Introduction

Negative (or “alchemical”)  inquiry performs real work.

It doesn’t usually include information or data. It doesn’t nail down a lasting conceptual framework. Nor does it describe how to apply knowledge in a rational effort to solve problems. Nor does it solely analyze a problem into parts, or propose hypotheses, or pontificate opinion.

These elements of thinking play subordinate roles in a negative inquiry. But they are all positively oriented elements by themselves.

Negative inquiry exposes and deletes falsified knowledge, and re-synthesizes what remains by default in a suggestive, rather than conclusive manner.

After deletion, what remains are a multiplicity of vantage points and questions, which had been suppressed under a positive or dogmatic framework.

A multiplicity of divergent vantage points is more insightful than answers or conclusions, because conclusions put an end to learning. This is similar to a brain-storming state of mind, which invites every perspective to the table.

These vantage points are often in contradiction with one another. In a positive enquiry, differences are perceived as obstacles to consensus, which need to be eliminated. This leads to conflict between advocates of different points of view. Ironically, the intentional pursuit of consensus leads to a battle for the supremacy of a singular conclusion. This eventually subdues divergent visions once again under a new dogma, diminishing the range of questions to matters of crisis management or framework preservation.

But when the inquiry is founded on the negative realization that an infinite universe can have no final framework, only ever more nuanced ones, then contradictory vantage points are no longer obstacles, but insights.

This transforms contradiction into paradox.

A paradox is an invitation to include and transcend the differences in a wider framework. It’s no longer an internecine battle between different ideas, but a more patient consideration of all the points in a Medicine wheel, allowing a larger framework to consolidate by merely sitting with difference. This results in an almost accidental consensus of spirit and vision. But without any conclusive (or battle-hardened) framework.

In other words, a negative inquiry (which is essentially Bohmian dialogue) presumes an infinitely open universe, where new frameworks are merely insights or ever larger overview perspectives, but never final answers.

Whereas, a positive inquiry – one that aims for a conclusive answer – presumes a knowable or closed universe, which generates conflict between competing answers.

Therefore, a negative inquiry is learning without end. It’s more like a performance of a new way of being, rather than an exercise in over-thinking. It’s like a dance between neither this, nor that and both this and that.

And this perpetual performance (or practice) of uncertainty or “suspension” awakens a sleeping potential of the human brain, which is to change the world at the root level of perception, where – as David Bohm phrased it — “a change in meaning is a change in being.”

The Black Magic of Language

Alchemical writing isn’t the kind of performance that postulates a divide between performer and spectator. This isn’t a “show”, in other words. These aren’t “merely words”. Here the power of words transforms the world directly, not as a means to an end.

This power isn’t found in explanation, description, analysis or metaphysical conjecture.

Those are merely ways of using language as a conjecture straining towards dead certainty.

Words have only a mechanical power in that direction. They can inform, instruct, deceive, indoctrinate, and over-power intelligence with the bells and whistles of extraordinary intellect, leaving us “convinced” of a particular vision. Stuck in dogma.

If this form of language becomes dominant, it embodies a machine intelligence, which seeks to eliminate questions by answering them. It craves perfection in a closed universe.

So, an answer is a kind of enchantment, which dulls the intelligence and makes us dependent on an external frame or authority for guidance. It’s a black magic.

The black magic of words requires a mixture of one-sided stories, white lies, transparencies of illusion that cling to the surface of reality like mental cataracts, dulling our perception, and a pinch of real insights. In the cauldron of an essay, this mixture hypnotizes the intelligence into a limited infinity (or demiurgic trap) that presents itself as “all there is to the world.” We become trapped in an infinite simulation of an open universe.

The confidence this generates in a reader is a secret dependency on the authoritarian magician. And it makes us afraid to ask any questions that might topple the diseased order to which we end up clinging for identity and stability.

The White Magic of Words

But words also have a neglected “white-magic” power to reverse these charms. This is the power to dissolve the illusion of perfect knowledge, which has even perverted an open-minded science into a search for machine perfection and has corrupted theory into a vehicle for seeking certainty.

Language that negates these illusions triggers a wholly new way of seeing and being. By negating the assumption that anything can be known conclusively, it removes our fear of uncertainty, restoring mystery and wonder in our relationship to the unfathomable world. It provides an immunity to indoctrination.

In other words, the white power of words doesn’t lie in concepts and other intellectual formulations that we are forced to believe or disbelieve. It lies in breaking down these calloused structures. Words used in this way can release the human spirit that had been trapped in a circular cage of thinking, which it mistook for reality.

By realizing the nature of a confusion, a fusion of dichotomies is performed. By becoming alert to imbalance, balance is restored.

