chaotopia

Singing in the pub: The Sheffield Carols

2011-12-13T15:54:00.002Z

Last Friday night, I went to the other side of town and sang carols in a pub.
As my dear readers will know, I'm not at all keen on christianity. However, I do like a good sing, and I only learned last year that I live in a town that boasts a unique folk event, the Sheffield Carols.

These are not any old carols; they are traditional words, but sung to locally-written tunes, often unusual and complex, with four-part harmonies and so forth. The groups are very local, and pub-based. Each group writes its own tunes, and works them up to a carol season that starts in November. (http://www.localcarols.org.uk/sings.php )

The Old Harrow hosts other folk traditions too, including Sword Dancing (http://www.oldharrow.co.uk/Sword-Dancing.php) . An idea of a carol session can be got at http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/sheffield-folk-carols-from-church-to-pub/6609.html and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87PFoh9VJP8.

On Friday, the opening song was 'While Shepherds Watched', but sung to the tune of 'On Ilkley Moor Baht 'at'. Try it, it works! The song booklet, or 'Words', as it's called, boasts eleven versions of that carol, each with a different tune. The way the lines are repeated and sung has echoes of familiar, older forms, such as chorus lines in groups of 3, the first two lines the same, the third different, maybe splitting between male and female voices.

One of the inspiring things about this tradition is the way it mythologizes the local area. Tunes in the song sheets have local names, like Malin Bridge or Holmfirth Anthem, and more mysterious names like Spout Cottage or Egypt. If you'd been brought up singing that carol, you would never be able to pass Malin Bridge without thinking of the tune, the words, or maybe even some transcendent moment.

Such things charge the world with significance. Every bend of the river has a name, every town has a tune. It would be wonderful if we had a corpus of pagan/heathen songs of this quality to sing at the seasonal festivals. And communities, groups that cared enough to work them up into something worth showing off to the whole village/suburb. Choral singing is one of our species' most delightful skills, one of the bases of collective joy, and just the kind of thing we need to make life better in the straitened times to come.

USA travels

2011-11-28T17:09:00.001Z

England to Texas:

It all started with a nightmarejourney, the plane half an hour late out of Heathrow, leaving 1 hour and 20minutes to get myconnecting flight at Chicago O'Hare. They kept us waiting in the first immigrationqueue for an hour, leaving just 20 minutes to get through the next 3procedures. These were: get baggage from reclaim, get it securitychecked and then put it back on again. They didn't spare any fartingabout - the laptop had to come out of baggage, etc etc. Anyway, no time to recheck bag, had to run up todeparture gate, where the excellent American Airlines staff sorted itfor me. I was the last on board, 2 minutes before it left theground. Deep joy, to be away from O'Hare's miserable incompetence and hostilesecurity.

Staying at my friend's place inSmithville, a hamlet near Bastrop, central Texas, we had a heatwave.80+F all week, and a plague of biting insects. One morning in the bathroom, I noticed a brown scorpion about 15 inches from my left foot. It looked dead, but I wasn't about to prod it and find out. My host later ascertained that it was indeed alive, and killed it.

There were some great critters, though. Looking out on their back yard, I speculated that my hosts had placed an incredibly bright red plastic bird on the bird feeder. Then it flew off - the magnificent cardinal bird. And we saw a roadrunner, which looked almost as daft as its cartoon incarnation.

The land was suffering though. The ground was baked dustbowl-loose, thetrees dead or dying, apparently the biggest drought in decades.

A few things really puzzle me about theUS of A. Not the big things, like why anyone not in the top 10% of income evervotes Republican, when that is clearly not in their interest. Far be it from me to criticize that, we have the same problem in the UK. It's thesmall things that puzzle me. Like why are American plugs and sockets so flimsy? Andthe money: the nation which leads the world in being obsessed with the stuff, has a currency that looks like Monopoly money, but without the helpfulcolour-coding.

The food can be puzzling too. Don't get me wrong - Ilove small diners, the preponderance of fresh seafood and many of thelocal delicacies (pecan-based in subtropical Texas). But the otherday, I added a bunch of radishes to my snack purchase, and thesupermarket checkout girl had no idea what they were. And thechocolate. It's been years since I was last disappointed by a Hersheybar, so I bought a pack of Hershey choc drops and managed to get halfway down them before the taste of rancid milk burned through, and I hadto ditch the rest. Why don't they fix that problem?

Therein lies one of the big secrets ofcapitalism's failure - the tyranny of brands. My lawyer friend, shortof clients because he works alone, analyzed this for me in thecontext of the service you get from a law firm. One - it is driven byadvertising; Two: only big firms can afford to advertise, Three: sothey hire lots of poorly paid, poorly trained paralegals, and use aproduction line model. Result? the service they offer is the worstyou can get. Stripped down, this formula is: big marketing = reducedquality. Even chocolate suffers.

And capitalism is supposed to give us choice andcompetition, leading to increased quality? What went wrong?Marketing, the favouring of growth over sustainable sizing,destroying the true free market. Solution? Break up all companies above acertain size? Restrict adverising? Maybe. It could hardly get any worse thanit is.

Texas to Atlanta:

Lest my curmudgeonly complaints seembiased and miserable, I shall assert that much about this trip hasbeen wonderful.This includes, of course, friends, but also covers the basic decency of mostAmericans. And I hadplenty of time to rewrite my novel, stalled for lack of publishingprospects, and revived by SiriusInk's avid interest.

Also the weather was gorgeous, once we'd escaped the heatwave. Flying, only thethinnest of haze over the patchwork quilt of fields, the shiningriver, the dam lake, the winding roads.

Now over a body of water with numerousinlets, the sand orange-pink in slanting afternoon light.

Now thick, evergreen and deciduousforest, watercourses snaking through it, no human structures as faras the eye can see. Then tiny settlements appear in clearings, thenforest-ringed suburbs, Atlanta's townships. Then we cruise downthrough industrial units, still as surrounded by woods, down to theairport, downtown still invisible from this side of the plane.

Atlanta was two wonderful days, the afternoon of workshops that Ian Read (hypnosis) and I (breathwork) did, came off splendidly, great audience and a great end to the trip. All I need now is some luck to get methrough the security hell of O'Hare on the way home.

Atlanta to England:

Yes, ChicagoO'Hare managed to screw up again. There are no maps or information about what's going on in other terminals, so it's pot luck whether you get to your departure gate on time. Fortunately, we had time to spare, so the fact that they didn't bother reporting ourflight on the boards of the terminal we were in had no effect, other than deepening our contempt for this place.

Nil points, O'Hare.You are where one would stick the tube to give the world transport system an enema. Mark my words,dear friends: if you can possibly help it, never, ever get aconnecting flight at Chicago O'Hare. They might make you stay there.

Raise a glass to the memory of Philip Harper

2011-11-25T15:25:00.001Z

On Tuesday I learned of the death of my friend Philip Harper. He was a truly extraordinary man, who lived his life in the quest for higher consciousness. Having been born with cysteinosis, he knew his life would not be long, and he packed more into his twenty-something years than most people manage in twice that or more.

Right up to the end, he was still struggling: a few months ago, he ordered a very demanding esoteric study package.

His final blog entry:

'I have now been told that their are no medical treatments options left to cure my cancer. At this point you reflect on the fact that although they or us may think doctors are gods, they are not. Whats left, all the non-medical options and a will to live.'
For those who never had the privelege of knowing him, his blog is still up at http://ritualchaosmagic.blogspot.com/ . His website is also still visible at http://www.ritualchaosmagic.co.uk/

There is a lot more that I could say about Phil, but I want to get this out into the world.
So I raise a glass to a man who will be sorely missed, but who leaves us all a mighty example.

'Now the words of the High One
Are heard in the High One's hall.
... Hail, to those who hear them!'

The Crowned and Conquering Brat: Some reflections on nippled cups, Grab Bags and baby talk

2011-10-30T21:51:00.001Z

It's time I had a proper rant.
Some of the things I dreamed about in the Playpower phase of my youth have come true, and I hate them.

Crowley's magick takes us through a succession of Aeons: first, there is Isis the Mother, the Pagan Aeon, in which we are ruled by the laws of Nature. Then comes Osiris the Father, the Aeon of monotheism and, most recently (since 1904 according to Crowley), the Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, the beginning of the maturation of humanity beyond repressive laws.

Yes, much of the old world had to go, such as the sexual repression horror of Victorian society that still lingered on.

That was dealt a significant blow by the lifestyle rebellions of the 60s; the Aeon of Horus was still making sense.

Fourteen years ago, it still made sense: In Chaotopia! I prized neoteny, which, biologically speaking is when individuals reach sexual maturity without developing all the other adult characteristics of that species; this is of course a metaphor for continual openness to development.

That freedom to be anything is the crown and burden of humans – that we are creatures of chaos, that we don't really know what we are. That means we can become anything – our limitless freedom of thought produces Auschwitz, and Beethoven, James Joyce and Big Brother.

This open-endedness is such a deep part of our nature, so I stand by my defence of neoteny – minds that are flexible and adaptable are those which retain youthful characteristics.

But the dark side of the Aeon comes increasingly to the fore: every Aeon must go through this, the accumulation of dilution, compromise, corruption.

Am I the only person who is deeply sick of the following?

1. Adults using baby talk: The other week, I read a report of a magistrate doing the requisite telling-off thing to a woman described as 'heavily pregnant' for an alcohol related offence.

The admonishment actually went: 'You've got a baby in your tummy...'
Did she think the woman she was addressing was severely intellectually retarded? Aren't magistrates supposed to be mature and sensible members of the community? Apparently 'no' is the answer to both questions.

Even professionals like doctors and vets use the word 'poo', a perfectly suitable term for 8-year olds, before they get the hang of what social contexts demand 'excrement' or 'faeces' and which 'crap' or shit'. Suggestion: some Home Office guidelines on addressing adults of reasonable mental capacity; Doctor, I don't do 'poo'.

2. The description 'Grab Bag' for a slightly-too-large bag of crisps. Toddlers grab, adults 'pick up' or maybe 'seize'. Suggestion: replace term 'Grab bag' with 'Greed Bag'.

3. Those nipple-like caps that project out of the plastic tops of disposable coffee cups, which some people actually drink thro, like nipples, eschewing the aroma of the heavily-branded coffee they have just forked out for.

Maybe that ridiculous nipple resulted from the landmark US court case many years ago, in which a person actually successfully sued McDonalds for serving her the hot coffee with which she managed to scald her thighs. Such a plunge into Aeonic-scale legal idiocy cries out for commemoration, in our species' collective Darwin Awards, represented in the form of nippled coffee cups. Thus passes the glory of humankind.

So what is it all about, this infantilization? Why can't I jump on and off buses as they hang around in traffic? Is it because we can no longer stand to lose a few idiots a year in exchange for these delightful, trivial freedoms? Are we thereby a more compassionate society?

I don't think so; consider the following: A few months ago, the Powers That Be closed a gap in the central fence of the dual carriageway at the beginning of the Old Kent Road, so now people have to step over it. This stops the less mobile from nipping over, and makes it slightly more dangerous for those that do. Why? So some bureaucrat can sleep at night, knowing he's taken the advice of his lawyer.

That driver is insurance; this is what makes sense of the extreme anti-smoking notices, which in some places even appear out of doors these days, in defiance of any basic human sense, the effectively-infinite dilution of the open air. But the logic of it is that some person might sue, and sue successfully, someone who allows smoke to drift over their business premises. Bearing in mind the McDonalds decision, one has cause to fear what such stupidity is capable of.

The degraded philosophy underlying that decision gave us our current claim-and-blame culture, surely the epitome of infantilization, the attitude that the adult citizen is not responsible, that Baby needs protecting from Hirself every second of every day.

So what is the function of this sick cultural mutation, the cui bono? It's consumerism. We are being softened up for the endless destruction of meaning and quality and the attempt to replace it by buying unnecessary stuff which, until we learn better, we work long hours to acquire so we can display it to our neighbours. Status crap, in other words.

Dreary, isn't it? Humans could be so much better.

More books for the market stall

2011-10-10T00:36:00.000+01:00

Helloeveryone, I need to slim down my book collection, so am selling thefollowing.

Withsome guideline prices, but any reasonable offer accepted, postageextra.

