It is commonly understood among those who profess to follow the way of “positive thinking” that the content of one’s thoughts has an influence upon reality. There are many different manifestations of this understanding, from the profound to the obnoxious (one need only remember The Secret), but the general principle is a sound one. For those willing to pay close attention to their own experiences, the flow of internal decisions does indeed leak out beyond the boundaries of the self into the surrounding world. Each human being is a nexus of causality, and the lineaments of this nexus extend from the innermost recesses of the human spirit to the furthest reaches of the earth.
This is not something understood only by New Age gurus and popular psychologists. Many of the great religious traditions are keenly aware that the patterns of our inner lives manifest themselves in our outer lives, sending ripples out to our local environs and beyond. In discussing precisely this phenomenon, the Russian philosopher and theologian Pavel Florensky speaks of a person’s “empirical nature,” that part the self that is accessible to one’s subjective experience, from one’s subtlest intentions to one’s basic physical behaviors:
But this empirical nature is disclosed in a system of thoughts, feelings, and desires, and is manifested in actions. These actions become autonomous and induce corresponding thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions in other people, independently of the one who provided the first stimulus. In action (and the word is action par excellence) an empirical character acquires a material body as it were and spreads spiritual power in this body.1
Thus, the inner reaches of each person’s being become manifest, or incarnate, in their actions, which in turn influence the interior spaces of other people. The nature of these manifestations is dependent upon the nature of their origin, and the character of a person determines the influence he or she exerts. Once this influence has set sail, so to speak, it becomes autonomous, acting independently of the individual from which it sprung:
Not only the energy of good will but also the energy of evil will finds for itself an autonomous expression, an expression no longer dependent on the one who wills. . . . An evil or a good will, once it is excited on the surface of the human sea, never disappears but eternally spreads out in widening circles, and the one who excited it is caught up by it like everyone else. Both Pygmalion, who fell in love with Galatea, and Gogol’s artist, who came to hate the portrait he painted, treat their creations as if they were living beings, people. A thought was conceived and embodied. It was born and it has grown up, and nothing will now return it to the maternal womb.2
While Florensky is here largely describing the effects of empirical nature as transmitted through words and actions, it is conceivable that there are other, more subtle, means by which the interior lives of individuals effect one another and the world around them. One need only think of the many remarkable stories of so-called paranormal experiences that seem to arise from any and every community and culture throughout time. I imagine that most of us have had some kind of experience of this sort or personally know someone who has, no matter how much we may choose to dismiss them. It is, I think, the norm to have a sister, or an aunt, or a brother who knows when a family member is hurt or has an uncanny capacity to sense others’ agitation. Married couples regularly display a capacity to predict and intuit each other’s thoughts and feelings that often appears to border on, if not cross into, telepathy. And there is no reason why we should think these nonmaterial connections between beings to be limited merely to the human. Animals appear to display even greater capacities for hard-to-explain intuitions and sympathetic connections. One need only consider the proverbial dog that knows it owners are coming home long before any purely sensory evidence could give this away. Or one may take the even more remarkable example of the death of Lawrence Anthony, the conservationist and “elephant whisperer,” who, after dying of a heart attack, was mourned by the elephants living on his reserve, during which they stood vigil around his house for two days. Apparently, the elephants return year after year on the anniversary of his death to pay their respects. Such occurrences at least point in the direction of an extrasensory connection between living things, and who knows to what extent these connections may be influencing the world around us every day. I suspect the more subtle among us are already deeply in touch with these currents, whether they are fully aware of what they are doing or not.
One need not look far, in fact, to find subcultures where such connections are taken for granted and even regularly manipulated to achieve certain effects. One such subculture is the modern occult scene, and indeed the entire “esoteric tradition” going back throughout history. Those who participate in occult practices seek to magnify their will along the various currents of interconnected consciousnesses to bring about some kind of change. One popular definition (by occult standards) of magic is that it is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will, the caveat being that it is not merely one’s own consciousness that can be influenced. Indeed, much occultism is fundamentally idealist in its philosophical thinking, and even material reality is reducible to consciousness and thus manipulatable. One of the many methods that magicians employ in order to effect such change is the creation of autonomous psychic entities for the achieving of a very specific end. In chaos magic, the postmodern, DIY occultism currently in vogue in a number of online corners, these entities are referred to as “servitors.” The magician begins by creating a symbol (referred to as a sigil) that represents a certain intention, an embodiment of will. This symbol is then fed psychic energy through systematic contemplation. Here is how one online guide to chaos magic prescribes the feeding of the servitor:
Close your eyes, enter a state of gnosis [a state of meditative concentration] and visualize your sigil. Imagine it as a living being whose sole purpose is to cheerfully complete a given task. Do this exercise for as long and often as you can for at least a week. When out and about your daily life imagine it following you around, either behind you or just out of sight. Try to feel its presence.3
In this way, a given intention of the magician is made autonomous, and the desired result is—at least in theory—achieved. The degree of autonomy granted to the servitor may, moreover, become problematic. As Florensky points out, one’s thoughts and intentions, once set free, often affect their creators in unexpected ways, catching them up in a rising tide of causality, and the aforementioned guide is quite explicit on this point:
It is vital that once your servitor has completed its task that you delete it. If you fail to do so it will grow, become resentful and possibly turn on you. Deletion is simple. Ignore it. Since your attention is its food by giving it none it starves to death. This is why you never assign a personality and such. To do otherwise may grant it sentiency and would be cruel to both the servitor and you.4
We will ignore the problematic assertion that human beings are able to create authentic life implied by the last sentences. The important point is that these entities act as if they were alive and have genuine influence upon the world. In fact, they are alive in a certain sense. The magician has fed some degree of his or her own life into the servitor, and this energy continues to enact the particular intention for which it is a conduit until its source is removed.