The Absence of Certainty Isn’t an Absence of Form

But these realizations must find some material form (in paper, for instance). Otherwise, the deletions of assumption (which are insights) won’t reach into daily life. They would remain only passing flashes of perspective that don’t translate into a new way of being. The immaterial insight must reach a material ground to re-fuse the confusion.

Language is the sacred twilit zone between the material and the immaterial worlds – a semi-material form, which can become imbued with transformative virtue (or conversely imbued with machine logic that tends towards domination and control).

The page (the subtle mud of language) can preserve both the corrupt imprints of a machine mind coiling towards dead certainty; and it can preserve a spiraling dance of dis-enchantment.

And anyone tending, attending or giving attention to a white magic performance participates in the ceremony of healing and is transformed by the page’s embedded virtue. In a white-magic direction, there is no separation between writer and reader: No expert, no dependency for guidance; only a brother or sister awakening from the cultural spell, who resonates with other awakening souls.

Performance Is Not a Show

But many presume that performances are merely attempts to attract attention or admiration. That’s because most performances are no longer transformative. No old forms of meaning are broken down, and no new forms are synthesized if we’re merely showing off.

But when one’s own chaos demands resolution in a larger order, then performance becomes an alchemical transmutation of disorder. Then a chaos is consumed in a cosmic fire, which simultaneously gives material expression to a new order from the ashes of the old.

In other words, negation is not the elimination of a capacity to posit ideas and points of view. Nor is it a prohibition on using machine intelligence. It merely refers to the elimination of that central assumption of positive knowledge, which makes us vulnerable to the black magic of machine intelligence. And this provides creative space to look at things in a more prismatic manner, from all angles of the Medicine Wheel. In this creative space, we lose the gullible conviction that we can get to the bottom of this unfathomable world. And this dissolves the craving to do so, which provides immunity from singular perspectives, which is black magic.

This is My Problem

I know this, because I can feel the fear within myself. It’s my own machine mind I’m confronting. I can pull these perspectives from the ether, but am I listening? I notice that a little jolt of fear triggers each thought, from morning till night. At first, that’s not fun to notice, because it wobbles the carefully preserved consensus reality of “who I am.” It makes me feel like a hypocrite.

But this hypocrisy quickly becomes the most interesting thing I’ve ever confronted. To notice one’s automatic nature is to become astonished and stirred to life. It feels like a false transparency of myself is being painfully peeled from an unknown reality.

So, this is a self-inquiry, not a lecture, although I attempt to organize what I am discovering so that you can understand what is otherwise – without this form-finding work – an interior chaos. I share this so that you and I will know we’re not alone in this madhouse. We are fellow prisoners, cutting free our chained minds.

In this performance, I’m deciphering the engineered entrails of this self-centric machine, this writer’s life. He is reading this, too, even as he writes. He is appalled by himself, and then amused, and then edified.

I am a rich source of study. The “I” is always a rich source, because identity is the central cauldron of the positive illusion. The page preserves the ceremony of turning towards this Self as an anonymous object. It provides perspective on “the Self” as a machine copy of a real being, not who any of us really are.

The Self is an enchantment (a predator’s trap), in which a genuine being is caught. We can tell each other this now. Nobody would listen to such an outrage only a few years ago. We were too convinced of ourselves. But the revelation of Epstein also heralds the revelation of our own private falsehood.

This is real work. My real life depends on dissolving the predatorial trap, and so does yours. We are not really separate beings.

Everything can change all at once for all of us in the same way everything in a room can look different all at once with the flicking of a single switch. The color changes, the room brightens, the furniture of thought reveals itself. A fundamental alteration in the assumption that sets the tone of color can make visible a way to live that was not visible before.

The performance here is a metabolization of the writer’s own black magic infection, which is not merely personal, but systemic (yours too).

How Performance Degraded into Spectacle: How Black Magic Came to Rule the World

But when our focus turned from these immaterial transformations towards the more material transformations of the internal combustion engine (etc.), performance began to degrade into entertainment, and our serious attention turned solely towards tool-making. And now we judge the “advancement” of other civilizations solely on this one criterion, forgetting that many of these older cultures were far more attentive to immaterial transformations than we are now.

So, as technology distracted us with its bells and whistles, the deeper meaning of performance became obscured.

Dance, music, art and sports – although often genuinely transformative – show signs of spiritual degradation, because the performers have become severed from the spectators. Spectators now tend to only worship the authoritative expertise of performers, or weakly bask in the reflection of their fame.

Of course, there is still some glimpse of a real transformation in listening or dancing to music, or in a poem, or a garden, or even in an ice dancer’s routine or in a double-play or a perfect pass. In all these genuinely profound or merely athletic forms of art, the intelligence, technical precision and choreography are genuine signs of transformative power in the performance, which can profoundly change the bearing of those who are fully immersed in the experience as readers, listeners or dancers at a bar, so that they are no longer merely spectators.

But these transformative moments are becoming rarer even as we become ever more dazzled by performative perfection.