BOOKS

Stanton T Friedman - Top Secret / Majic. Hardback, first edition. £8

Ann Druffel - How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction,hardback £3

KenWilber - The Eye of Spirit, p/bk £5

David Madsen - Confessions of a Flesh-eater (complete with recipes) p/bk £2

Alex Constantine - Psychic Dictatorship in the USA p/bk £8

Robert Graham - Night Vision; The powers of darkness £10

Timothy Leary - Chaos and Cyber-Culture £7

And some CDs:

Freya Aswynn - Shades of Yggdrasil. Includes the notorious recordingof Crowley's Leah Sublime £8

All other CDs £5

Stuart Davies - 16 Nudes, Live

Changes - Legends

Blacklight Braille - The Castle of the Northern Crown (2 copies)

" - Black Moon Selection

" - Songs From Moonlight Snow; the songs of Owen Knight

" - Dietles Tavern to Shadowland (2 copies)

" - Sailing Away

" - In a Dark Garden

Review of 'Reality' by Peter Kingsley

2011-09-23T17:40:00.001+01:00

Reality, by Peter Kingsley
www.peterkingsley.org/Reality.html

A book the size of a housebrick-and-a-half, called 'Reality: now there's an author who's not lacking in confidence. In a nutshell? A 550 page commentary on two pre-Socratic 'philosophers', Parmenides and Empedocles, rooted in a passionate critique of the origins of so much of our culture and its limitations; origins that Kingsley claim lay in a hatchet-job done by Plato on the pre-Socratic mystical traditions.

This book was a roller coaster ride for me. Right from the start, it got on my tits, with its attitude of 'your life is a pile of shit because you are not enlightened', the same superior cosmic style that I reacted to so negatively when I first encountered mysticism in my teens.
...Even though I find the idea of a radical deconstruction – no, scratch that, a radical rejection – of normal reality absolutely irresistible.

In the language of this book, I still linger at the three-ways, with the ghosts who are not living fully. For so Kingsley would have us believe the pre-Socratic Italian-Greek teacher Parmenides was saying, in brief works which academics apparently usually take as the origins of logical thinking: Parmenides is no respecter of elites - that's where all of us stand, in relation to reality as it really is. Focusing on the origin of logic as the origin of our modern way of thinking is a totally deluded notion; Parmenides' words referred to an era 'before people learned how to use reasoning as a mask to disguise their terror of logic'.

He defends the 'terror of logic' with reference to Socrates who, he claims, was killed for making the Athenians feel like fools. He depicts Socrates as one of the last of a line of enquiry that used logic to demonstrate that ordinary thinking cannot produce a consistent model of the world, that everything we think hangs above an abyss of incoherence, 'aporia', the pathlessness in which Socrates left his dialogical victims.

Kingsley's reinterpretation of the pre-Socratic lineage is based on discoveries about the practice of incubation, a meditation conducted in underground chambers. Parmenides, it seems, was the leader of one such mystery school, in which the initiates gained visions, maybe meeting the underworld Goddess, Parmenides' interlocutor in the poem Kingsley takes as his core work.

In this poem, the Goddess cuts away all self-importance and smugness, dismantling the familiar world, stripping away all assumptions; 'and from this perfect reality that she (the Goddess) describes, there is no escape'.
This was when I realised the book was really speaking to me. Perhaps the subtlest and most lingering of my visions was exactly that - there is no escape, anywhere - what we see is, in a very important sense, what we get. My intuition calls it embeddedness.

I like the way Kingsley uses the term 'being'. Often people annoy me with that word - what right have we got to ascribe existence to one thing and not another? Well, Kingsley, in line with Parmenides' goddess, ascribes 'being' to it all; indivisible, bornless and endless. That I can get with.

Kingsley leads us through a version of the mystical solve et coagula. In this process, the face of the Goddess changes; at first, we met the unnamed Persephone, whose 'deceptive words' take our world apart, then later, as her deception becomes more total, more paradoxical, more complete, we encounter the seductive Aphrodite, whose charm hunts down and makes helpless the strongest man. But having gone through the death process, we have attained a kind of perspective that enables us to live in Aphrodite's lush garden of illusion without losing our minds again.

So what has this mystical cult really got to do with the history of Greek philosophy? Kingsley tells it as a gigantic selling-short: 'there was no way [people] were going to accept that the ultimate reality is whatever they see around them ... And so ... philosophers have worked their hardest for more than two thousand years to make his 'it' some kind of logical abstraction that exists somewhere else - on another level of reality.'

So he begins to insert the idea that reality is a seamless, unitary world, with no levels, only the delicious illusions of Aphrodite and the frightening truths of Persephone, both referring to the same universe.

The next sections, on Empedocles, take us into other territory, but there is still much mystical lore to be recovered. Empedocles' thought has had some strange descendents – his fanciful Aeonic model was taken far too seriously by the Gnostics, providing the basis for their profound hatred of the world and the flesh.

That is what tends to happen when initiatic writings fall into the hands of the priestly ascetics, the life-hating control freaks, and such perversions cannot necessarily be levelled against the original texts. But is it surprising that Empedocles' writings spawned toxic nonsense, when he spouted world-hating dualism like: 'Incarnation as human beings is, very specifically, a punishment for the daimon's failings'?

However, Kingsley uses Empedocles to bring in a vital new theme, which I'll return to: that Love and apparent unity is the basis for unconsciousness and automatic behaviour, but that Strife, the principle of separation, is on the side of truth.

The theme of the self-exhausting nature of logic is resumed with Zeno's paradoxes. We are taught them as shallow games, but Kingsley claims Zeno 'used logic in its truest sense, not to fortify or justify our commonsense view of reality, but to undermine it, destroy it.' He brings together Parmenides, Empedocles and Gorgias, the founder of the Sophists, whom Plato decried as shallow and irresponsible in that they merely held up mirrors to popular misconceptions.

Now Kingsley has got us ready to reveal the Platonic hatchet job on the mystery schools, the beginning of a cultural shift away from mysticism, perpetrated on the European world these last 2500 years. Athens invaded Lipora, one of the centres of the mystery tradition that included Parmenides, Empedocles and incubation; this was the political dimension. Plato's writings took care of the written evidence of the tradition, such as the poem of Parmenides Kingsley refers to throughout the book, by radically reinterpreting them, in ways which Kingsley demonstrates do not stand up well under close examination.

Plato elaborated Empedocles' simple cosmology, of everyday life and the Absolute bound inseparably together, into different levels, articulating the notion of transcendence, 'the need to get from here to there even though there is no there apart from here'.

The distortion of pre-Socratic texts continued, and continues still; Kingsley shows us how Empedocles' words were actually altered, in what he sees as a deliberate suppression of mystery traditions.

That criticism strikes a strong chord with me. Consider Plato's notion of a realm of divine forms, that aetherial library of cosmic designs. Where are they supposed to be? In the mind? Fair enough, and we all share them; they resemble Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious, the ur-patterns of how we construct and perceive the world.

We can go further than that, and identify the structural relationships that are demonstrated by mathematics as ideal Forms too, patterns that are so deeply embedded in our minds that we see them everywhere we look.

However, I find very dubious the idea of actual other levels or planes of reality which contain these forms, levels which ascend step after step towards God. This is what the Neo-Platonists did with Plato's notion, and it is the basis of the Four Worlds of Renaissance Qabalah. And the philosophical underpinning of the empire of 'reason', its chief weapon in defeating the mystery traditions, and keeping them defeated.

This set of notions is what we have to thank for the rigmarole of Western occultism and, taken seriously, this book would be the death-knell of all that crock of neo-Platonist nonsense, that concoction of planes, rays and worlds. I for one would not miss it.

The way of awakening that Kingsley hints at throughout this book has some definite qualities in common with the Odian way, not least the sacrificial basis of full consciousness: 'the very act of becoming conscious is, itself, a process of destruction; of separation; of learning to die before we die.' [P435].

Concerning the illuminatory necessity of interrupting the Love principle with Strife, the author quotes a commentator describing the perfect sphere of love in Empedocles' cosmology – 'a state of crude and chaotic matter'; this sounds like Ymir, before Odin Vili and Ve carve a coherent universe out of him, before Strife gets on the case and produces some clarity.

It's not that there's anything wrong with love, but until we separate ourselves from our automatic impulses, which are ruled by love, by Aphrodite, we cannot become conscious. After we have achieved consciousness, then is time to return on the other arc of the cycle, into engagement with the world, into the rage of desire that Love generates.

Another feature of interest in this system [P289] is when Kingsley tells us that 'the ability to trap and bind successfully had a single name – metis'. Compare Odin's valknut, in its open and closed forms – it is the primary symbol of binding and loosing. One dimension of this dualism is in the technology of magical spells, in which we cause flow or stoppage. Another is in relation to the core nature of selfhood: on the Tree, Odin is torn apart, his self sacrificed, and out of that chaos new knowledge – the runes – and a new Self emerge. These are the two modes in which selfhood operates, the poles of solve et coagula, the cycle of dissolution and reintegration. On the one arc, we allow our selves to undo themselves; incubation, like some forms of sitting meditation, is a tool of the dissolution stage. The reintegration stage is automatic, but the nature of the visions and of the new self that emerges is influenced by our aspiration and knowledge.

Metis is usually translated as 'cunning', and this important divine attribute is examined in both Greek and Odian contexts in a fascinating paper 'Cunning intelligence in Norse myth; Loki, Odin and the limits of sovereignty', by Kevin J Wanner, which would require another essay to even begin to do justice to. (Wanner is at http://www.wmich.edu/religion/kevin_wanner.html )

Kingsley's words show up vividly the sometimes-problematic nature of the RHP/LHP distinction. On p185, he writes of this 'perfect, complete' reality: 'The only choice we have, our single real freedom, is to decide whether to participate in it consciously or be at its mercy.... '
This does at first reading seem like classic RHP as defined by Dr Flowers, along the lines of 'get with the cosmic programme, don't stand out' - but the next section shows us another dimension:
'The one option we have is to turn around and face, head-on, all the impulses that keep bombarding us and pushing us in every direction. By turning each impulse back on itself we are returning thought and perception consciously to their source.'
That sounds like a recipe for meditation, not for self-annihilation; more like someone fearlessly deconstructing all they appear to be, because they know there is something far deeper behind that anxious self.

Have we reached the source of the misunderstanding that seems to be at the root of much LHP/RHP dichotomy? Is it about where we draw the line, on this side of which is our free will, and on the other side of which the changes we label 'inevitable'?

There is another, and perhaps deeper, problem for the Odian seeker in this discourse. Kingsley criticizes seeking: '… if we manage to carry one particular search right through to the end, … we find ourselves straightaway at the beginning of another'.
To me, that's the core of the way. For Kingsley, it's bad: real Reality doesn't go anywhere, doesn't move. It's the opposite of the constant renewal of 'Seek the Mystery', this Absolute Reality.

On the surface of it, that's worrying; there is no progression, only perfection, always and forever. But the process Kingsley recommends is nothing but an increase in consciousness, and if that isn't what the Odian way is about, I don't know what is. And maybe the above idea is again a misunderstanding: the sense of a perfect universe comes at the culmination of a process, which will certainly feel like a journey. On arriving, one may feel that: 'There is no transcendental reality to get away to' (p288).
Now that is a notion I can get with – eliminate all those other levels, all those half-hearted semi-paradises, and let the self dismantle itself into bare, immediate presence. How can there be anywhere to go to from that place?

But we return, and then movement resumes. It may not ever feel as real again, that movement, but it doesn't mean we are not passionately engaged in changing the world to the best of our ability; even Kingsley admits his illuminated Greeks were engaged in political intrigue: the perspective of a motionless, eternal world has not paralyzed their will. They return from eternity and take up their work in the world again.

In the end, I can't find any serious fault with this book. Reservations, yes; his style has been described (by Duncan Barford) as 'arch', which fits perfectly; it definitely feels like he is talking down to his reader. This puts me off his other works, one of which I've been emphatically recommended by the friend who passed this volume on to me. I don't think I'll ever like his style, and it may irritate you too. But I have to recommend this book, because he has such vitally important things to say.

I'll leave you with a rallying cry from P497:
'Trying to escape from our own civilization can offer no real solution. What now is needed more than anything else is to penetrate to the roots of this western world and release the wisdom that has been waiting there for so long.'

Chap-ism: an appreciation.

2011-09-15T14:40:00.001+01:00

Seldom have I ever been accused of sartorial elegance, and most of those few occasions have fallen in the last year, since I decided I was just too old to go on getting away with being... casual? louche?... no, just plain scruffy.

Not that I was ever really scruffy - at least I always shaved. The current fashion, for neither having a beard nor not, gives us the unedifying spectacle of 50-something Oxbridge academics desperate to deny their age and just ending up looking like they could use a bath; but I have had a chequered relationship with the fashions that ran alongside my life.

As a 60s teen I was a proto-punk anarchist, a bright soft tie worn as a headband in ironical reference to hippie style. I wore my hair down to my shoulders and felt I was part of a youth vanguard. A year later I cut it short, when I woke up to the fact that longhairs were not guaranteed to espouse radical, countercultural ideas, and so the longhair gesture was meaningless.

In the 70s I sported a leather flying jacket and, yes, for one season, a moustache. My 80s garb was an extension of the same basic style. In the 90s I started dressing up more - suits and military fetish for special occasions - but my everyday wear was, frankly, dull, with the curious dullness of stylistic indecision.

