PARADIGM SHIFTS AND AEONICS,
by Pete Carroll
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All the philosophies, creeds, dogmas and beliefs that humanity
has evolved are variants of three great paradigms, the Transcendental,
the Materialist and the Magical. In no human culture has any
one of these paradigms been completely distinct from the others.
For example in our own culture at the time of writing the Transcendental
and Magical pradigms are frequently confused together. Transcendental
philosophies are basically religious and manifest in a spectrum
stretching from the fringes of primitive spiritism through pagan
polytheism to the monotheism of the Judaeo-Christian- Islamic
traditions and the theoretical non-theistic systems of Buddhism
and Taoism. In each case it is believed that some form of consciousness
or spirit created and maintains the universe and that humans,
other living organisms, contain some fragment of this consciousness
or spirit which underlies the veil or illusion of matter. The
essence of Transcendentalism is belief in spiritual beings greater
than oneself or states of spiritual being superior to that which
currently one enjoys. Earthly life is frequently seen merely
as a form of dialoque between oneself and one's deity or deities,
or perhaps some impersonal form of higher force. The material
world is a theatre for the spirit or soul or consciousness that
created it. Spirit is the ultimate reality to the transcendentalist.
In the Materialist paradigm the universe is believed to consist
fundamentally and entirely of matter. Energy is but a form of
matter and together they subtend space and time within which
all change occurs strictly on the basis of cause and effect.
Human behaviour is reducible to biology, biology is reducible
to chemistry, chemistry is reducible to physics and physics is
reducible to mathematics. Mind and consciousness are thus merely
electrochemical events in the brain and spirit is a word without
objective content. The causes of some events are likely to remain
obscure perhaps indefinitely, but there is an underlying faith
that sufficient material cause must exist for any event. All
human acts can be categorized as serving some biological need
or as expressions of previously applied conditioning or merely
as malfunction. The goal of materialist who eschews suicide is
the pursuit of personal satisfaction including altruistic satisfactions
if desired. The main difficulty in recognizing and describing
the pure Magical Paradigm is that of insufficient vocabulary.
Magical philosophy is only recently recovering from a heavy adulteration
with transcendental theory. The word aether will be used to describe
the fundamental reality of the magical paradigm. It is more or
less equivalent to the idea of Mana used in oceanic shamanism.
Aether in materialistic descriptions is information which structures
matter and which all matter is capable of emitting and receiving.
In transcendental terms aether is a sort of "life force"
present in some degree in all things. It carries both knowledge
about events and the ability to influence similar or sympathetic
events. Events either arise sponataneously out of themselves
or are encouraged to follow certain paths by influence of patterns
in the aether. As all things have an aetheric part they can be
considered to be alive in some sense. Thus all things happen
by magic, the large scale features of the universe have a very
strong aetheric pattern which makes them fairly predictable but
difficult to influence by the aetheric patterns created by thought.
Magicians see themselves as participating in nature. Transcendentalists
like to think they are somehow above it. Materialists like to
try and manipulate it. Now this universe has the peculiarly accomodating
property of tending to provide evidence for, and confirmation
of, whatever paradigm one chooses to believe in. Presumably at
some deep level there is a hidden symmetry between those things
we call Matter, Aether and Spirit. Indeed, it is rare to find
an individual or culture operating exclusively on a single one
of these paradigms and none is ever entirely absent. Non dominant
paradigms are always present as superstitions and fears. A subsequent
section on Aeonics will attempt to untangle the influences of
each of these great world views throughout history, to see how
they have interacted with each other and to predict future trends.
In the meantime an analysis of the radically differing concepts
of time and self in each paradigm is offered to more fully distinguish
the basic ideas. Transcendentalists conceive of time in millennial
and apocalyptic terms. Time is regareded as having a definite
beginning and ending, both initiated by the activities of spiritual
beings or forces. The end of time on the personal and cosmic
scale is regarded not so much as a cessation of being but as
a change to a state of non material being. The beginning of personal
and cosmic time is similarly regarded as a creative act by spiritual
agencies. Thus reproductive activity usually becomes heavily
controlled and hedged about with taboo and restriction in religious
cultures, as it implies an usurpation of the powers of deities.
