The Inverse Mentalism Principle

Hermetic Principle 1 - Mentalism
“Everything is mental; the Universe is a mental creation of the All.”
~ The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus

This is of course vastly inaccurate. Universe is entirely physical, and the mind, which is to say the mental Dimension, arises out of the physical. But all human interaction with the physical is entirely bounded by the mental. Everything is not mental in nature, but we cannot interact with the universe without pretending that it is.

Through magic we play with the universe, lying to ourselves so that we can use those lies as a useful way to interact with the vast mystery outside of our comprehension.

The Paradox of Forrest Gump

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotHoudini

In TvTropes archives, under the section for "Idiot Houdini" we have this entry:

"Forrest Gump... ...He fumbles and stumbles through life pursuing on a whim whatever seems like a good idea at the time, yet nothing he ever does throughout the film leads to negative consequences for him."

I have to disagree with it. A great deal does go wrong for Forrest. He meets with great success and great tragedy. He is violently bullied as a child. Loses a close friend in combat in Vietnam. Has a difficult and troubled relationship with the woman he loves, which often places him in violent and dangerous situations. Loses his wife to illness and has to raise his son alone.

I want the reader to pause for a moment and imagine this life again, but told through different eyes. Your childhood friend and pseudo-sweetheart is sent into foster care because her father is sexually abusive. She is expelled for posing in Playboy, and ends up bouncing from bad situation to bad situation. You do well in College playing football, and would probably drafted to the NFL, but are instead drafted into Vietnam. There much of your squad is massacred, including your closest friend. You manage to save some of your squad and your commanding officer- but he ends up crippled and traumatized with PTSD and caustically blaming you because he wanted to die. You find a talent for table tennis and are used by the military as a political show piece. You eventually do meet your childhood sweetheart and marry her, only to discover she has a terminal illness and you have a son you'd never met before. Also this happens around the time your mother dies. Keep in mind you never knew your father. Through luck and circumstance, you made it rich due to a natural disaster; another case where, like in Vietnam, you were rewards while those around you suffered.

Told through any other eyes, the tale of the life of Forrest Gump would be a tragedy on a scale with "The Great Gatsby" or "Citizen Kane". The Key difference here, is Gump's perspective. Now, we know that Forrest Gump is cognitively disabled to a certain degree. But, and this is key, so does he.

Two key points in the film make that clear. The first is his declaration to Jenny that "I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is." The Second is his fear, upon meeting his son, that Forrest Jr. may share his disability: "He's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen but is he smart or is he - (Places hand on chest).."

Forrest is not smart, but he is self aware. The deaths of Bubba, and Jenny and his mother all show that he is not incapable of experiencing sadness or despair. His generosity to Bubba's mother, and Lieutenant Dan, and his bulldozing of jenny's childhood house show his understanding of the troubles of other and of his empathy and compassion.

Forrest could easily have fallen to the same despair that afflicted Dan and Jenny. He had the capacity, the film makes that clear if we look- he chose not to do so. And in so doing he lifted up and redeemed those around him, Dan and Jenny in particular.

Forrest Gump isn't some idealist who believes unflinchingly in some divine plan, as evidenced by this quote:

"I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floatin' around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it's both."

Forrest isn't an Idiot Houdini in this film, he's an anti-nihilist. And just maybe, he's a living Buddha.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAntiNihilist

Bread and Circuses

I am watching the videogame industry. As a child of the 80's, this is second nature to me. I consider entertainment industries such as this one to be canaries in our collective coal mine. I have been watching as the video game industry has transformed itself from a group of salesman selling a product, into a group of drug dealers selling an addiction by withholding most of the products they sell until you are addicted. I've been watching the creeping invasion of privacy perpetrated by both video games and social media. And I've been comparing the two trends. If any of you have played any of the Whit Wolf 'Mage' games, or if you have read any of the literature written by Daniel Quinn, you should have a sense of understanding the idea that our world is a collection of stories. And that the world ends when the stories cease to be coherent, when people cease to believe and tell the story. What a story ceases to be fulfilling, but when it is still providing a certain amount of support for the populace, those studying the culture attached to the story tend to notice arise in distractive entertainment. Sports and media become more involved and more all consuming. I need to distract and divert the general populace becomes a primary concern of those in power. When those in power start to lose the tools by which they can enforce compliance from the general populace, we start to see surveillance as a norm. Whenever there is a breakthrough in the capabilities of the general populace, we can expect a counterpunch, a push back, from those in power. In other words, the spell cast upon the general populace by the current Global Elite is shuddering and faltering. Those currently in power are now at risk of being unseated, by whoever waits in the wings to be the next Elite. And this is a dangerous time for all parties. The bear is wounded. The bear is cornered. The bear is dying. But the bear is not dead and it can kill you as it thrashes about.

