Showing posts with label Castaneda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Castaneda. Show all posts
5.06.2008
On the Improper Propagation of Ideas
While I generally am interested in mythology, shamanism, personal and cultural enlightenment, etc. I am also, and perhaps more, interested in rational and well-written discourse. I am often flabbergasted by the mummery that passes for philosophy (the postmodern deconstructionism of Derrida and ilk) and religion (the new-agey second-rate Castaneda-ism) these days. The problem being that one can't really turn to science to talk about all the intangible, emotio-cultural, and even otherworldly concepts that also need to be grappled with. The problem also being that language is a frail, frail invention, and that in a world entirely consumed by the reproduction of the word it is almost entirely possible to say something that isn't slanted immediately into a thousand quite subjective perspectives. In other words, there is no objective dialogue. To paraphrase José Donoso, the author of a fabulous novel I'm currently reading, the limitation of would-be writers is that they believe there in the existence of a reality to portray. This is why I love stories. Unlike modern attempts at journalism, which fail because they can never be objective enough, literature by its very nature takes on the perspective of a narrator, and any information or ideas couched in the story are almost more palatable for being couched in what we already read as a biased perspective. Narrators lie, they can be obsessive or misinformed, and we love them all the more for it, qualities that would make us cringe in a journalist.
8.31.2007
exploding mythologies
It looks like my Myth, Symbol, and Ritual class will be the most exciting, and most challenging, of my courses this year. The professor, Fred Clothey, was a student of the renowned mythologist Mircea Eliade, a gruff imposing man who founded Pitt's Comparative Religion department and immediately threatened to scare all the freshmen out. Apparently he retired last year, but the University was unable to find another teacher for this course, and I feel highly honored to learn from an authority in this field and not some gawky grad student. Asking us what a myth is, he shot down all our uncertain ideas, and though I recognize that having not been in school for seven years I really need to relearn how to frame my vocal arguments, I feel certain I will have all my assumptions about myth questioned and learn a great deal in this field which I perhaps have the most personal investment in.
As opposed to the six page final paper for my Critical Reading class, here I am expected to write three 7-10 page essays (the first due next month), each dealing with one of the topics, myth, symbol, and ritual. On top of that I must also write my own personal myth and an observation of a ritual outside of my everyday experience, all things that I currently push myself to do in my personal writing, but perhaps not with nearly the critical intent that the professor might hope us to bring. Thankfully, I am fascinated by these themes, and already have thousands of ideas for subject matter.
For the myth I will take one of the apocalypses with which I am familiar, possibly Revelations but more likely the Norse Ragnarok, which has exerted it's influence on my psyche since I first read it in fourth grade, interpreting its symbols as well as through a mythological theory (I'm not sure just whose yet), in order to show that though it describes an end of the world (in illo tempore), it is also a creation myth which paves the way for this present reality.
For the symbol I immediately decided on that of the Tower, perhaps the most pervasive symbol in my own mythology, and fitting because that's exactly the phase of life I'm in. The Tarot's blasted tower, the tower of Babel, the World Trade Centers, Tolkien's White Tower, Stephen King's Dark Tower, the current race for the world's largest skyscraper, and even Oakland's infamous gothic edifice, the Cathedral of Learning (or Tower of Ignorance), in which I have all my classes. Building not just as recreation of world, but as the human folly of trying to become the gods. I could probably tie in the internet as modern parallel of Babel.
For the ritual, I had already been planning on attending a Jewish Temple service with Sophie at some point soon, which could be interesting in comparison to my Catholic upbringing. But I also had the opportunity to participate in a Peyote ceremony in the spring on which I took extensive notes, and could potentially participate in another one specifically to examine for the class. What's interesting about that is the ceremony is removed from its traditional context (in the Yaqui shamanism Castaneda studied), and literally smuggled into the modern American world, an angle which might interest Clothey, who extensively studied religious diasporas in Southern India.
Regardless of what I actually end up writing about it is certainly already getting me thinking much more critically in these terms again, and making me reconsider the idea of doing a double major, in creative writing and comparative religion.
As opposed to the six page final paper for my Critical Reading class, here I am expected to write three 7-10 page essays (the first due next month), each dealing with one of the topics, myth, symbol, and ritual. On top of that I must also write my own personal myth and an observation of a ritual outside of my everyday experience, all things that I currently push myself to do in my personal writing, but perhaps not with nearly the critical intent that the professor might hope us to bring. Thankfully, I am fascinated by these themes, and already have thousands of ideas for subject matter.
For the myth I will take one of the apocalypses with which I am familiar, possibly Revelations but more likely the Norse Ragnarok, which has exerted it's influence on my psyche since I first read it in fourth grade, interpreting its symbols as well as through a mythological theory (I'm not sure just whose yet), in order to show that though it describes an end of the world (in illo tempore), it is also a creation myth which paves the way for this present reality.
For the symbol I immediately decided on that of the Tower, perhaps the most pervasive symbol in my own mythology, and fitting because that's exactly the phase of life I'm in. The Tarot's blasted tower, the tower of Babel, the World Trade Centers, Tolkien's White Tower, Stephen King's Dark Tower, the current race for the world's largest skyscraper, and even Oakland's infamous gothic edifice, the Cathedral of Learning (or Tower of Ignorance), in which I have all my classes. Building not just as recreation of world, but as the human folly of trying to become the gods. I could probably tie in the internet as modern parallel of Babel.
For the ritual, I had already been planning on attending a Jewish Temple service with Sophie at some point soon, which could be interesting in comparison to my Catholic upbringing. But I also had the opportunity to participate in a Peyote ceremony in the spring on which I took extensive notes, and could potentially participate in another one specifically to examine for the class. What's interesting about that is the ceremony is removed from its traditional context (in the Yaqui shamanism Castaneda studied), and literally smuggled into the modern American world, an angle which might interest Clothey, who extensively studied religious diasporas in Southern India.
Regardless of what I actually end up writing about it is certainly already getting me thinking much more critically in these terms again, and making me reconsider the idea of doing a double major, in creative writing and comparative religion.
7.11.2005
on the books
and just because I approve of this meme going around, the 20 books that have most impacted my life (in no particular order):
1. Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
2. Crimethinc. Collective- Days of War, Nights of Love
3. Hakim Bey- The Temporary Autonomous Zone
4. var.- The I Ching
5. Octavia Butler- Parable of the Sower
6. Douglas Hofstadter- Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
7. Ayn Rand- Atlas Shrugged
8. Joseph Campbell- The Power of Myth
9. Jorge Luis Borges- Collected Fictions
10. Jalaluddin Rumi (Coleman Barks trans.)- Essential Rumi
11. Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.) Duino Elegies
12. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
13. Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea
14. George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-four
15. Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
16. Kurt Vonnegut- Cat's Cradle
17. Lewis Carroll- Through the Looking Glass
18. Jostein Gaarder- Sophie's World
19. John Clellon Holmes- Go
20. Marshall McLuhan- Understanding Media
and though there are countless more books I want to include I honestly can't leave these two out in shaping my approach to living:
21.Bill Whitcomb- The Magician's Companion
22. John C. Lilly- Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
It pleases me greatly that most of these books are fiction. There's nothing like a good story to really affect one's outlook on the world. Especially if your attention span for nonfiction is virtually nonexistent.
1. Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
2. Crimethinc. Collective- Days of War, Nights of Love
3. Hakim Bey- The Temporary Autonomous Zone
4. var.- The I Ching
5. Octavia Butler- Parable of the Sower
6. Douglas Hofstadter- Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
7. Ayn Rand- Atlas Shrugged
8. Joseph Campbell- The Power of Myth
9. Jorge Luis Borges- Collected Fictions
10. Jalaluddin Rumi (Coleman Barks trans.)- Essential Rumi
11. Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.) Duino Elegies
12. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
13. Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea
14. George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-four
15. Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
16. Kurt Vonnegut- Cat's Cradle
17. Lewis Carroll- Through the Looking Glass
18. Jostein Gaarder- Sophie's World
19. John Clellon Holmes- Go
20. Marshall McLuhan- Understanding Media
and though there are countless more books I want to include I honestly can't leave these two out in shaping my approach to living:
21.Bill Whitcomb- The Magician's Companion
22. John C. Lilly- Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
It pleases me greatly that most of these books are fiction. There's nothing like a good story to really affect one's outlook on the world. Especially if your attention span for nonfiction is virtually nonexistent.
6.02.2005
the almost unbearable lightness of being in time
Everything still feels really intense right now, as if I had been walking around in my sleep, and suddenly woke up and opened my eyes for the first time. Everything still feels fragile, but in this really beautiful way where I can take each moment for what it is and then let it slip through my fingers like grains of sand. Yesterday when I was walking home from work I was looking at the sunlight breaking around the passing clouds and falling through the leaves of the trees, and the joy I felt at being alive and witnessing this was indescribable. It was filled with sorrow too, in not being able to hold onto it, but for perhaps the first time I was able to look at that first hand and be able to bear it. To paraphrase Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan, the art of being a warrior is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive. To be able to look at all the things we have lost along the way, and all the things we can not control now and in our futures, and to smile at this though tears threaten to break in every moment. Because that's all we can do.
I don't know why I have always been obssesed with change, with the finality of endings and the unexpected unknowns of beginnings. Maybe because that's really all we can percieve in this world, the small differences from one moment to the next, and how our own actions are inextricably tied in with the world around us. As Octavia Butler put it in The Parable of the Sower "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change." Permanance is an illusion, our experience is one of coming togethers and falling aparts. And admittedly that can be a frightening thing to try and recognize head on. Maybe it's because I grew up in a dysfunctional family near the dysfunctional city of Washington DC, reading too many myths about the apocalypse and noticing too many of the tragic endings that accompany living near the country's psychotic center of government. Certainly things have only gotten worse there as time goes by. It looks the same on the outside, but it is falling apart day by day. Hell, even our bodies are falling apart on a daily basis, the skin cells shluffing off and collecting in the corners of our rooms as dust. Thankfully our bodies regenerate, at least until they don't anymore. Our society doesn't seem to be blessed with that ability, and has been rotting away since they wrote up the Constitution.
"Things fall apart, the centre can not hold." (Yeats)
I used to lie awake at nights as a child and imagine what it would feel like to be dead. The utter horror of it was that I realized I couldn't imagine not being able to feel anything. So I put it away somewhere and tried to forget that one day I too will end.
In the one year I attended college I took an honors class called "thanatos: the many meanings of death", which looked at how death is one of the biggest taboos of our culture, utterly played down and yet we are desensitized to its overexposure in the media. There is no mourning and no learning process for our dead and how to face it in our own lives. And if we were to learn to face it for what it is we might be able to take our own lives head on and live them literally as if the next moment might be our last. Because it just might. Beyond asking us to keep a journal of our emotional content, which was the point when I started writing regularly, our teacher also said that if we are doing something in our lives that doesn't make us happy then we shouldn't be doing it. Even if being in class right then was boring, and we felt we had much more exciting and worthwhile things to do at that moment, then we should get up and walk out of class and go do them.
To paraphrase Castaneda again:` I insisted that to be bored or at odds with the world was the human condition. "So change it." he said "if you do not respond to that challenge you are as good as dead."
And so I did, and walked out of going to school and living in Dead City as well. I can't say I've spent every day of the five years since then living my life fully, and there have been some major periods where I was most certainly not happy and didn't try to walk out of it because of some illusion of stability, but looking back now I can't say that a single moment has really been boring. I think I made a pact with myself that day when I stood up from the table and said I'd be much happier going down to the river with my guitar than sitting in class that I would try and never be bored again. That life is too short and too sweet to not live it passionately and intentionally. Why else do I believe in magic and hopeless romance, and play music without ever recording it, and write so many stories and poems, and wander aimlessly at night watching the stars, and do all the things that are there to be done and give my life meaning and fulfillment? Even walking down the street from work has to be packed full of the utmost feeling, because I am there feeling it, and may not be again. The wind on my cheeks and rustle of leaves in my ears could be just that, but it can also be the sighs of the world knowing that it too is falling apart and moving on, and my acknowledgement that this transience is almost too beautiful to bear. But just enough that I can blink back the tears from the corners of my eyes and laugh.
I don't know why I have always been obssesed with change, with the finality of endings and the unexpected unknowns of beginnings. Maybe because that's really all we can percieve in this world, the small differences from one moment to the next, and how our own actions are inextricably tied in with the world around us. As Octavia Butler put it in The Parable of the Sower "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change." Permanance is an illusion, our experience is one of coming togethers and falling aparts. And admittedly that can be a frightening thing to try and recognize head on. Maybe it's because I grew up in a dysfunctional family near the dysfunctional city of Washington DC, reading too many myths about the apocalypse and noticing too many of the tragic endings that accompany living near the country's psychotic center of government. Certainly things have only gotten worse there as time goes by. It looks the same on the outside, but it is falling apart day by day. Hell, even our bodies are falling apart on a daily basis, the skin cells shluffing off and collecting in the corners of our rooms as dust. Thankfully our bodies regenerate, at least until they don't anymore. Our society doesn't seem to be blessed with that ability, and has been rotting away since they wrote up the Constitution.
"Things fall apart, the centre can not hold." (Yeats)
I used to lie awake at nights as a child and imagine what it would feel like to be dead. The utter horror of it was that I realized I couldn't imagine not being able to feel anything. So I put it away somewhere and tried to forget that one day I too will end.
In the one year I attended college I took an honors class called "thanatos: the many meanings of death", which looked at how death is one of the biggest taboos of our culture, utterly played down and yet we are desensitized to its overexposure in the media. There is no mourning and no learning process for our dead and how to face it in our own lives. And if we were to learn to face it for what it is we might be able to take our own lives head on and live them literally as if the next moment might be our last. Because it just might. Beyond asking us to keep a journal of our emotional content, which was the point when I started writing regularly, our teacher also said that if we are doing something in our lives that doesn't make us happy then we shouldn't be doing it. Even if being in class right then was boring, and we felt we had much more exciting and worthwhile things to do at that moment, then we should get up and walk out of class and go do them.