Reproduction also implies that death has in some measure been
overcome. How awesome the power of creation and how final must
earthly death subconsciously loom to a celibate and sterile priesthood.
All transcendentalisms embody elements of apocalyptism. Typically
these are used to provoke revivals when business is slack or
attention is drifting elsewhere. Thus it is suddenly revealed
that the final days are at hand or that some earthly dispute
is in fact a titanic battle against evil spiritual agencies.
Materialist time is linear but unbounded. Ideally it can be extended
arbitrarily far in either direction from the present. To the
strict materialist it is self-evidently futile to speculate about
a beginning or an end to time. Similarly the materialist is contemptuous
of any speculations about any forms of personal existence before
birth or after death. The materialist may well fear painful or
premature death but can have no fears about being dead. The magical
view is that time is cyclic and that all processes recur. Even
cycles which appear to begin or end are actually parts of larger
cycles. Thus all endings are beginnings and the end of time is
synonymous with the beginning of time in another universe. The
magical view that everything is recycled is reflected in the
doctrine of reincarnation. The attractive idea of reincarnation
has often persisted into the religious paradigm and many pagan
and even some monotheist traditions have retained it. However
religious theories invariably contaminate the original idea with
beliefs about a personal soul. From a strictly magical viewpoint
we are an accretion rather than an unfolded unity. The psyche
has no particular centre, we are colonial beings, a rich collage
of many selves. Thus as our bodies contain fragments from countless
former beings, so does our psyche. However certain magical traditions
retain techniques which allow the adept to transfer quite large
amounts of his psyche in one piece should he consider this more
useful than dispersing himself into humanity at large. Each of
the paradigms take a different view of the self. Transcendentalists
view self as spirit inserted into matter. As a fragment or figment
of deity the self regards itself as somehow placed in the world
in a non arbitrary manner and endowed with free will. The transcendental
view of self is relatively stable and non-problematic if shared
as a consensus with all significant others. However, transcendental
theories about the placement and purpose of self and its relationship
to deities are mutually exclusive. Conflicting transcendentalisms
can rarely co-exist for they threaten to disconform the images
of self. Encounters which are not decisive tend to be mutually
negatory in the long run. Of the three views of self the purely
materialistic one is the most problematical. If mind is an extension
of matter it must obey material laws and the resulting deterministic
view conflicts with the subjective experience of free will. On
the other hand if mind and consciousness are assumed to be qualitatively
different from matter then the self is incomprehensible to itself
in material terms. Worse still perhaps, the materialist self
must regard itself as a phenomenon of only temporary duration
in contradiction of the subjective expectation of continuity
of consciousness. Because a purely materialist view of self is
so austere few are prepared to confront such naked existentialism.
Consequently materialist cultures exhibit a frantic appetite
for sensation, identification and more or less disposable irrational
beliefs. Anything that will make the self seem less insubstantial.
The magical view of self is that it is based on the same random
capricious chaos which makes the universe exist and do what it
does. The magical self has no centre, it is not a unity but an
assemblage of parts, any number of which may temorarily club
together and call themselves "I". This accords with
the observation that our subjective experience consists of our
various selves experiencing each other. Free will arises either
as an outcome of a dispute between our various selves or as a
sudden random creation of a new idea or option. In the magical
view of self there is no spirit/matter or mind/body split and
the paradoxes of free will and determinism disappear. Some of
our acts arise from random choices between conditioned options
and some from conditional choices between randomly created options.
