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January 2009

Everyday SymbolismMysteries

The Secret Symbolism of Magic Tricks

by Dr. Mark Dillof
written by Dr. Mark Dillof
The Secret Symbolism of Magic Tricks

Might it be that we enjoy magic for reasons that are far deeper than we realize? Magic tricks are, indeed, symbolic. I shall illustrate by analyzing three of my favorite — the Cut and Restored Rope Trick, the Linking Rings, and the Slydini Knots.

The Cut and Restored Rope Trick

In this effect, the magician cuts a rope. He now has two shorter ropes. But, mirabile dictu, he restores the rope. It’s like it had never been cut! He then cuts the rope a second time, and once again it has been restored.

I stumbled upon what I believe to be the deeper meaning of this trick, when I was investigating the etymology of the word “decide.” What motivated me was that decisions have never come easy for me. Oftentimes, when I’ve needed to make a decision, I would do nothing at all. Of course, my Hamlet-like indecision never really allowed me off the hook, for as William James argues, not to decide is itself a decision.

If we look at the etymology of the word “decide,” we see that it means “to cut.” There is our clue to the rope trick. What has been cut has been changed irrevocably. It can no longer return to what it was. The original wholeness — consisting of an infinitude of untried possibilities — has been lost. And that is why it is so hard for many people to decide anything, for in taking a step in a certain direction, all the other possibilities have been forever negated. If we embark upon a certain career, then we cannot embark upon another. If we marry a certain person, we cannot marry another person (assuming we are not a polygamist). There will always be a “road not taken.” That is why, Soren Kierkegaard tells us, important decisions involve a leap of faith, and why such leaps are fraught with anxiety.

If only we could decide and yet not decide. In real life we cannot do this, but, in the world of magic we can! And that explains the appeal of the cut an restored rope trick. For the rope is cut, i.e., a “decision” is made. But then, it is restored. I.E., the decision has been annulled, as if it had never been made. No wonder the trick is so appealing, for it symbolically denies the irreversible nature of decision.

On a higher level of consciousness, it is indeed possible to act in the world, to decide, while still maintaining our oneness, but that’s another story. It is quite possible, though, that the trick resonates from those depths.

The Linking Rings

This is the classic effect in which large metal rings, about 10 inch in circumference, seem to magically link and unlink. There is something very pleasing about watching impenetrable objects link and unlink.

The symbolic meaning of this illusion occurred to me when I was interpreting the dream of a client of mine. In her dream, her ex-husband, who was not a magician, was linking and unlinking the rings in front of her. What could the dream mean?

A common concern of both my client and her ex-husband was being able to join together without losing their independence. But how is that possible? The dream seemed to provide some sort of magical image of how that was possible. Link two solid and impenetrable rings, the two of them could remain themselves, and yet, when they wanted to, join together. But they could, then, just as easily separate. Thus there was really no marriage here, if by marriage we mean a union in which two people lose their individuality so as to become one with each other. Instead, there existed that modern form of union called a relationship. Here the two fundamentally retain their individuality, for they never really form that union called marriage.

I think that the subconscious appeal of the Linking Rings is that it provides a magical answer to a question that many people have: how can we join with other people while maintaining our individuality?

The Slydini Knots

Years ago, when I lived in New York City, I took some magic lessons with one of the world’s great slight of hand artists, Tony Slydini. One of his most famous tricks has come to be called, by magicians, “the Slydini Knots.” This is a close-up effect, one performed in front of everyone’s eyes. Slydini would show two silk handkerchiefs, which he would tie together with a knot. Then he would tie a double knot, and would pull the handkerchiefs so that that the knots were very, very tight. It would certainly take quite a long time for anyone to get these formidable knots out. He would even pass the knotted handkerchiefs around to the audience. Then he would take the knotted handkerchiefs and have an audience member hold one handkerchief. To the surprise of the audience, the knots magically dissolves and the two handkerchiefs separated from each other!

If that was not amazing enough, Slydini would do the trick again, but this time he would have a member of the audience tie the handkerchiefs together. After they had tied a very tight knot, Slydini would have them tie a second knot, and then a third knot. It would take an hour to untie all of these knots, and perhaps they could not be united, but Slydini would, again, magically untie them to the astonishment of the audience.

