We Hail from the East

We Hail from the East

Part I. You are what you Think

There are few things more difficult in the path of personal growth than changing the way we think. Despite how aware we may be of the fallacy of a thought pattern, or how self-destructive it may be, changing them takes a considerable amount of energy, courage, and does not happen overnight. Yet despite the difficulty in changing the way we think about ourselves and the world around us, few things help to illuminate who we are to ourselves than doing so. It is no wonder that in so much western mystical practice, we begin in the realm of air, symbolized by the east and the rising sun, to bring forth change in the physical realm. The first Law of Magick is “Know Thyself.” Before I continue, any readers of this journal entry that are not familiar or comfortable with “magickal jargon,” do not be turned off as this is not the focus of the article. However, it is an integration of both spiritual and scientific principles that underline personal development.

Our thought patterns develop and change slowly over the course of our lives. It would be nice to think that this always happened for the better and that new thought patterns are always healthier and allow us to create our world in a more deliberate way than old ones. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Many of us create unhealthy thought-patterns as quickly as we develop healthy ones. And many throw away healthy thought patterns in lieu of unhealthy ones so often that it leads to palpable disturbances at the mental, emotional and physical levels.

One reason why thought-patterns are so difficult to change, is that they are largely (and ironically) not always conscious to us. We have become so comfortable with them that we identify them with who we are and we project them onto the world without question. While I am not trained in psychotherapy, my personal experience in it has led me to the observation that it relies largely on “being conscious of being conscious.” That is, bringing our thought patterns into our conscious realm. This involves evaluating the way that you think about things, the conclusions that you draw, and testing their accuracy. This is very important because our physical world is created by trickling directly from our thoughts. When we are stuck in unhealthy thought patterns, we continue to create unhealthy components in our environment.

In his book, The Quantum Doctor, physicist Amit Gaswami tells us that all physical things begin in a realm of possibilities. That is, outside of our physical world there is a world of potential, outside of time and space. Here, all possibilities exist. They only come into fruition by our conscious observation of them. In quantum physics lingo, this event is termed a “quantum collapse” and the act of consciously bringing a possibility into a physical form is called downward causation. As I am not a quantum physicist, this is as detailed as I will get into the physics and let the reader consult his book for a more detailed description of this event. Nonetheless, his analysis of how our physical world is created is beautifully compatible with western mystical teachings. These teachings draw out a roadmap of manifestation, if you will, that brings us through levels of creation that are symbolized, poetically, by the four elements:  Air, Fire, Water and Earth. The scientific minded, such as myself, could easily throw the whole idea out the window at this point, saying that the four element system has been obsolete since the times of Democritus. We must bear in mind that in mystical work, we work in symbols and abstract ideas since this is the language of the subconscious, creative mind. Perhaps it is the Libra in me that has made it a life-long process to harmonize the sensibility of science with the beauty and creativity of mysticism.

Part II. Neurobiology and the Four Elements

First, what is thought? What is a thought-process? And why are thought processes so difficult to change? Our thoughts in this world are largely a faculty of the brain. So let’s begin there. The brain consists of approximately 100 billion special cells called neurons. Each neuron is a relatively simple machine with an input end and an output end. Its only language is in the form of an electrical signal that eventually translates into a release of a chemical called a neurotransmitter. These neurotransmitters, like statement in a language, travel across an empty space called a synapse and eventually find their way to another neuron. Here it can either 1) activate that neuron or 2) inhibit that neuron. But this is all a relatively simple process and there does not seem to be much potential for learning, memory or personality. The aspect that creates these things is the networks between many neurons in the brain. As we develop our thoughts and memories, specific connections between certain neurons become strengthened over time, while other connections become weakened. We become comfortable and very efficient at using certain networks over others. Therefore, developing a new thought-pattern is a lot like going skiing for the first time and using muscles that have not been used very often. We feel vulnerable, clumsy, uncomfortable, and are bound to fall the first several times.