What happens when we have no idea what our appearance might mean? I sit in a bar and people look lost, at sea in images, young men, 20 something, fuzz of stubble, corporate clothes that refuse to exert a sexual male identity... they are blurred, out of focus, these metrosexuals in the pseudo-community of their Gap clothes.

Not to mention the fashion victim teens who wear their corporate hoods up in blazing heat, even when there are no security cameras to hide ostentatiously from... let's not even step into that style abyss.

Can we escape from the gravity well of corporate clothing boredom? What might it be like to dress in a non-corporate fashion?

We have to look to subcultures for answers to that sort of question; enter The Chap, http://www.thechap.net/

A Chap (and the description is not male-restricted) adopts a 1940s style, only barely modified at all for contemporary sensibilities, and - important distinction, this – not just for special occasions, but every day.

This makes sense on a number of levels. For instance, consider layers, and the British climate. That old style is well adapted to the world of energy shortages which we shall all need to get used to. We walk out, we have great hats and overcoats. We step into a heated room, we remove scarf, gloves, hat, overcoat. The room gets warmer, we remove the jacket. We still have a waistcoat or a sleeveless pullover on over the shirt.

This is not only intelligent but massively more stylish than anything current hoodie-sports shoes-jeans fashion can possibly offer.

And consider self-reliance: traditional clothes can be repaired, if not too badly damaged. We keep shoes clean and stretched with shoe tree, preserving both fabric and appearance. We throw less away. We look better than the most expensively-attired name-brand victim, and we got most of it from charity shops.

Bugger... That was the secret.

Review - Is There Life After Death? The extraordinary science of what happens when we die. By Anthony Peake,

2011-08-29T21:32:00.000+01:00

This book was thrust into my hands by a fellow magician, because she'd found it interesting and thought it might be my kind of thing. I think the author would have me believe that this was significant, a signal from my Higher Self who reincarnates endlessly into the same body, the same life-cycle, again and again.

For this is Peake's thesis - that we are each in one of the runs of our own personal, solipsistic, endless Groundhog Day. These repeats are an Eternal Return that differs only in tiny or great differences that increase with the degree of experience of the re-incarnating Self.

This book follows a pattern familiar from the science-mystic fringe: introduce a wacky and exciting idea, back it up with an unusual stretch of interpretation from quantum physics, then proceed to contrast 'Western thought' unfavourably with some interpretation of Eastern mysticism.

Peake kicks off with a dubious leap from the double slit experiment and the Copenhagen Interpretation, about which he writes one or two things few physicists would agree with.

Then it improves, with a good rundown of Bohm's Hidden Variable interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Then he presents the fascinating theory that input from our senses is 'buffered' until the buffer is full then released to consciousness, a sort of quantization of memory into packets. Which generally cannot be re-accessed - we are not talking about normal memory here, but the vivid memory of flashbacks, where a specific memory swamps consciousness.

Then he moves on to Pribram's holographic theory: (p90)
'In the same way that the image on a holographic photographic plate is a swirl of blurs and fuzziness, so it is with the universe "out there'. It is only when the lens of the brain, acting as a laser light on a holographic plate, brings out the three-dimensional image that the universe comes into being.'

He quotes Pribram:
'Maybe reality isn't what we see with our eyes. If we did not have that lens - the mathematics performed by our brain - maybe we would know a world organized in the frequency domain. No space, no time, just events.'
That is a stirring thought, and reminds me of how, in Northern myth, that drama is the primordial giant Ymir sacrificed by Odin and his two brothers to generate a comprehensible universe.

Then we're into Oliver Sacks-like meditations on what the weird zones of human neurology tell us about ourselves.

One of the unavoidable problems with a solipsism as encompassing as the one he seems to embrace is: How do you argue from the contents of your universe? How can I use quantum physics ideas, or neurological findings, to argue my position, when these sciences don't reflect any objective reality?

The idea that raw reality might have 'No space, no time, just events.', and that everything else is something we construct, is a degree of solipsism I can get with - the Woden-Vili-Ve in us hacks a (fairly) coherent universe from that timeless, stagnant Ymir confusion - but there is an Ymir there in the first place: solipsists tend to throw the Ymir of objective existence out with the universe we make.
He doesn't deal with this, doesn't justify his particular blend of facts from one direction and factless depths of solipsistic speculation on the other.

However, there is something very tempting about this idea. And it falls into that vast category of ideas which grow from that basic sense that there is something deeply, disturbingly wrong in our common grasp of what is happening in the world.

So why don't I 'convert' wholeheartedly to the belief system here?
Because, first, it violates Occams Razor, by sewing together a bunch of speculative ideas; and second, because I'm a constitutional pessimist, and this is one of those interpretations of the universe that attempts to rescue some degree of human-heartedness to what seems an indifferent or even hostile set of physical conditions. I suppose it succeeds in that, but it does seem rather harsh that we don't know that we are immortal. Surely if we're running the multiversal show, we would overcome that painful illusion?

I shall remain haunted by the core idea in this book, of serial virtual reincarnation, because it does explain a lot. Would I recommend the book? Yes, because it will give you an itch for the mystery.

Adventures in Ireland 2: The pilgrim's mountain, Irish hyperreality and the island sanctuary

2011-08-17T12:49:00.001+01:00

On Lughnasadh Sunday we walked up Croaghpatrick, the mountain from which the notorious St Patrick is supposed to have banished the snakes from Ireland ('What's that guy got against reptiles anyway?'). Over 15,000 people (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8204987.stm ) go up every year on that one day, and you can believe it – the long track is as busy as the Old Kent Road. It was a pretty unpleasant climb, especially after we ascended into the fog and rain, but an incredible spectacle: people of all ages and dress styles, being helpful towards each other. An old man with two sticks fell in front of me, and people gathered round to help him up, I got one of his sticks back to him, and he proceeded another three steps before falling again. And it didn't stint on weirdness: up on the summit, in fog, a speaker system blared out Mass and the confession queue snaked up to the tiny stone church. On the way back down I saw a little old man in suit and tie and brogues, strolling up the scree-strewn path as if it was just another trip to Mass in his Sunday best. Back down and soaked to the skin after a four hour round trip, we drank comforting stout in the pub at the foot of the track.

We stopped for a meal on the way back, a hotel in Westport, the nearest town to Croaghpatrick. Donal came out with a perfect description of Irish tourist hyperreality: 'This place is a bit diddly-I’.

The next day was the Bonniconlon Agricultural Show, the local highlight of the year. It was fun, and definitely not diddley-I – sheepdog trials, horse jumping, cattle, sheep, goats, boxty to eat, what looked like the remains of a turf turning demo, a dog show, fairground rides for kids, water-collecting and field drainage systems, turf-stripping machines, a sheaf throwing contest which went on all afternoon, a fiercely anti-British IRA stall, and even a stress-relief masseuse from the local town who was having to work hard to convince the locals of the benefits of her craft.

The final couple of days we spent around the neolithic burial complex of Loughcrew Cairns, recommended to us as the less touristy version of the Boyne Valley passage graves. Not fancying another satnav adventure, we navigated map in hand to the general area, then disappeared into the maze of local roads. Wondering where we were going to stay the night, we suddenly spotted by the road a sign saying ‘Parking and Camping, open till 6’. It was 6.20, and the gate was still open, so we pull in and asked – and yes, not only did we have a place for our tent tonight but we’re right at the foot of the Slieve na Calliagh, the Hill of the Sorceress, the range of hills that start dramatically up out of a gently rolling landscape, topped by the Loughcrew Cairns.

So we sat by our tent, cooking and eating, watching the poachers go out a few minutes after the staff left the buildings, two lads on a quad bike, one of them with a shotgun. Some time and a few detonations later, they returned with a bulging bag. We walked up the main hill, where the most impressive tombs are, and saw the best sunset I’ve ever seen bar none – like a grid of red-hot steel mesh or flowing molten metal stretched across the sky.

The next day was for walking and magic. My Statement of Intent was: To experience ecstasy, to be taken out of myself.
Which I was.

Back in Britain, the following weekend was the riots. I thought of the crannog we saw in Lough Talt, a tiny artificial island sticking up from the water. It was some Bronze Age family's sanctuary from their bandit neighbours, complete with secret steps under the water level, the route known only to the kin who built it. Imagine, what a palaver to go through, to avoid robbery of your scarce and tiny resources – a few scrawny animals, on a pile of rocks. That's what life can be like when times are hard and there's no effective law.

Adventures in Ireland 1: Localism and the satnav; bathing in slime

2011-08-15T23:34:00.002+01:00

I've now had my phone (destroyed by Irish rain) repaired, have devirused the main computer, welcomed another laptop into our home and taught it the house rules, had the car fixed following the breakdown it politely waited for us to get back from Holyhead to have, and fixed the shelf that fell off the wall in the middle of the night we arrived back. Yes, to a Ragnorok of household appliances. So now I can spend time writing my blog.

Stuck in Dublin traffic we have time to discover our satnav's map is not just Britain, but the British Isles, so we use it to get out of Dublin and on our way to County Mayo. By nightfall, we are in Ballina, and, flushed with our earlier success, attempt to get the machine to direct us to Bonniconlan, the nearest village to the hamlet our friend Donal lives in. Judy tries various spellings (we're already alerted to the range of spellings employed as Gaelic turns into English), but the device is having none of it. So we try 'Knockroe', the name of the actual hamlet. The satnav offers us a few choices this time, one of which is in Co Mayo, in the vicinity of Ballina. Hoorah,we think, and drive on, to a suburb of Ballina with long front gardens and bungalows. I text Donal: We're in Knockroe. The text returns immediately: You are not.

So Donal directs us to Bunnyconnellan (another spelling), where he comes and fetches us to Knockroe. The third Knockroe we'd had anything to do with today (I drew a discreet veil over the first).

This Knockroe turns out to be about 5 houses on a winding lane, one step up from a farm track. I ask him how people find Knockroe. His reply is the purest example of localism I've ever heard: ‘If you don’t know how to find Knockroe, you’ve probably no business being here.’

Our valuation of local knowledge over electronic deepens a couple of days later. Having been recommended the slimy experience of bathing in seaweed, we set out early for seaside town Inniscrone. The satnav takes us on rougher and rougher tracks, two stages at least worse than the road through Knockroe, until I'm starting to worry about the car making it in one piece. The terrain changes from small roads through woodland to open sections of bog, scarred by deep turf-digging trenches. I imagine we will emerge from this, onto a proper road, but suddenly the satnav put up its orange flag, and announces 'We have reached our destination'. We are at a crossroads between two potholed mud tracks with peat bog as far as the eye can see. The Ox Mountains looks twice as near as they should, and the only human activity visible is a few figures on the distant horizon doing something with a JCB. We get out and look round, imagining what it would be like to call the breakdown service here, then get back in and retrace our course.

We get to Inniscrone eventually, after a second false pass. We'd promised to change money for Donal, only to discover Inishcrone hasn't got a bank. So, back to Ballina, by which time we're ready for lunch. We shop, get Euros and finally make it to the Enniscrone Seaweed Baths.
What an experience. Each private room has a cedarwood steam box, and a bath which delivers hot seawater and is already full of seaweed and seaweed extract, cooked from vegetation gathered that day. It's Edwardian, very steam punk, and no pun. You steam, you soak, you please yourselves for as long as you like, floating in the slime. Highly recommended. Oh yes, it's good for you too.

Back at Donal's, the satnav tale goes down well. He takes us out on one of his walks, deep in Kilbride Bog, where we'd been misled to that afternoon, to a wilderness as wild as it gets in these islands.

Review of 'Exhale: an Overview of Breathwork' by Gunnel Minett

2011-07-21T14:01:00.006+01:00

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Exhale-Overview-Breathwork-Gunnel-Minett/dp/0863154646

I first experienced connected breathwork at a workshop led by Ramsay Dukes at the 1991 IOT World Seminars in Lockenhaus, Austria. It was such an impressive experience, that 20 minutes of breathing differently, that I went home determined to learn how to do it.

I bought the only books available at the time - 'Rebirthing in the New Age' (Yes; none of us is innocent) by Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray, and 'Vivation - the Science of Enjoying the Whole of Your Life', by Jim Leonard and Phil Laut.

These were the in-house manuals of Rebirthing*, and its lineal descendant Vivation. The other great lineage of connected breathwork descends from Stanislav Grof, whose fascinating books do not tell you anything about how to do breathwork, so those two books really were the only ones at that time.

A few more books have come out since then (see my website under 'Breathwork Resources' for a brief list), and I shall retrospectively review some of them over the next year; this helps me to clarify to myself what still needs saying about breathwork, which in turn will influence what I write in my next breathwork book.