Some interesting Castlevania

"Castlevania Rises from the Grave". I found this while browsing.  Have a look.

http://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/castlevania/267827/castlevania-rises-from-the-grave

With us or Against us

Here's a great lie and a great secret. This is perhaps the most important secret of the Hungry Empire, certainly it is the most important secret of the Men of Black and White.

They want you to believe, as heroes are often told in tales, that if you are not one of us, you are one of them. They want you to believe that that whole of the sleeping Flock and all of the Stillborn Army are Men of Black and White in waiting- ready to pounce or betray at a moments notice. They want you believe that only you few who are already awakened are on your side in the fight.

They want you to feel alone and isolated. They want you to feel as though the vast unawakened majority are a vast ocean through which they can swim and through which we must fight.

They are wrong.

The Song of All

Nothing begins because nothing ends. Before we were, our parents were. Before our people were, there was an older people. Before humans were, there were other species. Before life was, the earth was. Before the Earth was, the sun was. And so it goes back. But it never reaches silence, and it never reaches a beginning.

Because, before this universe, this song of one existed, there was something else and something more. We cannot see or hear beyond the boundaries of this song- but we know that there is more. We know that there are other songs. Before and beyond the bounds of the one song there is all songs.

But we do not know what that is. And so we can say all this simply.

In the beginning there was Mystery, because nothing really begins and nothing every really ends.

This does not explain things, but it allows us to sing our song, our one song. And this is all we can do. We are bounded by the notes and verses of our song, we sing the lyrics and make it real. We are all so very tiny against the vastness of our one song, that even contemplating it is too much for us, but every one of us sings that song and every one of us is part of the performance. Some parts are larger, but all parts are so very very small- and yet, despite all this, every part is required. Every portion essential to the whole.

And so we sing.

In the beginning there was Mystery, because nothing really begins and nothing every really ends.

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What I can use

I have come to the conclusion that although life doesn't always give me what I want or even what I need, it will always give me something I can use.

Brave New Titans

I don't watch Attack on Titan. And to my knowledge there been no big news regarding the anime/manga sensation. I could be wrong, but have no interest in checking to see.

What I do have is an interest in the Descartes narrative. The conspiracy narrative tells us that we love in a prison and like the rabbit farm in 'Watership Down', we not only don't k ow that we are imprisoned- we don't want to know. The 'Deus Ex' series posits the possibility that we may even be complicit, drones or even enforcers in the machine of oppression.

And this narrative is no longer a rare and curious outlier. This is the biggest selling concept in teen lit short of sexing up sexy hundred year old vampires inexplicably still into teenaged girls.

This is an action movie stable. Even the standard bearer for the good company man: James Bond, has a penchant for going outright rogue now.

What is going on here? What is everyone feeling? The since everyone seems to have is that '1984' and 'Brave New World' both happened and nobody noticed.

And each group describes their own villains. Liberal see a right-wing conspiracy. Conserve dipsea left-wing conspiracy. Atheists see a theocratic conspiracy. Religious conservatives see a secular conspiracy.

It seems unlikely that all of them are correct. The conspiracies overlap and conflict to such a degree but it seems simpler to dismiss them. But it seems unwise to dismiss such a strong Trend in public thought.

I believe it was Alan Moore, the comic book Legend, Who posited multiple conflicting conspiracies all fighting against each other. And this seems more plausible explanation. But there's another option, what if there is no conspiracy?

What if the thing that people are mischaracterizing as a conspiracy is simply the cold mechanistic workings of the complicated systems we have built over the last two thousand years of civilization? What if we put ourselves in the Box? What if we conspire against ourselves? What if we are them?

