Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Switching the Four Modes
Take one situation and deliberately think it through in each of the four modes — Science, Religion, Art, Magic — in turn, treating each as a tool to pick up and put down rather than a truth to defend, so you stop being trapped in a single default way of seeing.
Switching the Four Modes: Take one situation. Think it through, on purpose and in turn, as Science (facts, causes, what’s observable), Religion (the master idea — what it’s about, what should be), Art (how it feels, what’s satisfying), and Magic (what you want; treat it as alive and full of omens). Inhabit each sincerely, then put it down. Read all four back; notice your default and your blind spots; then choose the mode to act from. None is “the truth” — each is a tool.
What it is
In SSOTBME, Ramsey Dukes (pen name of Lionel Snell) argues that human beings make sense of the world through four fundamental “ways of thinking” — Science, Religion, Art, and Magic — which he describes as “as essential to a holistic view of reality as the four suits in a deck of cards are essential to a proper poker game.” His radical move is to treat these not as rival accounts of what is true, but as tools you can deliberately choose between depending on the situation.
Magic, in his hands, is “a way of thinking” you can pick up — not a competing physics you must believe in. This practice operationalizes that idea. You take a single live situation — a stuck project, a relationship knot, an illness, a decision — and think it through on purpose in each mode in turn.
The value is not in finding the “right” mode but in noticing how trapped you usually are in your default one, and in recovering the angles your default mode is blind to. Dukes’s four modes, roughly:
- Science — the objective/observed: what are the facts, measurements, causes, mechanisms? Detached, third-person, repeatable.
- Religion — belief in master ideas: what larger principle, value, duty, or meaning is this about? What “should” be?
- Art — the subjective/expressive: how does this feel, what’s its mood, shape, aesthetic, what would make it beautiful or true-to-feeling?
- Magic — the wilful and analogical: what do I want here, and what happens if I treat the situation as responsive, personified, full of omens and as-if connections?
The Method
A practical pass distilled faithfully from Dukes’s framework (short attributed phrasing, not full reproduction):
- Pick one situation and write it at the top of a page. One concrete thing you’re chewing on. Keep the four modes as four headings beneath it.
- Think it through as Science first. Strip out feeling and meaning. What can actually be observed? What are the measurable facts, the likely causes, the mechanism, the testable prediction? Write it as a detached observer would.
- Now switch to Religion. Put facts aside and ask the “master idea” questions: what is this situation really about? What value, principle, or duty is at stake? What should happen, and what would it mean to act with integrity here?
- Now switch to Art. Drop “should.” Ask how it feels — its mood, its shape, its colour. If this situation were a painting, a piece of music, a scene, what would it be? What ending would be satisfying rather than correct?
- Now switch to Magic. Adopt the wilful, personifying stance: state plainly what you want; treat the situation as if it were alive and responsive; look for analogies, omens, “as-if” links; ask what symbolic act would shift it. (See the companion practices below.)
- Hold each lightly, then put it down. The discipline is to fully inhabit each mode while you’re in it — argue its case sincerely — and then drop it and move on, rather than collapsing back into your favourite. Dukes’s whole stance is that none of them is “the truth”; each is a lens.
- Read all four back. Notice which mode you defaulted to, which one was hardest, and what each one saw that the others missed. The synthesis is usually richer than any single pass — and you decide which mode to act from. (Sourcing note: SSOTBME is in print and frequently quoted; the lines above are attributed paraphrase and short quotation, not full reproduction.)
Source & Lineage
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell, b. 1945), trained in mathematics, published SSOTBME (Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed) in 1974. Its central thesis — that magic is best understood as a distinct, legitimate mode of thinking rather than a failed science — directly seeded the chaos-magic movement (Pete Carroll, Ray Sherwin and others).
Where chaos magic later turned this into “paradigm shifting” between belief-systems for results, Dukes’s own emphasis is gentler and more philosophical: a literate person consciously choosing the right tool for the job.
The Traditions' versions
The deeper move — deliberately re-describing one situation through multiple incompatible frames to free yourself from a single default — recurs widely; Dukes’s version is distinctive in naming exactly four modes and in licensing the magical one as a legitimate, choosable tool: - Cognitive reappraisal (CBT) — deliberately generating alternative interpretations of an event to change its emotional charge.
- De Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” — rotating through fixed thinking stances on one problem (parallel structure, secular framing).
- Bashar’s permission slips / examining beliefs — choosing the frame that gives you the result you want.
- Tart on “consensus trance” — seeing that your habitual mode of perception is one conditioned option, not reality itself.
- Chaos-magic paradigm shifting (Carroll/Hine lineage) — the harder, results-driven descendant of this idea.
Common refinements
Defending instead of inhabiting. The skill is to argue each mode sincerely while you’re in it, not to grade them. Suspend the verdict until all four are written.
- Never leaving your home mode. Scientists skip Art and Magic; dreamers skip Science. Force yourself through the uncomfortable ones — that’s where the new information is.
- Collapsing the modes into one mush. Keep them clean and separate on the page. The contrast between them is the whole point.
- Mistaking the magical pass for a verdict about reality. It’s a lens for generating wants and symbolic options, not a claim that the world literally answered you.
- Forgetting to choose. After all four, decide which mode to act from for this situation. Flexibility serves action; it doesn’t replace it.