The first chapter, The Importance of the Breath, reviews what most people do not know about how important breathing is. Links are made between conscious subjective experience and physiological processes. Minett explains the book's title - the importance of exhalation is not only expel CO2; defensive muscle tension prevents us exhaling as deeply as we can: 'How we exhale shows how willing we are to trust what happens to us and go with the flow of life.'

We learn an astonishing statistic - 60% of all emergency ambulance rides in USA's largest cities involve hyperventilation or other breathing disorders.

Chapter 2, The Power of the Breath, is a historical overview, a rich compendium of techniques, including a terrific review of the role of breath in magical/meditative practices and soul lore, spanning the Athos island monks to the !Kung and many other peoples who are still living traditionally.

Good survey of the psychotherapeutic background to breathwork, the first time I've come across a discussion of Reich and 'body psychotherapy' in a breathwork book, and the author correlates the symptoms of kundalini arising with possible physiological mechanisms. She also covers the Buteyko method for treating asthma, another first in any breathwork book I've seen.

All these things help contextualize BW, which in turn enables us to understand what we are doing with it. We have come quite a way since Orr, Ray, Laut and Leonard in understanding what is actually happening in a breathwork session.

Chapter 3, Healing and the Breath, has an excellent run-down on the physiology of breathing, the best I’ve seen in a breathwork book. It’s good to have, for instance, something on why alternate nostril breathing works, looking into the physiology of the ida-pingala system.

She continues into modern breathwork, the two lineages of Leonard Orr and Stanislav and Christina Grof. Orr's stuff is contaminated with a daft immortalism, which Minett critiqued in a recent article for the free online magazine Breathwork News (http://www.breathwork.be/), so I'm a bit surprised she has any time for such nonsense in this book.

It gets worse, though: she shows a seriously uncritical eye when it comes to things which claim to be 'spiritual'. That word blinds people, even intelligent people, to the toxicity of the teachings of the likes of 'Breatharian' 'Jasmuheen'. This person, who somehow remains out of jail whilst encouraging fatal eating disorders with the lie that people can live without eating, represents the point where breathing philosophies impact with the Darwin award.

Mentioning such people on the same page as the wonderful healing science and magic of breathwork brings the latter into disrepute, for thoroughly understandable reasons. Nobody should be asked to take seriously such rubbish on their way to healing.

There are a couple of other problematic statements. On p152 we are told that ‘some foodstuffs can cause autism in children’ – whilst there is some promising research going on in this area, this is a bit of a scattershot statement for such a subtle and complex field.
She also mentions a bizarre-sounding theory of how trauma is stored, to take into account the existence of pre-birth memories: in ‘chemicals’, stored ‘anywhere in the body’. This may be true, but needs much more detail before we can take it on as a working theory.

She makes interesting points about hyperventilation, which of course sits right next to the mechanisms by which breathwork leads to an extraordinary state of consciousness (ESC). She also sounds confused over the hyperventilation (HV) vs superventilation (SV) debate: surely they’re the same physiological thing, in different contexts? You have assistance, and a healing frame for the experience with SV, but not with HV.

There's an excellent guide to the physiological and emotional changes experienced in giving birth, and being born, and a fine appreciation of the placebo effect, putting it in its proper place as a sign of the chief mechanism of healing, the body’s own. This contrasts vividly with the irritation shown by drug trial people against that wonderful effect, showing just how little pharmaceutical companies care about patient health.

There's also a good overview of the 3-brain notion, reptile-mammal-neocortex, the fourth zone of the frontal lobes, and what she treats as a 5th zone, the heart-nerves. She has an interesting interpretation of the function of these neurons: ‘The heart selects the information that corresponds best with the inner world and interprets it to fit our individual world view’.

There are lots of very interesting exercises, which I’m still trying out. Keenly - since Minett points out that the brain expands and contracts as we breathe, so that faster and more intense breath gives the brain a massage!.

She examines the role of breathwork alongside conventional approaches, and here falls into that weak PoMo argument that ‘there is a growing recognition that what we call ‘objective facts’ in reality are only mental constructions’.
For a demolition of such attitudes, see my review of Alan Sokal's 'Beyond the Hoax',http://chaotopia-dave.blogspot.com/2010/11/magical-thinking-science-and.html.

The problem she’s addressing is of course our old enemy parascience, the talking of science-like religious drivel by scientists, the shallow triumphalism of scientists blundering into areas science is not competent to address, and then aggressively defending their occupation of these territories with straw-man arguments.

We don't need some hippy-dippy paradigm shift in order to fight parascience – all we need is clear thinking. Such arguments as we find here merely ally the book with worldviews which are being discredited, weakening breathwork’s credibility, its status as an objectively effective technique.

The final chapter, The Future of Breathwork, contains a plea to bring more challenge, meaning and stimulation into the over-controlled lives of adolescents, suggesting initiation rituals. This sounds like a great idea, but who would run such schemes, and what belief-system would over-arch it all? In the absence of a universally-accepted religion (for which I'm grateful) I can only imagine such a thing happening in small tribe-sized communities.

So where is this book in the multiverse of breathwork?
It is very much a book about the 'spiritual' dimensions of our craft. I use quote marks because spirituality is an extremely problematic term in itself: for a start, check Watkins Bookshop's usage (see blog April 2011); clearly, it can mean many things, and has a span which reaches from the sublime to the embarassingly bad.

Still, we probably need the word; I just prefer not to use it, when I can find a less devalued (or simply a clearer) alternative term.

This is a good book, but contaminated with newage wishful thinking. We are judged by the company we keep, and some of the stuff around breathwork must put off those who are not naturally inclined to faith, the god-minus genotypes amongst us.

For instance, I'm very glad I didn't read Jim Morningstar's intro before asking for this book as a Yule gift, because I'd have missed a worthwhile read, and it is really not necessary to go along with Mr Morningstar's personal faith in a benign universe to get good things from either breathwork or this book.

As for the new age, Minett doesn’t mention the most significant criticism of it, that it is driven by consumerism, tainted at core by the shallowest philosophy mankind has ever devised. It rests on a kind of spiritual tourism, a consumption of novelty. If spirituality means anything worthwhile at all, that value lies at the opposite pole to the new age.

Yes, breathwork needs to grow up and leave behind this religious guff: we have a wonderful set of techniques for healing, the exploration of higher consciousness and its magical properties, and we don't need bargain-basement metaphysics to make it work.

Would I recommend this book? Yes, but probably only to completist breathwork coaches who want a decent but pricey review of the field. The £20 price tag will put most off; it's a nicely produced, stout paperback with glossy paper, but not so lavish as to justify such a high price.

* Not to be confused with various psychodramatic rebirth techniques involving pushing and lubricant gel.

Two Energy Magic workshops

2011-07-20T17:54:00.000+01:00

Two posts in a day - I'm catching up, not setting a new pace for myself!

The pilgrimage attitude: I bring something. This is the opposite of tourism, where I go to consume something, the something being ‘differentness’. (All travellers – read Hakim Bey’s ‘Overcoming Tourism’, at http://hermetic.com/bey/tourism.html )

So I went on a ridiculously early flight to my Austrian workshop. Well, 7.15 is not in itself ridiculously early but factor in the 'arrive 2 hours early' acrobatics of current security and the fact that London's underground does not run all night, I had to get up at 3 in order to get 2 night buses.

But at least it wasn’t Ryanair - no food ban, the flight is not packed (with people who’ve never been on Ryanair before), and the seats have pockets in the back for your books. There is no sense that you're a victim lured onto one of their flights to be bamboozled, tricked, and ripped off. And for no difference in price either.

So I'm definitely not complaining. I decided to enjoy the sleeplessness amidst the crumbling charms of Schloss Limberg, and presented a workshop on Energy Magic. People loved it: We did the breath, felt the energy, went outside to feel it in the forest, and as we came back in, there was the most almighty crack of thunder and the heavens opened.

That's not the first time I've seen such a thing, and I regaled the participants with the tale of a storm in upstate New York that our chaotron seemed to kick off. The flimsy wall of the seminar room let water in, and we had to staunch the flow with sheets before we moved on to doing healing with the energy.

Three people lay down, other sat or stood while we did healing on them. I succeeded in following two of them up over the next couple of weeks, and both healings were sustained, not mere temporary good feelings.

My next presentation was at Pendle Hill Pagan Camp. The success of this session came as a bit of a surprise, because some of the people who turned up didn't seem to want to do any work. However those who did carried it well, and everyone seemed to be having a great time. Two healings I’m aware of happened, one of the recipients of which I managed to sustain contact with.

Her experience was quite far from any of the healings I've reported on these pages - more like a deep trance leading to emotional and spiritual resolution; more like the kind of thing I'm familiar with as a breathwork coach.
.
The dimensions of energy work continue to unfold; there is plenty to do in seeking this mystery.

Heavens to Murgatroyd exhibition - some thoughts

2011-07-20T17:17:00.001+01:00

http://newsevents.arts.ac.uk/event/heavens-to-murgatroyd/

I know, the exhibition's been closed for weeks, so why am I bothering reviewing it? Well, certain features of this show and how it portrayed itself stuck in my throat, so here goes.

First, check out the above, still-live link, the description of this exhibition - or just take my word for how grand it all sounds.

Remember a day when art didn't need a slew of justification, an ocean of context, a swaying stack of theories? And I had reservations about the title - it's the expression of the 50s cartoon character Snagglepus. Wikipedia lists no magical dimensions to this pink lion, so unless the presenters of this show have some personal thing going about the magic of Snagglepuss, this title strikes me as shallow and lazy.

Still, we're all acrobats of the double- and triple-bluff these PoMo days, so we went anyway; the whole shtick promised a real breakout thing.

- but 8 pieces? And the 'installation' that we are told 'will wrap the exterior of the Arts Gallery' turns out to be a poster, admittedly a gigantic one, in the window.

I wasn't going to bother reviewing this little show. After all, I've seen more beautiful, freaky postmodern art objects on a single IOT altar. Many times.

And this is what bothered me and made me write this: the objects on those altars were contextualized to magic, whereas it seemed to me that the objects in this show didn't engage at all with the actual functions of either magic or mysticism; neither did they challenge the consensus ghettoization of magical thinking. This exhibition felt as if it was embarassed by its association with such flaky notions, choosing instead to hide behind the skirts of this glittering, empty culture in order to pay the rent.

This is a kind of cultural imperialism, like explorers arriving at an isolated village and carting away all the cult objects to show back in WestCiv; these artists have appropriated a style - mystery - and isolated it from its meaning, so they can sell it. Or maybe more that they've visited a ghetto, appropriated the style of the original, vital artwork and then gone away and made a fashion statement out of it, its shallowness reflected in the choice of the show's name.

So what could artists be doing with magic? Maybe try engaging with it a bit more; that engagement would surely show through in your theory-blurbs.

Or take a lesson from artists who have managed the interface between art and magic much more interestingly, such as the artist known as Snakebeings (http://www.snakebeings.co.nz/index_2.php ). He approaches the issue from the other end - with a starting point of Catholic magic as found in Compostela, he constructed strange engines for belief, theurgy and divination: here, the irony did not overbalance the seriousness of the questions the pieces asked. This is an artist who is moved and maybe conflicted about magic, not limply theoretical.

Perhaps the most telling exchange was the one my lover had with the woman who was minding the exhibits; she asked her why the Dream Machine in the corner wasn't working. The reply was along the lines of 'the artist thought it was appropriate that it degenerated over time'.
Oh dear, what sad, pretentious hippy crap to justify laziness. Not good enough! Try harder!

Robert Leihy's Trip Manual

2011-05-26T13:03:00.000+01:00

Robert Leihy's Trip Manual
http://psychedelicpsychology.org/

I posted my review of 'Psychedelic Information Theory' on Amazon, and, having retrospectively bemoaned the lack of non-dogmatic trip manuals in that review, I was pointed at this one by Mr Leihy.

He has some very worthwhile things to say about the psychedelic experience. One of them is his contrasting of the rational mind with a 'spontaneous thought generator' that generates new content in psychedelic experience.

This is like a concretization of the functions Kent (Psychedelic Information Theory) ascribes to spontaneous self-organization of the subunits that make up top-down consciousness, after the top-down control has been disrupted by psychedelics.

He goes on to pull together the rational mind and the spontaneous thought generator into a single system, in which both new psychedelic content and rational thought are 'output from the spontaneous thought generator ... Rational thoughts pop up just like any other spontaneous thoughts.'

He has an admirably sane, anti-dogmatic approach to cosmic visions:
'In my own humble opinion, the overall cosmic concept that existence is a complete mystery releases a person from the controversy over which cosmic answers to consider as absolute truths.'

And:
'...all of the various sometimes-conflicting “answers” to cosmic questions are really improvable assumptions. The mysteries of spirit, causation, free will, and the nature of being remain completely intact even after a religious experience.'
Now that's what I call Chaos Magic.