At this point we have already seen two of the four elements at play. As stated once before, Air symbolizes potential. It is unstable at this point and has not yet begun its journey to manifestation. This is the world of potentials in the quantum realm. Once we “collapse” the potential through observation, the neurons fire and we enter, symbolically, the element of fire. Interestingly, in neurology, another tem for a nerve impulse is an “evoked potential.”  Fire represents action in mystical thought. We have now have gone from a world of possibilities to an actual, tangible event. That is, the road map through the four elements from a potential to actuality begins with Air, then is brought into action with the baptism of Fire. Next it will generate emotion in the symbolic element of Water (as well as an avenue to the subconscious but that will be discussed later), then finally manifests, symbolic of Earth. These symbolic elements illuminate a beautiful and very abstract image of an otherwise difficult, and perhaps dry, topic of magickal thought. Even I, with my very limited artistic ability, find extreme value and poetry in the use of such imagery. 

But let’s back up for a moment. Now that we have been birthed from the air by adding the element of fire and action within our neural networks, we enter the realm of water. Water is where our thought-patterns receive the blessing of our emotions. It is also what makes them so difficult to break. Here, our thoughts are sent to a part of the brain called the limbic system. If there was any part of the body where the mind and brain can be empirically connected, it is here in the limbic system. The limbic system transfers signals from the brain to the body. It regulates our emotions, makes sense of current events by comparing them to past events, and generates physiological changes within the rest of the body. Here lies the mortar that solidifies how we feel about our actions and why we continue to think about things the way do. It creates a feedback loop that reinforces our thoughts, for better or for worse. Without the limbic system, we would have no affinity for addiction, anger or fear. But we would also have no affinity for the positive, health aspects of these items, such as pleasure or the capacity to protect ourselves from danger. 

We find it so difficult to break our current thought patterns because our brains have been literally “hard-wired” to reward ourselves to think this way. When we change out thought patterns, the feeling of reward and well-being is disturbed and our brain must search for other avenues to find them. Temporarily, we feel uncomfortable and lost. It is akin to taking the same route across a state the same way every month for year. Then someone saying, you must now find your way there, but without using any of the same roads, and you cannot use a roadmap!

Physical disease manifests through this four element system. When we have manifested an image of ourselves that is vulnerable and weak, for example, the body becomes stressed, tired and more vulnerable to disease. When we see ourselves as strong, loved and resilient, we become less prone to disease. This is not just some recent new-age bandwagon. There is a respectable amount of research that has linked how we think of ourselves to how well the body recovers from and holds off disease. Further, how our body interprets the world around it, directly affects the types of decisions that we make and the word that we create.

However, when the physicists were talking about the “realm of possibilities,” they were talking about possibilities for the entire universe where literally all possibilities exist. Each of us, however, occupies only an infinitely small fragment of the universe so were are given only a relatively small subset of possibilities to work with. We very well know we are born in a certain set of circumstances that make certain possibilities unavailable to us. I cannot, for example, sit down and have a cup of coffee with Julius Caesar because of the period of time in which I occupy. I also am limited by circumstances such as genetics, the culture in which I live, and so forth. Further, because at any given time, we are only occupying a fragment of our lives, we are also limited by the past and future. I can no longer choose to spend my childhood in California because that time has passed. Nor would I be likely to go out and successfully land a job flying passenger planes for United Airlines if I did not even plan to start flight school until next year.

So from the infinite pool of possibilities, each of us is given a subset of possibilities from that pool in which to create our world. It is as if there a room full of artists but I limited amount of colored pencils. Each would be given and set of, say, ten colored pencils to create a world on a canvas. But even with those ten colors, there exists an unimaginable amount of things you could create on the canvas. Quite literally, you could choose to draw the Garden of Eden or the horrors of the Auschwitz. So here, when we speak of the realm of air being of possibilities, we must put it into perspective that it our own personal creative potential. It is like staring at a blank canvas. At this point, there are infinite ways that you could apply the paint. However, as soon as we begin to paint, we enter the element of Fire and action. The possibilities have begun to collapse into manifestation. Here we also see from an artistic perspective how we get stuck into certain thought patterns. Any musician, painter, or writer may have experienced that it is easy to get stuck in a specific style that becomes very hard to break. Many of the most creative artists challenge themselves to move out of those comfort zones and explore styles that they are less comfortable with. Once they do so, they often find a whole new dimension opens up for them.  They have developed a new network within the brain. It is uncomfortable and clumsy at first, but eventually, the mental muscle strengthens. 