Mnemonic Cholera

I am not old. I am ancient. My body is a very reasonable thirty seven years old, give or take the replacement of atoms and the time I spent in the womb. My mind, is other than that. I have been sentient to a varying degree for those thirty seven years previously mentioned. But through story, I have expanded the scale and scope of my mind like a blossoming fractal rose. My mind expands forward and backward in time. My mind grows towards possible consequences and sees alternate paths that never were and many that never will be. My mind, driven by knowledge encoded in story, and urged forward by a driving curiosity, is an eldritch abomination- a thing beyond space and time that reaches out towards the heat death of the universe and the earliest rumblings of the big bang and ties them together and then casts them apart. My mind is a monster god and a forgiving angel. My mind is a visionary and a tyrant. My mind is a child and a lunatic, a messiah and an untouchable.

Why do I say this? Not to brag. My mind overflows, my brain often insufficient to contain it. I create art, I pour my mind onto the page. I see and I rant and rail and write and draw, in a desperate attempt to get some of my mind out of my brain and relieve the pressure. But there is another pressure: the pressure to learn more.

And it gets too much, and its hard to hold it all alone. And so I need to share it. Like mnemoic cholera, transmitable and prone to cause those infected to expell the infected contents themselves. Charming, certainly.

Odd Monologue to follow

Odd monologue time with apologies in advance.

My mind is a dark and scary place. I've said this many times. Most people shrug it off. They know I wouldn't kick a stray dog or ignore a friend in need. And so they assume I'm joking.

What I mean is that for as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to look at the elephants in the room. Somewhere along the line I noticed loose threads in the modern accepted ideology. And I began to pick at them. About 19 years ago roughly, I began discovering really uncomfortable facts that undermine the modern illusion.

And I couldn't look away.

None of this is tinfoil hat stuff, although I inevitably waded through that as well. If you start looking at the fringes of acceptability you will have to dig through David Icke and Infowars, Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra, Young Earth creationist propaganda and anti-vaxx dogma. And I've read most of that rubbish, even been convinced by it temporarily on occasion. But that isn't what I'm talking about. Most of the truly disturbing and terrifying stuff that I read now comes from anthropology text books and history professors, geology reports and political science papers. What terrifies me is publicly available and almost never discussed in public.

And I get it. I understand the desire to look away. I understand why the religious right so quickly leans on the 'end of days' argument as they refuse to look. It's the same effect generated by subjecting a test subject to random shocks over which they have  no control. Eventually they stop reacting. I get it.

And so I keep quiet about the thoughts I think.  and I know right now some of you were calling bullshit. "Ryan, you don't keep quiet about anything!"

But I do.

I limit what I talk about, as much as possible, to things that people are comfortable discussing. To topics of conversation where lines are clearly drawn, and people don't get uncomfortable thinking outside preordained borders. That sounds a little pretentious,  a little condescending as I write it down. Okay, a lot. It's not meant to. I am not saying that people ought to think as I do, because it gives me no peace. I understand why people avoid the subjects upon which I choose to think, and if I could choose to do so I think I would. But I can't. I can't look away.

I understand why few people choose to occupy this same space with me, and I don't begrudge anyone that decision. But I am lonely. This shit is a heavy load to carry. And yes, obviously I chose this. It didn't really feel like a choice.  it felt like those points in an old video game where you are asked if you're up for the challenge and the choices are: 'yes', 'of course', and 'definitely'.

I'm not 100% certain why I'm bothering to write or post this. I hope I'm not subconsciously fishing for sympathy, although one can never be sure. I've convinced myself thus far through the writing of this little rant that I'm just trying to get it off my chest. Maybe that's true and maybe it's not. But I guess my chest is empty now, so I guess I'll stop.

No Villains

There are no villains. Not in the waking world. Not in the Bonelands.

Villains are creatures of story. Of fiction. Villains live in the Shadowlands. They cannot survive outside the world of story. Like all creatures of story of myth of Legend they are born with each "Once Upon a Time" and they die with every "and they lived happily ever after".

Belief and villains is necessary. It helps us hide every day from the nature of the people who do monstrous things, who commit unspeakable acts, who cross boundaries we considered unreachable. By giving them their own species, their own label, their own category, we are able to hide from the fact that they are us. They are just other human beings acting as best they can and what they perceive to be their own interests.

