FOOL ME NICE: THOUGHTS ON THE GENTLE ART OF MISDIRECTION.

(This was delivered at the first Symposion Arcanus on November 23, 2010 at the Bordello Bar in Los Angeles. It's my notes to a spoken performance, so it's not properly formatted for any sort of formal publication, but I thought I'd share.)

No one appreciates being lied to. But today I’m not focused on lying. I’m discussing misdirection. I mention lying, because misdirection is often tossed into the same karmic dumpster as lying. This is not only wrong, but unfortunate.

Lying depends upon subverting honesty and goodwill through persuasion and manipulation. Misdirection, often considered an obstruction to honesty, can actually bypass preconceptions to allow a deeper connection to truth.

Lying makes us feel tired and jaded, while being fooled can fill us with wonder, even innocence. I think we have a sense of this. Being lied to by a friend or a salesperson pisses us off. However, magicians who make rabbits disappear, or cards come out of our ears, amaze and entertain us.

Think of the first (or last) of the Major Arcana, the Fool, clever and gullible, with all the wisdom and ignorance of a child. We understand on some level that that innocence and wisdom are one and the same.   

Also, misdirection can have nothing to do with consciousness. Adam and Eve were incapable of lying until they ate from the Tree of Knowledge.

But misdirection? You cannot lie to a stuck and rusty bolt. It’s pretty unconscious. But you can misdirect it, nudging it a tighter to work out the rust, before finally twisting it free.

Basic Illustration: Judo/Martial Arts

The main function of misdirection is to bifurcate a seemingly unified system, often keeping one element at bay, so another element can manifest. In the case of the bolt, we reversing direction lets the threads unbind.

In humans, instinctive resistance and reaction, together are a very powerful combination. However, if we misdirect the resistance impulse away and separate it from the reactive motion, we divide our adversary, and he or she becomes much easier to control.

This is the principle of tsukuri and kuzushi, of breaking your opponent’s balance (his poise) before attempting any technique.

For judo, the misdirection should not be huge; in fact, the smaller the better, otherwise the conscious mind can react and adjust. The goal is to keep the misdirection subliminal, not to lie or deceive the conscious mind, but to act so quickly that the conscious mind is never involved.

Smallness, Vaccines and Tiger Balm

When consciousness is not an issue, the misdirection is often small. For example in medicine, vaccination is essentially a feint—normally, the body does not produce antibodies unless it has been sick. 

But what if we inject attenuated or deactivated pathogen into a body? Obviously, we can’t inject too much or too vital a pathogen, but luckily, we don’t need to. Just a little bit can trigger an immune response.

With no outward symptoms, antibodies are being churned out, as the misdirected immune system activates its own defenses.

Another example in medicine is counterstimulation. Consider Tiger Balm.

Tiger Balm’s active ingredient is turpentine. Not exactly high tech stuff. The turpentine creates a little irritation which draws attention away from a strain or sprain. It is a classic misdirection, because it provides relief not through deadening sensations, but through actually causing new ones, separating one’s attention from the initial injury.

Little misdirection=big relief. Besides, I like how turpentine smells.

Chi and Kiai

Sometimes, however, misdirection has to be big. Especially when ego is involved. Much of this type of misdirection involves occupying the conscious analytical mind so it does not get in the way of action. Since the conscious mind is both skeptical AND clueless, small and subtle is usually ignored.

In judo, one may not see the pinky bending up, or the quick flick of the wrist, but everyone hears the kiai. The shout.

Kiai is assumed to focus one’s intent, if you’re talking to a karateka, unify ki, of you’re listening to an aikidoka, or trigger a healthy and useful dose of road rage if you’re doing judo.

Despite these esoteric explanations, it’s possible that the vocalizations serve to misdirect the cognitive speech areas of the brain, to achieve heightened intuition and power.

In fact, a recent study published in the journal Neuroimage. “Human Brain Activation during Phonation and Exhalation ” suggests that “the laryngeal gestures for vowel and syllable production and controlled exhalation involve left hemisphere mechanisms similar to speech articulation.”

Now, as a martial arts teacher, I know how badly speech and left-hemisphere thinking slows a student down. A common axiom for martial artists is “Don’t talk. Don’t think. Just do.”  

Back to the study:

“On the other hand, the neural control for vocalizations that are not specific to speech, such as whimper or prolonged vocalization, will show a more bilateral distribution. In fact…the response volume for phonation was greater in the right hemisphere compared to the left.”

I believe kiai misdirects the pathways that would usually serve left-brain-centered thought and speech and repurposes them for right-brained spatial and intuitive positioning. Result? More speed, power, and flow.