So here, again, I have wondered about the deeper symbolic meaning of this effect. By serendipity, I stumbled upon a book about Buddhism. In it, is a long section called “The Surangama Sutra.” Here, the Buddha uses a handkerchief as a prop to illustrate what he means by freeing oneself of ego consciousness. Buddha makes six knots in a handkerchief, and states that they represent six different levels of ego illusion:

“Ananda! Let me ask you another question. This handkerchief has six knots tied in it. If I untie them can they all be untied at once?”

“No, my Lord. The knots were originally tied by one in a certain order, so when we come to untie them we must follow the reverse order…”

“Again the Lord Buddha was pleased at the reply and said: It is the same with the disentanglements of the conceptions of the six senses. The first knot of false conceptions that must be untied, is the one relating to the false conception of an ego personality, one must first of all attain a realization of its utter unreality…” (The Buddhist Bible, Edited by Dwight Goddard, Beacon Press, 1970, p. 220.)

The Buddha then proceeds to describe the meaning of removing all six of the knots. Suffice it to say that the notion that our ego — that which at times we cling to most dearly, and at other times would gladly be free of — is indeed akin to a knot. If the handkerchief represents the Self, then the ego is noting more than a knot in the Self.

I think that we know this subconsciously, which is why the effect of Slydini magically resonates in us. Usually, it takes an enormous struggle to be free of that knot called ego, sometimes a lifetime struggle. The appeal of the Slydini Knots trick is that…

 

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Everyday SymbolismMysteriesPolitics

Why Obama Eats Egg Whites for Breakfast

by Dr. Mark Dillof
written by Dr. Mark Dillof
Why Obama Eats Egg Whites for Breakfast

Everything we do, no matter how minor, reveals who we are. That is why a good film director might have an actor perform some small but telling gesture. The actor might sit in a chair or smoke a cigarette, but the way the action is performed reveals his or her character. Also revealing are our tastes, including the foods that we like to eat and how we like them prepared.

Of course, it is one thing to see a family member or friend perform an action, eat a certain food, wear something, etc., and then to say to him or her: “Ah, that is so you!” It is a far more difficult task to discern the deeper meaning of what he or she is doing. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote how it was the task of philosophy to illuminate the meaning of our everyday being in the world. We shall follow his lead.

Which brings us to a recent news item: President Barak Obama likes to eat fried egg whites and bacon for breakfast. Some have suggested that it’s because the yoke is high in cholesterol, but the addition of the bacon would rule out that theory. It must, instead, be for a deeper psychological reason, one that is being expressed, symbolically, in the language of food preferences. We shall return to Obama’s eggs, after an important detour.

Obama’s Identity Crisis

“It proved necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses…” — “My Father’s Dreams”

President Obama is a man with an unresolved identity crisis. As others have pointed out, his crisis derives from the fact that his mother is white and his father black. Being a mulatto felt to him like he had no definite identity. Identity crises, of this sort, can be positively resolved, and often are. The black conservative historian, Shelby Steel, who also has bi-racial parentage, clearly has found himself. But, as Steel argues in a recent book, Obama has not. The problem is that Obama fell victim to a false sense of selfhood, one founded on racial identity. Only a person who does not know himself resorts to defining himself in racial terms. As Obama’s autobiographical books indicate, the route that he took — in an effort to resolve his identity crisis — was to decide that he was a black man.

But, Obama knew how successful and privileged his life had become in white society. And so — from Monday, through Saturday — he lived the life that black liberation theology would condemn as the bourgeois life of white people. But on Sunday he sat in a black church, listening to angry and venomous sermons by his black pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He remained a parishioner for twenty years, for he needed those Sundays to be a weekly catharsis from the other six days of the week, when he felt that he was losing his identity, as a black man. So, here he is, with his identity not on a sure footing.

OK, So What’s Eggs Got to Do with It?

To feel defiled is to feel that our identity has become infected by that of which we come into contact. On the symbolic level of human consciousness, to come into physical contact with a slimy substance is to feel slimed. According to Sartre, the experience has a quasi-moral quality to it. After all, we say of a person with no character that he is slimy.