He has an enlightened view of the current worst-of-all-worlds legal mess around drugs, and is convinced that engagement with psychedelics (in which he includes cannabis) is generally healing.
He has a lot of faith in people making use of the positive experiences they get on psychedelics in their everyday life, to make themselves 'smarter, stronger, and better people', but is realistic about psychedelics not necessarily 'curing' addictive patterns.

The advice for running psychedelic sessions is very good. For instance:
'Ground control can always talk to the user in a rational manner and help him to separate his inner experience from the outside world if necessary. Questions such as “What are you experiencing now? ”, “Is there much visual imagery? ”, “Can you interpret your experience?”, and “Does your experience seem to be leading toward a goal?” will help the user to activate the rational observer in his mind while at the same time still experiencing the psychedelic experience.'

I expected things to go downhill with the Religion chapter, like they usually do, but was refreshed by Leihy's non-dogmatic, sceptical approach to the (very real, subjectively) psychedelic experience of God.
'Huxley makes the assumption and believes that what he calls “Mind at Large”, is truly God, the knower of all things. I hang back one step and take the more cautious approach and consider the religious experience to be one of many different cosmic concepts that can be experienced fully but none of which can be absolutely proved or disproved.'

However, he does seem to slip into a starry-eyed view of the religion problem:
'Recognizing the awesome and miraculous nature of existence and its extreme complexity can take the place of worship.'
If only that were the case for the majority of people. The persistence of simple, dogmatic faith into adulthood is one of the most problematic features of human behaviour, and, as sad as it sounds, it looks like most people will never grow up enough to tolerate ambiguity or engage in real enquiry.

Still, he is not sunk in dumb newage faith, despite his quoting the highly dubious Deepak Chopra.

He advises something like a Chaos Magic approach to Invocation:
'If COEX systems symbolized by the serene sage, the loving Aphrodite, and the confident and honorable superhero were close to the surface of consciousness in a person’s daily life, his relationship with the outside world could be quite pleasant, productive, and satisfying.'

I was intrigued by his statement that 'One’s relation to an assumed or a real God is a basic and important personal COEX system, and the less conflict within it the better.'. He goes on to suggest we find 'comfortable assumptions and convictions to resolve conflicts within this domain of mystery'

This is a therapeutic resolution that is no doubt worthwhile for some people, but I'm not sure I want 'comfortable' assumptions or convictions, and he does say some very dubious things about this issue:

'There is even a cosmic resolution between the concepts of the creationists and the evolutionists. Assuming that existence is an ongoing process influenced by spirit, ... it would not be too much of a jump in logic to assume that God is creating existence in such a way to make it appear that evolution has and still is taking place. He could be creating even older bones in the ground for us to find in the future even as we speak ... Evolution could be taking place but God could be creating it.'

That's rubbish: the above isn't evolution, but a cynical facsimile of it, a lie. If we want to honour God, then please let's give him the good grace to make laws and, most of the time (apart from miracles) let things run according to those laws. The laws of Nature as the mind of God, and so on.

But Leihy is defending a very different kind of god here, a shyster who hides himself deliberately, an authoritarian father out to trick and hurt his children into dumb, terrified obedience, to paralyze their intellect. This is William Blake's sociopathic bully Nobadaddy, probably the most evil god ever invented, and there is no way I want to 'get right with' that thug.

Back to the good stuff; in the final Summary, he writes:
'I believe that the greatest long-term benefit of psychedelic experience is that it can help to reduce emotional, psychological, and philosophical tensions to the point where calmness, relaxation, clear thinking, and the basic appreciation of life can become more prevalent. Living in a more relaxed body and with a clearer mind if a great benefit in this turbulent and uncertain world. In addition, the universal need for “self transcendence”, as is sometimes pursued with dangerous drugs and extreme activities, can be fully satisfied with minimal risk and with absolutely no poisonous effects or aftereffects'

Well said, Mr L; these truths need arguing again and again, then maybe, just maybe one day things will start to change for the better.

More Energy Magic events plus a brief rant

2011-05-23T20:10:00.000+01:00

In a couple of weeks I'm facilitating a workshop on practical energy magic, at the Hagazussa pagan festival in Austria (http://babajaga.hagazussa.tv/). This will be the other end of and hopefully a culmination of my first year of teaching energy magic, not to mention experimenting much more rigorously with it.

The weekend after that I'm leading a one-day breathwork intensive in my home town of Sheffield. You can book at:
http://m.facebook.com/event.php?eid=147839925288313&refid=25

Then the weekend after that, I'm back teaching energy magic again at the Pendle Witch Camp, my first visit to that festival. Looks like some good things happening, check it out at: http://www.pendlewitchcamp.co.uk/

While on the subject of 'subtle energies', I'll take the opportunity to resume my rant about parascience. Some of what science is doing to interface with 'subtle energies' is very good, like Chinese researchers making sense out of qigong in terms of physics. The decades-old work on the microwave aspect of qi/chi has already been used to design new and more effective healing procedures.
This is wonderful, but there's an important issue at stake every time we describe the physics correlate of some subtle experience: that we never to let the external, physical description of the experience, (which belongs to what Wilberian integralists would describe as Upper Right Quadrant) dominate, coarsen and defile the subjective (Upper Left Quadrant) dimensions of the experience.
This needs to be recognized as the core principle in combating the insidious, disastrous cultural toxin of parascience (Twitter #parascience, @dleeahp)

Robin Williamson and John Renbourn in Sheffield

2011-04-17T20:59:00.001+01:00

Robin Williamson and John Renbourne, Friday 15th April, The Greystones pub, Sheffield.

The first time I saw Robin Williamson play was with the Incredible String Band, in Cardiff, in 1970, on an all-day bill which also included the Four Tops. For me, the String Band were the archetypal British Acid Folk band, and that had a lot to do with Williamson's strange, fey songs and his skill with numerous instruments, many no-one in this country had heard of until then.

Between then and this gig I've seen him twice more, and both performances were different again - jug band style with Clive Palmer, bardic storyteller with harp. This performance was a bit of all of those, salted with amusing anecdotes from his long and interesting life.

The gig was sold out and, in fact, heavily over-sold - there wasn't even any standing room by the time the players were on stage, and this made for a rather spiky, irritable crowd. All that changed, as people consumed their sacraments of bitter beer, and the music got under way. Williamson played guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and Irish Harp, with real attack; his hair was long and grey but his voice as good as ever, still sinuous and quirky, and sensitive to the other singer, weaving notes around John Renbourn's. After the first two numbers Renbourn stayed very much in the background, the unobtrusive, excellent accompanist, around whose notes Williamson wove his meticulous ornamentation.

Before long, all irritation was forgotten, as we all surrendered to the power of one of the best and most civilizing things in the world - live music. Surely only Robin Williamson could get away with playing Howlin' Wolf's 'Goin'down slow' on an Irish harp...

Review of 'Psychedelic Information Theory' by James Kent

2011-04-16T18:38:00.000+01:00

Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason. James L. Kent, PIT Press / Supermassive LLC, 2010.
http://psychedelic-information-theory.com

My acid-drenched late-teens spanned the very end of the 1960s. I longed for ways to describe and understand my highs and, at that time, the only book that claimed to interpret psychedelic experience was Timothy Leary's book of that name, which, modelled on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, handed the entire thing, lock, stock and goofy (but superior) grin, over to oriental mysticism.

What's more, the illegalization of acid in 1966 meant that book was left high and dry, washed up by the first wave of research, and so, by default, acquired a much more canonical status than it deserved. Another phase of investigation didn't emerge until the late 80s, when the MDMA craze catapulted psychedelics into the public domain again. Since then we've seen a cautious re-appearance of studies on psychedelic experiences; we seem, at least for the time being, to be in a modest renaissance of psychedelic research and evaluation.

James Kent's book is a timely and thorough attempt to describe and evaluate the psychedelic experience in non-religious, non-spiritist terms. He defines psychedelic information theory as: 'The study of nonlinear information creation in the human imagination, particularly in states of dreaming, psychosis and hallucination', and on its scope:

'It is the conjecture of PIT that all mystical states, including healing and regenerative states, have unique formal nonlinear qualities that can be described in physical terms close enough to make good approximations. This means that PIT is also a work of technical shamanism, neurotheology, or spiritual neuroscience, and can be referenced in the clinical application of psychedelic drugs in shamanic ceremony, mystical ritual, or psychedelic therapy.'

That's an early warning of unusual word-usage, with the peculiarly broad use of 'mystical states' telling us straightaway that Mr Kent does not hang out with mystics. He also positions PIT next to chaos magic, defined rather oddly but not inaccurately as:
'The practice of using ritual techniques of spiritual transcendence to manipulate belief systems ... an occult blend of neo-shamanism, cognitive theory, and social theory.'
More of which later...

Writing about how psychedelic information moves through societies, he has the insight to ask why we should care about PIT and answers with a whole chapter (2). Also, he is alert to the well-known dangers of psychedelically-triggered megalomania, and to the bad trip, which generates 'Psychedelic information with negative value ... delusional, paranoid, false, or subverts the health of the individual or culture.'

On the big question, What is Consciousness?, Kent lists, with relentless, confident abstraction, minimum requirements in data processing terms for a consciousness such as the human. Consciousness is seen as linearly stable - in other words, it tens to generate a single, linear narrative:
'Consciousness can perform many functions, but it only performs one function at a time'.

Is this a more extreme position than mine, in my review of Pete Carroll's 'The Octavo' last month? Or is it just that he's saying 'perform' in the place I would have put 'monitor', as in 'be aware of' or 'identify with as self'?

Yes, it took me a while to get over the 'systems' language (Ken Wilber readers: this is a very Lower Right quadrant discourse), but as I did, I got more excited by what this book represents. It is a sober (yes!), scientific approach to understanding not only the effects of psychedelics on the brain, but the effects on society; a real stab at a secular description of the relevance of tripping.

Discussing the other qualities of consciousness, he writes:
'Self-awareness is an epiphenomena [sic] of the functions and properties of consciousness maintaining linear stability through time.'

The use of the term 'epiphenomenon' rather than, for instance, 'subjective experience of', always flags up my parascience warning light, because it relegates self-awareness to a sideshow. This is an example of the reductionist viewpoint entering territory it shouldn't, the essence of the parascience attitude.

His theory uses a modular model of consciousness, which relates it both to chaos magic and to traditional soul-lore such as the Germanic. Approaching the psychedelic experience from this viewpoint:
'All hallucinogens must first destabilize top-down coherence of consciousness to produce novel states of spontaneous organization between the modular sub-units; this is how all hallucination begins. ... Destabilizing or splintering consciousness into novel configurations is the essence of psychedelic exploration'.

Yes! Now he's talking my language. This is the 'solve' of 'solve et coagula', the invocation of Ginnung, the hanging of Odin on the tree, the necessary dissolution before a 'collapse into higher coherence' is possible.

This insight develops into his 'Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action'. Writing about our ordinary selfhood, he echoes Aldous Huxley in 'Doors of Perception', when he wrote of removing the mind's filters:
'What we perceive as waking consciousness is a synthesis of bottom-up sensation modified by top-down expectation and analysis . ... The top-down filtering and focusing of incoming sensory signal is ... perceptually seamless ... Tonic inhibition ... suppresses what is considered abnormal or outside the acceptable range of consciousness.'

Kent introduces a very useful model of how we do magic ('shamanism') on psychedelics:
' ... even though psychedelics destabilize top-down modulatory control of consciousness, feedback control and linear system stability can be entrained back into coherence via external periodic drivers, including rhythmic motor activity, drumming, singing, chanting, rocking back and forth, dancing, and so on. It is no accident that these are also the basic formal elements of shamanic ritual.'

In a very strange chapter, he models the form of the psychedelic interruption of ordinary consciousness using an 'ADSR envelope', something from the world of sound-engineering 'by plotting the attack, decay, sustain, and release (ADSR envelope) of the hallucinogenic interrupt as it effects [sic] consciousness'.

On the subjective experience of nitrous oxide inhalation, he writes:
'The periodic interrupt of N2O can be modeled as a perceptual wave ambiguity that toggles back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness at roughly 8 to 11 frames-per-second, or 8-11 Hz (hertz)'
Where do these numbers come from? Looking to footnotes, we read that the 'interrupt envelope is an approximation based on subjective reports.'

There's a lovely table for us psyche-nerds, listing a range of psychedelic properties that correlate subjective experience with binding affinities for aminergic receptor targets. He comes up with some fairly detailed models of how we hallucinate, and mentions an effect I'd always thought was psychosomatic:
' A common early side-effect of hallucinogen use is stomach tightening and intestinal cramping; this is undoubtedly due to 5-HT2A agonism interfering with serotonergic modulation of smooth muscle contraction in the gut.'

