Tendrils of Reality

1/2 each green, red, orange, and yellow bell peppers - diced 1 jalapeno - diced

1/2 onion - diced

4 cloves crushed garlic

2 carrots - shredded

1 cup green cabbage - shredded

1 lb ground beef, 20% fat - cooked until brown

pepper, salt, onion powder, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, oregano, red chili powder, ginger

Add vegetables.

Cook until done.

Drain fluid, transfer to bowl in warm oven and wash skillet for next step.

Twin Dragon brand Egg Roll Wrappers. All other brands I’ve tried suck.

Set up for rolling. Follow folding/rolling instructions on package.

About 1 to 2 heaping tablespoons per wrapper.

If working alone, store temporarily. Better to have someone else begin frying them as soon as they are rolled, lest they might stick to things and tear.

Fry in olive oil with optional few tablespoons of coconut oil, about a 1/2 inch deep, on medium-high heat. Transfer to oven on platter lined with paper towels.

untiltheseashallfreethem suggested I talk about what “magic” means, and while my own definition is complicated enough to be an incomplete long-form blog post, here are some definitions from others.

1. “Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” --Aleister Crowley, (MTP, p.XII).

2. “Magick is the science and art of causing change in consciousness to occur in conformity with will.” --Dion Fortune.

3. “Magick is the science and art of causing change (in consciousness) to occur in conformity with will, by means not currently understood by traditional Western science.” --Donald Michael Kraig, (Modern Magick, 531).

4. “Magic is the Highest, most Absolute, and most Divine Knowledge of Natural Philosophy, advanced in its works and wonderful operations by a right understanding of the inward and occult virtue of things; so that true Agents being applied to proper Patients, strange and admirable effects will thereby be produced.  Whence magicians are profound and diligent searchers into Nature: they, because of their skill, know how to anticipate an effect, the which to the vulgar shall seem to be a miracle.” --Introduction to the Goetia, Crowley edition, p.6.

5. “Magick…is the production of desired effects, whether within the person of the magician or exterior to it, by means of a deliberate and special use of powers and faculties within the psyche.  This may include effects produced by the agency of entities or energies which do not belong to the psyche of the magician: but if the action is to be described as magick it must be entirely under the command, and according to the will, of the magician.”       --Melita Denning & Osbourne Phillips, (The Foundations of High Magick, p.xviii.)

6. “actual magic, by which I mean practical sorcery and parapsychology”. --Peter J. Carroll, (Liber KAOS, p.20-21).

7. “we prefer to consider science as the study and engineering of highly probable coincidences, such as the tendency of apples to fall downwards when dropped from trees.  We prefer to consider magick as the study and engineering of less probable coincidences, such as the tendency of trees to drop apples when we ask them to.” --Peter J. Carroll, (Psybermagick, p.15).

8. “Magic and religion bear the same relationship to each other as engineering does to science—magic is applied religion.” --Leonard Zusne & Warren H. Jones, (Anomalistic Psychology, p.198).

9. “The ancient lore of the Watchers, comprising the knowledge of certain powers resident within the deep mind of man, by means of which natural law can be affected without using the generally recognized channels of communication. Parapsychic manipulation. The use of magick is witchcraft.” --Paul Huson, (Mastering Witchcraft, p.250)

10. “Magic: (1) A general term for arts, sciences, philosophies and technologies concerned with (a) understanding and using various altered states of consciousness within which it is possible to have access to and control over one’s psychic talents, and (b) the uses and abuses of those psychic talents to change interior and/or exterior realities. (2) A science and an art comprising a system of concepts and methods for the build-up of human emotions, altering the electrochemical balance of the metabolism, using associational techniques and devices to concentrate and focus the emotional energy, thus modulating the energies broadcast by the human body, usually to affect other energy patterns whether animate or inanimate, but occasionally to affect the personal energy pattern. (3) A collection of rule-of-thumb techniques designed to get one’s psychic talents to do more or less what one wants, more often than not, one hopes. It should be obvious that these are thaumaturgical definitions.” --Isaac Bonewits, (Real Magic, p.258)