The degree to which we accept the existence of such beings or their capacity to influence reality is largely beside the point, for it is indisputable that they will at the very least have a significant effect upon the internal life of the magician, and this effect will continue to radiate outward, becoming incarnate and influencing the interior lives of others. It is, moreover, conceivable that such entities operate on a shared non-sensory level of reality and are able to exert influence on the consciousness of other beings, although the exact processes by which this would occur remains obscure.
Whichever way we choose to view such occult practices, it is clear that they represent the exploitation of genuine knowledge regarding the causal systems of reality in which we are all enmeshed. Such practices are, moreover, based on precisely the same understanding as that of the religious view articulated above, which further indicates the plausibility of their efficacy. Nevertheless, there remains an abyss between the use the occultist makes of such knowledge and that of the religious person. Although the general picture of how this particular level of reality operates is fundamentally the same, or at least very similar, religious and occult activity remain largely antithetical to one another. While the magician seeks to fulfill his or her will, the religious person seeks to purify the self through asceticism.
The occult manipulation of servitors and all other fields of psychic causality are in essence a search for power, whereas the ascetic path that characterized religion (or at least ascetic religion) is the exact opposite. The ascetic recognizes what the occultist does not: the evil that is constantly attempting to stretch forth out of the depths of our souls and exert its influence. So long as these seeds exist, so long as one’s heart has not been made pure, any activity that one undertakes will be ambiguous, blended with all the passions of our fallen nature. To recognize this and seek to magnify one’s will through the acquisition of power, occult or otherwise, is only to water the weeds in our hearts that might otherwise have lacked the space to grow thick. Florensky again:
Love of evil is the most expressive manifestation of the corruptness of human nature, and no one can say that he is completely free of this perversion. Even the most innocent of the human race, children, are not free of evil will, whose manifestation is described, e.g., by Saint Augustine. . . . After this, what can one say about adults? Increasing much more rapidly than one’s age, sinfulness has love of evil as its sting. . . . From the cruelty of an innocent child tearing the wings from a butterfly to the bestial defilement of this very same child, the path is uninterrupted, and no one can say what he might be capable of, what is “absolutely impossible” for him. As soon as the barrier placed by exterior life to the seeds of evil are removed, these grow into lush fields, unless there is sin-destroying grace. Power, riches, independence from public opinion, expelling fear from the soul of a man without grace, enable the sprouting up of demons about which, at another time, he would be horrified even to think.5
The magnification of one’s will through occult practices is, therefore, no less hazardous to one’s own soul or to the world at large than is the magnification of one’s influence through the acquisition of wealth, prestige, or political power. An evil will made large not only exerts the same level of evil on a larger scale but becomes in the process yet more evil as the base appetites that it feeds grow in proportion to the power it accrues. Indeed, the occult practice is likely even more hazardous, as it all too often involves the opening up of the self to exterior spiritual entities of a dubious nature, which are regularly explained away as manifestation of one’s unconscious or else as benign or at least manageable beings. The absurdities and degradations characteristic of the lives of so many occultists is a testament to these dangers.
The ascetic, on the other hand, seeks to stifle the seeds of evil in his or her heart. To follow the ascetic path is to seek the absolute perfection of oneself. In Eastern Orthodox theology, this perfection is understood as theosis, or deification, the union of the person with God. The self is perfected in this union because the self’s foundation and end are united in the will of God, who is its creator. This is abundantly clear in many of the Church Fathers. Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, describes the principle (or arche) of each thing as the intention that God has for that thing, which is ultimately identical with each creatures perfect end, or telos. Each creature is called forth out of nothingness in time and must travel a road, a process of development, from its arche to its telos, which may be broken and stained by the vacillations of an as-yet imperfect will. The ignorance inherent to the infantile moments of each creature, and the subsequent shattering of reality engendered by the fall, causes this process of development to often be characterized by an opposite process, an opposite path by which each creature can violate its own ground and descend back toward the nothingness of its birth. It is only by keeping one’s eye fixed upon the intention that God has for one that perfection may be achieved in the giving of oneself to the will of God, wherein one receives one’s self back again, but perfected. “He that findeth his life will lose it: and he who loseth his life for my sake will find it.” (Matt. 10:39).