Having established that the brain's synaptic connections can be changed through training, he states that this is what makes shamanism possible, and he introduces Part II - Shamanism in the Age of Reason. 'Shamanism is the craft of evoking spontaneous organization of psychedelic information in a subject or group of subjects ... This ... fulfills the functions of therapy, sorcery, mind control, applied psychedelic science, targeted neuroplasticity, behavioral conditioning, and tribal bonding ... Physical Shamanism, or Shamanism in the Age of Reason, is differentiated from Spiritual Shamanism in that physical shamanism relies on models of neural oscillators and resonant wave entrainment as opposed to spirit models of channeling, telepathy, or clairvoyance.'

Then, after the promising start referencing Chaos Magic, he slides into conventional black/white magic nonsense:
'... the shaman learns to apply this technology for healing and positive plasticity, the sorcerer succumbs to the temptation to use this technology for black magic and negative plasticity'.

He has difficulty getting to grips with sorcery, defining it as 'the craft of manipulating the fabric of psychedelic space for personal gain or vendetta', even though he lists among the relevant powers a few which don't have to be used harmfully at all, such as clairvoyance, shape shifting, remote viewing and telepathy, as well as the darker skills such as curses and mind control.

This confusion, I suspect, arises from a lack of magical experience. He states: 'If shamanic sorcery is a kind of nonlinear chaos magic it should also be considered to be somewhat unpredictable, uncontrollable, prone to high rates of failure, and potentially dangerous.'
Yes, it certainly can be. And there are people out there doing it. When he says 'Anyone experimenting in the field of psychedelic shamanism should be careful to avoid the dangers and temptations of sorcery', I would add: 'Or if you're going to do it, at least avoid sloppy practice.'

This attitude does seem to be a little bit connected to his wishful thinking about the dance scene: 'Goa Trance music is the psychedelic essence of resonant hallucinogenic tryptamine interrupt ... Using an electrically amplified sound system, a trance DJ can manipulate a tribe of thousands in the same way a traditional shaman manipulates a tribe of dozens.'
What a pity that, judging from my experience, virtually no psy-trance fans use tryptamines, but confine themselves to the totally unchallenging phenethylamines such as MDMA. Is it completely different in the US? Or has he been seduced into the shallow newage attitudes around 'shamanism'?

He is good on self-transformation through repeated exposure to 'shamanic' events, and even seems to be referring here to what a magician would call the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, or Wode-self:
'The holographic image of idealized self does not emerge in a single moment or even in a single psychedelic session; the organization of a psychedelic meta-identity is a process that may take many hours of a single psychedelic session or possibly multiple psychedelic sessions to fully complete.'

One of the most hopeful passages is a section on that mysterious sense that most ayahuasca users get that some transformation is happening at the level of gene expression. He notes that 'hallucinogens target 5-HT2A receptors, and ... 5-HT2A activation has also been demonstrated to produce powerful anti-inflammatory effects in cardiovascular and soft tissues; and 5-HT2A agonists like LSD may produce potent anti-inflammatory effects against TNF-a (tumor necrosis factor alpha), an autoimmune regulator which has been indicated in atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, type II diabetes, depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease.'

This is tremendously exciting, especially for people like the two guys from www.clusterbusters.com I met at the Breaking Convention conference last weekend, who could only get relief from their crippling pain and fear from regular LSD use.

Dealing with spirits, he has the wisdom to assert that '... psychedelic spirits are tricksters', but recognizes that 'it does not matter if the spirits are real or delusion, the information they generate is real and can be analyzed from a formal perspective.'

Finally, he approaches the subtle and knotty problem of 'Gnosis, the All One, and Nonlinear Communion', and concludes that 'Without debating the metaphysical existence of God, the formal techniques for subjectively communing with the All One are reliable and repeatable, and can be readily achieved'.

There are some problems with this book. The minor one is that it very badly needs a proof-reader. Mis-spellings and solecisms abound; 'entoptic' is spelt 'entopic' in a chapter heading, and consistently thereafter, and there are some small but annoying problems with his biology, like reversing the night-day attributions of the retina's rod and cone cells (and 'amine crystals' do not pass thro the blood brain barrier - oww, that hurts! - amine molecules do).

The more major problem is that he has brought together many of the elements of a powerful theory, but it feels unfinished; the text continually swallows itself up, getting lost in a maze of details, as if it's waiting someone to come along and supply an overarching narrative.

In this book's sub-genre, there is probably nothing else since Jim DeKorne's 1994 book 'Psychedelic Shamanism'. De Korne navigates between science and magic, and never really makes a satisfactory link between them; Kent has gone much further and produced a much more useful discourse, but is confused about magic, his ideas contaminated by airy-fairy wishful thinking about shamanism.

For all those objections, this is a brave and useful work whose time has come. At its best, it reads like a manual that has dropped through a wormhole from the future, maybe 15 years on, from when we know how to run our brains.

Spirituality Redefined for the Publishing World - Watkins's Top 100

2011-04-12T19:13:00.000+01:00

http://www.watkinsbooks.com/review/watkins-spiritual-100-list

In the Spring issue of the Watkins Review, that venerable bookshop shared with us their list of 'the 100 most spiritually influential living people'. Can we learn anything from this unusual claim? What new meanings of 'spirituality' can we work out from this list?

Well, starting with numero uno, the top of what they refer to as 'The 100 Spiritual Power List', is someone I'd never previously heard of, Eckhart Toller.

This list is mainly of people I've never heard of (63 of them), and of the other 37, I've mostly not read their books. But that's just me.

The Dalai Lama is at #2; no surprise there; he would certainly fit most people's profile of the term 'spiritual'.

Ken Wilber is at #9; that also doesn't surprise me - he tries to make sense out of culture and higher consciousness, so that qualifies as spiritual.

I started getting puzzled, with Oprah Winfrey at #8. I know, I didn't either. Click on the link above; it gets weirder.

At #14 was my second big surprise - Alejandro Jodorowsky. That the creator of the wonderful film 'The Holy Mountain' can rub shoulders with the stiff, pretentious paintings of Alex Grey (#16), makes for strange bedfellows in the 'spiritual'. That writers of barking-mad drivel such as Drunvalo Melchizedek (#36) can share the space with the divine Alan Moore (#49) is even weirder; that the fantasist Erich von Däniken (#63) can hobnob with Stanislav Grof (#89), one of the greatest healers of all time, is just bloody daft.

But then again, I shouldn't be surprised; this is a list of what sold, so there are no criteria of quality at all.

Still, someone at Watkins Review did have to decide which books, films, paintings and lives (Nelson Mandela, #19) had some quality called 'spiritual'. So what explains the inclusion of Dan Brown at #42? No, there doesn't seem to be another world-renowned writer of this name; it really is the man who wrote 'The Da Vinci Code', so what is he doing here? I'm not paying £4.95 for a copy of the Review to find out, so I guess I'll never know.

Review of Breaking Convention

2011-04-12T00:06:00.000+01:00

Breaking Convention: a multidisciplinary conference on psychedelic consciousness.
Fri April 1st to Sun Apr 3rd, University of Kent, Canterbury. www.breakingconvention.co.uk

I only made up my mind to go to this three weeks before the event, and by then the only B&Bs left vacant in Canterbury were in the £50+ pppn bracket. I took a look at the conference forum (isn't the internet marvellous), got a place to crash and acquired four passengers for my London-Canterbury drive, a motorized pilgrims' route through the gravel-island floodplain of Southwark and out along the Old Kent Road.

The first night, there was a screening of 'DMT, the Spirit Molecule', the record of Rick Strassman's work with experimental volunteers. This film illustrates a major problem in every area of internal work which leads to staggeringly ecstatic states - that so many blissed-out people literally believe they are meeting angels, extraterrestrials and so on. They project the glory and radiance of their visions outwards, rather than owning them as attractors towards which we can all work.

In other words, dear visionaries, the good and the bad news is - that glory is YOU, that Angel is what you can become, that perfect extraterrestrial civilization is what we humans could have if we stopped messing about and learned new ways to live.
The same problem crops up with a lot of mysticism - the visionary has drawn away from, maybe even mortified, his flesh, in order to attain that bliss, and yet experience of bliss is experience in the flesh, it cannot be otherwise. Instead, though, the visionary often creates a little abstract playground of transcendence, projecting the glory that belongs to the flesh into that sterile realm.

Yes, angels and perfect civilizations are real - as real as rocks - but they are made from nonlinear patterns in our destabilized brains. Think of it this way: instead of running Windows or Linux, you're running unknown systems that don't have the kind of coherence you're used to - but very strange and sometimes superior kinds of coherence arise from that chaos.

Some of the talks, especially from some of the senior heroes of psychedelia, were stuff we'd heard before, even if we've never been to this kind of thing but simply read a few books. However, those famous names do provide part of the glue that holds it all together.

The conference was actually framed as 4 events, two running in parallel at any time, meaning that no-one could take in all the talks. My talk took place in the Exceptional Experiences slot. The afternoon had a terrific turnout - 50 seats plus almost as many again on the floor and side shelves.

Amongst the talks I particularly enjoyed were Tom Froese on the origins of symbolic thought. This included a critique of David Lewis-Williams' Marxist perspective, his assumption that all change is driven by social conflict, and pointed out Lewis-Williams's reluctance to speculate about what caused the altered states that gave rise to cave paintings. Was it psilocybin? If so, it is hard to imagine how Lewis-Wiliiams's putative elite restricted that sacrament to themselves.

A challenging perspective from Kilindi Iyi's 'High dose, towards an organic singularity' - this researcher was not kidding with the title - he claimed to have been modelling the shamans of pre-Sahara civilizations when he ingested 30-40g doses of dried psilocybin mushrooms, and became 'something more than human.' He also proposed the interesting speculation that, when the Sahara dried out, its civilizations moved to Nile, taking their gods with them, and forming the earliest layers of the Egyptian religion.

And Kalliope Tavoulari spoke on 'Psychedelics & scientific breakthroughs.' Everyone knows about Francis Crick (member of Soma, an org for legalizing cannabis) attributing his visualization of DNA structure to an LSD session, but the speaker had found a few other top scientists inspired by psychedelics, including Kary Banks Mullis, who invented the immensely useful DNA sequencing technique of Polymerase Chain Reaction.

My talk will probably be published soon; I shall be sure to announce it here. The purpose of it was to introduce the methodology of chaos magic to the psychedelic discourse - and I think it got a good reception.

Of the other events, I enjoyed the excerpt from Donal Ruane's forthcoming film on ayahuasca shamanism and his healing journey. One member of the audience had brought photos of a strange object he had thrown up during a recent ayahuasca session, which enabled his healing and made for a fascinating if grotesque discussion.

Robert Dickins gave a talk entitled 'The rise and fall of psychedelic literature', discussing how our views of LSD had shifted. Dickins made the important point that, with Leary's 'The Psychedelic Experience', a trip manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, an absolute meaning was ascribed to tripping, and this throttled psychedelic literature for a long time.

I would say that the same problem has come about, much more slowly, in internal exploration in general, where the success of mystics on attaining 'enlightenment' has overshadowed the whole field with absolutes derived from religion.

All in all, this conference was an outstanding success. The organizers did something really important: they made the 2nd ever psychedelic conference happen in the British Isles, the only previous one being in Bath in 2004.

Not only that, but they facilitated a bunch of more than 600 people to self-assemble from scratch a highly functional micro-culture. On the first morning, walking in to the conference a little late with two other delegates, a man stopped his car and gave us a lift. This was just one example of how civilized people were.

I did get the impression that, although exhausted, the organizers were sufficiently happy with the result to want to do it again in a few year' time. I hope so.

Review of The God Instinct by Jesse Bering

2011-03-25T10:43:00.000Z

The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life, by Jesse Bering
http://www.jessebering.com/the-god-instinct.php

In 'The God Delusion', it seems that Dawkins would like to give believers a good, sensible talking to about their irrational belief, in the faith that the searing light of reason will banish those ideological shadows. Jesse Bering's book is of a refreshingly different stripe; basically, he is telling us that we are stuck with a tendency to God-related thinking.

He points out that our proneness to believe in God come not from ideology but biology. He takes the main elements that contribute to religious thought - the idea of a personal God, the idea that every life has a purpose, and the idea of life after death - and shows how our mental proclivities add up to a massive pressure to engage in such beliefs.

Why? These behavioural features conferred selective advantages and, as many have pointed out, evolution produces survival, not truth.

The features he examines are the 'theory of mind', the ability we develop during childhood that enables us to put ourselves inside other peoples' heads, and a bias towards teleology. Combined together, these traits bias us strongly towards notions of purposeful design. Also:
'...our theory of mind, erroneously applied to the stateless state of death, orient us toward belief in the afterlife.'

So far, he has due and realistic respect for the million-year old reality generator under our hats, including the departments that just don't listen when we talk reason, if reason is going to vitiate our chances of surviving and passing on our genes.

