Yeats' Third Principle of Magic and Patterns of Primordial Awareness

The third principle of magic opens up an opportunity for greater understanding and even wonderstanding of the nature of our own mind and the nature of reality, and it helps us to begin to enter into the mysteries of life. Yeats tells us that the great mind and the great memory of Nature and of the Cosmos can be evoked by symbols. How does that work? As we contemplate this vitalizing question, we can understand much more about what the dominant culture cuts us off from, and how the loss of magic and sacredness goes altogether with the loss of species and the degradation of ecologies. This also suggests something important about the way to heal ourselves and our world: We may need a recovery of magic, an initiation again into magical consciousness. That will involve a spiritual path that helps us fully live into one of the most important spiritual ideas introduced in this contemplation: That we are patterns of primordial awareness, and that suffering arises when that awareness mistakes itself for something it is not.