The Rationality Delusion

Today we live in a highly rational age. One day, and we pray soon, it will be seen for the nonsense it is. We’ve created a “nuts & bolts” belief system (quantum physics aside) which blinkers us to what really surrounds us in the mysterious multiverse we live in.

We go about the world and think in a severely limited reality tunnel. We insist on labeling everything. And if something doesn’t fit a given label, it simply doesn’t exist. Or it is demonized by the the new inquisition of rationality.

If you bend spoons, apparently with your mind, you must be a conjuring act. If you see a UFO or a spectral hellhound, you must be a nutcase. 

If you practice magick and conjure demons in a bid to explore the deep and mysterious recesses of your mind… at best, you’re an eccentric, at worst you’re delusional.

And yet the theory of evolution was stolen from magick. Why? Because the arch rationalists were desperately in need of a substitute for religion.

Naturally, the idea of evolution has no basis in reality. It’s no more than a good story, a ripping yarn, very much like the Bible. But Charles Darwin and his cohorts had no qualms about pilfering the idea of shapshifting from magick for their theory of evolution.

Darwin well knew that sorcerers claimed to be able to shapeshift into animals. And in his travels on the high seas on the Beagle, he’d have encountered people, still living in the world of magick, who, when they saw a tiger quite naturally would assume it was a sorcerer.

And Darwin was thus inspired to create his so called scientific theory of evolution, based on rational thinking. In truth it was plagiarizing of the worst order.

All that said, rationality is an enormously useful tool. But a tool it must be. It must not be raised up as the one supreme god of our age. But that is what has happened. 

The rationalists rail against the monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam. Yet they are blinkered to the fact that they have created a new god, that of rationality, with its divine son, reason.

Bear in mind that rationality and reason are merely internal dialogue, which can be externalized as the spoken word. Rationality and reason depend on language. They are language. And of course language is a construct. We created it to describe what we perceive around us. And to communicate with our fellow humans.

Rationality and reason do not describe reality; at best they create a map of it. But the territory remains a wild and undiscovered land. And a land few of us come near to perceiving or experiencing. This is because rationality and reason put a reinforced steel door in the way of doing that.

As I say, rationality is a handy tool for operating in the everyday world, the one we perceive with our senses and compute with our minds. It enables us to plan, to create strategies and to create machines that are phenomenally helpful to us.

But with the relentless rise of rationality and reason, we have lost the art of magick, which was central to our world before the new gods of rationality and reason arrived on the scene. Indeed, a king could not reign unless he was adept in the Great Art. We have cast magick aside. And we are not the richer for it. No, we are the poorer.

We now live in a harsh, metallic world full of endless talk, particularly on social media. It’s a world full of unrelenting internal dialogue, manifesting in ranting online or in mind-numbing reality TV.

And note well, that even the churlish and downright stupid worship the god of reason  – but of course, they don’t do a good job of utilizing the tool of rationality, mostly because they mix it with emotion and therefore rant inanely. But use it they do. And thus their reality tunnel is equally constrained, dull and lifeless.

Because of the great prophets of rationality, such as Richard Dawkins, the magick we once knew is close to being dead. And Mr. Dawkins wields a monstrous trident over it, gleefully thrusting it into the last vestiges of magick.

But he knows not what he does. For his god is a delusion; the rationality delusion.

But magick cannot be suppressed. It will rise again. And we will cross the great rainbow bridge into the land of the gods. And they will return. And this world will be renewed. A new aeon will rise. It will be an aeon where we use rationality as a tool to get things done in the world, the world that we perceive with our senses.

And it will be an an aeon where we travel the shimmering other realms that can be entered via the liminal, in-between places, like the crossing of roads, stone circles, burial mounds and tumuli… the sacred landscapes that beckon us.

Poets will stand equal with scientists. The mega corporations will crumble. And magickians will work hand in hand with physicists and chemists. A new alchemy will arise. And we will all walk with the old gods again.