Occasionally, though, he has a trace of the 'but it's only a trick of nature' parascience ploy, like when he considers how God could be re-introduced into an evolutionary perspective: if we choose (or can't help ourselves) to believe in God as a causal agent in our lives, then the fact that our neurology and endocrinology, as supplied by biological evolution, supplies such a powerful push towards belief in God, may be taken as evidence that God designed us to be able readily to perceive Him.

Bering considers this, and kind of rejects it. Why? Do we have to continue to reject the evidence of our immediate experience in favour of a 'but it's just nature tricking us' explanation? Maybe we have an innate bias towards that kind of thinking - we could call it 'The Completist Delusion'.

Which connects with what he says at the end of his examination of the idea of purpose, where he points out that, if we truly subscribe to Darwinian theory, we have to:
'view human life, generally, and our own lives, individually, as arising through solely nonintentional, physical means. This doesn't imply that we are 'accidents', because even that term requires a mind, albeit one that created by mistake. Rather, we simply are.'

This sounds like the basis for an atheistic mystical vision - but I imagine only a tiny minority of weirdo intellectuals would be able to utilize such a gymnasium of belief.

If there's a principle we can tease out here, it is that of honouring the prime data of human experience, which is subjective, inevitably. Maybe for some people (like the girl in Brian Wilson's song 'Wonderful'), the feeling of the existence of God is a primary datum, like being able to say 'I'.

If that tendency to feel God is not going to go away, then we have to consider the future of religion. Bering prophesies that the God-illusion is so persistent that atheists will never outnumber theists.

So we have a responsibility: we are stuck with religion, so what can we do about it? We can't leave it to what has been called the 'global conspiracy to cover up mass child rape', ie the Roman church. In their case, one can only hope that the social changes that are damaging them will continue escalating, until that church is eroded to a fraction of its present size, a tiny minority of lunatics in barbed-wire underwear, with all the decent folk who can't help seeing God left outside of it, doing something more humane.

We need to cherish and promote the better, more humane end of religion. And keep it out of the state, out of legislation and public life. It should be something you do in the privacy of your own home.

This book is fantastically well written, and abounds in intimate portraits of his own experience, making me think of the literary qualities and personal vividness of Oliver Sacks. Strongly recommended, and maybe I shall take on the magical belief that: the facts of science are given by God...

Breaking Convention - conference on psychedelic consciousness

2011-03-05T19:28:00.000Z

Breaking Convention - A multidisciplinary conference on psychedelic consciousness.
Friday 1st - Sunday 3rd April.
Details at http://breakingconvention.co.uk/

I shall be giving a talk entitled 'Solve et Coagula: psychedelic self-dissolution and supernormal abilities' at this event.
Aside from that, there are loads of speakers with some very interesting topics.

Check it out!

The Octavo, by Peter J Carroll - a review

2011-02-25T21:31:00.000Z

The Octavo, a sorcerer-scientist's grimoire, (Roundworld Edition) by Peter J Carroll. www.mandrake.uk.net

This is the second book Pete Carroll has brought out in the last two years, after a number of years' silence. In 2008, there was 'The Apophenion', which was something of a departure towards an overall philosophical position, which we might call chaoism, as distinct from chaos magic. Now he presents us with a new synthesis that aims at a much closer marriage of scientific theory and magic than he, or, to my knowledge, anyone else, has attempted.

The first thing you'll notice about this book (other than the excellent illustrations) is the subtitle. The reference will be lost on non-Pratchett experts like me; I've enjoyed a few of Pratchett's books and found others a bit twee for my taste. (I have to admit, though, that he shows superb understanding of the thermodynamics of godhood in 'Small Gods', and a brilliant vision of the Other in 'Lords and Ladies.') Apparently, there's an Octavo of Discworld spells, and it seems this volume is using the conceit that it's the Roundworld equivalent in order to show how physics and magic can be combined in two very different universes.

The second thing you'll notice is the physics. Publishers say that every equation in a book halves the readership, and there are a lot of them in The Octavo*. More, in fact, than in Liber Kaos, but they - at least the ones in the first few chapters - are of a very different kind.

The 'Equations of Magic' in Liber Kaos have always been problematic: they dealt in quantities which are not measurable, and probably never will be, like 'degree of gnosis' and 'magical link'. So, they are not really equations, but things that look like equations; what they amount to, at best, is a mental checklist, a summary of what we know about magic so far. With a shorthand like that, all that matters is that it's easily memorable, and the physico-mathematical symbolism does not help at all.

The equations in Octavo are very different. They are much more ambitious, genuinely cosmogonic in nature, and I suspect they have some very important things to say - to those who understand them rather more deeply than I do. I did get lost for much of chapters 2 and 3 (I only have maths to just short of A-level), but surfaced again at the start of Ch 4, where he compares Discworld and Roundworld physics, and comes out with some pretty profound stuff.

One of the things that's particularly interesting about Carroll's science is the way he attributes real physical - or aetheric / shadow-physical - reality to quantities that appear in the fundamental equations of physics. In Liber Kaos for instance the wavefunction in the Schroedinger equation is a measure of a real quantity in shadow-time, rather than a mere mathematical convenience, to be discarded as soon as possible in the course of calculations. No, Carroll finds a home for these misty, despised quantities, integrating them into a description of a magical universe. In The Octavo, he comments about quantum superposition, which is a concept we're normally just supposed to get our heads round, that it actually has fine detail which makes it much more physically real - the alternative forms of the particle are kind of parked in sideways-time. For me, that is a distinct improvement on the usual way superposition is described.

This realistic use of mathematical entities recalls Galen Strawson's 'real materialism'**, as does this (p97):
'A visualized or imagined event can have a similar effect on the imaginary time plane as the probability function of a material event, because it too constitutes a wave-particle event'.
In other words, 'thoughts are as real as rocks', to the real, Strawsonian materialist. Carroll also gives a physico-mathematical reality to Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields - they are the information contained in the virtual radiations emitted by everything all the time.

I do like the depiction of particles as closed universes (p23), and it's satisfying to read Theories of Everything, but the problem for the mathematically sub-literate becomes: how can I distinguish the true ones? I'm not sure that Carroll's doing away with the Big Bang (a dirty job, but someone had to do it) yields a truly more complete ToE than the current one: a steady state model of the universe comes no closer to explaining where everything comes from than the expanding-from-a-point one does, it simply makes it an unaskable question, which is not the same thing. His cosmological explanation of the red shift (the core mystery of cosmology) involves something like a new mechanism for Zwicky's previously-rejected 'tired light' hypothesis, and I have asked a mathematical friend of mine how viable an explanation it is.

Some of my reservations about this book stem from Carroll's over-willingness to form Laws. Right near the beginning of the book, he has concreted the 'multiple selves' model into one. The idea of selfhood as multiple arose out of a very postmodern milieu of thought about what we are, and has proved very useful to magicians. However, it does suffer from a vagueness at its core: it would be a good idea to clarify the difference between personalities and the moment-to-moment sense of selfhood. The former may be usefully thought of as multiple, but the sense of self is always and ever phenomenologically singular. I challenge anyone to describe how it can be sensed otherwise.

This excessive taste for laws surfaces again on p66, where Carroll attempts to prove that there is always ' an even number of selves', with an argument I found so unconvincing I suspect the author is self-consciously preaching to the choir, knowing we'll indulge him.

My main criticism of the book is that the 'Equations of Magic' reappear in Ch6. I've said above why they are not equations, but simply tally-sticks; they remind me of Frazer's useless laws of magic, but with added algebra to put more people off. Has a magician ever told you they've helped him or her plan a working?

Their inclusion wouldn't be such a bad thing if it wasn't for the very high quality of arguments pursued using real equations in the cosmological parts of the book: to someone who hasn't been following the maths very closely but can see how the EoMs cannot be real equations, they simply serve to cheapen the value of the other equations and arouse suspicion about their validity. And to use them to derive, via a complicated chain of reasoning, the conclusion that group magic is no more powerful than individual magic is pure tautology, because the only way anyone could get that conclusion would be by building it into the 'Equation' in question.

By the way, can we have a straw poll on this? My feeling is that group magic is immensely more effective for some kinds of enchantment.

The final complaint I have is a purely aesthetic one. Sure, it wouldn't be a bad idea to replace the phrase 'material base' with something else, because we do talk about servitors quite a lot. But the term 'groundsleve', to my ear, is down in the flooded and odious basement of English, along with 'staycation' and 'bromance'. (OK, I suppose that means I'll have to come up with one myself.)

Back to a few final words of praise: One of the satisfying things about this book is the way Carroll fills out and brings up to date old ideas, some of which he has developed and used years before. Like the way the good old GPR gets completed into the GCR, a much more symbolically satisfying and complete thing.

Proper weight is given to the Apocalypse, and what wizards can do to help avert the collapse our stupidity has got us into.

I have to make a special mention of the llustrations. If there was an award for 'best occult book graphics of the year', then Matt Kaybrin's would sweep it, with these bold, dark, unusual mixtures of traditional and cyber-art.

In the end, I would definitely recommend this book. It is important, maybe very important, and will stir some interesting thoughts even in the non-mathematically-inclined. Carroll's basic attitude to mysteries is the only healthy one: not to try and banish them, like the Dawkinsian parascience bunch, or use them to obfuscate, like the religious do. He writes: 'Mysteries should present challenges, not opportunities for dumb belief.'

*I showed the book to a mentally tough shaman I know, and as soon as he saw the equations, he declared he'd rather chew his leg off than try to understand them.

** Check my blog from 22/11/2010 for a review of a book by Strawson.

Online Breathwork Discussion Group starting

2011-02-22T16:51:00.000Z

I've just started a discussion group based round my booklet-CD set 'Connect Your Breath!' People with the book are doing breathwork sessions, then I am offering coaching advice online.

The venue is the new Runa College, at http://edred.net/moodle/ , although you might have to go to http://edred.net/ first to learn about the College and enrol.

Here's the blurb from the course:

This group is all about the experience of breathwork. It is highly practical, and has as its one requirement that you possess a copy of my book/CD set ‘Connect Your Breath!’ The CD is a ‘virtual coach’ you can use for a 50 minute breathwork session on your own or with someone else.

Breathwork benefits our moment-to-moment awareness and cultivates the observing position or 'observer self'. It is a much more interesting way of learning to meditate.

It cultivates our relationship with the deep parts of us that guide our development through bodily sensation - in other words, it opens us up to our 'bodily wisdom', the semi-conscious and unconscious channels through which the Wode-Fetch complex communicates with us.

It also confers mundane benefits, of relaxation, de-stressing, pain management, the overcoming of insomnia and panic attacks, and increases our appetite for life. And it is also a cure for boredom!

What to do:

Have a look at my website, www.chaotopia.co.uk, and read a bit about breathwork.

Get your copy of the book, start to practice breathwork and then there are two (not at all mutually-exclusive) options – email me personally to ask for advice on your own breathwork practice, and bring your experiences to this Forum for discussion.

Out of this discussion group, I will at some stage create a course on Breathwork, with more coaching options.

More on that later!

High Society, Mind-Altering Drugs in Culture and History - Review

2011-02-05T16:47:00.000Z

High Society, Mind-Altering Drugs in Culture and History. Exhibition at Wellcome Collection, until 27 February, Admission Free. Details at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2010/WTX063369.htm
And book, http://www.thamesandhudson.com/9780500251720.html

As you walk in the door, the first thing you see is a massive display case. It is choc-a-bloc with drug-taking paraphernalia from all around the world and throughout the ages, from ancient South American vessels for psychoactive snuff, through bongs, opium pipes, a crack pipe made from a pierced cola can to some wineglasses, full of red and white wine, sealed across the top for some recent corporate event or other. If you needed convincing of the basic idea of this exhibition, that 'Every society on Earth is a high society', then you probably needed look no further.

Artefacts around drug-taking are what this exhibition displays, not only the drug-taking kits themselves, many of which are a tribute to human ingenuity in the matter of achieving extraordinary states of consciousness, but also artworks - paintings, photos, sculptures and audio-visual installations about both the effects of psychoactive drugs on the individual and on the society he or she inhabits.

'High Society' is divided into themed sections, and one of those themes is 'The Drugs Trade'. Paintings of opium warehouses and factories give us an idea of the breathtaking scale of Anglo-Indian opium manufacture, a cornerstone of the vast wealth of the British empire at that time. Do all empires depend on addictive drugs?

The section 'From Apothecary to Laboratory' traces the medicalization of drug use, via the enormous number of patent medicines rich in heroin and cocaine which were freely available until a little under a century ago. Some of these are part of drug mythology, like the original 'Forced March' cocaine pills, produced until 1924, and popular with troops in WW1.

'Self-Experimentation' covers a wide range of the drugs people use for transformative experiences and fun, from hashish and mushrooms to the delights of nitrous oxide intoxication in the 1823 etching 'Doctor and Mrs Syntax with a party of friends, experimenting with laughing gas', in which the good Mrs Syntax and the Doctor look like they're having far too much fun, by modern medical standards.