To paraphrase Castaneda again:` I insisted that to be bored or at odds with the world was the human condition. "So change it." he said "if you do not respond to that challenge you are as good as dead."
And so I did, and walked out of going to school and living in Dead City as well. I can't say I've spent every day of the five years since then living my life fully, and there have been some major periods where I was most certainly not happy and didn't try to walk out of it because of some illusion of stability, but looking back now I can't say that a single moment has really been boring. I think I made a pact with myself that day when I stood up from the table and said I'd be much happier going down to the river with my guitar than sitting in class that I would try and never be bored again. That life is too short and too sweet to not live it passionately and intentionally. Why else do I believe in magic and hopeless romance, and play music without ever recording it, and write so many stories and poems, and wander aimlessly at night watching the stars, and do all the things that are there to be done and give my life meaning and fulfillment? Even walking down the street from work has to be packed full of the utmost feeling, because I am there feeling it, and may not be again. The wind on my cheeks and rustle of leaves in my ears could be just that, but it can also be the sighs of the world knowing that it too is falling apart and moving on, and my acknowledgement that this transience is almost too beautiful to bear. But just enough that I can blink back the tears from the corners of my eyes and laugh.
4.27.2005
dream yoga and social yoga
I woke up for the first time in a long time today full of energy and ready to face the world. So I put on Squarepusher and did some intense yoga to get my body moving with my soul. Last night [info]kritusi_vuki and I had another of our intense conversations, the ones where we have intense psychic connections that invariably lead to peculiar instences of telepathy and remote viewing (and that in itself beyond being overwhelmingly enjoyable, points to the potential for using the internet to reach some sort of cybergnosis, a topic I may soon have to explore further). At some point while we talked the question was jokingly raised as to whether we could have flat dreams. So I decided to take on that challenge and intended to dream myself to flatland as I was drifting off to sleep. The night before I had a peculiar dream in which each scene appeared as if it had been filmed and then animated over, much like the movie waking life, except done in multicolored scribbled spirals (based off fibonacci's sequence of course, as it is very deep in my consciousness right now). Last night I returned to that place, but now it was not just animated over the appearences; the dream presented itself as if the world was divided into infinitely thin layers like paper that could each be written on or folded in order to arrive at the multidimensional mode that reality normally presents itself in. The spirals were still there of course, but now seemed much more coherently meaningful as they detailed the manner in which the sheets or planes furled and unfurled around each other.
My words probably don't do so much justice to the experience, but it was quite intense, and reminded me of a certain dream I had a year and a half ago. This was around the time when I kept dreaming that all the radicals I know, including myself, were locked up in concentration style camps by the Bush administration, and coincided with one of my worse downspells of mental instability and apocalyptic anxiety. In this dream I was rotting in a prison cell when it occured to me that I was dreaming and that it would be possible to get out in a very different manner then I got in. I felt like some force was trying to teach me this manner, and suggested that if I folded myself along my main axis and then rolled along it I could move through extra dimensions of space. Now this reminded me of several things, various techniques Castaneda talks about for accessing the astral plane, the teseract method of astral travel in "a wrinkle in time", the scene in Donnie Darko where Donnie discovers he can see his will/ intention and follow it through space-time, and of course yoga, which is all about folding the body in peculiar ways. This dream was actually one of the main reasons I learned yoga in the first place, and have tried to practice it daily. Not that I have yet learned how to project myself astrally, but doing yoga has changed my life drastically for the better and points to a host of "secret powers" that humans can be capable of accessing if they take the practice to change their perceptions of what is possible. And I stopped having the prison dreams, so perhaps I did learn how to escape after all.
Now, I'm not so sure what exactly I could learn from this dream of breaking the world down to its constituent planes, besides the fact that it looks really cool and it is nececssary to pay attention to the planes when spinning a staff or poi or dancing. I suspect though that one could follow their curves like waves and learn how to read the future from its movements. I've had some experiences of that in the past, and perhaps it's time to experiment with them further. The only limits are in our imaginations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. I did have dreams of being able to disintegrate my consciousness into that of all things long before I acquired the skills and mental stability required to actually do it.
While eating breakfast, Grace showed up to talk about the new radical mental health collective that is forming, which seems a good deal more organized than when Eleena and I tried to start one a couple years ago. Grace is mostly concerned with identifying issues that are prevelent in the community and then determining what the social factors are that might cause them, which seems a good approach to the whole subject, especially if it is addressed through drawing and roleplaying to balance out the more linguistically oriented therapy techniques. Madness is a social disease after all. At this point I am mostly concerned with how mental, physical and emotional health are tied in to our spiritual well-being. If people do not find their lives to be fulfilling and meaningful they are less likely to be healthy. I haven't given much thought to how this issue can be positively addressed, but I imagine encouraging yoga could help. As well as hosting social situations that do not revolve around drinking or listening to music so that we can actually get honest and positive feedback from each other in the community. The next meeting is on the 6th at yardsale books, so I've got over a week to get some clearer ideas together as to what I intend to bring to the group.
My words probably don't do so much justice to the experience, but it was quite intense, and reminded me of a certain dream I had a year and a half ago. This was around the time when I kept dreaming that all the radicals I know, including myself, were locked up in concentration style camps by the Bush administration, and coincided with one of my worse downspells of mental instability and apocalyptic anxiety. In this dream I was rotting in a prison cell when it occured to me that I was dreaming and that it would be possible to get out in a very different manner then I got in. I felt like some force was trying to teach me this manner, and suggested that if I folded myself along my main axis and then rolled along it I could move through extra dimensions of space. Now this reminded me of several things, various techniques Castaneda talks about for accessing the astral plane, the teseract method of astral travel in "a wrinkle in time", the scene in Donnie Darko where Donnie discovers he can see his will/ intention and follow it through space-time, and of course yoga, which is all about folding the body in peculiar ways. This dream was actually one of the main reasons I learned yoga in the first place, and have tried to practice it daily. Not that I have yet learned how to project myself astrally, but doing yoga has changed my life drastically for the better and points to a host of "secret powers" that humans can be capable of accessing if they take the practice to change their perceptions of what is possible. And I stopped having the prison dreams, so perhaps I did learn how to escape after all.
Now, I'm not so sure what exactly I could learn from this dream of breaking the world down to its constituent planes, besides the fact that it looks really cool and it is nececssary to pay attention to the planes when spinning a staff or poi or dancing. I suspect though that one could follow their curves like waves and learn how to read the future from its movements. I've had some experiences of that in the past, and perhaps it's time to experiment with them further. The only limits are in our imaginations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. I did have dreams of being able to disintegrate my consciousness into that of all things long before I acquired the skills and mental stability required to actually do it.
While eating breakfast, Grace showed up to talk about the new radical mental health collective that is forming, which seems a good deal more organized than when Eleena and I tried to start one a couple years ago. Grace is mostly concerned with identifying issues that are prevelent in the community and then determining what the social factors are that might cause them, which seems a good approach to the whole subject, especially if it is addressed through drawing and roleplaying to balance out the more linguistically oriented therapy techniques. Madness is a social disease after all. At this point I am mostly concerned with how mental, physical and emotional health are tied in to our spiritual well-being. If people do not find their lives to be fulfilling and meaningful they are less likely to be healthy. I haven't given much thought to how this issue can be positively addressed, but I imagine encouraging yoga could help. As well as hosting social situations that do not revolve around drinking or listening to music so that we can actually get honest and positive feedback from each other in the community. The next meeting is on the 6th at yardsale books, so I've got over a week to get some clearer ideas together as to what I intend to bring to the group.