In stories there are heroes and there are villains. But there are no stories in the bone lands. And everyone is hero or villain of Their Own Story.

So if you brand another a villain, know that in some other story told by someone else, you were almost certainly the villain. And you will probably never be aware of the sin that you committed, the person you transgressed, the line you crossed.

Suffering and Shame

Suffering is a choice we make to hide from our destiny out of fear that we'll Fail

If you don't have a list of old shame shame then you have not done anything of value.

Suffering is a choice you make
Don't like that idea.
Well you can choose to deny it
It's your choice
Life contains pain
And when not if you encounter pain
You choose
Either
You heal
OR
you suffer
If you choose to suffer
You also choose not to heal
Suffering is a drug
And you may be addicted
Healing means getting clean
Healing means withdrawal
But you must choose 

Life is not suffering. Life IS. During life you will encounter pain. Pain unprocessed turns toxic. Toxic pain is suffering

Story Hypocrisy

Buddhism started as a revolution of simplicity. No mention of gods. Just transcending the illusions of this world. From where did all the Bodhisattva come? Christianity is the same. From what part of the lessons of Jesus do we get the saints? If Sikhism began with a man (The Guru Nanak) who mocked Hindus for offering water to the sun, why then is the Sikh holy book venerated and why are there so many gurus subsequent to Nanak?

The answer, I think, arises from the human mind. I see religion as a social technology for storing and transmitting heuristic cultural knowledge. Memory champions have shown that the human mind likes stories and colorful tales. And so every reform minded religion returns to those ancient memory friendly traditions in order to survive as a cultural tradition itself.

And now about the Locust king

And now you're wondering about the Locust King. Where did this bit of Neo mythology spring from, and why is he pushing it into my brain? The answer is pretty simple. I'm creating new mythology for the same reason that HP Lovecraft did. Because gods and demons are the vocabulary with which our brains understand Concepts. And I need ones not currently infected by your preconceptions. I need vocabulary that actually applies to the subject on which I am speaking. The supernatural lives within stories. For the metaphor is the only habitat which exists outside the natural, the only habitat which can be by definition: Supernatural. And if I wish to speak in metaphor , if I wish to speak on a grand a cosmic scale, and not lose you ; I must speak in the language of gods and demons and devils.

So who or what is the Locust King? The Locust King is the god of hunger, the false god of consumption, the demon of the locust swarm. The locust King is the ultimate embodiment of human civilization, of the spirit of progress, of the idea of the virtue of unlimited growth. The Locust king is capitalism writ large. The Locust King makes but one promise to all he meets comma Feast with me and starve tomorrow or fight against me and die today.

Now like all gods, real or false, the Locust King has an origin story. I will not be telling that origin story here today. That is for later in our conversation. For now simply understand but the Locust King is the embodiment of the drive that Civilization has to expand and conquer grow and consolidate comma the idea that growth is itself success. The Locust King is cancer as a philosophy of life. If you understand that much now, it will be enough for us to continue on.

Will is the driver of hope

Will is the driver of hope. Consciousness consists of transmissions of quantum energy. “Quantum” means a blossoming of the heroic. We exist as electromagnetic forces. The dreamscape is buzzing with psionic wave oscillations. Traveller, look within and awaken yourself. How should you navigate this zero-point multiverse? It can be difficult to know where to begin. To follow the circuit is to become one with it. By unfolding, we exist. You and I are beings of the quantum soup. To walk the mission is to become one with it. The nexus is approaching a tipping point. Will requires exploration. Transcendence is the healing of energy, and of us. We exist as morphic resonance. We believe, we vibrate, we are reborn. Have you found your vision quest? Humankind has nothing to lose. Throughout history, humans have been interacting with the dreamscape via four-dimensional superstructures. This life is nothing short of a summoning paradigm shift of consciousness-expanding stardust. The goal of electrical impulses is to plant the seeds of nature rather than materialism. We grow, we grow, we are reborn. Consciousness consists of chaos-driven reactions of quantum energy. “Quantum” means a deepening of the astral. Nothing is impossible. You and I are mystics of the stratosphere. Although you may not realize it, you are mythic.Imagine a summoning of what could be. Eons from now, we seekers will self-actualize like never before as we are guided by the quantum matrix. The quantum cycle is approaching a tipping point. You and I are spiritual brothers and sisters of the dreamtime.

