What if the great slogan of chaos magic, “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” were a load of total, utter hogwash? What if it weren’t worth the pixels I just spilled on quoting it? What if it were as far from the facts of things as any statement could be? What if everything is true and nothing is permitted?
Everything is true. All stories bear resonance, richness, woven from narrative palettes that Eliade, Jung, von Franz, Campbell, and others have more than adequately illuminated. The arcing unities across divergences – of duality, quarternity, decay, rebirth – imply a formality among the infinite multiplicities.
Robert Johnson tells the story of a duplicitous client for whom he provided psychotherapy. The client was meant to practice active imagination in their therapy sessions. After some time, the man declared that he had been lying to Johnson the whole time and in fact was fabricating all of the psychological material that he had been presenting. He began laughing uproariously, delighted to have fooled the illustrious psychologist.
Yet Johnson was unperturbed. He reminded himself that in the past when he had been made a fool, the world had not ended. So he waited and watched and let the man’s laughter run its course, until it turned to tears and anguish. Then the client realized that, though his stories might have been made up, nevertheless they expressed the truth of his struggles and suffering in life, and that in spite of his best efforts to obfuscate, Johnson had indeed been guiding him on a healing path.
All those lies, yet woven from truths that would not be denied. Everything is true.
Liars have to convince themselves they are being honest in order to be convincing, after all. Honesty is partly a matter of physiology, of a felt sense. Many a soul doubts their accurate judgment because it conjures sensations of uneasiness. They have forgotten that everything is true.
If everything is true then there no longer needs to be war, fear, famine, or scarcity. Each individual is invited to carve their own creases in the roots of the world tree. We go beyond the binary, either/or, and embrace the complexity, both/and. There is no longer the awful burden of being right, so ideology will naturally soften back into the supple flesh of poetry from which it fossilized. Oh for a world forged from poesis!
After all, if my ability to feel good about my beliefs does not depend on correcting yours then we can skip the wasteful pointlessness of “I am right, you are wrong.” No longer do I have to enslave myself to the mistake that merely listening to a point of view is the same as endorsing or supporting it. Ah, for a world which empowered all to listen! The “Havamal” is quick to recommend that one hold one’s tongue, slow to encourage one to speak up.
But if everything is true? What about when my belief and another’s directly contradict one another? What about when one belief is grounded in exhaustive quantities of credible evidence and another a product of obvious fantasy? Surely if I believe that getting stabbed through the heart is healthy, my belief will soon be revealed as evident falsity. And through this possibility of incommensurate belief, we find ourselves in the grip of conflict, of seeking to impose our truths on one another.
Thus is the importance of insisting also that nothing is permitted. Put simply, the fact of my truth being a truth does not permit me to act. If I want to impose myself on you, I am not permitted to do so, not any more than if I want to help you and act on that belief. If my truth says I have a right or obligation to impose myself on you then I will be at an impasse, since other truths contradict me, and who can honestly make the decision for the right aggregation of truths?
Rather, the only choice, the only way out, is through adopting the stance of curiosity. Of genuinely, open-mindedly trying to listen to myself and to others. If the rightness of my belief is no basis for justifying my impingement on another then all I have left is the process of communication, clarification, seeking understanding. My senses of humor and irony will need to be well developed if this is going to work.
What would a magic built on this principle, “everything is true, nothing is permitted” look like? There would be much less need for egoism, paranoia, selfishness, pomposity. There would not be the grasping desperation that makes spells fizzle if not enacted with inordinate, effortful strain. There would be a lightness, a playfulness, a looseness, a sparkling, dancing, improvisational grace. There would be no groaning, creaking dogma; no clanking rigidity.
Once we stop having to fight about who is right, and once we relinquish any pre-determined right to act, our only remaining options are curiosity and play. We become as the dance of quantum foam, or the artful romance of fire and ice. We are almost obliged to honor the truths of others, and likewise, to genuinely – not just in a shallow or narcissistic or lazy way – honor our own (ever incomplete and changing) truths.
The beautiful thing is, you can disagree with these words to your heart’s content and I will affirm you for it. Which frees my energies to create, listen, adapt, cultivate. I don’t have to fight anyone for my right to exist, so therefore I have no need to oppress either. Victim mentality evaporates (so often it seems that the more power someone has the more of a victim they think they are). Victim mentality chokes creativity. Abundance follows from a surfeit of truths and a dearth of permission.
The elegance of the idea that nothing is permitted: it creates a radical sense of responsibility for the consequences of my actions, since I can never justify my choices (who can claim to be omniscient after all?). This is healthy insofar as it invites me to question the places where my truth, true though it is, might yet be incomplete and in need for expansion. Oh, so now our energies go to learning rather than defending. Sounds magical to me.
If everything is true, then the slogan “nothing is true, everything is permitted” can continue to be valid. Inverting this celebrated formula does not oblige us to abandon it. Why settle for one lens on reality when we could have an infinity?