4.17.2005
sacred techniques and occult technologies
I just posted this on my livejournal, but figured it was fitting enough to be included here as well...
Yesterday after drinking way too much coffee then I needed I biked down to CMU for the art sale, at which James and Laura and Matthu had a table displaying all the work they threw together the day before while Matthu and I were recording. Right across the aisle Alberto was set up, and I couldn't help but let myself fall into his strange spiraling landscapes and technorganic geometries. As much as I wished I had the money to buy one of his masterpieces I contented myself with flipping through a stack of photocopied pages from his notebooks. To my shock and pleasure I discovered that he had not just copied some of his more beautiful hand drawn pieces but several pages worth of instructions for drawing golden spirals, phyllotaxis, and hypercubes and other sacred geometries all in relation to each other. Alberto taught me phyllotaxis awhile back and I recently passed it on to James and Luara, and for the past several days I had been experimenting with golden spirals based off of fibonacci's sequence and was only beginning to scratch the surface, but here in my hand were secret techniques that would allow me to push these lines to the horizons. I felt like I was holding pages torn out of some ancient grimoire, magical knowledge hidden in the layers between ink and page, and when Alberto saw me scrambling through the pages he laughed heartily. Of all the people who had walked past the table that day and rifled through the sheets I was the only one so far who saw them for what they were, magic spells, and a chance to tap the mind of one of the greatest living alchemical artists in the world, or at least on this side of the room. How am I so blessed that my closest friends, the people gathered in this ten foot bubble of art and energy, are the ones who will revolutionize the medium and push art past whatever boundaries it has currently been languishing? And is it coincidence that they've all gone to CMU and live in Pittsburgh? I think not.
I am not a trained visual artist myself, or even a seriously dedicated one. I am a dabbler for the most part, and have chosen language as my primary medium, but when it comes to sacred geometries I can't stop myself from working with them. They are like maps to the universe, little bits of ordering tossed up from the chaos that help it make just a little bit more sense. A petaled circle, a graceful spiral, to some they may be pretty lines, but to me they really are magical devices, and worth infinitely more than simple money.
"You will put these to good use" Alberto said, as I handed him some creased bills, "and teach me anything you get out of them." Of course I would, and I smiled that on one of the pages was his son's small footprints, themselves a study in complexity. Sarah was there with Javier and I looked into the child's eyes and realized that they were not really blue or black or any color at this point. They were like hematite or mercury, shimmering and flowing over the world that to this little one will always be an incredibly mindboggling wonder. The son of artists and shamans, those eyes will see more than any of us could possibly imagine.
tangled attractors
I went home where we celebrated Joan's birthday, and I spent the rest of the evening drawing, trying out new lines and angles and permutations till I could no longer think straight and the ink began crawling off the page. At one point James came over, and we finally got a chance to talk about a few of the visions we had had during the other week's session. Well, mostly I rambled about matrices, seeing rooms and beings with closed eyes, downloading instructions from the akashic records, and being a mask on the film of the iridescent bubble of reality or a cell in the talon of some vast intergalactic sphinx-like hyper-deity. Finally we settled down to draw some possible appearences on what we both came to decide was a psychic hub that connects each of us to everything else we have continued contact with through the angles of certain usage patterns; a device very similair in description and purpose to Castaneda's assemblage point, which interprets a reality from the lines of the world that pass through it. James remarked that we didn't have to be physicists to make breakthroughs in the field, at which I laughed and said that's because we're metaphysicists and that if there was a breakthrough, chances are it would break out other places as well, which seems to be the norm for inventive memes. Who knows, perhaps this too is another sacred geometric passed down from shaman to shaman throughout the ages to map the precious fields of chaos.
assemblage point
Yesterday after drinking way too much coffee then I needed I biked down to CMU for the art sale, at which James and Laura and Matthu had a table displaying all the work they threw together the day before while Matthu and I were recording. Right across the aisle Alberto was set up, and I couldn't help but let myself fall into his strange spiraling landscapes and technorganic geometries. As much as I wished I had the money to buy one of his masterpieces I contented myself with flipping through a stack of photocopied pages from his notebooks. To my shock and pleasure I discovered that he had not just copied some of his more beautiful hand drawn pieces but several pages worth of instructions for drawing golden spirals, phyllotaxis, and hypercubes and other sacred geometries all in relation to each other. Alberto taught me phyllotaxis awhile back and I recently passed it on to James and Luara, and for the past several days I had been experimenting with golden spirals based off of fibonacci's sequence and was only beginning to scratch the surface, but here in my hand were secret techniques that would allow me to push these lines to the horizons. I felt like I was holding pages torn out of some ancient grimoire, magical knowledge hidden in the layers between ink and page, and when Alberto saw me scrambling through the pages he laughed heartily. Of all the people who had walked past the table that day and rifled through the sheets I was the only one so far who saw them for what they were, magic spells, and a chance to tap the mind of one of the greatest living alchemical artists in the world, or at least on this side of the room. How am I so blessed that my closest friends, the people gathered in this ten foot bubble of art and energy, are the ones who will revolutionize the medium and push art past whatever boundaries it has currently been languishing? And is it coincidence that they've all gone to CMU and live in Pittsburgh? I think not.
I am not a trained visual artist myself, or even a seriously dedicated one. I am a dabbler for the most part, and have chosen language as my primary medium, but when it comes to sacred geometries I can't stop myself from working with them. They are like maps to the universe, little bits of ordering tossed up from the chaos that help it make just a little bit more sense. A petaled circle, a graceful spiral, to some they may be pretty lines, but to me they really are magical devices, and worth infinitely more than simple money.
"You will put these to good use" Alberto said, as I handed him some creased bills, "and teach me anything you get out of them." Of course I would, and I smiled that on one of the pages was his son's small footprints, themselves a study in complexity. Sarah was there with Javier and I looked into the child's eyes and realized that they were not really blue or black or any color at this point. They were like hematite or mercury, shimmering and flowing over the world that to this little one will always be an incredibly mindboggling wonder. The son of artists and shamans, those eyes will see more than any of us could possibly imagine.
tangled attractors
I went home where we celebrated Joan's birthday, and I spent the rest of the evening drawing, trying out new lines and angles and permutations till I could no longer think straight and the ink began crawling off the page. At one point James came over, and we finally got a chance to talk about a few of the visions we had had during the other week's session. Well, mostly I rambled about matrices, seeing rooms and beings with closed eyes, downloading instructions from the akashic records, and being a mask on the film of the iridescent bubble of reality or a cell in the talon of some vast intergalactic sphinx-like hyper-deity. Finally we settled down to draw some possible appearences on what we both came to decide was a psychic hub that connects each of us to everything else we have continued contact with through the angles of certain usage patterns; a device very similair in description and purpose to Castaneda's assemblage point, which interprets a reality from the lines of the world that pass through it. James remarked that we didn't have to be physicists to make breakthroughs in the field, at which I laughed and said that's because we're metaphysicists and that if there was a breakthrough, chances are it would break out other places as well, which seems to be the norm for inventive memes. Who knows, perhaps this too is another sacred geometric passed down from shaman to shaman throughout the ages to map the precious fields of chaos.
assemblage point
3.20.2005
dangerous crossings
I started reading lvx23's "Walking Between Worlds" yesterday, and must say, it's good. As a scattered collection of web writings it still manages to be quite cohesive and thought-provoking, and admittedly a lot of the pieces remind me of stuff I would have written (but no longer need to as they've already been done!). It reminds me of that old cybernetic saying about standing on the shoulders of giants, all the work of the future builds off of the work of the past, paying homage to it and taking it another step forward. I find it interesting though that we are reaching a point with the interconnection of the Net were we are all giants, and we are all working off each other's shoulders at the same time, bootstrapping ourselves towards some higher understanding.