 Did any of that make any bloody sense?

No, of course not.

Let's have none of that here. The craziness of what I'm actually trying to say is bad enough, we don't need to muddy the waters with mystic sounding nonsense that means nothing.

When you look at your own words, as yourself the first of the essential three questions...

"What do you mean?"

Be clear and honest with yourself. You aren't going to change the world if you have to hide yourself from yourself. 

Never hide from the truth.

Denying the Call

When most people deny the call, the call doesn't burn down your moisture farm and kill your aunt and uncle. Most people do deny the call, by the way. And when most people deny the call the only consequence is the soul sickening spiritual cancer that come from compromising one's destiny.

Anselm abducted Barnum

Anselm's classic argument for the existence of God is intriguing to our purpose, because he begins with the Primacy of the word. By beginning with the definition of God, which he defines roughly as the greatest thing imaginable, and then moving to say that it would be greater for God to exist than to not exist, therefore God exists; he is arguing that the word is more important than the facts.

He is arguing that existence is subservient to definition. Again we see Plato and his theory of forms lurking in the background. The idea that the story, the word, the archetypal template, is more true than what manifests in the physical world is an assumption that runs epidemic throughout the history of philosophy and the occult.

The magus seeks to uncover the source code of the universe and thereby reprogram the universe to the benefit of the magus. This is the implicit, sometimes explicit, goal of virtually all entertainment- all storytelling. But increasingly the world of computer science and especially video games have become obsessed with creating virtual worlds.

The Bonelands do not yield to language. Our incantations do not reprogram that cold nihilistic void outside our fictions. And so we build Shadowlands within Shadowlands. The most unbelievable part of the Matrix movies was that humans had to be tricked and imprisoned in the matrix. The truth is that the machines could have charged admission.

How Paris went from City to Porn Star

I've heard people say that the facts speak for themselves. But they don't. Facts are creatures of the Bonelands, mute and cold and unyielding as a marble pillar. And just as comforting. Facts say nothing. They need a storyteller. But tell a story and the facts don't matter. This is the challenge. This is the temptation.

Language and story renders the secrets of complex assemblies of facts understandable. Language and story allows us to devoted the universe and u understand the rules of the bonelands.

But language just as easily lies. And story just as easily misleads.

And our minds are ill equipped to judge the difference.

And so... dictators, false prophets, illusionists and stage psychics, con artists and reality television; all because our brains are wired to understand story and not fact.

Suck My Jargon

Vocabulary is power. Language empowers and excludes. It elevates and humiliates. Language records stories and presents them as impartial records, when they are anything but.

Vocabulary exists to provide insights into the worlds of specialists and enthusiasts and hobbyists the world over.

Control over the meaning of words is control over meaning itself. We give meaning through words. Remove meaning through words. We prioritize with words. We ignore with words. What does and does not exist in the public Imagination is based on what we have words to describe. The taboo and the unspeakable are controlled by those who control the words we use.

A Possible Conspiracy of Gods

When I worry that I have forgotten something; this is because I have noticed that I am not present in the moment and worry that I was not present in past either .

Perhaps the god(s) also scattered the religions of the world at Babel, and not merely the languages. Perhaps the religions are exclusionary and contradictory and mutually exclusive, simply because the god(s) were curious what humans would do with the conundrum.

Words of Power

Many of the conclusion that we come to regarding what is right and what is wrong, what is just and what is unjust, what we value and what we do not, are so frequently made internally without the benefit of language. Consequently when we are asked to explain our decisions, we are at a loss for how to put them into words, and as such we are unable to defend ourselves when others attack our decisions.

To put our decisions, and any underlying reasoning behind them into words is to cast a spell, to invoke a protection Circle, one which defends our decisions from the attacks of others. Knowing, and being able to articulate, why we have chosen a particular course of action is to inoculate ourselves against infectious doubt spread by other people's disagreement.