In practice most of our acts are based on rather complex hierarchical
sequences of all four of these mechanisms. As soon as we have
acted one of our selves proclaims "I did that!" so
loudly that most of the other selves think they did it too. Each
of the three views of self has something derogatory to say about
the other two. From the standpoint of the transcendental self
the materialist self has become prey to pride of intellect, the
demon hubris, whilst the magical view of self is considered to
be entirely demonic. The material self views the transcendentalist
as obsessed with assumptions having no basis in fact, and the
magical self as being childlike and incoherent. From the standpoint
of the magical view, the assorted selves of the transcendendatilst
have ascribed a grossly exaggerated importance to one or a few
of the selves which they call God or gods, whilst the materialist
has attempted to make all his selves subordinate to the self
that does the rational thinking. Ultimately it's a matter of
faith and taste. The transcedentalist has faith in his god self,
the materialist has faith in his reasoning self and the selves
of the magician have faith in each other. Naturally, all these
forms of faith are subject to periods of doubt. --- * Origin:
ChaosBox: Nothing is true -> all is permitted... (2:243/2)
Blackout And Sigils ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The blackout or as it
is commonly referred to, the death posture, is the technique
that the late Austin Osman Spare refined for his own magical
use and which has been adopted by chaoists, solo and group, world
wide as its popularity has been increased by the works of the
IOT over the last decade or so. The normal procedure, as many
will undoubtedly be familiar with, (and this is only one of its
uses) is that a sigil/glyph of desire is held in the mind`s eye
whilst in what we all refer to as the death posture e.g., stood
on tiptoe, arms locked behind the head, body stretched to its
limit, deep spasmodic breathing, until total exhaustion and inevitably
one blacks out, the sigil is then lost to the mind of the inner
and the banished of laughter is evoked to prevent the resurfacing
of the said sigil. Anyone who has used this technique for the
above said purpose, will have at sometime or another experienced,
even if just slightly, difficulty in holding the posture long
enough for the desired gnosis to take effect sufficiently for
blackout. And due to this difficulty, a well planned ritual can
be a well planned waste of time as the desired result is not
implanted properly. A technique that has been repeatedly employed
by myself on such occasions is based upon the same principles
as the death posture but as I have found, a little easier and
without pitfalls that one can experience with A.O. Spare`s technique.
This technique is a strange mixture of inhibitory and excitatory
gnosis, forced overbreathing, dancing or spinning, and of course
exhaustion. The end result is of necessity for this process the
blackout, which is as we know, of the inhibitory gnosis. I will
now explain how this technique is employed by one for the insertion
of sigils for whatever purpose one feels the need. First one
has to sigilise the desire in any form that one may wish, but
in all cases and especially this one, it must be very easy to
visualise. Once that has been achieved, one may then begin to
design the ritual for that particular purpose in mind. Banishings
and invocations may be employed, if so wished, this is, however,
not a necessity for the successful outcome of this process. At
the culmination of the rite the individual starts the overbreathing,
panting deeply and spasmodically and at the same time visualising
the sigil as vividly as you possible can, bright, intense and
very clear as the overbreathing continues. Then when you feel
that the time is right, start your spinning round and round,
still overbreathing and still holding your visualised sigil in
your mind`s eye. Music can be played for a background to the
dancing, tom toms or any other drum is rather excellent background
sound for this purpose. When the individual has reached a state
of sheer exhaustion, very dizzy, sweating and ready to drop,
he or she then, still spinning and overbreathing and of course
holding the visulised sigil in mind, works their way to the centre
of the circle or working area. There a partner, either active
or passive to the rite, (in other words, if a solo worker, try
to get someone to help you with this part) stops you spinning
and grabs you in a bear hug lifting you off the ground and squeezing
you about the solar plexus, where a large network of nerves lie.
At this precise moment the music, if any has been employed, is
stopped, and death-like silence is kept. The practitioner holds
his or her breath whilst being squeezed and the sigil is visualised
as if burning with bright, white heat as its image is burnt into
your mind. Within seconds the blackout will occur and the sigil
is lost to the mind. At this point it is important that your
partner lets you drop to the floor, unless that is you wish to
return to primal chaos! On coming round, in most cases, you should
evoke laughter to banish the sigil and all thoughts thereof,
your laughter breaks that silence and the rite is finished in
whatever manner wished. |