Lvx23 tells an allegory of a goat who was meant to be in an xmas pageant but choose instead to be free and run away from the whole ridiculous scene. Except that he had spent his whole life around this town, and couldn't wander far. "Perhaps freedom was more than he bargained for." Lvx23 argues that this is representative of our own human condition and inability to escape the pens of our social conditioning and comfort zones. Recently there has been a lot of talk on Key23 about consensus reality tunnels, and how to break out of them into realities that are just a little bit freer or more condusive to the magical and fractal world view. But even these too are reality tunnels of a sort, even if there attractor basins are strange and swing wide from the norm. Is it possible to be truly free? Is it possible, as Castaneda puts it, to stop the world and experience life outside of any preconditioned tunnel of perception? I want to say yes, there's something in my heart that tells me this is true and possible, but fraught with danger too. There is comfort and safety in an established world-view, even a non-standard one. And inertia. It takes a lot of energy to get out of the old grooves and spin into a new one, like particles escaping their atomic core. And this upsets everything we previously held to be true. As T. S. Eliot said, "Do I dare disturb the Universe?"
I think the only way (or safest way) to do so is not to throw ourselves headlong into the chaotic abyss between worlds, but to gradually push our boundaries until the worlds collide and become one. The limits of freedom that surround our comfort zones act as an event horizon for that domain, the space we can act within that can be expanded to give more freedom. Take for example any activity that one needs to practice to get better at, yoga perhaps, or music. There is the safe zone in which you know the activity well and find it not a challenge to do. Practice maintains that zone and pushes at its edges. Trying new poses or riffs that are not quite so easy or possible yet, but over time they too will be comfortable and the boundaries will be expanded, to the point of breaking into whole new realms of movement. The point when your circle interlaps with another, and reality multiplies in all directions.
Lvx23 tells an allegory of a goat who was meant to be in an xmas pageant but choose instead to be free and run away from the whole ridiculous scene. Except that he had spent his whole life around this town, and couldn't wander far. "Perhaps freedom was more than he bargained for." Lvx23 argues that this is representative of our own human condition and inability to escape the pens of our social conditioning and comfort zones. Recently there has been a lot of talk on Key23 about consensus reality tunnels, and how to break out of them into realities that are just a little bit freer or more condusive to the magical and fractal world view. But even these too are reality tunnels of a sort, even if there attractor basins are strange and swing wide from the norm. Is it possible to be truly free? Is it possible, as Castaneda puts it, to stop the world and experience life outside of any preconditioned tunnel of perception? I want to say yes, there's something in my heart that tells me this is true and possible, but fraught with danger too. There is comfort and safety in an established world-view, even a non-standard one. And inertia. It takes a lot of energy to get out of the old grooves and spin into a new one, like particles escaping their atomic core. And this upsets everything we previously held to be true. As T. S. Eliot said, "Do I dare disturb the Universe?"
I think the only way (or safest way) to do so is not to throw ourselves headlong into the chaotic abyss between worlds, but to gradually push our boundaries until the worlds collide and become one. The limits of freedom that surround our comfort zones act as an event horizon for that domain, the space we can act within that can be expanded to give more freedom. Take for example any activity that one needs to practice to get better at, yoga perhaps, or music. There is the safe zone in which you know the activity well and find it not a challenge to do. Practice maintains that zone and pushes at its edges. Trying new poses or riffs that are not quite so easy or possible yet, but over time they too will be comfortable and the boundaries will be expanded, to the point of breaking into whole new realms of movement. The point when your circle interlaps with another, and reality multiplies in all directions.
3.14.2005
the pre-apocalypse blues
The sun is shining, and even though there’s still an underlying chill in the air it finally feels like one of the first days of spring. Yet in my heart I feel the icy fingers of another case of the pre-apocalypse blues. Maybe it’s all the recent killings, the lack of restful sleep, all the talk of danger on Key23, or the flocks of crows (who will ever be an omen for me of secret and fearsome worlds to come). But I again feel the pull of that hyperliminal headspace where every event seems portentous, and the world seems fraught with a sense of immediacy and peril that needs to be addressed before everything goes up in flames. I suppose the biggest factor right now might actually be all the work I’ve been doing recently to gain access to the deeps of the subconscious, a technique best framed in light of Castaneda’s idea of the assemblage point. In "The Art of Dreaming" the fictional shaman Don Juan tells Castaneda that our perception of reality is a fixed position of the assemblage point, that part of our etheric body where the chaos of experiences gets interpreted into a functional reality. The magical use is in recognizing that our "normalized" view of reality is only one position among infinite interpretations, and that one can learn to shift the assemblage point to interpret a host of other realities where the magician can access powers and insights unavailable or unknown in the normal position.
I haven’t been so interested (yet) in accessing other realities as in the first step of breaking the fixed position of the assemblage point to experience the flow of world itself unfiltered by any analytical interpretation (a technique Castaneda calls Stopping the World, and claims is necessary before creating any new magical world-view). The result of this is a pandemonium of impressions and influences, a flux of potentially meaningful connections unhampered by any previous subjective placement, the metafilter of consciousness stripped bare to reveal the inchoate host of movements that underlie everything. The lines of the world, as they say. The subconscious is not a personal phenomenon but the collective medium for experience, accessing it dips the veil of individuality into the sea of the total, so it comes up dripping with meanings, images, and insights that the individual could not have assembled alone. Little bits of other people’s lives, hints of other realities of time and space clinging like shipwrecked children to the only sturdy piece of flotsam for miles around.
In doing this I have found much of beauty; ideas and dreams full of wonder and mystery and hope that I am still trying to express (through poetry, art, music, spells, and long chaotic ramblings) in order to inspire others and turn them in to the magic and power of this erisian dream-realm. But I have also encountered ontological horrors, fears both personal and collective, glimpses of possible dystopic futures that I for one would not like to see become "real", if they are not already becoming so. Most predominately the threat of global annihilation that seems eminent even in the most lucid of waking states. If you have eyes to see and a heart to feel it is near impossible to not be aware of the coming breakdown of the western mono-civilization and its potential to bring down the rest of the world with it. All it would take is one nuke… or just a continued neglect of the environment that sustains us and makes life on Earth possible.