But it gets more complicated because when we follow the pathway from Air (Potential) to Fire (Action) to Water (Emotion) to Earth (Manifestation) because each of these domains can directly affect each other. So there is more than just a strict linear relationship. As we have seen, a set of physical (Earth) circumstances can affect the mental (Air) realm. And once we have developed an emotional attachment (Water) to certain actions (Fire), we are more prone to continue those actions. That’s part of the beauty is that there are checks and balances along the entire pathway. The image below illustrates how two aspects of these checks and balances work. It is altogether much more complex since virtually all aspects of the four elements and the transitions between them are influencing one another.

The concepts that I have described here cannot be attributed to any one person or any particular group of people. The beauty of it is that I have seen this wisdom pop-up in numerous fields under the guise of different terminology. The symbolic mystical four-element system can be traced back at least to the ancient Greece. In medicine, there is a relatively new term called the “neuroendocrine immunology.” This described how thoughts and nerve impulses (neuro) are given meaning and affect the body through chemicals called hormones (endocrine) and have direct affect on how our body responds to the world (immunology).

So it may be pretty simple to see how thoughts affect us on the microcosmic physical level such as within our own body, but this does not seem to have much to do with creating a change in our external world; that is, until we look beneath the surface and once again look at all the moving parts. Remember that all of the stages are feeding back into one another. Everything that you have created, the place where you live, the social group you associate with, your spiritual beliefs, and to much extent, your health, has been a result of decisions that you have made somewhere along your life. These decisions may have seemed trivial at the time, but nonetheless, each one has gotten you to where you are now, and quite frankly, had you not bought a snickers bar at a Wal-Mart 8 years ago, for all you know you could have wound up in a very different place. When I was a teenager, some friends and I were in the woods shooting off some rounds with our BB guns. It was a cold afternoon with no sun and my hands were cold and numb as I occasionally took a drag of a cigarette. At one point, I dropped my cigarette. As I leaned down to pick it up, a bottle above my head shattered. I realized that a BB had hit at the precise point that my head was in less than second before. I thought to myself, “had I not been smoking, I would not have dropped my cigarette and wouldn’t have leaned over. Did a cigarette save my eye?” …perhaps, perhaps not. Because we can just as easily say, had I not been smoking, the pace of my walking would have been different and I might not have wound up in that spot at that precise time in the first place. Plus the nicotine is a powerful psychotropic compound and alters levels of dopamine in the brain. Perhaps without this change in brain chemistry, I would have made a different decision altogether and walked the opposite direction. One will never know. The only thing that is certain is that every decision we make sculpts our external reality to an extent that might be anything from as trivial to choosing strawberry jelly over grape jelly, to being as extreme as whether or not you develop a disease or win the lottery. 

But assuming that we understand and accept this, none of this is very useful unless there is something we can do about it. After all, a key component of spiritual growth and magickal practice is to live with a purpose- to be deliberate in our outcome. Otherwise, we may as well just throw our hands up and say “what’s the use?” and try to just enjoy the ride that life throws at us. How we control our outcome goes back to self-reflection and knowing ourselves and the reasons why we think the way we do. If you find yourself in the same types of relationships over and over, it is likely not a coincidence. There is probably some thought pattern that you may not even be aware of that is driving you to attract, or be attracted to, the same types of people. You might find that you have false beliefs about yourself or the world that is causing this type of manifestation. Reflecting on how we think and why we believe the way we do can take an immense amount of courage and brutal honesty. We have spent a lifetime building up defenses to hide certain unattractive aspects about ourselves from ourselves as well as others. We call these “defenses” and they are designed to protect our most vulnerable aspects. Therefore, this entails going into the most vulnerable, often most well-guarded, aspects of ourselves. Further, once we find a faulty thought-pattern that does not always mean we will have an easy time changing it.

