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Human consciousness is a fluid, transformative process — felt as self-awareness. The exploration of consciousness is more than theoretical frameworks. It is about how we experience the world and evolve within it. In this context, magic is symbolic representation — the process of translating internal experience into symbols, language, and meanings that allow us to connect to something greater than ourselves. Consciousness is magical because it does this.
"We can view the process of consciousness and its unfolding as a kind of magic, shaped by self-awareness and symbolic representation. This is what I call Magical Consciousness — the act and art of symbolic awareness."
— Germane Marvel, How to Solve the MetacrisisThe Theory of Emanism emerges from Black Metamodernism — the practice of using diunital, both-and cognition to integrate cognitive dissonance. It applies the diunital thinking first identified by Princeton alumni and former Harvard Merit Professor Vernon J. Dixon, who observed that diunital (both-and) thinking was the opposite of the dichotomous (either-or) thinking predominantly used in the Northern Hemisphere and particularly the West.
The old alchemical principle of solve et coagula — dissolve and coagulate — is dichotomy and diunitality in a different guise. The metacrisis is an ideological traffic jam at the crossroads of pre-modernism, modernism, postmodernism, and post-colonialism. The question is: which part of the metacrisis is not caused by dichotomous thinking? Diunital philosophy is the way through.
Each concept builds on the last, moving from the most foundational question — what is nothing? — through increasingly refined understandings of existence, mind, and the divine, arriving at a hypothetical future culture built on these principles. Click any concept to read its full explication.