I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about how vastly spirits’ existence might differ from our own. That they likely have modes of being and consciousness that would be literally unimaginable to us, confined as we are within the limitations of our human experience. Not one to be deterred by the impossible, this week I’ve written up some of my thoughts on what that could look like.
I generally steer away from equating scientific models with magical ones. People try to do it all the time – especially in the field of quantum physics – and the result is virtually always bad science, bad magic, or both. With that said, let’s suspend the rule briefly and talk a little bit about spacetime.
For folks who aren’t familiar with relativity, the idea is that there is a single “spacetime continuum” that is all made up of the same stuff. What we think of as dimensions (up, left, yesterday) are properties that emerge from the curled-up, fractal nature of this space-time-stuff. We are constantly moving through time at a (mostly) fixed speed and direction, but there is (so far as we know) nothing about the structure of the universe that would require this to be the case. Time is a single dimension among many, and (theoretically) ought to behave the same as any other.
This opens up some interesting avenues for contemplation, because there is no good reason a spirit’s perception of time should look like ours. Perhaps a spirit experiences time at a wildly different rate than us. They might be an enduring consciousness spanning vast eons of time, and the places they intersect with humanity might be like little flickers that barely register on their awareness.1 Or, to them, we might move as if suspended in amber, allowing them to communicate huge quantities of data to us in an instant.
Come to think of it, they might not experience time as a series of sequential moments at all. Say time is like a river. A human consciousness would be like a pole stuck into that river – the current flowing inexorably by us, where we experience each drop of water as something fresh and new, here now and then gone and never to be recovered. But a spirit might be less like a pole and more like a ribbon trailing downstream. Perhaps the spirit is experiencing a much broader range of time, all unfolding at once.
For that matter a spirit might not be immersed in time at all. Perhaps they are more like a bird, flying above the river, that can see future, present, and past all unrolled at once in a shining continuum. Perhaps, like an osprey diving for fish, they can navigate over the time-river and plunge into it in a specific place at will.
All of which is almost useless speculation, because we’re stuck in our human experience of time. We wouldn’t have the tools to understand the alternative even if it were explained to us, except by the loosest analogy.
Almost useless. Because there are some interesting ideas that emerge when we stop thinking of time in a linear way.
The first is related to ritual repetition. Often, newcomers to ritual magic are encouraged to practice a basic ritual daily. For me it was the LBRP, which I practiced at least once every day for over a year. Part of the value of this is pragmatic: the ritual becomes deeply ingrained in you, and its procedure and symbolism become something you don’t have to consciously think about. But this repetition also means you – a singular entity – are performing the same ritual in the same manner hundreds of times across time. For a being that has a higher experience of time, watching you perform a ritual at 400 different, regularly-spaced places in time simultaneously is going to be much more powerful than if you performed it once.
The other idea that comes out of our musings on time is related to causality. Let’s say I do a spell to get a job, and the next day I get a great job offer. That job offer didn’t just materialize out of the blue, even if it wasn’t something I was previously aware of. Somebody reached out to me because they thought I would be a good fit for the role, and they thought I’d be a good fit because somehow I got on their radar, and the role only existed in the first place because the company had a business need, etc. It doesn’t take long for you to trace that line of mundane causality back before the point in time where you did the spell. Which suggests two possibilities, both sort of disturbing: either a near infinite capacity to re-write reality on the fly without anyone being consciously aware that any change has been made, or the possibility that causality can run backwards in time and that spells can influence events that occurred before they were performed.
I was once asked whether someone could do a spell to change their past. To which the only possible answer is: how do you know you haven’t? If the past was thoroughly changed, you wouldn’t even realize it had happened. The world would look the same to you either way. Perhaps you do such spells all the time and don’t remember it.
Think about the most serendipitous moments you’ve experienced in your life. Perhaps you should be doing spells to bring about those moments, despite them being in the past. Perhaps the only reason the moment occurred in the first place was because of a spell you’re going to do tomorrow.
Which I guess is as good a point as any to wrap this up. I don’t really have a thesis for today’s post, I just like playing with what-ifs. I’ll reiterate what I’ve said in the past about keeping magic magical. Let’s be a little less quick to assert that we know how the universe works. And a little more open to the wonder that can be found in even relatively mundane things. Like rivers. And birds.
- This is, on a somewhat smaller scale, how I like to imagine trees experience the world. ↩︎