It is interesting how the study results match my instructions to my students. The whimpering part is especially interesting, since Bruce Lee would often sound like a hungry puppy dog. Just before he kicked your ass. Even if you were Chuck Norris.

Of course, rather than explaining any of this, and having my students think, I just have my students yell and make funny noises.

Misdirection in Religion  

Even more than in martial arts, when we work with religion or magic, our main obstacle IS the conscious mind. When do we pray? When we need help. When do we think of magic? When we need it. In other words, we invariably come to religion or magic with an agenda, and while consciousness serves a purpose, it always ends up getting in the way.

Churches, at least the successful ones, know this, and employ various strategies to misdirect the mind.

From its opulent cathedrals, to its persistent use of Latin, to those ornate robes, the regalia and ceremony of the Catholic Church all serve to misdirect the conscious, skeptical mind, to open the soul to a deeper presence, and a deeper awe.

The trappings of a church engage and misdirect the senses so we can transcend them. Chanting or bells for the ear, iconography and symbolism for the eye, transubstantion and communion for the taste, incense for smell, rosaries for touch.

Meanwhile, our conscious mind cannot help but try to weave everything into a narrative, to analyze critically, or to posit meaning because that is what consciousness does. And, while the conscious mind is occupied, one’s core being may enter the presence of God.  Or the flying spaghetti monster, if that’s your church.

Think of a mandala, or, better yet, visualize one. Mandalas are circular, geometric…sometimes bordered in gold leaf or accented with bodhisattvas or animals or deities, but that some of them are and some are not show that these motifs are not central to the function of the mandala.

In its most distilled forms, a mandala’s goal has nothing to do with the mandala. The eye is drawn to its center, but the goal is not to reach the the center. The mandala is essentially a tool to misdirect one’s sensory apparatus so one is free to encounter experience itself as pure, and as the abode of enlightenment. 

In certain types of Zen Buddhism, koans accomplish similar goals by entangling the critical mind in seeming non sequiturs. The point of “what is the sound of one hand clapping” is not to get the answer, nor to find its place in history. Younger students may be tempted to “solve” the koan, or the find something clever to say. They may research the koan and try to classify it according to date or type, or history.

Meanwhile the teacher is probably eating pickled vegetables.

Point being? The answer is not in the answer at all.  The saying "do not confuse the pointing finger with the moon", implies that awakening is the simple realization of one's nature — not the ability to interpret a kōan with one's mind.

What interests me about misdirection, however, is not finding Buddha nature, but that misdirection is very useful and malleable. It neither respects, nor disparages one’s identity, even if that identity is expressed through desire, which is a very non-Buddhist concept. Misdirection obtains, whether one is on a journey of self-discovery, self-denial, or simply wants to cast a spell.

Magic

People often assume that magic connects one to the paranormal or extrasensory. However, what exactly does that mean? There is no fixed threshold of consciousness; consciousness manifests in degrees. By misdirecting our consciousness, we may, ironically become not unconscious, or semiconscious, but more than conscious.

Much of the paraphernalia of various magical traditions again serve to misdirect the mundane mind, helping the practitioner to reach deeper consciousness whether one calls it Samadhi or gnosis.

When I first heard of Austin Osman Spare’s sigilization techniques a few years back, I was amazed at how elegantly and efficiently he used misdirection to effect magic. With sigilization, the words stating an intent, often a sentence, is reduced to an abstract design; the sigil is then charged with the will of the creator. Finally, depending on your philosophy, it’s destroyed, either ritually if you need it, or tossing it in the garbage it you don’t.

Or, it’s simply forgotten.

Chaos magic, then does not require cavorting with demons in the 666 layers of abyss. (I mean, if you want to, go right ahead…and say high to Demogorgon!) But for me, the genius of chaos magic lies in how effortlessly a sigil takes an ordered lexicon such as a sentence and randomizes it. The mundane mind, which refuses to let go of the lost language follows the sigil into oblivion, while the motive force, the charge, is unleashed into the universe.

With so practical, so functional a method, it’s difficult to see how Spare could have ever been a student of Crowley’s, but then again, sometimes it’s hard to see how Martin Luther could have ever been a Catholic.

Poetry

It’s only a little sidestep to go from religion and mysticism to the arts, especially when talking about Milton, who was every bit as religious as Luther.

However, instead of attacking language directly as Luther did when burning the Papal bulls, Milton uses language in Paradise Lost to convey not the mere facts of human fallibility, but its very experience, its sting.