Over the fall and early winter I was feeling the pre-apocalypse blues something fierce, to the point of nearly falling into abject apophenic madness. I had not yet since my ontological shipwreck and existential reawakening of the summer found solid ground, or the right strokes to swim through the awesome chaos I had opened myself into. Who would have thought total connection to all beings could be such a terrifying thing? One could drown in the waves of implication without the cybernetic steering wheel of a clear-cut metaphysical assemblage (world-view), and I had none. And in the flungness of that confusion where everything is prophetic, my age-old nemesis, the Prophecy of Armageddon, reared its ugly head, forcing me to take some stand. I’ve been studying cultural tales of "the end of the world" since I learned to read, and as long as that future remains a possibility I have to stay sane enough to work towards a brighter future, regardless if the task is mine or if I have the power to change anything. Where there is fear, there is an opportunity for hope.
Recently I read Starhawk’s "The Fifth Sacred Thing," which is itself a prophetic vision of a future of total state control and a small but hopeful group of people who use magic and the joy of interconnectivity to overcome it (incidentally, though this book was recently published it fails to recognize the impact modern technology is already having on the direction of the future, something I feel any realistic prophecy or future-fiction needs to take into account; but that’s another story all-together). Although this story steers away from that of a nuclear apocalypse, it does raise several good points about the nature of prophecy, which while self-fulfilling is still an extension of our hopes and fears. And is thus intentionally directable. Starhawk’s characters talk often about keeping themselves in the "Good Reality," that head space of positive thinking where no matter what terrors you’re facing if you expect the Universe to respond with goodwill it will, and the smallest of positive events feeds back on itself and brings more positive events into being. Hope as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The inverse is obviously the "Bad Reality" where, like Murphy’s Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and will continue to do so in a spiral of disaster until death begins to look like a better option than waiting for whatever tragedy will happen next.
Of course in "real life" the karmic implications of this are much subtler and intertwined, and one person’s hopes and fears get expressed all mixed up with everyone else’s so it’s hard to tell just where one prophecy leaves off and the next begins. But every little bit helps, a single moment of joy shifts the whole tide of the subconscious just a bit in that direction. So now whenever I feel my imagination seduced by the fears of the dystopic nightmare and I start prophesying the apocalypse, I remind myself to stay in the "Good Reality" and go out and spread positive actions and ideas of hope in whatever small way I can.
I haven’t been so interested (yet) in accessing other realities as in the first step of breaking the fixed position of the assemblage point to experience the flow of world itself unfiltered by any analytical interpretation (a technique Castaneda calls Stopping the World, and claims is necessary before creating any new magical world-view). The result of this is a pandemonium of impressions and influences, a flux of potentially meaningful connections unhampered by any previous subjective placement, the metafilter of consciousness stripped bare to reveal the inchoate host of movements that underlie everything. The lines of the world, as they say. The subconscious is not a personal phenomenon but the collective medium for experience, accessing it dips the veil of individuality into the sea of the total, so it comes up dripping with meanings, images, and insights that the individual could not have assembled alone. Little bits of other people’s lives, hints of other realities of time and space clinging like shipwrecked children to the only sturdy piece of flotsam for miles around.
In doing this I have found much of beauty; ideas and dreams full of wonder and mystery and hope that I am still trying to express (through poetry, art, music, spells, and long chaotic ramblings) in order to inspire others and turn them in to the magic and power of this erisian dream-realm. But I have also encountered ontological horrors, fears both personal and collective, glimpses of possible dystopic futures that I for one would not like to see become "real", if they are not already becoming so. Most predominately the threat of global annihilation that seems eminent even in the most lucid of waking states. If you have eyes to see and a heart to feel it is near impossible to not be aware of the coming breakdown of the western mono-civilization and its potential to bring down the rest of the world with it. All it would take is one nuke… or just a continued neglect of the environment that sustains us and makes life on Earth possible.
Over the fall and early winter I was feeling the pre-apocalypse blues something fierce, to the point of nearly falling into abject apophenic madness. I had not yet since my ontological shipwreck and existential reawakening of the summer found solid ground, or the right strokes to swim through the awesome chaos I had opened myself into. Who would have thought total connection to all beings could be such a terrifying thing? One could drown in the waves of implication without the cybernetic steering wheel of a clear-cut metaphysical assemblage (world-view), and I had none. And in the flungness of that confusion where everything is prophetic, my age-old nemesis, the Prophecy of Armageddon, reared its ugly head, forcing me to take some stand. I’ve been studying cultural tales of "the end of the world" since I learned to read, and as long as that future remains a possibility I have to stay sane enough to work towards a brighter future, regardless if the task is mine or if I have the power to change anything. Where there is fear, there is an opportunity for hope.
Recently I read Starhawk’s "The Fifth Sacred Thing," which is itself a prophetic vision of a future of total state control and a small but hopeful group of people who use magic and the joy of interconnectivity to overcome it (incidentally, though this book was recently published it fails to recognize the impact modern technology is already having on the direction of the future, something I feel any realistic prophecy or future-fiction needs to take into account; but that’s another story all-together). Although this story steers away from that of a nuclear apocalypse, it does raise several good points about the nature of prophecy, which while self-fulfilling is still an extension of our hopes and fears. And is thus intentionally directable. Starhawk’s characters talk often about keeping themselves in the "Good Reality," that head space of positive thinking where no matter what terrors you’re facing if you expect the Universe to respond with goodwill it will, and the smallest of positive events feeds back on itself and brings more positive events into being. Hope as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The inverse is obviously the "Bad Reality" where, like Murphy’s Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and will continue to do so in a spiral of disaster until death begins to look like a better option than waiting for whatever tragedy will happen next.
Of course in "real life" the karmic implications of this are much subtler and intertwined, and one person’s hopes and fears get expressed all mixed up with everyone else’s so it’s hard to tell just where one prophecy leaves off and the next begins. But every little bit helps, a single moment of joy shifts the whole tide of the subconscious just a bit in that direction. So now whenever I feel my imagination seduced by the fears of the dystopic nightmare and I start prophesying the apocalypse, I remind myself to stay in the "Good Reality" and go out and spread positive actions and ideas of hope in whatever small way I can.
3.09.2005
the shaman as signpost
This was written in response to a recent post on Vortex Egg in which metachor mentions the students he substitute teaches asking him if "magic" really exists. In order to not put himself in potential trouble with the rigidity of social intstitutions he told them it did, but that they would have to look for more info themselves. Here's my take on it:
One off the attributes of the shaman is that while they have access to occluded information and present an available outlet for others to gain access to it, they do not do so by "standing in the middle of road" (as Castaneda puts it), waving a big signboard that says "Secrets of the universe... Free!"
Being on the edge means staying in the shadows, dropping tantalizing hints and subliminal sugestions but not explicitly revealing sources to those who seek for them. A shaman's power is precisely that he controls (or cozens with) forces that others do not. If everyone had such access the shaman would cease to exist, except as a redundant figurehead to a time when information was still a costly and dangerous trade.