This is probably because the competitive context of a successful artist or athlete undercuts inspiration in several ways. First, the competitive atmosphere converts the performance into a commodity. Social norms constantly push the genuine performer towards an idea of success or status that is almost too impossible to escape. Here profit-seeking and name recognition become distracting ulterior motivations to performance for its own sake, while keeping spectators behind paywalls.

This creates a rigid distinction between the superhuman “professional” artist and the amateur or common spectator. Performance then becomes stripped of its spiritual dimension and becomes transcendental only in the sense that it transcends the amateur audience member’s wildest fantasies of similar attainment, reducing the spectator to a mere mortal who is cut off from the world of living gods. All we can do then is clap from the sidelines like serfs worshipping the higher blood of Royals.

And this describes the endpoint in a long, slow decline of shamanistic ritual into art and finally into entertainment as a mere distraction from “real life.” So, then, no matter how “moved” we are by a great performer, the performance itself is not transformative, but merely a recapitulation of a power dynamic, which keeps the spectator (or the serf) in their paying place and unable to find their own voice (because individual voices only really develop in a chorus larger than ourselves).

Hence, the spreading feeling of isolation and meaninglessness among the vast legions of us muggles, even as the skill level of professional performers reaches magical heights.

So, this is what many people imagine when they see another muggle trying to “perform” for others. Because, for decades now, almost all we hear is the competitive noise of people who feel compelled by this poisoned cultural predicament into building personal brands, and straining to be popular, which leads to a second-rate expression of their genuine potential.

How White Magic Returns

Everyone is born to be a performer in the authentic or white magic sense. By birth, every living being is putting form to an unrepeatable juxtaposition of time and space, which is their individuality.

And it wasn’t all that long ago, when every human tribe danced around the fire, and allowed themselves to merge through rituals of song and dance with other beings and larger worlds.

These form-shifting performances made it possible to see the world as an owl or bear, not only for the benefit of hunters and gatherers, but for the benefit of life itself, which wisdom serves.

And it was a way to fly to the moon before rockets. And these were not imaginary stories for entertainment, but real transformations, which allowed the human being to see things beyond their normal ken; and to find balance in the seemingly stormy world of predators and prey; and access the green fuse — the double-helix — of life and death rising from some eternal ground.

Performances allowed the body to receive intimations of the whole. They were more profound than religious dogma. They gave us the freedom to inhabit every perspective without becoming stuck in that form as a dead certainty.

Slowly, we’re regaining respect for what was lost. And we’re learning to recognize once again that not all “form” is solid matter. Heat and light have subtle material forms. And there are formations of thought and belief and emotion. And there are forms of insight that are utterly immaterial. And even atoms themselves are only patterns of energy forming and disappearing. And patterns of energy rise from an infinite potential that is like a silent mind prior to the eruption of a solid idea.

And there is something we don’t remember clearly, but which flickers on the periphery, which is the memory of who we really are; and the nature of this world. It is a way of being we forgot; a way to hear stories or listen to words, without squeezing them into a fistful of nothingness.

Peeling the Transparency of Pretense from the Real

Fake forms obscure authentic forms everywhere we look. There’s a fake version plastered over everything real in life. It’s as if our eyes have been covered by many layers of transparency. And each fake layer has to be peeled from our vision, until a reality emerges that is not static and fake, but active.

Even “balance” is obscured by fake balance. What we call a balanced human being is often just a person so set in their ways that nothing can affect them. Nothing can throw them off, and nothing can stir them to life either. Thus, callousness becomes a fake version of toughness. And brutality becomes is a fake form of bravery.

And the real meaning of performance has been made invisible by a fake overlay of “show”.

And peeling away the false layers from the real is tremendously unpleasant. Nobody wants to notice the fake qualities of the things we’ve become dependent upon for identity.

So, the amateur performer (who is sincere) is forced to realize that whatever we do will likely remain invisible. It will be obscured behind false conceptions of what is happening, which almost nobody wants to question. In isolation, none of us are keen to shove the curtain aside and join the dance, because that will mean facing our own pain of self-deletion (the deletion of who we think we are).

Language performs this healing work by deleting the false transparencies of ourselves. This performance isn’t a search for meaning. It is meaning (truth and beauty) breaking down the walls of false and ugly knowledge.

And if we wish to avoid the commodified trap of becoming “known” to others (and to ourselves), we will have to reject the public persona, before we become trapped in it, and embrace the status of a random nobody, an anonymous amateur.

But this person will no longer be a spectator. And this person will lose their fear of the abyss of shape-shifting transformations, which is death. And this person will find themselves in an open-ended world, which can never be solved or lead to a settled identity.

And the emptiness that used to scare us then becomes a space to play.

And it is language that triggers this change in orientation; a language that performs an act of deletion, releasing the caged spirit.