It's All in Your Mind

Sam and Dave's is a popular nightclub in the heart of Osaka. It caters to the gaijin crowd but attracts plenty of Nihonjin. Walk in on a Saturday night and you'll see plenty of people engaged in the drinking and dancing mating rituals that are common to contemporary industrial cultures.

The drinks are a bit pricey, as they always are at such places, but they have a good selection of beers. And they serve food too - place your order at the bar and they give you a number to put on your table, then they send a server out to you when your food's ready.

It's a fine place, lots of fun. It's not the sort of place you'd expect to see an illustration of the magical underpinnings of the Universe. But one fine evening, after a couple of drinks, I was holding forth to my friend David about the Law of Fives.

The Law of Fives is one of most fundamental teachings of Discordianism. As stated in the Principia Discordia (on page 23, which is also a number of some portent), it reads:

The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES,
OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5.

The Law of Fives is never wrong.

In the Erisian Archives is an old memo from Omar to Mal-2: "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."

That last bit is very important: the harder you look, the more you will see the Law of Fives in action. Sometimes you have to look really hard, but if you do, you will find a connection between any situation and the number five.

(Why not pause for a moment and try it? I look around the cafe where I'm sitting with my laptop writing this, and I notice that there a five tables in the room. There are five people in the room. One hands another a five dollar bill.)

I was trying to explain this to David, and I said, "Now, for example, if we looked out at this room right now, I'll bet we could see the number 5 somehow." I turned around; the people at the table directly behind me, only a few yards away, had placed a food order and been given a number to set on their table.

Sure enough, right there in black and white, several inches high, was the number 5.

When you step on to the path of magic, "coincidences" like this are typical, bizarre synchronicities that seem to drip with meaning and portent. An excellent account of this phenomenon can be found in Robert Anton Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger. It was an important factor in the life of Aleister Crowley, who took the incident of stumbling across his misplaced manuscript of The Book of the Law as a communication from the "Secret Chiefs".

Now oddly meaningful coincidences can be explained fairly simply: when we set out on the path of magic or mysticism, we are exercising our brains' pattern recognition abilities. If the untrained human brain can look at two dots and a line and see a face, or see a face or a rabbit or an Arabic word in the dark patches on the face of the moon, or obscenities in the lyrics to "Louie Louie", then it's not surprising that a process of training the intuition can result in the perception of even more interesting and subtle patterns. I was delighted to discover that there's even a word for this misfiring of the pattern recognition system: pareidolia.

But sometimes things go a little further than just coincidences. We see minor incidents of what appear to be "poltergeist manifestations" or the work of "mischievous fairies", small objects seeming to move or disappear when no one is looking.

To take a small example of this from my own experience, let us consider the Case of the Confounding Keys:

One Wednesday evening in September a few years ago, I went to the ball court at the neighborhood middle school to get some exercise playing solo wallball. I remember that while running around the court, I took my keyring (a good sized one with about a dozen keys on it) out of my pocket so it wouldn't bounce around or fall out, and put it on the ground.

Later that evening, back home and searching unsuccessfully for those keys, I began to worry that I had left them at the court. I went back over for a look - no keys. (I should mention that my vision is 20/20 in both eyes, and that I had a flashlight to illuminate my search.)

I posted a note about the lost keys with my phone number by the court's only entrance.

Thursday morning I visited the school office to check if anyone had found them and turned them in. No luck, and no phone calls responding to my note. Thursday night, and again Friday afternoon and Friday night, I checked back around the court. No keys. (Fortunately, I had spares for the most important ones.) I put a few more signs up around the school area, this time with mention of a $10 reward.

Saturday afternoon, around 4 pm, I went back over to the school for another wallball session. (It's great exercise.) Sitting on the court, right by the wall, plain as day, were my keys.

What are we to make of that? Was I temporarily delusional? Afflicted with some strange temporary, and highly specific, malfunction of my visual cortex? If so, how was it that over several days no one else found them and turned them in, even with the promise of a reward? Was someone playing a trick? Who? How and why? Did my keys fall into some sort of interdimensional rift? Were they hidden by mischievous faeries?

I don't have an answer. But one useful observation: the strange but common urge that makes us look again and again in the place where a lost item "should" be, even when we know intellectually that it's not there, sometimes pays off.

Sometimes the magical experience goes a lot further than small items moving around. Some people report full-blown visions and other such extraordinary experiences.

