DEMONS ON THE DANCE FLOOR

Superstition and Magick Part 5

DEMONS ON THE DANCE FLOOR

Superstition and Magick Part 5

If there is a science to getting rich, then there must be the math capable of describing it. There must be the ability to test it and to get the same results over and over again. If, as I propose, magick and superstition are rooted in some sort of homeostatic imperative of the human organism, then there should be evidence over and over again that our thoughts, our will, our movement, our interaction within the field changes the field. If we create our own reality, this must be testable over and over again. I believe Crowley was right, magick is a science, and so was Wattles, getting rich (flourishing) is a science. We should be able to get anything we want.

If it wasn’t for the demons.

When I was 21, I became an evangelical Christian and joined a conservative, mainstream church, and I was constantly flighting demons. I was a Chicano and an activist, but I attended a Republican-lead congregation that was so huge and rich they televised their services every Sunday morning. I felt out of place there, but only when I focused on my ego; when I focused on God and his people, I fit into the community. I loved how they would call me “Brother, Danny.”

The leadership of the church, intentional or not, convinced me that Satan wanted to burn me and that he and his legions were always lurking in the shadows tempting me away from God.

I know the official message was much more complex than that, but at 21 and bursting with desire, what impeded me most in my walk with God was sin. I was struggling with demons, they told me, principalities of darkness.

To keep God always on my mind, I went to church Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, to Bible study Tuesday night, and evangelical training on Thursdays, where they taught us how to go door to door spreading the gospel. Once a month, there was a special Friday night session to speak in tongues. We would get together in a little room in one of the church buildings and people would speak in tongues.

My imperative was to not sin, but I wasn't very good at it.

Sometimes I could go a week without any major sinning, other than a few thoughts here and there, but then a weekend would come and a non-Christian friend would drag me to the club. I'd party all night, and the interactions I had at the bar often led to even more sins. There were demons on the dance floor, tempting us all with sin. I see the image like an oil painting, young people on the floor under a disco ball moving their bodies, closing their eyes in ecstasy or looking at the sexy dancers with lust, but behind each person is a demon whispering in their ears, tempting them with sex, drugs, more beer.

One night, I was dancing with Anne, a premed student at State, and after the club closed, she came to my apartment and we drank all night and did lines on a mirror and other sinful activities, and as we lay next to each other with the sun coming up, I confessed to her that I was a backsliding Christian and that I was sinning.

Anne admitted that she too was a Christian, and she believed that what we did was a sin, and we talked about our relationship to God and the churches we attended, and we ended up getting on our knees and praying for forgiveness. Get thee behind me, Satan, we said together before we crawled back into bed.

Even after I left the mega-church, I still wrestled with demons, psychological ones, traumas, things that impeded me from getting what I wanted. I wanted to be successful writer, but my "demons” often pulled me away. The demons in my thoughts would tell me I was worthless, stupid, better off if I just got drunk and forgot the whole thing of being a writer.

The imposter syndrome is real, but you could change the language and say that psychological demons sometimes seem to impede us from achieving homeostasis and from flourishing. Often my thoughts, memories, and the insecurities I had about my place in the social world created thought-demons breathing down my neck, watching my every move, waiting to trip me. I struggled with ADHD, but it took me a while to understand that it is not an impediment to flourishing, but rather a strength, when you’re focused on something. For me, the demons came during downtime, when I wasn’t focused on writing or conversation, when thoughts invaded my brain, stole my peace and lead me to addictive behaviors and rage against the machine. I was the machine.

I remember one time when I was in my 20s, I couldn’t find my keys and I was so angry at myself for being an idiot that I knocked things off tables and pulled out drawers and started throwing things around, all the while saying to myself, Fucking son of a bitch! I hate you I hate you I hate you!

Suddenly --and this might be hard for some to believe, but I'm positive that you could reframe this in the language of physics and it would make sense --suddenly a version of me from the future, in my 50s, started to observe the younger version of me throwing things around and yelling, I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!

And he/I whispered into the ear of the young man, This is theater. Watch.

And I felt like I was observing myself from another perspective, standing outside of myself and seeing how ridiculous I looked, this strong young man using his energy and power for self-destruction. I felt compassion for him, and the anger seeped out of me and I felt relief.

Most of my time in the Default Mode Network I fought neurological demons, which is to say chemical pathways embedded into my nervous system. In sharp contrast, when I was focused on something that I loved, like writing, I could speak to angels. When you are focused, when you are in the state of flow, when you are experiencing the runner’s high, or the Writer’s High, you do not have the mental bandwidth to include an “I” in the experience, because you are connected to something larger than yourself. You lose your sense of self. Not entirely, at least not for most people and not for very long.

Now I’m older, and there are less demons in my life, so I am able to live the life I create for myself, to a certain extent. There is the ultimate demon.

I'm talking about Laplace’s demon.

Imagine an entity so vast, equipped with all possible data in the universe and with processing power way beyond any current or theoretical computational system, a conscious being that knows EVERYTHING, not only the exact positions and velocity of all quantum particles in the universe (which humans can’t know) as well as all the positions of everything in universal space, solar systems, galaxies, blackholes, quasars and the exact movement and energy-state of All-There-Is, it would able to predict the future and see the past. You can see this on a basic level, using Newtonian physics: if a baseball is coming towards your face at high speed and there is no wind or other factors to change its course, you know it will hit you, and it will hurt, so you get out of the way. You predicted the future based on position and velocity, the vector of things in time-space. But in real life, there is a lot more to understand than a ball coming at you. Who has that ability?

Who can know everything there is to know? Only Laplace’s demon, and he ain’t sharing it with us.

We don’t even know what our next thought will be. Humans are so complex and often chaotic that we can’t accurately predict our own behavior.

But what we can do, when we are focused, is filter out information that does not serve our long-term goals. We do this consciously or not, but the fact is we co-create the interface within which we interact. We co-create the arena within which we play out our lives. And we can teach ourselves to be better creators.