Eggs are, of course, among the slimiest of things. For Obama, to have the white and the yellow mixed in the bowl, blended together, is to have both white and yellow become slimed. The horrible result is that both, the yoke and the albumin, have lost their separate identity.

The part of the egg with which Obama identifies is the white (The color of his skin is irrelevant here.) The yellow, of course, is rich, fatty, and tasty. Eating the yellow represents living off the fat of the land, living a self-indulgent life. It therefore seems immoral. Not everyone experiences eggs this way. We are not arguing, as Freud did, for a universal symbolism. We are just suggesting what we discern to be Obama’s relation to eggs, and to who he is.

Thus it is that Obama — who has desperately sought to preserve his black identity — unconsciously identifies with the purity of the white part of the egg, the albumin. It is neither rich and fatty, like the yellow, nor nearly as tasty. But he gets to have the fat back again, in the form of the bacon strips. The bacon is acceptable, for it does not, as would the egg yoke, defile the purity of the white egg albumin. After all, the egg white may be on the same breakfast plate, but they do not lose their distinct identities. Thus Obama sees his struggle as one of staying pure, i.e., undefiled from those impurities that would sully his sense of himself as an idealistic black man.

Yes, it is very unsettling that the leader of the free world does not really know himself. (Of course, it is far from being the first time that this has happened.) The problem is that a leader who does not know himself is unlikely to have a clear understanding of the world he inhabits, for self-knowledge and worldly wisdom often go hand it hand. When it’s lacking, it can result in foolish, if not disastrous, policies and decisions. We can only hope that President Obama will rise to the occasion — that he will quickly find himself, grasp the fundamental values that have made America great, and serve our nation with wisdom. That, though, would require a shift in his sense of self from Afro-American to just American. That’s the real hope that we would like to believe in.

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Mysteries

The Mystery of Being Home & Yet Not Being There

by Dr. Mark Dillof
written by Dr. Mark Dillof
The Mystery of Being Home & Yet Not Being There

“Though I’m in Kyoto,
when the cuckoo sings
I long for Kyoto.”
— Basho

The other day, while browsing through books of poetry at my local Barnes and Noble, I stumbled upon that strange haiku by Basho. It puzzled me how Basho could be in Kyoto, and yet, when the cuckoo sings, long to be there. Apparently, the plaintive sound of the cuckoo moved the poet to conclude that although he was physically in Kyoto, he was not there in some other sense. But, what is that other sense?

As a way of deciphering this mystery, I substituted Binghamton, NY, my home town, for Kyoto. And then, a doorway into the poem appeared before me, which I entered. I think that Basho’s haiku is about the longing for home. For one can be home in the physical sense, but not fully home in a deeper sense. It can take a moment of intense beauty — the song of a bird, a shaft of sunlight, falling leaves, a haunting melody played on a violin, or some other such moment of splendor — to awaken in us a certain metaphysical nostalgia.

To be home, in this deeper sense, is to achieve that fullness, wholeness, and oneness with the universe that we intuit is our birthright, but which we know we have lost, when we became conscious beings, and fallen beings. To regain that lost sense of unity is what it would really mean to return home.

In lieu of that metaphysical return, there is the usual nostalgia. It explains, for example, the popularity of retro-style clothing, antiques, the migration of urbanites to small towns, the popularity of “The Prairie Home Companion,” and old movies. In difficult times — and times are always difficult — we idealize what seems to be a more innocent age. Other people more desperately seek to return home by more desperate means, such as drinking and drugs. But, of course, the gates of Eden are now closed, and guarded by two angels with flaming swords.

There is, though, a real way to return home. Paradoxically, we cannot journey home until we have fully left home. It’s what Homer’s Odyssey is all about; indeed, it took Odysseus twenty years to return. Symbolically, that it what baseball is all about — leaving home, completing the journey through life, and then returning home. More universally, it’s the fundamental theme of all such heroic journeys.

If it is true that we cannot return home till we have fully left home, then the practical question, then, is: how to leave home? If you ask deep questions about life, with all the force and power of your being, you will soon find that you are not in Kansas anymore. You may, in an obvious sense, still reside in Kansas or Kyoto in Binghamton or Brooklyn or in Los Angeles, but you will have entered into the unknown, the unfamiliar. You will find yourself alone. And, then, you must rely on your inner light to guide you homeward.