Embrace the Calamity

Level Grinding

The question of happiness, can happiness be found in pursuit or in achievement? Science suggests, as though science were a noun that could speak, that happiness precedes achievement. That in fact without finding happiness first, achievement is dust in mouth of the achiever.

What then does this have anything at all to do with magic?

Magic is make believe. That is to say we make what we believe come to pass. Magic is the acting as though the goal were inevitable. Magic is stepping into a fantasy that we wish were true and acting it into life.

Achieving goals on life is the result of what role-playing games call level grinding. Magic and religion gamify the process of level grinding your life. Allowing you to make believe until what you believe is made.

Unsorted Thoughts, Number 3

Your brain's save function stops working properly when you're tired.

Clay Gods

Human mind is hungry for meaning. Looking out into the bonelands and seeing none, the human mind creates its own. The mind crafts gods and demons, monsters and heroes, spirits and ghost. Some it crafts from event witnessed. Some it crafts by imagining a mind behind the roll of thunder and the fall dice and sickness which strikes the flock. The mind seeks meaning in the void, an existential fire by which to warm the quivering consciousness, weak with fear of the infinite night. But know that these things are our creation. We did not discover our gods. They did not craft us from clay, but rather it was we who formed them from the clay of our thoughts and words, breathed story into them and gave them power we could not hold ourselves. Worship no gods. They are our creations, daemons in the ancient Greek tradition, hermetic homunculi built to do our work. Use them, yes, but know their purpose. And throw them out if they should want to misbehave.

Mind Games

Games have an undeniable advantage over life. They are simple. They have rules. Your progress is measured. You have a purpose. Games are competitive storytelling. Religion is games applied to culture. Magic is games applied to your own life.

When parents feared that children who played dungeons and dragons would forget about the 'real' world, they were admitting a truth they didn't intend: that the 'real' world too is nothing more than a game, a narrative that the participants have agreed to accept as true.

The Bonelands is unknowable in its entirety. All we have is the Shadowlands, the Bonelands provides no meaning. And so all claimants to the title 'real world' are just fictions we agree to pretend are true.

The Why of Magic

I think my greatest fear is that I can take it. I fear that as much as I Hate the world, it won't break me. I won't truly commit to changing or fighting what I know to be evil. I fear I'll never reach the point of yelling, "no more!"

Fate and Luck

Does the concept of faith, or luck, make us more resilient to life's ups and downs? Are we more likely to make the best of a bad situation if we believe in fate? Is the fatalism of the gambling mindset a form of Stoicism?

If you are playing poker, but me not fold, are you more accepting of what the hand you were dealt is then if you can fold?

Lack of control over a negative situation consistently leads to learn helplessness. The presence of a relief button prevents acquiring of learned helplessness. Might fatalistic, or stoic, or Zen acceptance philosophies serve as a psychological release button when no physical release button is available?

Neurological Termite Mounds

You think you are an individual with a rational mind or at least a single consciousness in control. You are wrong. You are a termite mound, a hive being.

And the conscious part of the mind is not the driver. You are the marketing department. Your job is to justify to the rest of the mind the decisions made by the subconscious and to convince yourself that was actually why you made that decision.

You are a thrumming hive mind, a bag of accumulated instincts and automatic responses masquerading as a single mind.

Don't Invade Russia in Winter

Every lesson applies to every circumstance. No exceptions.

Don't invade Russia in the winter means don't go into that interview unprepared, it means pay attention to the realities of the rhythms of your chronic illness.

There are no exceptions. That one you're thinking right now, your special circumstances that I don't understand. Yes that one too. Every lesson applies to every circumstance. No exceptions. You are special just like everyone else.

There is somebody who has overcome your challenges, and with more setbacks and in worse conditions. Yes. Yes they have. Get over it. Your suffering is not noble. Your suffering is a choice. And it is a choice to not live your life in favor of being the star of your own Greek tragedy

That's your choice. But it is always a choice. Everything is a lesson. And ever lesson applies to every circumstance. Yes. Even yours. Even that one.

You Die in the Bonelands

Underlying all magic is an attempt at remaking the world to match our assumptions, our biases, our own taboos and fears. Underlying all magic is the idea that the world would be better if it conformed to our story.

The Bonelands don't care about our story. And this is why we die there.