Grant Morrison is a self-described "chaos magician", who in his day job is one of the most popular and successful comic book writers around. He described such an experience like this:

The short version is that I was sitting up on the roof garden of the BajaRat Hotel and this thing happened and -- it's hard to describe, we're going into areas that are unusual, so all I remember is getting back downstairs and laying on the bed and -- some unusual things happened, and then it seemed like there were entities in the room it was like those silver morphing blobs you see in rave videos. It was like computer generated things and they claimed to be cross-sections of fifth-dimensional entities as expressed through four-dimensional spacetime and they claimed that I was one of them and that I had to come back and see what the old homestead was like. And that was when I felt like I was peeled off the surface of spacetime and they took me out of my body and then to what seemed to be the fifth dimension because I could see the entirety of space and time as a dynamic object in which Shakespeare was over here, and I was over here and the dinosaurs were here and we were all in the same object, and time was a thing.

So, I appeared to be in a fifth dimensional fluid, an information space that I could say was maybe kinda bluish, extending out infinitely. These things swam through it and interacted with it and they told me that what the universe was, was a larval form of what they are, which is fifth-dimensional entities. And the only way to grow a fifth-dimensional entity is to plant it in time, henceforth our universe.

(Morrison admits that at the time of this experience he was no stranger to psychedelic drugs, but says that this event was of an entirely different order than a drug experience.)

For believers in the paranormal, all these coincidences and visions and unexplained events are evidence of some sort of supernatural entities or powers. To the skeptical, they are explained by pareidolia, or by failures of memory, or as illusions or delusions or hallucinations, malfunctions of the sensory nervous system.

From a Zen Pagan perspective, neither of these explanations is satisfactory. The true believer's approach makes claims about the objective universe that don't hold up to controlled experiment and observation. The skeptic's neurological reductionism neglects the fact that most events in the universe occur outside of laboratory controls, and ignores the person to whom the experience is happening. The subjective dimension is flattened out.

When we practice ritual, or engage in meditation, or seek otherwise to alter our consciousness, we expect to see and experience strange and unusual things. To encounter "spirits" or to have some other sort of transpersonal experience after staying up all night dancing or drumming around a bonfire, or fasting for days, or sitting unmoving in mediation for hours at a time, or ingesting strange herbs, or working yourself into a ritual frenzy, is not odd. To the practitioner, these experience are the goal of the work.

Dismissing the experience as "mere delusion" is like calling a performance of Bach fugue a "mere disturbance of air". It is technically correct, and even captures important information -- understanding that disturbance of air allows for the proper acoustic design of concert halls, after all. But it misses the aesthetic dimension that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

In the same way, calling a shaman's vision a "hallucination" may be accurate, even useful in certain contexts. (If someone was going to risk their life or well-being on information that came to them in a vision, for example, it would be good to point out that such information is not a reliable guide to objective, or "consensus", reality.) But it misses the mystical element, the deep emotional content, of the experience.

Taking Morrison's experience as an example, in his discussions of his encounter he is clear that he believes that it was a psychological experience that did not involve physical contact with extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings. But it was a deeply moving experience, one that has had a tremendous impact on his life and his art:

If the same experience had occurred in Biblical times I would no doubt have described burning bushes and celestial voices. If it had happened in the Dark Ages I would have used the language of angelic hosts and infernal spirit hierarchies. If I was Aleister Crowley I'd have called it Aiwass and founded a religion. If I'd been brought up with a lot of fear in the last few decades perhaps I could have explained it as Satanic Abuse or Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I'm a comic writer, so my attempts to frame the experience in language sound read like surrealist science fiction.

Following the apparent 'encounter' which was real enough emotionally and experientially that it rewired my entire head and changed my life forever, I began to experience all manner of weird synchronicities and I plunged deeper into some very odd and dangerous magical spaces for a few years.... [F]rightening as it was at the time, I have to say that the ordeal was a breakthrough which changed my entire life - made me happier, freer, more creative, sexier and younger by the minute. I don't do magic now, it does me. I feel like I'm living in one of my own stories.

Angels or epilepsy? Gods appearing in burning bushes, or five-dimensional[*] intelligences incarnating as silver blobs?

[* Not six dimensional. Not eight. Five, of course, in accordance with the Law.]

The answer towards which you are biased, the model you adopt for your investigations, determines the observations that you choose to make and the interpretation of the data. Therefore, for any reasonably interesting question, the harder you look into it the more you tend to be seeing your model.

For example, in the early twentieth century, some physicists held firmly to the notion that light was composed of a stream of particles. They devised experiments to detect these "photons" - and sure enough, they found them.

Other physicists were sure that light was a wave phenomenon. They devised experiments to watch these waves interact - and sure enough, that's just what they saw.

The "truth", as it turned out, was the tautology that light is light. It does what light does. "Particle" and "wave" are models, mental constructions which don't matter a hill of beans to light.

If you accept the notion that lost keys are stolen by the fey folk, you will see evidence for their existence everywhere you look - that glimpsed motion out of the corner of your eye, the strange feeling of a presence even when no one is there, the small items that seem to have moved or disappeared.

