The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Put Right
Notes on Iain McGilchrist in light of brain quadrants; and, bridging Iain’s work with metaphysics
Short version ~ The fable is a cautionary tale: as a junior partner to the Master, be careful playing god. You are not the Master. You don’t know the whole and you can’t make things whole again if by dividing you make a mess. Trying to fix your mess by dividing further, only makes your mess worse.
Only the Master can make things whole again, bridge all divisions, knit all divisions back together again.
Longer version ~
Spiritual Master and the rebellious student
Before Disney, thru Goethe, the story went like this:
The poem begins as an old sorcerer departs his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform. Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for him, using magic in which he is only partially trained.
The floor is soon awash with water. The apprentice realizes he cannot stop the broom because he does not know enough magic required to stop what he has started (note the Frankenstein resonance).
The apprentice splits the broom in two with an axe. Each broom piece becomes a whole broom who takes up a pail and continues fetching water, now at twice the speed. At this increased pace, the entire room quickly begins to flood.
When all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns and quickly breaks the spell. The poem concludes with the old sorcerer’s statement only a master should invoke powerful spirits. — Wikipedia
Iain found in Neitztche the idea this applies to spiritual communities built around an authentic spiritual Master, one personally connected with Oneness-Wholeness.
As the spiritual community grows and flourishes, the Master learns there are too many practical details of running the village he is not good at. In fact he has no time for the lesser, merely detailed tasks. It serves the village most if he maintains his connecting into Oneness so the community continues to have a healthy vortex of positive energy.
The Master is forced to delegate administrative details to his apprentice, his merely mentally capable emissary. The Master can then continue in his main job of maintaining the Big Picture, the Whole, the overview, watch for attacks from negative forces.
So the Master delegates all lesser admin tasks to his brightest student, the Bureaucrat.
After a few years, the Bureaucrat says to himself, “What does the Master know? I’m the one doing all the hard work. I know more than the Master knows.” The Bureaucrat becomes unreasonably self-assured, a cocky, arrogant Know-It-All.
Things proceed, the village community declines. Why? The Bureaucrat doesn’t know much about the whole of things, the whole-making of all details, the bridging of all divisions. He only assumes he knows as much as the Master. In truth, all he can do is to divide, analyze and count.
The village becomes dysfunctional and collapses. The student who usurps the Master, the Bureaucrat who betrays the good King.
This is the story, on a group level, which each of us goes thru individually. The rebellious human left brain — after puberty — thinks he’s better than the right brain.
bd: A good question here is, WHY does the Bureaucrat fall into assuming he knows more than the Master? The left is detail-oriented. It is constitutionally adverse to taking in and grasping the whole picture. The Bureaucrat does not have the interpersonal skills to bridge divisions and disagreements between community members and factions. All the Bureaucrat can do is read the rules out-loud, point to his own mental map, the way “things spoz’ed to be.”
Assumptions are what Left uses to compensate for its inability to grasp the whole accurately and reliably. This is why we often say, “assume” makes an”ass” out of “”u” and “me.”
Other ways to voice the wisdom of the fable
The fable is a cautionary tale: Only the Master can make things whole again, bridge all divisions, knit all divided factions together again within a container of healthy values.
It’s good for the Bureaucrat to have self-esteem about what he knows. However as a junior partner to the Master, be careful playing Master. You are not the Master. You don’t know the whole; you can’t make things whole again. You can only divide and divide further. You make a mess because your thinking is one-sided. Trying to fix your mess by dividing further, only makes your mess worse. You’ve understood enough to get into trouble — not yet enough to get out.
How the Disney version led us astray
Made solely for entertainment purposes, The Disney version excuses all of the Apprentice’s blame and shame.
It leads us to empathize-sympathize with the Apprentice — not the Master. Mickey is cute. We are supposed to forgive him. The harm he does is “cute,” “harmless fun.”
The master is couched in Atlantean Black magic tropes. If we were making Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice in 2021, for the first time; and, we used Iain as a consultant, we would throw out all the black magic (Black magic is what results when the parts are manipulated without awareness of; and, attention to the Whole).
Instead we would make the Master a loving father Sun being. Then the blame and shame would fall where it should, on the Apprentice, empty-bureaucratic-ritualistic practice of spirituality.
Iain also offers this quote from this Einstein :
Our intuitive mind is a sacred gift; the rational mind is meant to be a faithful servant to this Master. We have created a mainstream culture which honors the servant yet has forgotten the gift ~ Einstein
https://innersunshine.medium.com/the-sorcerers-apprentice-put-right-76fcc7a7b16d
From Sorcerer’s Apprentice to Faust
The same theme in Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice informs his play Faust, the notion of “Faustian Man” as the modern type. The basic concern about Faustian Man is he, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, has command of powers, not true mastery of those powers. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Faustian Man has confused “command” or “facility” with “mastery.”
This is the real issue lying at the heart of almost all critiques of Late Modern society, the expressed concern about “magical thinking”, or expressed in Carl Jung’s observation, “we have grown rich in knowledge but poor in wisdom”. Having command is one thing, authentic mastery is quite another.
References
A whole bunch of Iain McGilchrist audios and videos I took in this past week