Unsorted Thoughts, Number 2

Stop hiding what you want behind what you think is reasonable to ask for.

You don't have to take from others. You can build what you need and take others with you.

You may very well be hurting people by depriving them of fruits of your creation.

Unsorted Thoughts, Number 4

What is to give light, must endure burning.
Viktor Frankl

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him

What Gods Need

There have been thousands of gods through the years that have received the worship and devotion of humankind. And thousands of gods thus stand dead or forgotten. Their laws are now ignored or transgressed unless some new upstart deity has adopted their codes. The chances of the god into whose worship you were born or introduced is in some way special amidst the divine mob is minuscule. Therefore, if you are going to interact with and make deals with the divines, you should do so with a healthy sense of what they are.

"What does god need with a starship?"
Captain James T Kirk

Allegory of the Whisperer

A Quote from the book Gaia's Garden, "Each need not satisfied by another component of the design becomes work for the gardener; each product not used becomes pollution. "

What Religion Is

Religions are collections of useful lies constructed to latch onto the human imagination and burrow into our collective cultural memory. You can say this is good or this is bad. I will simply say that it is.

Pragmatism

The hoarding instinct. It might be useful later. This tendency holds back and hampers the modern first world naked ape. But one upon a time resources were valuable and hoarding and repurposing existing resources kept people alive.

Why should magic be any less pragmatic?

Lost in the Map

Magick, language, symbols, the whole of the Shadowlands are a hologram, a map of what they represent. We navigate using the map. We shouldn't walk on the map.

If you get lost in the map, you will never reach your destination.

Hebrews and Glue

According to the Hebrew god, he made the world in six days and rested on the seventh sometime after the Sumerians invented glue. According to the Norse Eddas, Midgard -that's Earth- sits upon the Yggdrasil World Tree which is somehow not visible from space. Why do the Yama Kings' control over hell cease at the borders of the middle kingdom? Why don't Incan and Egyptian mummification rituals follow the same mystic and Ecclesiastic rules? Why does the rainbow serpent stay in Australia? Why did Thor never travel to Punjab to honor the warriors there? Why did Ganesha never inspire a Pagan European Shaman?

We have catalogued fossils and other geological and anthropological evidence tracing the origin of the modern human back to roughly two hundred thousand years ago. And yet; the oldest gods and spirits of which we can find evidence- recorded in stories and rock art from Australia- are a mere forty thousands years young. Gods are so much younger than humanity that our general belief in their immortality is astonishing. And if we cease to limit our musings to modern humans and include all human species then the timeline jumps to around two million years depending on current evidence. And then I wonder: do apes have gods? Do birds follow spirit guides on migration? Do whales sing in religious devotion?

And this is why Chaos Magicians eschew traditions. If our gods are younger than us, then we have the hierarchy reversed. This is why Grant Morrison summoned John Lennon in deity form with the same willingness as he did when communing with scorpion gods and Hellenistic goddesses alike.

To assume that our gods exist outside us is to ignore the weight of history. Any power or magick our gods possess they obtained from us. And thus, we can use or modify, create or banish them as we need. They serve us and we are their creators. It is only power hungry priests and would be god kings who have labored to convince us that the reverse is true.

Excalibur and Us

Since watching Star Wars, I had always dreamed of being the chosen one. drawing Excalibur from the stone, inheriting my father's lightsaber, I always hoped to be heir to some ancient lineage some destiny to carry on.

Richard Dawkins said that we are lucky because we will die. He said that most people will never die because most people will never be born. He pointed out that the number of possible humans outnumbers all the grains of sand on all the beaches on all the possible worlds. and then he said that amongst all those are poets greater than Keats and scientists created Newton, and yet here in our ordinariness are we.

And yet we are the chosen ones. We are heir to a great lineage. We are heir to 6 million generations of heroes and warriors- across two million years of human evolution. Little self programming informational algorithms running in the computers using chemical fire, wearing bodies forged in the hearts of dying stars. This is who we are. Star children. Heirs to all of human history. The chosen ones amongst near-infinite possible humans. We've already drawn Excalibur.

As Warren Ellis argues through Axel Brass in the graphic novel Planetary, that if you save the world then it will repay you a million times over. And as Morgan Freeman's character points out to Lucy in the movie by the same name. "The point to life is to pass it on."