If you adopt the model that all this is the result of illusion and mental failing, you'll see how much you keep forgetting, how you overlook items right in front of you. You'll notice how unreliable your vision is, that out of the corner of your eye you sometimes see things that aren't there. Tremendous discrepancies in the memories and reports of different witnesses to the same events will become apparent. You will shake your head at the unreliability of human observation, and worry about how common outright delusion seems to be.

Rather than ask which is "true", it is better to ask which model is useful and applicable in any given situation. A modern physicist or engineer knows that sometimes he or she has to use the particles model of light, and sometimes the wave.

Bringing spirits into your calculation for a rocket launch is not particularly useful. But during a creative endeavor, the muses, the spirits of creativity - in one guise or another, whether understood as metaphysical or psychological entities - must be appeased.

To a trial lawyer, the unreliability of eyewitness observation and of hearsay evidence is fundamental, while an astronomer or physicist relies on the assumption that precise observations can be made and accurately communicated. A gambler who believes that his wishes can influence the roll of the dice will quickly end up broke; but go to a football stadium and insist to the rabid fans there that all their wishing doesn't change the action on their field, and not only will you be surprised by the reality of the "home field advantage", but if you assert your belief too strongly, you're liable to get your nose broken.

The industrial-strength shaman must be able to move from model to model, from reality tunnel to reality tunnel, as needed to be effective in any given situation. He or she must understand that even the notion that there are multiple models, is itself a model, to be adopted or to be dropped as needed.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea illustrate this brilliantly in their psychedelic science-fiction classic The Illumimnatus! Trilogy. After leading the reader -- and the characters -- on for hundreds of pages of twisted conspiracy theories involving the Law of Fives (as well as fictional versions of the Discordian Society, the A:. A:., and John Dillinger), we're given a look at the truth behind it:

"You're doing fine," Hagbard said. "Here's your latest revelation from the A:.A:. ." He reached into his pocket and took out a photo of a female infant with six fingers on each hand. "Got this from a doctor friend at Johns Hopkins."

Joe looked at it and said, "So?"

"If we all looked like her, there'd be a Law of Sixes."

Joe stared at him. "You mean, after all the evidence I collected, the Law of Fives is an Illuminati put-on? You've been letting me delude myself?"

"Not at all." Hagbard was most earnest. "The Law of Fives is perfectly true. Everybody from the JAMs to the Dealy Lama agrees on that. But you have to understand it more deeply now, Joe. Correctly formulated, the Law is: All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated, given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator." The evil grin flashed. "That's the very model of what a true scientific law must always be: a statement about how the human mind relates to the cosmos. We can never make a statement about the cosmos itself - but only about how our senses (or our instruments) detect it, and about how our codes and languages symbolize it. That's the key to the Einstein-Heisenberg revolution in physics, and to the Buddha's revolution in psychology much earlier."

"But," Joe protested, "everything fits the Law. The harder I looked, the more things there were that fit."

"Exactly," said Hagbard. "Think about that.

With this understanding, watching the Law of Fives manifest lets us see how the mind connects the dots of our observations to create the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we call "reality".

Camden Benares also gave a beautiful illustration: "Today I heard about a new thing called whatamores. I now believe in whatamores. If you can believe in whatamores and if we can form a mutually acceptable definition, we will discover large amounts of circumstantial evidence proving the existence of whatamores. When we believe enough, there will be whatamores. Do we really want any?"

This notion of our beliefs and concepts shaping the reality that we experience long predates the Discordian movement and its formulation of the Law of Fives. It goes right to the heart of Zen. As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh explains, "All concepts are dharmas, objects of mind, signs. Look deeply into one dharma, and you will see all dharmas. Once we understand that a concept is just a concept, we can go beyond that concept and be free of the dharma that concept represents."

What does this look like in practice?

The Zen temple of Nanzenji[*] is one of the most historically important in Japan. It owes its existence to the application of the "belief in whatamores" principle. In 1264, Emperor Kameyama built his retirement villa in this beautiful spot on the outskirts of Kyoto. He quickly encountered a major problem with his new digs: they were haunted. Kameyama asked several priests to exorcise the ghosts, but all failed until he invited the Zen priest Fumon to take a crack.

[* The same temple as mentioned at the start of this book.]

Rather than chanting or using some ritual to dispel the haunting, Fumon and his disciples sat in silent meditation. The ghosts disappeared.

Kameyama was so impressed that he became Fumon's student and donated the villa as a Zen temple. The favor of an Emperor -- even a retired one -- greatly increased the prestige and power of the Zen sect, and had a significant impact on Japanese history.

Fumon knew how to get rid of the whatamores: stop believing in them.

It is the key to meditation, shamanism, and magic in all their forms: change your mind, change the world.