Class VII: Patterns of Magick
“Look for the beauty in the pattern. There are no coincidences at this level of complexity.”
—David Deutsch- Introduction: Pattern Recognition
is a large part of the game
Shiaparelli, June 4, 1888 Hubble, Aug. 26,
2003Tree of
EvolutionDNA
moleculeGREAT PART OF WIZARDLY SEEING
and thinking is pattern recogni-
tion. That is, looking at a bunch
of trees, and seeing a Forest. Or,
as in stereograms, looking at a
bunch of squiggles and seeing a
three-dimensional scene. This
kind of perception is also basic to
science. It has helped us to understand and create
theories about the way the Universe works. Every
time someone makes an important breakthrough in
perception and sees “the Whole Picture,” it’s an
epiphany. It’s like finding a bunch of puzzle pieces all
mixed up together, with some right side up and others
upside down. Our job is to sort them out, turn them
around, find ones that have similarities, and fit them
together piece by piece until a picture emerges.
The ultimate goal of science is to discover a single
grand “Theory of Everything,” one where all the
pieces of all the different puzzles can be assembled
into one giant picture, with no pieces left over. Scien-
tists call this idea The Unified Field Theory, but they
still haven’t worked it out. The main problem is in-
cluding and accounting for Life and Consciousness,
and so far there are no equations for this.
Magickal folks and geniuses see patterns where
others do not. In 1831, Charles Darwin looked at the
variety of finches in the Galapagos Islands and saw
the pattern of the evolution of life as a branching
tree. In 1953, James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice
Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin looked at organic
nucleic acids and conceived the double spiral pat-
tern of the DNA molecule.Nature has symbols too, found in many underly-
ing patterns of structure. One of the most important is
the spiral. It is found everywhere from the DNA mol-
ecule in your body, through the arrangements of leaves
and seeds in plants and flowers, the shells of snails
and the chambered nautilus, tornadoes and hurricanes,
all the way up to the shapes of galaxies. Wherever
you look, the spiral or another pattern is present. We’ll
discuss some of these patterns in more detail later on,
in Course 2, Class I: “Natural Mysteries.”However, sometimes our minds can get overly
enthusiastic, and we perceive patterns that aren’t re-
ally there. In 1877, Giovanni Shaparelli looked at mark-
ings on the surface of Mars and his mind organized
them into a pattern of lines, which became famous as
“the Martian canals.” Only when we sent Mariner
space probes to Mars to take photos we discovered
that there were no canals there at all. No lines were
found of any kind, just craters, lava fields, mountains,
and deserts, similar to those on the Moon. We also
found red iron rust, polar ice caps, enormous vol-ca-
noes, vast canyons, and ancient riverbeds—and re-
cently, frozen oceans of ice just beneath the surface.Corrected pages 3rd printing.1.p65 19 6/10/2004, 2:59 PM