Which isn't to say that occult knowledge shouldn't be widely available, but that's what the Net is for for the modern shaman. As someone in the precarious position of power and responsibility your choice of telling these young aspirants that magic is real and that they should search for themselves is perhaps not only the safest bet (to cover your own tracks and tail) but jives with the idea of magical initiation. It is the searching for hidden knowledge that opens the mind to it just as much as the knoweldge itself. If a magical world view was just handed to us, we probably wouldn't recognize it (or want it), but by longing for and searching for it we set ourselves up to recieve it in its full import.
Rumi talks of a man possessed by longing for spiritual enlightenment who wanders out into the desert and falls to his knees crying in prayer. The angels are shocked and ask God why he does not answer the prayers since God is the only thing the man has left to depend on. God responds saying that if he fulfilled that need the man would go back to whatever idle amusements attracted him, but that the passion of his longing is enlightenment itself.
Your student's desire to discover a world of real magick is perhaps the surest sign that they will do so, and on their own if need-be. The shaman's role in that is to mirror that desire and reflect it back in the direction of the right trail to follow, or in the direction that there arre trails to follow if you have the courage and clarity to find them.
One off the attributes of the shaman is that while they have access to occluded information and present an available outlet for others to gain access to it, they do not do so by "standing in the middle of road" (as Castaneda puts it), waving a big signboard that says "Secrets of the universe... Free!"
Being on the edge means staying in the shadows, dropping tantalizing hints and subliminal sugestions but not explicitly revealing sources to those who seek for them. A shaman's power is precisely that he controls (or cozens with) forces that others do not. If everyone had such access the shaman would cease to exist, except as a redundant figurehead to a time when information was still a costly and dangerous trade.
Which isn't to say that occult knowledge shouldn't be widely available, but that's what the Net is for for the modern shaman. As someone in the precarious position of power and responsibility your choice of telling these young aspirants that magic is real and that they should search for themselves is perhaps not only the safest bet (to cover your own tracks and tail) but jives with the idea of magical initiation. It is the searching for hidden knowledge that opens the mind to it just as much as the knoweldge itself. If a magical world view was just handed to us, we probably wouldn't recognize it (or want it), but by longing for and searching for it we set ourselves up to recieve it in its full import.
Rumi talks of a man possessed by longing for spiritual enlightenment who wanders out into the desert and falls to his knees crying in prayer. The angels are shocked and ask God why he does not answer the prayers since God is the only thing the man has left to depend on. God responds saying that if he fulfilled that need the man would go back to whatever idle amusements attracted him, but that the passion of his longing is enlightenment itself.
Your student's desire to discover a world of real magick is perhaps the surest sign that they will do so, and on their own if need-be. The shaman's role in that is to mirror that desire and reflect it back in the direction of the right trail to follow, or in the direction that there arre trails to follow if you have the courage and clarity to find them.
2.26.2005
on being pulled
On Being Pulled (Gravity and Intention)
notes from the digger’s manual 2 –20 –05
All beings have weight. If you throw them in the water they will cause waves. All beings have gravity, but this doesn’t just mean they fall down a lot. They each exert a field of attraction on every being, a subtle pull that influences and is influenced by the pull of every other thing. The earth pulls us to it, the moon pulls the tides and our blood, the stars pull each other and hold it all together. We are stars too, centers of our own web of attractions, and what strange attractors indeed. We are attracted through us the influence of all that crosses our attention, consciously or not, and change our relationship to the entire world in every moment. Imagine a cluster of spheres attached to each other by strings; move one and it readjusts the tension between all the rest. Our muscular system works the same way, in tensile integrity that continually keeps the system in balance (tensegrity, made known by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes). The whole universe is balanced in this tension, a great nexus of affect and reciprocation. Nothing is not involved, nothing is not affected, even our atoms "know" when another moves on the other side of the world, because they all move. They are all one medium, waves in the sea of particles that make us up, and it is only our attention to the particular waves of influence that separates them into distinct beings. Attention is etymologically to be stretched away from something, to be made more tensed, to be apart from what we attract and are attracted to. Knowing is being affected, interpreting the tensions into separate things in whatever degree one can be aware of their distinct level of detail. In this sense a rock knows something about falling into Earth’s pull, if not much else. Earth itself knows what it’s like to attract countless beings to its surface and about circling the sun. We exist as nodes in this web of mutual attraction, interfaces in Indra’s network, not reflecting all the other reflections but influencing all the other influences, or interpreting all the other interpretations.
Though it is all one flow of pull, it appears to us local attractors as two separate movements. We receive the pull on us, interpreting the incoming tensions, and create a pull on the universe, extending our influence outwards. The yin and yang states of intention and extension, everything stretching into us and back out into the universe; like breathing, but on a cosmic level and with all your senses. In passing through us this flow of tensions changes us, and we change the flow, readjusting the tensegrity of all the other centers of attraction. And like breathing, we can exercise some amount of control over how we let that flow pass through us. Like Kybernos, we cybernetically steer ourselves on the waves of this chaotic sea of influence. Any object, event, or idea can be treated as an external center of attraction, a star around which we spin like planets or particles, and the tensions we channel are limited to their particular sphere of attraction, and influence. We are always doing this as particular things are always passing through our attention, and we are always reinterpreting ourselves in relation to each one, even if it’s so subtle we do not know it consciously. A loud aggressive man enters the room, your stance (and the stance of everyone else present) changes in relation to their particular gravity.
Once something has attracted our attention we react to it, either by being attracted closer, or being repelled away, which in itself is a kind of attraction. In being influenced we are moved in relation; this is intention, not some desire towards an abstract goal state, but the process which is the action itself. As Castaneda put it, "There is no technique for intending, one intends through usage." we let ourselves become involved and fall into the things which attract us. Heidegger uses the example of intending to open a door by using the doorknob. In order to break from the subject/ object dichotomy he states that our intention is not towards "using" the doorknob itself, but in being drawn through the door. The doorknob itself is only an extension, a part of the world taken as part of ourselves to stretch out our reach of what we can most directly influence.
Though we do effect everything, it has a more localized limit in which the effects are strongest, like Earth’s gravity well or a blackhole’s event horizon. It’s likely there is a massive blackhole in the center of each galaxy, keeping the stars in tight. This is the extent or domain to which we can reach, the bounds of our sphere of influence. If you stretch out your arms you can reach further, if you hold out a stick you can reach further still. If you whisper only those close by can hear you, if you use the internet people all over the world can. Technology has become a quest for more precise ways to extend our interactions with our environments. All mediums become an extension of our intent, moving us further towards our attractions, depending on what we use to move in what manner. Metachor and I were bowling, and I mused that if the bowling ball extends our intention to knock down the pins, then the pins themselves were part of that intent to bowl. They are not separate from us however, but become part of us as an extension of our intention towards playing, just as we become extensions of someone else’s intension to tell us something. Language is a tool after all. Intention stretches out of us as attraction on the universe, realigning tensions of everything in its reach. What happens then if we were to consider the wholes Universe as an extensions of ourselves, as we have attention and intention for? If we were to catch the right grooves, letting the influence of the stars move through us, could we not in turn influence their spin, or everything else for that matter? Are we not heavenly bodies too, with the whole weight of the cosmos coursing through our backs?