It is, moreover, in the person of Christ that one is able to see the will of God most perfectly, and thus in him that we may see ourselves as we are meant to be. The ascetic path is not one of rigid adherence to external rules, but the living encounter with Christ and his will for each person. In the Logos, all the principles of creation are revealed as a part of the all-encompassing will of God that is expressive of the outpouring love through which all things are brought to be. As Christ is the incarnation of the Logos, in him is seen the totality of perfected being and thus the ascetic sees the model of himself toward which he must exert his efforts:
The holiness of the person lies precisely in his living freedom, in being above all schemata. A person can and must correct himself—but not according to a norm that is external to himself, even if it be the most perfect norm. Rather, he must correct himself only according to the way he himself is in his ideal form. The standard for a person must be he himself and only he himself, because otherwise it would be possible to conclude mechanically from what is alien to and outside the person to his life, and to give him norms in this mechanical manner. The uniqueness of every person, his absolute irreplaceability by anything else, requires that he himself be standard for himself; but in order to be standard it is necessary to have already attained an ideal state. In order to become a saint it is necessary to be a saint: it is necessary to pull oneself up by one’s own hair. This is possible in Christ, Who, in His flesh, shows to every man God’s idea of him. This is possible only through experience, through personal communion, through the unceasing scrutiny of the Face of Christ, through the finding of one’s genuine self, one’s genuine humanity, in the Son of Man.6
Each person’s recognition of his or her own self can be seen in the early depictions of Christ. Many early Christian murals and carvings depict Christ as the fulfillment of every human type. He is depicted holding scrolls and surrounded by disciples to show that he is the true philosopher, the source of all truth and wisdom. He holds a wand to show that he is the true magician because he is the true spiritual power, the ultimate potency of all being. He is shown at various ages and even at times with feminine features (see Mathews Clash of Gods Chapter 5). One can see in this variety of depictions the fulness of humanity revealed in the person of Christ, in whom all people—and indeed all of creation—find their foundation and perfection.
The self-perceived in Christ must be pursued, grown within one’s life as one’s life. This process of becoming perfect is an architectural or horticultural one. All that does not conform to what one truly is, which is to say what God truly wills one to be, is cut off like a withered branch, and the edifice of one’s self must be built on the heavenly pattern which is revealed in the person of Christ:
Every impure thought, every idle word, every evil deed, everything whose source is not God, everything whose roots are not fed by the water of eternal life is inwardly condemned because it does not conform with the Ideal which is in Christ and because it is incapable of receiving the Spirit—all this will be torn out of the formed empirical person, of human selfhood.7
Thus, the ascetic act is in fact an artistic act, the building of one’s self in synergy with God, the gardening of one’s soul into the full potential contained in the authentic seeds of one’s foundation and the systematic destruction of the weeds that violate that foundation. “Religiously instructive creativity and artistic creativity are analogous. For spiritual ascesis is art par excellence, art that gives the highest beauty to creation.”8
How great a difference is there between this art of the spirit and the volitional technologies of the occultist. The pursuits of the will are vain so long as the will has not been washed, has not been formed by the perfection of Christ. To achieve this purification is to partake of the divine itself, the inrushing of the divine beauty. “And if an artist gives beauty to the world, the artist of artists makes the universe shine with the beauty of beauties.”9
Of course, it is plausible that an occultist, too, might be seeking to create him or herself in accordance with God’s will, although I suspect that a genuine seeking of this sort requires one to abandon the techniques so often employed in occult (or New Age, or neopagan) practices. Nor is the self-aggrandizing occultist the only one guilty of seeking to fulfill a fallen volition. We are all, to some degree or another, guilty of this, and the more we seek to magnify our power, the more opportunities we give ourselves to magnify our passions. There are any number of ways of doing this, from social manipulation to science to political prestige (to writing online articles). The difference between the chaos magician and the stock broker attempting to push the market for profit is merely the level of reality in which each works. Neither is properly ascetic, and so the activities of both are distractions. To find truth, one must go beyond oneself and the endless tools for propping up our own disordered desires that make up so much of our efforts. The giving of oneself to God in love is not a matter of proper technique, but of faith, contemplation, and self-denial.
Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton University Press, 1997), 164.
Ibid., 165.
Arch-traitor Bluefluke, The Psychonaut Field Manual, 8. Retrieved from https://img.fireden.net/tg/image/1454/10/1454107178165.pdf.
Ibid.
Florensky, Pillar and Ground, 513–14.
Ibid., 169.
Ibid., 174.
Ibid.
Ibid., 165.
Benjamin,
Your's is a well-captured description of the assumed process of positive thinking:
"It is commonly understood among those who profess to follow the way of “positive thinking” that the content of one’s thoughts has an influence upon reality...the flow of internal decisions does indeed leak out beyond the boundaries of the self into the surrounding world."
Do you think that this is associated - if in an inverse manner - with the concept about which St Justin (Popovic) writes when he says:
"In actual fact, man bases his entire, visible life, life in time and space, on invisibilities, ie, on the soul, on its thoughts, on its conscience. In the world of visible realities and existence man orients himself by his thought; by it he weighs and appraises everything - by thought, which is invisible to himself...by it he has oriented himself to the world of spiritual realities and spiritual values...the human spirit is a wonderworking laboratory, in which sensory impressions are processed into thoughts in an incomprehensible manner." (Man and the God-man, p. 18)