Two books remind me how sometimes we need to follow chance to uncover hidden worlds.
Image © Rachael Lloyd
Most enthusiasts of the occult and strange would agree that all is not quite as it seems: the world we see around us isn’t the whole story. But if measurements, observations and rational deductions won’t reveal such ‘hidden’ layers of reality, how can we uncover them?
Some people lay claim to direct channels to the mystery realm—in the form of ghosts, familiars, spells and invocations. Others follow rather more chemically-activated routes, courtesy of that bloke down the pub selling packets of doubtful powder.
But if neither ghosts nor hallucinogens are your thing, another way to go beyond the rational and logical is to invoke chance. The occult tradition is full of chance as a route to revelation. Turning up the next Tarot card produces mysterious clues about your future. A random page in the Bible delivers a message from God. Breaking apart the fortune cookie reveals, in a shower of crumbs, next month’s sales figures.
I regularly turn to two particular books when I need reminding how luck can sometimes reveal wiser ways to live. The first is Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), a classic story of an ‘alternative world’ in which the Allies lost the Second World War.
Or did they? In fact most of the novel’s protagonists suspect the world they see is not real: there is another ‘occult’ reality, one in which the Axis powers lost the war. This occult real real world is revealed in book-within-the-book The grasshopper lies heavy, ostensibly written by the titular ‘man in the high castle’, Howard Abendsen.
With the help of the I Ching, the mystical Taoist ‘book of changes’, Abendsen uses chance to divine Grasshopper’s plot and details. He follows the ancient fortune-telling method of throwing yarrow stalks, selecting, based on the random pattern formed by the fallen sticks, mysterious portents from the I Ching, which form Grasshopper’s message about the real nature of the High Castle world. In a nicely meta-postmodern touch, some biographers assert that Dick actually used I Ching in the same way, to write The Man in the High Castle.
In fact, almost all the book’s characters, trapped in their illusory world, use random consultation of the I Ching to uncover the hidden truths about their world. Dick’s message is that to reach inner truth, invoking chance, unpredictability, disturbance from deterministic logic isn’t just a nice idea: it is necessary.
For me, this necessity of invoking chance to reveal what is real is the core meaning of High Castle. In the occult approach, following a fixed, deterministic set of rules or logical analysis ultimately cannot reveal hidden truth. You need something unexpected, spontaneous.
Which brings me to Alan Watts’ classic The Way of Zen (1957). Watts describes a clear historical line from the I Ching through Taoism to Zen Buddhism. Invoking chance or spontaneity to reach understanding is embodied in the Zen koan: the ‘puzzle’ set by the Zen master, the solution of which will lead the novice to enlightenment, to revelation of what is. To every novice’s frustration, it seems no amount of logical processing of the terms of the koan will reveal the answer.
A famous story tells of a Zen novice who, trying hard to solve the koan, is only enlightened when his master suddenly hits him over the head with a stick. Only this spontaneity, unexpectedness, somehow enables the koan to reveal what is.
The link from High Castle to Zen is a natural one: most of High Castle’s action takes place in the Japanese-occupied west coast zone of the former USA. Mr Tagomi, a high-ranking member of the Japanese occupying administration, has spent his life following intricate, subtle rules of ‘face’, the elaborate code of honour and social behaviour. But one day he is forced to kill a German agent, a massive, spontaneous and unexpected departure from his deterministic rules of behaviour.
It’s no coincidence that this is the moment when Mr Tagomi is afforded a glimpse of an entirely different world, what he realises is the real world. Deviation from his hard logical rules of behaviour, forced upon him unexpectedly, has led Mr Tagomi to a revelation of the true what is.
Importantly, accessing the hidden world is about more than just occult curiosity: it is a route to a more authentic way of life. Mr Tagomi realises that the occupying forces, with all their apparent dominance, not to mention the Nazis’ insane philosophy of the Aryan superman, are wrong about how the world really is.
Meanwhile, another character, antique dealer Robert Childan, arrives at authenticity by a different but equally unexpected, rule-defying route.
Childan struggles to prove that his antiques have the historicity much prized by his Japanese customers. Only a perfect, unbroken string of historical evidence—akin to a perfect logical argument—can provide the confidence that an object is genuine.
Simultaneously Childan goes to increasingly desperate lengths to curry favour with his Japanese clients, attempting to follow their meticulous, and for Childan ultimately unfathomable, rules of social status. But he knows that one day both he and his antiques will be denounced as fakes.
Childan’s solution invokes the unexpected, the unplanned, in the form of creativity: ditching the antiques, he instead turns to contemporary artworks. It is no longer a question of following the rules: the art is what it is—it is authentic, it has its own inner truth not based on logical verification.
The customers can take it or leave it: Childan ceases to try to manipulate them into valuing his items, and instead trusts to the unknowable outcome of a creative process.
This is a very Taoist approach: letting something happen, letting things be, and trusting to the wisdom of spontaneity. According to Lao-Tzu, the poet-philosopher of Taoism, ‘The principle of the Tao is spontaneity.’
What these examples share, for me, is a concept of ‘wisdom’: an expertise that goes beyond training or rules. Wisdom solves the koan, wisdom enables Mr Tagomi to accept the fundamental wrongness of his world.
Wise actions are not constrained to follow logical rules: Childan’s switch to contemporary art does not satisfy the Japanese customers’ thirst for historicity and will not establish Childan’s social credit with them: but it is wise, because it offers him an alternative path to a more authentic world, closer to inner truth.
I like to re-read both The Way of Zen and The Man in the High Castle every couple of years, if only as a reminder that sometimes we have to take seemingly odd paths toward solving our problems. We all find ourselves in situations where the ‘rulebook’ lets us down, or when what should be simple rules create levels of complexity we are at a loss to cope with.
So maybe sometimes we need to abandon the rules, at least temporarily: to ‘go occult’, to turn the cards and throw the yarrow stalks, to find a different way forward.
Mark Haw is an academic based near Glasgow. When not teaching engineering, he writes fiction and non-fiction. His book ‘Middle World’ (Macmillan) recounts the tale of an obscure Scottish botanist whose microscopic observations one June morning in 1827 led to a revolution in physics, chemistry and biology. Mark also runs reallysmallscience, a team of researchers taking science and engineering into nursery, primary and secondary schools across Scotland.