Magic works on the principle that we can cause change to happen in accordance with our will, that we have some element of skill over the attentions and extensions we work our intentions through. Magic is writing a letter, or casting a spell, whatever means work best to fill the specific intention, regardless of whether that means seems possible in terms of a normalized view of cause and affect. Sometimes, the more impossible, the better; the mage is also a juggler, and people go to the circus to be amazed. Magic often draws on influences so subtle and attractors so arcane as to be unbelievable, but it works because these things are all connected, intent flows through them all and moves them in accordance with each other. But whose intent? Certainly not that of a single person. Our movements are cast on the whole web of movements, and everything we do through the force of that power carries the whole weight of the universe around us. No intention is not part of the intention of all beings. We are an extension of the Universe just as much as it is an extension of us, in relation to where we set the limits of our intentions. Except that we are only distended from life when we are dead, its pull never really loses us. If we choose to be single beings acting with the intentions of single beings then our reach and power is only that which we can muster ourselves. But if we act within the intentions of others then the power has a much greater pull, and control is extended that much further. Unfortunately this force can be disastrous if not intended towards the greater good, as can be seen right now in humanity’s treatment of the planet and each other. In the spin of the universe, things sometimes die violently, and our case may not be such a tragic thing. But if we act with the intentions of the universe, with the intentions of all beings, then our reach and power and aim includes all of them. And we all get to dance together, and be content.
notes from the digger’s manual 2 –20 –05
All beings have weight. If you throw them in the water they will cause waves. All beings have gravity, but this doesn’t just mean they fall down a lot. They each exert a field of attraction on every being, a subtle pull that influences and is influenced by the pull of every other thing. The earth pulls us to it, the moon pulls the tides and our blood, the stars pull each other and hold it all together. We are stars too, centers of our own web of attractions, and what strange attractors indeed. We are attracted through us the influence of all that crosses our attention, consciously or not, and change our relationship to the entire world in every moment. Imagine a cluster of spheres attached to each other by strings; move one and it readjusts the tension between all the rest. Our muscular system works the same way, in tensile integrity that continually keeps the system in balance (tensegrity, made known by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes). The whole universe is balanced in this tension, a great nexus of affect and reciprocation. Nothing is not involved, nothing is not affected, even our atoms "know" when another moves on the other side of the world, because they all move. They are all one medium, waves in the sea of particles that make us up, and it is only our attention to the particular waves of influence that separates them into distinct beings. Attention is etymologically to be stretched away from something, to be made more tensed, to be apart from what we attract and are attracted to. Knowing is being affected, interpreting the tensions into separate things in whatever degree one can be aware of their distinct level of detail. In this sense a rock knows something about falling into Earth’s pull, if not much else. Earth itself knows what it’s like to attract countless beings to its surface and about circling the sun. We exist as nodes in this web of mutual attraction, interfaces in Indra’s network, not reflecting all the other reflections but influencing all the other influences, or interpreting all the other interpretations.
Though it is all one flow of pull, it appears to us local attractors as two separate movements. We receive the pull on us, interpreting the incoming tensions, and create a pull on the universe, extending our influence outwards. The yin and yang states of intention and extension, everything stretching into us and back out into the universe; like breathing, but on a cosmic level and with all your senses. In passing through us this flow of tensions changes us, and we change the flow, readjusting the tensegrity of all the other centers of attraction. And like breathing, we can exercise some amount of control over how we let that flow pass through us. Like Kybernos, we cybernetically steer ourselves on the waves of this chaotic sea of influence. Any object, event, or idea can be treated as an external center of attraction, a star around which we spin like planets or particles, and the tensions we channel are limited to their particular sphere of attraction, and influence. We are always doing this as particular things are always passing through our attention, and we are always reinterpreting ourselves in relation to each one, even if it’s so subtle we do not know it consciously. A loud aggressive man enters the room, your stance (and the stance of everyone else present) changes in relation to their particular gravity.
Once something has attracted our attention we react to it, either by being attracted closer, or being repelled away, which in itself is a kind of attraction. In being influenced we are moved in relation; this is intention, not some desire towards an abstract goal state, but the process which is the action itself. As Castaneda put it, "There is no technique for intending, one intends through usage." we let ourselves become involved and fall into the things which attract us. Heidegger uses the example of intending to open a door by using the doorknob. In order to break from the subject/ object dichotomy he states that our intention is not towards "using" the doorknob itself, but in being drawn through the door. The doorknob itself is only an extension, a part of the world taken as part of ourselves to stretch out our reach of what we can most directly influence.
Though we do effect everything, it has a more localized limit in which the effects are strongest, like Earth’s gravity well or a blackhole’s event horizon. It’s likely there is a massive blackhole in the center of each galaxy, keeping the stars in tight. This is the extent or domain to which we can reach, the bounds of our sphere of influence. If you stretch out your arms you can reach further, if you hold out a stick you can reach further still. If you whisper only those close by can hear you, if you use the internet people all over the world can. Technology has become a quest for more precise ways to extend our interactions with our environments. All mediums become an extension of our intent, moving us further towards our attractions, depending on what we use to move in what manner. Metachor and I were bowling, and I mused that if the bowling ball extends our intention to knock down the pins, then the pins themselves were part of that intent to bowl. They are not separate from us however, but become part of us as an extension of our intention towards playing, just as we become extensions of someone else’s intension to tell us something. Language is a tool after all. Intention stretches out of us as attraction on the universe, realigning tensions of everything in its reach. What happens then if we were to consider the wholes Universe as an extensions of ourselves, as we have attention and intention for? If we were to catch the right grooves, letting the influence of the stars move through us, could we not in turn influence their spin, or everything else for that matter? Are we not heavenly bodies too, with the whole weight of the cosmos coursing through our backs?
Magic works on the principle that we can cause change to happen in accordance with our will, that we have some element of skill over the attentions and extensions we work our intentions through. Magic is writing a letter, or casting a spell, whatever means work best to fill the specific intention, regardless of whether that means seems possible in terms of a normalized view of cause and affect. Sometimes, the more impossible, the better; the mage is also a juggler, and people go to the circus to be amazed. Magic often draws on influences so subtle and attractors so arcane as to be unbelievable, but it works because these things are all connected, intent flows through them all and moves them in accordance with each other. But whose intent? Certainly not that of a single person. Our movements are cast on the whole web of movements, and everything we do through the force of that power carries the whole weight of the universe around us. No intention is not part of the intention of all beings. We are an extension of the Universe just as much as it is an extension of us, in relation to where we set the limits of our intentions. Except that we are only distended from life when we are dead, its pull never really loses us. If we choose to be single beings acting with the intentions of single beings then our reach and power is only that which we can muster ourselves. But if we act within the intentions of others then the power has a much greater pull, and control is extended that much further. Unfortunately this force can be disastrous if not intended towards the greater good, as can be seen right now in humanity’s treatment of the planet and each other. In the spin of the universe, things sometimes die violently, and our case may not be such a tragic thing. But if we act with the intentions of the universe, with the intentions of all beings, then our reach and power and aim includes all of them. And we all get to dance together, and be content.
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