The Peril of Solipsism in Magical Practice
By Taylor Ellwood
In a recent livejournal post, I was writing about a personal issue and
how previous choices I’d made as well as influences from other people
had impacted my reactions to this personal issue. A good friend of mine
responded and said that my understanding of the situation was wrong,
that no one else was responsible for how I acted. S/he argued that no
one else is responsible for my reactions. While I knew my friend meant
well, her response bothered me a lot.
It wasn’t that I was trying to duck out of responsibility for my
responses. I am certainly responsible for my reactions and whether or
not I choose to act them out, or make a conscious choice and deal with
whatever situation is at hand with mindful awareness. And yet while
it’s true that I am responsible for my reactions and actions, I
couldn’t help but feel that there was something missing from hir
response.
I realized that what bothered me about hir response was that I didn’t
feel that the impact tat other people had on my reactions was
acknowledged. Not too surprisingly I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.
One commenter pointed out that the argument was flawed by using the
example that if a four year old had just been raped and was
experiencing a devastating emotional impact, you wouldn’t tell that
four year old that s/he was responsible for hir reactions to the rape.
And indeed that child would not be entirely responsible for hir
reactions, because those reactions would be a response to the impact
that someone had on hir. There would also be a question of whether she
had the emotional and mental capacity to be fully responsible for her
emotions.
The example fully illustrated a problem I’ve written about before,
namely that occult practices sometimes advocate responsibility to the
point of solipsism. Solipsism argues that anything outside the mind of
the person doesn’t exist because it can’t be known. What this means is
that even the people around you might just be a figment of your
imagination. You can never know if someone is real in a solipsistic
paradigm.
Now you might wonder how being responsible equates to solipsism.
Ideally it wouldn’t, but when taken to an extreme, where the impact of
others is not registered, responsibility can become solipsism. Worse,
if you don’t fully recognize the impact that you can have on other
people, then no matter how responsible you may act, that very act of
responsibility can become an act of self-obsession, focused so much on
claiming responsibility for what happens in your internal reality that
you ignore the impact your actions have on others and on external
reality in general. When we claim that we are responsible only for our
own reactions, and not anyone else’s reactions we ignore the principle
of connection.
Particularly in U.S. culture it’s not hard to ignore this principle. We
are raised on the belief that we are all rugged individuals, self
sufficient, not needing anyone or anything. This illusion is a
façade, yet all too easily it’s bought into. Self-sufficiency
when taken to the extreme leads to a detachment from other people and
the environment.
At least in my magical paradigm everything is connected. The choices I
make each day do have an impact on me. And the reactions I have to
situations are mostly my responsibility. I am, after all the final
arbiter in allowing myself to react or consciously act. But in all of
my choices and actions there is also an impact on other people around
me, and on the environment I am a part of. My choice to commute by bus
as opposed to driving by car has an impact on the environment and other
people. On one level that impact is simple. If I commute by bus, it’s
one less car on the road, and also that much less pollution going into
the air. If I choose to drive my car to work I could have a shorter
commute, but I also put one more car on the road and I’m also polluting
the air with the fumes from the car.
On another level this choice is complex for it involves weighing and
recognizing the impact my choice has on myself and on others. It
involves deciding if I’ll drive my car for the sake of convenience, or
if I’ll take the longer commute of the bus and know I’ve made a choice
which is environmentally sounder. It involves acknowledging not only
the responsibility to myself in the choices I make, but the
responsibility I have to others for the impact of those choices.
I’ll tell you a secret, something which has fascinated me about occult
texts and indeed discussions. There’s a lot of talk about intent and
manifesting intent and being responsible for intent, but almost nothing
is said or written about impact, about consequences, about knowing that
what you did has a life beyond intent made manifest. When nothing is
said about impact, when impact isn’t acknowledged how can we claim
responsibility for our actions or reactions? The answer is that we
can’t.
To claim true responsibility doesn’t just involve mindfully
acknowledging that you are responsible for your reactions…it is to
recognize that you have an impact on others. Sometimes the hardest
responsibility to claim is acknowledging that impact on others,
especially if the impact has been harmful. The clichéd saying
about the road to hell being paved with good intentions is still an apt
saying for it shows that no matter how much we intend good, we can
still manage to do a lot of harm by not recognizing the consequences of
that intent made flesh.
I also look at this issue from another perspective, namely that any
person (No matter how consciously aware s/he claims to be) can be
manipulated by someone else. If the manipulator knows the right buttons
to push it can be easy to spark a reaction. Are you then still
responsible for that reaction? Yes, you are responsible for it, but
that manipulator is also responsible in the sense that hir actions had
an impact. A reaction is a choice to do an action again as a way of
answering the stimulus that sparked it. There is connection here! Take
the connection away and you have nothing to react to, because nothing
has impacted you.
Connection is one of the most important principles of magical work. If
you don’t have a connection, magic won’t happen. Taking responsibility
for that connection means being mindful not only in your reactions, but
in also acknowledging the impact you can have on others. When magic is
worked with the recognition of the impact as well as the intent then it
can be said that the magician is knowingly responsible for what occurs.
The magician knows there will be consequences and accepts those
consequences as worth dealing with in order to manifest reality a
specific way. S/he recognizes that responsibility isn’t simply a
function of maintaining awareness of internal attitudes or even
reactions to situations; rather responsibility is an acceptance that
connections can and will be made and how those connections manifest is
the responsibility of all involved. This responsibility doesn’t just
involve the self, but is a responsibility to the other people involved
as well, a shared responsibility.
This kind of responsibility doesn’t create co-dependence, but does it
create interdependence, a mindful awareness that we are connected to
each other and to the environment we live in. This connection in turn
fosters awareness that reality is much larger than just the self. This
doesn’t lessen the magician, but ideally fills hir with recognition
that even as s/he shapes reality, s/he is shaped by it as well. In
other words, we can own our reactions, but we must also own the
consequences of those reactions. We gain control and awareness of our
reactions when we acknowledge that they have an impact on more than
just the self. With that understanding comes reflection wherein a
person can acknowledge how hir choices shape the internal and external
reality.
I also think it important to add that mindfully acknowledging that your
actions have an impact on others doesn’t make you less authentic in
your choices. If anything it can make you more authentic because you
really have to face a difficult choice when you know that what you do
will displease other people, but you know making the choice is what is
best for you and your future. You still acknowledge the impact, but you
also acknowledge that the choice is worth the impact and you make it,
choosing to live with the consequences in order to be true to yourself.
You know the price for your actions and you settle with that price and
find in all of this a true sense of responsibility to yourself and
other people. You balance your intent with the impact and you make a
mindful, conscious choice. There’s magic in that.
Taylor Ellwood is a co-author of
Creating Magickal Entities, author of Pop Culture Magick, Space/Time
Magic, Inner Alchemy, and Multi-Media Magic (Forthcoming). He is a
co-writer (with Lupa) of Kink Magic: Sex Magic Beyond Vanilla
(available November 2007). He is also the non-fiction managing editor
of Immanion Press, which produces quality advanced occult books. For
more information about him and his projects please visit
http://www.thegreenwolf.com