Part III. The Use of Symbols

So why even bother with all the symbolism? Aren’t they outdated and obsolete? As stated earlier, the hard part is not always finding the thought-process, but changing it. There are many people sitting in a therapists office right now who know they have false beliefs about themselves such as, “I am not worthy of love” or “I need 10 cigarettes to get though the day.” But if it was as easy as saying, “This is false, don’t believe this.” Then therapists would be out of a job before the day was out. But even if we are well aware that something is true, that doesn’t mean we subconsciously believe it to be true. A person with social anxiety may well-know that going to a party is not likely to be at all harmful, but if she subconsciously believes it to be harmful, her body may respond in almost exactly the same fashion as it would if she were being harmed. So obviously, our subconscious doesn’t respond well to “pep-talks.” What it does respond well to, however, are images and symbols and even melodies and harmonies. These items have the ability to be so enriched  with meaning, but sufficient obscure enough to bypass the thinking part of the brain. Think of a song that has changed you in some way. Perhaps you have heard it for years and was maybe even played at a cousins wedding. You may have no idea what the words of the songs are, and might be hard pressed to elaborate on even what the song is about. Nonetheless, every time you hear it, you elicit similar conditions that might be present if you had ingested a psychotropic drug, Spontaneous feeling and sensations are quite common, as are recollections of memories that you never knew you still had. 

While  symbols are traditionally conceptualized as something visual, auditory symbols (no pun intended) are also quite effective. There are myriad reasons why symbolism is so important in spiritual practice.  Some people find that symbols are simply more universal and they carry more powerful emotions and meaning than simply reading a description of something on paper. But perhaps most importantly, we must remember that much of how we think is unconscious to us and our subconscious mind thinks differently than our conscious one. This is one reason why dreams are rarely literal. Your daughter in your dream may not represent your daughter but actually may represent yourself when you were her age, or it might represent the need to be nurtured, or a fear of loss. It could represent any number of things depending on the person who is dreaming, the relationship they have with their daughter, and whether they in fact even have a daughter. It is very difficult to change the way we think if our subconscious mind still hangs on to negative beliefs so we must find a way to communicate with it.

While it certainly doesn’t hurt to tell yourself that you are healthy, strong and happy, it may be more useful to imagine an image of yourself as being healthy, strong and happy. It may be even better to have a picture of yourself being healthy, strong and happy and look at it often. When I feel like I need more of a certain force in my life, say courage, I might find a picture of someone from mythology such as a god or goddess that emulates the trait that I want to exude. When I need a boost of courage, I imagine that god or goddess living within me. I find using this method over using actual people from history with those traits for a number of reasons. Namely, they tend to be more pure. When you choose an actually person, you may take on their downfalls as well. While using an image of Tennessee Williams to allow us to be a better writer, we don’t also want to inadvertently pick up the insatiable craving for alcohol which eventually led to his death. God and goddesses and other non-human entities tend to be more specific to a particular trait, such as mercy and forgiveness (Jesus), Strength (Artemis) or sex and pleasure (Dionysus or Aphrodite). 

So while probably not necessary, symbols are a powerful tool that has survived since the dawn of human civilization and probably even earlier. If they were not useful, they likely would not be increasingly used everywhere from churches to advertising to sculpt the way we think and ultimately alter the choices that we make. Contemporary thought, driven largely by research and new technology, need not be a threat to ancient spiritual and mystical practices. On the contrary, many schisms between the two seemingly disparate fields have been merely semantic. As I have tried to point out, the fact is that we have many philosophies saying the same thing, but using a very different language. It is my hope that as science continues to push into new territories, that we will continue integrate the new knowledge with ancient wisdom in our never ending search for meaning and who we are. After all, everything we have ever done has begun with a thought. We all hail from the East.