#8
Unlike the whys, the magic attracted little media attention. The exception was Lynn Graham (the daughter of Sheila Graham, one of the leading Hollywood gossip-columnists in the 1950s and 1960s) who had a talk show Trend Setters, on Cable D Video out of N.Y.C. She heard about our first experiment, when we “made it rain,” from a student, and invited me to appear, accompanied by two students. Succinctly, she wanted to hear about what I call the “ooga-booga” of magic—whatever might seem sensational—while I wanted to explain the cognitive implications of acausality. Enough said.
I received one response from the show. Into my office one day walked Ken Heyman, who was to set in motion the third major project during this period.
I recognized Ken immediately because I had approached him not long before, at the opening of an art show, and he had “brushed me off” (I led with a line about the art in the exhibit, and I later learned that his lack of collegiality was due to the fact that he did not want to discuss the art.) But the reason I originally approached him was because of the unusual distinction he held in anthropology as Margaret Mead’s photographer in the field for twenty years during her prime, having taken the pictures that appeared in her books (Mead being the most prominent cultural anthropologist since anthropology started as a discipline in 1870). Ken had also been one of Life magazine’s main photographers during the 1950s and 1960s, widely regarded as photojournalist’s golden years. Now he was teaching at Parsons School of Design, which was another division of the New School for Social Research.
Ken and I eventually became friends, but not before we completed our project, sparked by his reason for seeking me out. Certain “coincidences” had started to drive him crazy, literally, and he had sought the help of a psychiatrist who recommended that Ken “rest” in a hospital, where Ken sensed he was in danger of losing his liberty—that is, of being committed. So he convinced the doctor that he was sane enough to leave by saying what the doctor wanted to hear, namely that the coincidences had no deeper meaning. Ken then set out in search of alternative solutions, which is when he saw the show. In the discussion of magic it was especially the allusion to “spirit” that resonated with him. Viewing magic as related to religion, the anthropological record suggests that mages (“shamans” among “primitive” peoples) generally if not always operate with some understanding of spirit, which, at its lowest common denominator, can be defined as a consciousness, and in the context of magic, the agency by whom or which the magic is successful or not. Looking at coincidence in this light made particular sense to Ken, and he wanted more.
So we sat down with a recorder, as is standard practice in elicitations, but no clear expectation of where we were going. Ultimately we held six sessions, in which Ken drew me out on the idea of spirit so that we covered many bases, answered questions and addressed common misconceptions. I had not thought through the topic so thoroughly before, and some of the explanations I myself proffered along the way came to me as revelations of a sort, flowing logically and interconnecting with one another.
For instance, seeing spirit as consciousness links the human mind (not to be equated with the brain) to the concept of ghosts as well as gods: The only quality possessed by “supernatural” spirits, including God, is consciousness, and the notion of any spirit being unconscious is absurd. Further, this idea of spirit helps in the understanding of the different relations between matter and spirit in the world’s religions—spirit as present everywhere but separate from things—omnipresence—versus the belief that things are themselves conscious—as in many Pagan perceptions—both of these notions being in contrast to the Hindu belief that matter does not exist and there is nothing but God/Consciousness). It also helps sort out an understanding of “soul” versus spirit, and addressed the issue of whether references to the “Energy” (or the “Force” as in Star Wars) is tantamount to talking about God.
On the basis of the elicitation, I created a course, Studies in Cognitive Anthropology: Experiences with Spirits, in which I used this expanded perspective to elucidate the spectrum of belief from primal spiritism to civil occultism and the major modern monotheisms. (Of course, magic was a topic, and our record in the experiments was introduced as a challenge to one’s beliefs.)
In neither the elicitation nor the course, of course, did I suggest what spirit, if any, was real or true. However, in both cases I did introduce the principle of cognitive consonance, and I went so far as to say that a belief in spirit or spirits adds a dimension that can enhance consonance simply because it explains more.
So I was not supporting any particular truth: What’s more, consistent with the science of anthropology, I suggested that it cannot be known for sure what is really true, and that the most a person can do is construct as whole a vision of reality as he can. But this in effect raises relativity of belief to the status of a universal, which is as close as a scientist can get to religiosity (as a scientist). Of course this was consistent both with ecumenism and with the whys precept of think for yourself, and the synergy was daunting.
At the same time, as I read through a transcript of the sessions, I compulsively edited it, and became increasingly aware (and subconsciously uncomfortable) that it was beginning to be a book. (Ken’s involvement was limited to the initial sessions, by his own wish.) In addition to clarifications, I organized the original transcript, which roamed and rambled according to the whims of our conversation, under more focused conceptual categories.
At some point I gave the work a title, “Who Ot Is,” which itself begs for explanation. The title essentially means, Who God Is, but I needed to insert my candidate for a gender-neutral personal pronoun in the English language. In the course of discussing spirits, one is impressed—or depressed—very quickly by the inconvenience of the gender problem in our language. Many spirits, including angels and demons, but especially what has been referred to as God, the Great Spirit, are either neither or both male and female (angels, for instance are neither whereas Shiva, the Destroyer, is both). Using the plural “they” and its other forms to refer to individuals (as in “A person should make up their own mind”) might work with humans even though it is numerically obfuscatory, but it does not work when referring to spirits, most especially not with a monotheistic God (even when referring to the prevalent Christian concept of the Trinity!)
The word “It” doesn’t work—not just because spirits are not things in that they don’t have physical bodies, but because they are conscious (which can be seen in the fact that it is rude to refer to animals as “its.”). And this is not to mention the time and space and ink devoted to he/she or she/he and their permutations despite the fact that these are still unbalanced because one gender is cited ahead of the other.
I contrived the word “ot” on the grounds that it was created on two bases—one, the linguistic principle that new words work best when they are not confused with similar words in the same context, and two, the confluence in “ot” between the words “who” and “it.” I systematically ran “ot” through various semantic contexts and it held up well, while the various grammatical forms of the word conform to those of “it,” with which speakers are already familiar—so, ot as the subject/object, ots the possessive form, and ot’s the conjunction for “ot is.”
So to capitalize the word conveys the idea of deity. In addition to resolving the awkwardness with respect to persons, the topic of spirit made the word almost revelatory as a constant reminder of the true nature of many spirits (according to all the major faiths). I am always surprised by the number of students in a class for whom this knowledge seems to come as a revelation of something obvious.
In my mind, the work was a primer in the concept and lore of spirit without pertaining to any particular belief system—or, rather, pertaining to all of them. However, the subject, combined with the elicitation style of the writing, infused it with a catechism-like quality that would certainly be perceived as pontifical, and I perceived a potential for misunderstanding much worse than with the prior manuscripts, which intensified the conflict that had become characteristic of my career.
Moreover, the work, deriving from Ken’s interests, was for practical purposes not academic, and therefore was suitable only for commercial or “trade” publishers, which would give me no protection or “cover’ from popular perception. Yet I still was not entirely able to make my peace with the withholding of such information. So, with some apprehension, I queried a literary agent—someone who has a general knowledge of the book business and who mediates between editor and author. The agent quickly responded, “Why would anyone care what you think about spirit?” Enough said.
No Guru 