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Mysteries

The End of the Year and the End of the World

by Dr. Mark Dillof
written by Dr. Mark Dillof
The End of the Year and the End of the World

I was listening to radio talk show host Dennis Prager, yesterday, New Years Eve. He meant to say that it was the end of the year, but through a kind of Freudian slip, said that it is the end of the world. He caught his slip, laughed it off, and attributed it to the fact that the world economy has been through some terrible times this past year, suggesting to some that the end of the world is nigh. Mr. Prager may be partly correct in his self-analysis, but I think that there is much more to his remark than he realized. What follows is my own understanding of his Freudian slip.

The scholar of comparative religion and anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, noted that connection between the New Year’s parties that we celebrate in the West and the orgiastic end of the year celebrations that occur in “primitive” societies. In such societies, when the year comes to an end, total chaos reigns. Psychologically, this is necessary, for everyone has an inner sense that there cannot be a new creation without a prior destruction of the existing order. Thus it is true, psychologically, that the end of the year means the end of the world, so that a new one can emerge.

Almost everyone longs for change. (Many people hope that a savior will effectuate the changes for them; thus the election campaign message of Barack Obama.) The promise of the New Year is that it really will be a new year, and not merely a recycling of the previous years. That is why we make New Year’s resolutions.

I was reading an article by Alex Williams in today’s NY Times. He cites research that claims that 80% of New Years resolutions fail by Valentine’s Day. (Although he did not say, I would suspect that the number reaches the high nineties by end of the year.) In his article, Williams interviews psychologists, who offer the usual shallow advice on how to make change lasting. I wont offer a critique of it here.

I have, over the years, given much thought to the question of why it is so very difficult to make lasting changes to one’s life. It seems to me that a new life really requires the ending, in a very significant way, of our former life. We cannot, for example, give up something apparently minor, like biting our nails, without changing everything else. Indeed, to make the smallest change, requires changing our entire way of living. Nothing less than a metanoia, which the mystics define as a 180 degree change in a person’s vantage point is required. This is because everything we do is interconnected. As George Sands had said “We cannot tear out a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire.” To throw the book into the fire is not, of course, to commit suicide. To throw the book into the fire is to make a decisive break with the past. Without such a break, recidivism is bound to occur. Before we know it, we shall be biting our nails, eating between meals, not exercising like we said we would, and so on.

There is, of course, a connection between the micro and the macro, between personal changes and the changes that need to be made on a national level. Apropos is the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s view that capitalism as “creative destruction.” New ideas and creations, and technological innovations, eventually render the status quo obsolete. Once the horse and buggy was intrinsic to our economy. But creative new technology, i.e., the automobile, destroyed that industry. If Schumpeter is correct, then clinging to moribund industries does not bode well for the future. The effort of the government to bail out the automotive industry is an example of this hopeless clinging, and how it will prevent something really new and better to emerge. There are a whole category of illnesses — physical, spiritual, and economic — whose fundamental etiology consists in a refusal to let go of that which needs to be relinquished .

Almost everyone has, in his own life, the equivalent of smokestack industries that he should have let go of long ago. I’m, of course, referring to ways of thinking and living that we inwardly know to be obsolete. Unless they are abandoned, we can neither have a new year, nor can we inhabit a new world.

There is, though, a difference between the changes that occur in business world and industry, and those that need to occur on a personal level. In business and industry, the present way of doing things will often not be rendered obsolete until something new appears. But, on a personal level, changes are required before anything new appears! Thus a person will no longer believe in his former answer to the question of how to live life, prior to a new answer appearing on the horizon. Thus, for a period of time, a person is in the desert, left high and dry, i.e., he is in despair. The sooner he really lets go of his former answer, the sooner a new one will appear. Like Indiana Jones, we must have the faith to walk over the edge of the cliff, hoping that a bridge will materialize in time.

So, this long rumination brings me back to the question of New Year’s resolutions. It is a good idea to make resolutions, but we should be realistic and know that if there is to really be a new year and and a new world, that we must be willing to really abandon that which we seem to love so dearly — who we presently are.

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