For this, Milton uses poetry and in his poetry, one tool. Enjambment.

Enjambment means to carry a sentence over from one line of poetry to the next.

In my English classes I talk about how the mind hungers for completion, which is why we hate sentence fragments. Here, the mind is misdirected into thinking it has the complete answer at line’s end, to have the answer crushed or transformed when the next line continues the sentence.

In Paradise Lost, Book 1, Milton writes:

Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant…

See how this plays and skewers preconceptions of divine presence and might? And in Book Two:

… now conscience wakes despair
That slumbered, wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.  

As the reader stumbles, Milton leaves her in naked awareness of her hubris in envisioning God. The pain of falling, failing, being found wanting.  This prepares and opens your mind to the hell that Milton in about to create.

The Voice of God Beyond Perfection

In addition to poetry, Misdirection plays a subtle, but very important role in music. Minute imperfections in pitch or timing humanize a piece. In fact, some music software has a humanize function, to introduce slight imperfections in timing so a piece does not sound too mechanical.  

When it comes to pitch, consider the violin. It has no frets. The violinist uses her kinesthetic sense to estimate where the note is supposed to be. I know there are a few violinists who disagree, but even if you tell me that you have perfect pitch on your fingerboard, don’t you dare tell me that all violinists do. Yet, the violin, with its microtonal vibrato and overtones, somehow captures us more than a simple moog-generated sine wave. More than any other instrument, the violin has channeled the soul of Western civilization and drawn comparisons to the human voice.

Like the violin, a voice has no frets or stops. Pitch, again, is a function of muscle memory and control, which is inherently variable.

This is misdirection at its finest, for both voice and violin. Hearing the pitch waver ever-so-slightly around perfection raises two separate threads: one is focused on what is being heard, and the second, what should be heard were the voice perfect. This misdirection allows the listener to collaborate with the music, bring this idea of perfection into it, and as the deliverer of perfection to become in a very real sense, divine.

Also, the closer a singer approaches perfection, the more clear it becomes that perfection can never be reached. For me, this vulnerability makes listening to Callas or Pavarotti not merely an aesthetic experience, but a human, spiritual one, with all the power and pathos of Original Sin.

In contrast, when a singer is Auto-Tuned, although the voice may be pitch-corrected to mathematical perfection, this very perfection eliminates the need for interpretation, so we have nothing to do but listen passively.   

Yes, can be pretty, but it is an unchallenged beauty. Ultimately, paradoxically, Auto-tuned perfection becomes annoying, boring, like angels singing hosanna hosanna over and over and you know they have never ever gotten a zit, a parking ticket, was late on a credit card payment, or farted in public.

And, since perfection shouldn’t be boring, we know we are missing something, and that can leave us dissatisfied, disaffected, and stagnant.

Misdirection, ultimately, as motion

Ultimately, I believe misdirection, is not deception at all, but the initiator of motion. Look at a yin yang. The dark fish has a light eye, the light fish has a dark. This has been interpreted as reconizing that one cannot exist without knowledge of the other, and we are all one, but I find that insipid.

What do we do when we talk to people? We look them in the eye. What are we looking for: connection. If you, the dark fish, had a destiny to be a dark fish, why on earth would you ever move? You’ve already reached your destiny—you’re the dark fish!

Unless you saw in the eyes of the white fish, a darkness that reminded you of you. And vice-versa.

When I see the fish, I see them in motion, essentially perfect, yet eternally misdirected, mortal, and moving. There’s something beautiful and sad about that. And reassuring, too.

My final thought comes from the Tarot. When doing a reading, when we see a reversed card, we instinctively ask “why is this card upside-down?”

A novice reader can often jump to the conclusion that a reversed card means something antagonistic to the upright card. Or, some readers just ignore reversed cards, saying it complicates their readings.

Yet, even as we ask about reversed cards, this begs the deeper question: why do we so rarely note when a card is not reversed? Why do we often accept these cards as they are, without thinking of their position? Their motion? Not in relation to the other cards, but in relation to themselves. Without the possibility of reversal, even The Fool can become jaded, complacent… a signifier of identity, rather than a motion…of sentimentality, rather than growth.

In this sense, a reversed card may actually be nudging us toward actualizing the very qualities and potentialities that we’d already possess, were we not fooling ourselves.

Through imbuing  us with motion…the dynamic of reversal...the possibility and possibilities of misdirection do not merely convince us that we are thinking, nor even that we are alive, but immerse us in the experience that we simply, and unambiguously exist.

And that may be the most exquisite and gentle misdirection of all.

But that’s the subject for my next talk. :)