the probable actions that will – or may – be needed, in your terms, in the moment immediately following, from microscopic action to the motion of a muscle, the driving of a car, the reading of a book, or whatever.

One of the intellect’s main purposes is to give you a conscious choice in a world of probabilities.  To do that properly the intellect is to make clear, concise decisions, on its level, of matters that are its concern, and therefore to present its own picture of reality to add to the entire construct.  On the one hand, you have been told to identify yourselves almost completely with your intellects.  On the other hand, you have been taught that the intellect, the “flower of consciousness”, is a frail, vulnerable adjunct – again, a chance creation, without meaning and without support – without support because you believe that “beneath it” lie “primitive, animalistic, bloody instincts”, against which reason must exert what strength it has.

Despite all of that, men and women still find the solutions to many of their problems by rediscovering the larger sense of identity – a sense of identity that accepts the intuitions and the feelings, the dreams and the magic hopes as vital characteristics, not adjuncts, of personhood.  When I tell you to remember your own natural persons, I do then want to remind you not to identify with your intellects alone, but to enlarge your scopes of identity.  Automatically those other, often-shunted-aside characteristics begin to add their richness, fulfillment, and vitality to your lives effortlessly.