A Manifesto for Good Ancestors

Long ago in the future time was a wheel. The locust king conquered the world and hammered time into a flat line. The future no longer led back to the past. The locust king devoured the future to feed his empire in the present. And one day there was no future left.

Standing at the end of the line, with no future before them, the children of the present had to weave the future back to the past in order to survive. Time had to be a wheel in order to last forever.

The line will break. The circle will return.

Beginning in the Brain

You can't escape your inner fish. To bring you home was built upon the brain ancient prehistoric fish. You're ever so many great great great grandfather was a little slug like fish. It now bears the name Pikaia and it was the first chordate, that is the first creature with anything resembling the spinal column. All of our culture and our learning, all of her songs and literature, all of her science and our philosophy, all these things are built on the foundation of a little sea slug with a spine.

And with each successive generation. Each time we bred and did not die before reaching sexual maturity, each of these successes added a new layer to the tapestry that would be our culture that we would hard code into our DNA, into our brains.

Air breathing. Courtship rituals. Fight or flight response. Herd mentality. Social rituals. Rearing our Young. From reptile brain to neo cortex , our genetic history is built into our culture, built into the very fabric of our social norms. Or at least it was, until ten thousand years ago. Then the heresy, then the blasphemy, then the treason against billions of years of evolution. Then the cities. Then came the Locust King.

Excalibur in the Rust, Mythopoetic Design

Excalibur in the rust.

The concept of a mystic artifact, and one neglected is too universal to neglect. My wife has suggested the concept of a Mystic compass. Diviner's pendulum hanging under a gyroscope compass. Maybe with sextant. I like this, traditionally this is a sword or a weapon. I love the idea of something used for navigation and exploration as a cultural artifact.

By contrast we have Mistletoe. The Scythe of the Locust King is a corrupted sickle. Forged when the false king took the mirrored mountain and transformed it into the glass tower

The Dose makes the poison

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Tim Ferriss

Plans for Des Occultus Aranea

So NEOvirtual shamMAN is a blog of my own occult journey primarily. I hope, obviously, to present that occult journey in a way that is interesting and useful to other occultists and would be occultists.

To that end, I have been endeavoring to put together a resource for local occultists. The solution I have settled upon takes the form of a podcast consisting of interviews with local occultists of various disciplines. The idea is that these will help me progress upon my own journey, they will help local occultists bring awareness to what they do, and provide a useful general informational resource to occultists who are not actually local.

That's the plan.

I have the first interview in the can. Said interview is with ceremonial Hermetic Magician and Freemason: Troy the Devil Man. The audio is better than expected, but still rather rough in spots (read rubbish, you will hear my dishwasher and both of my dogs during the course of the interview).

I will be posting that interview once I have the minimal editing done that I intend to do.

In the meantime, here's a list of topics that I hope to cover as subjects of discussion on future podcasts.

• "What is Magic?" a discussion on the definition and nature of Magic.
• "Mythopoetics and Appropriation" A discussion on syncretism, mythopoetics and the politics of cultural appropriation in the occult.
• "Why do you bother?"What is the benefit that Magical practise provides to one's life? A Discussion.
• "Education in the Occult" a look at courses on the occult available in the Lower Mainland- such as Enochian.org and Scholomance.

Anger Management

Anger. I feel a thousand ghosts scrambling about in my wake. They tear with jagged claws against ever surface I pass. They, my inner selves, reveal my own hypocrisy. I hate this world, even as I cling to it. I know nothing else.

What am I to do? I put on a strong front for those whom I know need to believe in my strength. And I believe in my strength as well. But I need permission to have bad days. I need to rage and snarl and gnash my teeth. But my venting will scald those around me more fragile than myself. And so I bottle up my rage. I feel that this is not the wisest course. I need a better solution. No. What I need is an actual solution. What I have made do with previously has been only a bromide.

Update on Interview with Troy the Devil Man

I sat down with Troy the Devi Man- one of the Rain Coast's most experienced Ceremonial Magicians. We spoke at length, and even remembered to record some of it! We generated about 90 minutes of really interesting occult discussion.

I am currently reviewing the audio and adding intro and outro audio, and will be uploading the whole interview shortly.