11. “Magic originally signified only the knowledge of the more sublime parts of philosophy; but as the magi likewise possessed astrology, divination and sorcery, the term magi became odious, being used to signify and unlawful diabolical kind of science acquired by the alliance of the devil and departed souls.” --Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768)

12. “Magic is a faculty of wonderful virtue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance, and virtues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing, and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderful effects, by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other, and to their inferior suitable subjects, joining and knitting them together thoroughly by the powers, and virtues of the superior bodies.” --Agrippa, (Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Bk. I, Ch. II)

13. Magick is “the conscious application of imagination and focused attention to bring about a desired goal through visualization.” --Ellen Evert Hopman, (in Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard, p.19)

14. Magick is “coincidence control.” --Oberon Ravenheart, (Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard, p.19)

15. Magick is “probability enhancement.” --Anodea Judith, (Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard, p.19)

“Explain this happening!”

“It must have a ‘natural’ cause.”

“It must have a ‘supernatural’ cause.”

Let these two asses be set to grind corn.

May, might, must, should, probably, may be, we may safely assume, ought, it is hardly questionable, almost certainly—poor hacks! let them be turned out to grass!

Proof is only possible in mathematics, and mathematics is only a matter of arbitrary conventions.

And yet doubt is a good servant but a bad master; a perfect mistress, but a nagging wife.

“White is white” is the lash of the overseer: “white is black” is the watchword of the slave.  The Master takes no heed.

The Chinese cannot help thinking that the octave has 5 notes.

The more necessary anything appears to my mind, the more certain it is that I only assert a limitation.

I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning.

********** Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers’ rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism. We supported liberal policies because we saw the world clearly and wanted to help people, but they supported conservative policies out of pure self-interest (lower my taxes!) or thinly veiled racism (stop funding welfare programs for minorities!). We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals. And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours.

When I moved from Yale to Penn, and then from Penn to the University of Chicago, the matrix stayed pretty much the same. It was only in India that I had to stand alone. Had I been there as a tourist it would have been easy to maintain my matrix membership for three months; I’d have met up now and then with other Western tourists, and we would have swapped stories about the sexism, poverty, and oppression we had seen. But because I was there to study cultural psychology I did everything I could to fit into another matrix, one woven mostly from the ethics of community and divinity.

When I returned to America, social conservatives no longer seemed so crazy. I could listen to leaders of the “religious right” such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson with a kind of clinical detachment. They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn’t think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why Christian conservatives wanted to “thicken up” the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Social conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Well, now that I was no longer on the defensive, I could see that those arguments made sense, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mind-set (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later) and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.

It felt good to be released from partisan anger. And once I was no longer angry, I was no longer committed to reaching the conclusion that righteous anger demands: we are right, they are wrong. I was able to explore new moral matrices, each one supported by its own intellectual traditions. It felt like a kind of awakening.

In 1991, Shweder wrote about the power of cultural psychology to cause such awakenings:

“Yet the conceptions held by others are available to us, in the sense that when we truly understand their conception of things we come to recognize possibilities latent within our own rationality … and those ways of conceiving of things become salient for us for the first time, or once again. In other words, there is no homogeneous “backcloth” to our world. We are multiple from the start.”

I cannot overstate the importance of this quotation for moral and political psychology. We are multiple from the start. Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other potential concerns are left undeveloped and unconnected to the web of shared meanings and values that become our adult moral matrix. If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong. But years later, when you travel, or become a parent, or perhaps just read a good novel about a traditional society, you might find some other moral intuitions latent within yourself. You might find yourself responding to dilemmas involving authority, sexuality, or the human body in ways that are hard to explain.

Conversely, if you are raised in a more traditional society, or within an evangelical Christian household in the United States, you become so well educated in the ethics of community and divinity that you can detect disrespect and degradation even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong. But if you then face discrimination yourself (as conservatives and Christians sometimes do in the academic world), or if you simply listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, you may find a new resonance in moral arguments about oppression and equality.