There are some absorbing video installations, among which is the delightful 1955 BBC film of (in)famous psychedelics researcher Dr Humphrey Osmond sitting with Christopher Mayhew, whom he has just dosed with a substantial hit of mescalin. Osmond was infamous for poisoning various animals, including one unfortunate elephant, with LSD in an attempt to interpolate an LD50 for humans*, but here we see him in a more humane mode 'experimenting on a human', as the blurb has it.

It is not often one gets the chance to see a Tory MP tripping his tits off, talking about how, when Osmond questioned him, he was calling him back from an experience which took place in a realm beyond time. The BBC decided they'd gone too far on their Panorama programming with this one, and it didn't appear on our screens for many years later. Apparently, Mayhew said the experiment was one of the most interesting things he had ever done.

In 'Collective Intoxication' we sample the earliest report by a European, Richard Spruce, of intoxication with the DMT herbs of Amazonian shamanism, in the 1850s, and see a photo of Queen Elizabeth receiving a bowl of sacred kava drink from the Fijian head of state in 1982. In 'A sin, a crime, a vice or a disease?', we learn of the dilemma, voiced in those words by a public figure of the day, of how late Victorian society was to cope with mass availability of the highly addictive derivatives of poppy and coca then commonplace in high street pharmacies.

History has shown us that the decisions those legislators made have turned out to be bad ones. We have a 'drug problem' where over a billion pounds a year are spent on drug enforcement in the UK, and the official estimate of the proportion of heroin that is actually stopped from entering the country and getting distributed is 1%.

One percent: it is clear to any but the most blinkered individual that the 'war on drugs' (which, as Robert Anton Wilson pointed out, should be called the 'war on some drugs') has been 'lost'. I use quote marks because the expression 'war on drugs' is so utterly silly, it could only have been coined by a cynical politician, for a public deep in the throes of the hallucinations engendered by a skillful blend of fear and lies.

Just before we leave the exhibition, we walk through a room filled with an installation called 'Afyon', consisting of a 4-screen projection of opium fields in Turkey. The effect is mesmeric, both serene and troubling at the same time, and just outside the main rooms, on the wall of a side-corridor, there is a framed news clipping, a review of the show from The Independent. The reviewer found the exhibition a little too tempting for his taste, advising anyone trying to kick a habit to give it a miss; thinking of those fields of poppies, it's hard not to sympathize with such a view.

However, what are we to do with the facts about drugs? Sweep them under the carpet and not have exhibitions like this? I'm reminded of the disgraceful debacle over Prof David Nutt, the UK government's chief advisor on drug policy. This man was sacked for speaking the truth, as uncovered by studies on the official figures for hospital admissions and other parameters, about the relative scale of harm done by different drugs, legal and illegal.

The government didn't like the truth, and didn't want the Prof going round telling it to people, so they sacked him and issued a statement containing some drivel about what 'messages' Nutt's discoveries were sending to young people. In other words, they preferred convenient lies to proper science.

This illustrates the delusional thinking underlying all contemporary drug legislation. There is a belief afoot that humans just 'don't need' drugs, that they are some atavism of our stupid past, or some evil terror inflicted on us. This flies in the face of everything this exhibition is showing us, graphically, repeatedly - that the human being is a drug-taking animal, that this is part of a drive to transcendence that must be in our very genes, it is so universal.

Modern thinking about recreational and sacramental drug use is stuck in a fingers-shoved-tightly-in-ears-whilst-mouth-gibbers- outright-nonsense denial of the facts of nature. It reminds me of Victorian attitudes to sex, how the medical profession was at the forefront in denying the universal importance of sexuality to human beings.

Sure, there are individuals who don't take drugs and don't want to, just like, to wring some more use out of the sexual analogy, there are medically healthy couples who only have sex once a month. This doesn't invalidate the basic truth and the core message of this superb exhibition: broadly speaking, humans take psychoactive drugs: deal with it. When we deal badly with it, we get the results indicated by the final exhibit: a photograph of gold-plated handguns, from Mexico City's Museum of Drugs.

Surely we need some sort of socialized control over drugs - no-one wants to see children taking powerful psychoactives, but at the moment, we seem to have legislated the worst of all possible worlds. The responsible drug-user is punished with draconian jail sentence, young people are criminalized for possession of a herb, and the gigantic profits made possible by illegality make drug dealing the profession of choice for the most violent elements in society. If, for instance, the possession and small-scale growing of cannabis were decriminalized, I would bet any fortune I could lay my hands on that youth crime figures would slump to a fraction of present levels; much of the economic basis for the vile culture of youth gangs would be swept away overnight.

'High Society' only has another 3 weeks to run. Go and see it. I shall go again. There is also a book of the same name, which a very generous breathwork client gave me after visiting the exhibition. It's beautifully made, full of pictures, carries the message of the exhibition and would make a fine item on any coffee table, or wine table or....

As if to draw a final thick line under this message, when my friend and I got on a bus back to South London, we noticed that the well-dressed, neatly coiffed young woman seated across the aisle from us was doing her texts or somesuch whilst nipping on a bottle concealed in an orange Sainsbury's carrier bag. Humans take psychoactives: deal with it.

*He got it wrong: the lethal dose he came up with was a fraction of the 'heroic' dosages later ingested by some of the most hardcore 60s experimenters, like the poet Robert Hunter.

TechnoMage by Dirk Bruere - Review

2011-01-23T22:10:00.000Z

TechnoMage by Dirk Bruere. Pub. Lulu, available from http://www.neopax.com/technomage/

It's extraordinary what can happen when a detailed and state-of-the-art knowledge of engineering, psychology, physics, exotic computing, neurophysiology, martial arts, psi experiments and a few less well-known or less respectable disciplines are blended with magic inside the same skull. Dirk Bruere put this book into my hands back in June last year and I've only just finished reading it. My reasons are: a) I find books on magic very hard to read, b) this is a large and complex book and c) there is some very, very interesting and important stuff in it.

At the start, the author asks: 'Who is this book aimed at? ... That rather rare breed who mix science, engineering and magick into what I have termed TechnoShamanism.' That comment earns points with me straightaway: Bruere is not claiming to be teaching anything about 'shamanism', thereby removing himself from the grotesque and dishonest feeding frenzy around that word. Yes, I'm taking yet another opportunity to excoriate that blurring of meaning, that devaluation of traditions the world over which sprouted from a certain epiphany, the realisation that one can make much more money (and fame) by teaching the sanitized mix called 'Core Shamanism' to gullible and cash-rich newagers than by languishing in the halls of Academe.

My first impression of TechnoMage was of its size: 400 (large) pages, and my next was of how crammed with information it is. It is hard to sum up what the mix of ideas is like: Bruere's thesis is that 'powerful magical techniques are a thing of the present and the future rather than the past'; he has built on the sceptical foundation of Chaos Magic, even retaining some of its exercises, but his book reads very differently to any CM book I've ever seen.

The first two chapters set the scene: Ch 1 is Semantics and Spells, and Ch 2 is Science and Magic, and it is here that he defines the underlying assumptions of his TechnoShamanism:
'Reality lies in Mind and Consciousness
Belief is everything
Perceived Reality is fluid and conditional
The Subjective and Objective are equally real
Space and Time are illusions'
OK, I wouldn't unreservedly subscribe to all those positions myself, especially not the final one, but we're definitely in the land of magic. His definitions of buzz-words like 'multiverse' are refreshingly rigorous; it struck me that the author is walking behind Chaos Magic tidying up all the half-defined notions that launched us out from the boring old Newtonian world.

Much of this reads like a science lesson for magicians, or perhaps more accurately, a lesson in the languages of science and magic for intellectuals; here I use that word positively, to mean one who delights in thinking to some depth, marginalized of course by our infantilizing culture. Magicians should be the most intelligent people in a culture, and Bruere asks good questions. Some of the science stuff may even empower our magic - after all, if it seems to do so, then it does.
Of course, this Science stuff doesn't delight every magician, but if it is your thing, this chapter will really do it for you: Bruere is out there with the weirdest notions: the relatively tame Einstein's Brain paradox, the identity paradox that underlies Greg Egan's tremendous novel 'Permutation City', and then the really mad stuff, like Max Tegmark's 'All Universes Hypothesis', a notion so counter-intuitive and, as far as I can see, so out-to-lunch, that we may as well declare that, under its moderately convincing layer of dusty regolith, the moon really is made of green cheese.

With Ch3, Psi and the Occult, we plunge into the retro-land of post-Victorian spiritism, the Scoles experiment. Funny really, you have this group who are determined to prove there's something objectively interesting about the results they get, but they insist on sitting in the dark. And they have crystals on the table, which, ipso facto, directs our attention to the far end of the credulity spectrum. Something extraordinary did happen - but probably not contact with any ET called Manu. Mr Bruere is of a similar mind to me on this, and concludes that 'belief is everything'. He makes a superbly original examination of where the energy for 'psychic' manifestations comes from, and speculates that it might be driven ultimately by temperature differentials: somehow, energy is extracted from the surroundings against the normal thermodynamic gradient. This would be a great trick on a larger scale - the perfect renewable energy scheme!

This chapter also features the PK Party, where you get fifteen or so people into the right state and all start bending cutlery. This is something I really want to try. He looks at Remote Healing, a popular area, and one in which my current course at Arcanorium College are building up to experimenting in, in a couple of weeks.

Bruere is not alone in debunking the ludicrous notion that UFO abductions are, even when 'real' to the 'abductee', even remotely likely to be anything to do with extraterrestrials, but it's unusual and valuable to read anyone who has time for subtle energies or UFOs but who hasn't also got some flaky axe to grind. His speculations about working with the Ultraterrestrials, the notional non-humans behind the highest-energy ET type manifestations, remind me of the work of Dr John Dee and his dodgy skryer Edward Kelly - men engaging with entities so powerful and capricious it matters little whether they are angels or demons. And one of his ideas struck me with a special personal resonance: 'Temporal effects are apparently maximized by closed loops between past and future.' My experience of working with models of higher consciousness - using both the HGA and the Wode-Fetch complex models - bears this out, over a timescale of 40 years. Maybe one day I'll elaborate on the story I started telling in Chaotopia!.

Chapter 4, Gods and Demons, introduces Marvin Minsky's fascinating 'Society of Mind' model, in which our intelligence and awareness emerge from a collective of sub-functions, one consequence of which is that we have many channels of possible input, all of which we need to use in order to do effective magic. This concept, together with Dawkins's Memetics, and Jung's Archetypes, forms a framework for a discussion of entities, in which he combines memes, Agents and Archetypes into a set of equations, which may or may not be your thing. On the Ouija Board, he is the only writer I've read who, having ruled out outright fraud and sensibly dismissed the notion that there's really any dead persons moving the planchette round, remarks on the much more interesting notion that what is going on is an astonishing degree of unconscious collusion.

Chapter 5 covers Hypnosis, and is a good rundown on the subject, including fascinating references to Hilgard's Hidden Observer experiment, and its implications for the reality (or unreality) of the self. Chapter 6, Mind Tools, examines remote hypnotism, sensory deprivation and 'brainwashing', culminating in a useful set of instructions for running your own cult. In Chapter 7, Subliminals, he includes NLP, sigils and 'hypersigils'.

Ch 8 is titled Psi and Science, and this is great stuff for those who are interested in indications of the reality of psi effects. He goes into experiments which have interesting and important consequences for magic, but seldom get written up in books on the subject, like the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research programme, in which psychokinesis on random event generators was tested, and, according to Bruere's comments, proven.

Ch 9, the Electromagnetic Domain, covers transcranial magnetic stimulation, the technique that first gained renown in the hands of Michael Persinger, of 'god-helmet' fame. Even more impressive is the link between hauntings and magnetic field variations shown by Richard Wiseman's studies. Might this amount to a physiological basis for the Devereux 'earthlights' hypothesis, in which intense geomagnetic/ electric fields seem to cause an ESC which would account for UFO abduction memories?
Ley-lines and poltergeists, hauntings and UFO abductions, are all connected via electromagnetism (EM) and presence-sensing 'organs' in the brain. Bruere relates this kind of sensitivity to the notion that Elves do not like iron, which may smooth out local EM variations, cutting off our perceptions of this other realm.

This is one of the points where, despite his determined search for physical explanations of psychic phenomena, the author demonstrates that he is not a simple reductionist. I get the impression that he is well up for exploring these realms.
This chapter contains some of the scariest stuff. Bruere comments: 'The governments of Earth are moving into what was previously 'our' space', the mental', and he mentions in passing the infamous mind-rape programs which elements of the US (so-called) intelligence community perpetrated on its citizens, using drugs, until, apparently, they found electromagnetic systems that mashed people's brains up just as well. He examines the possibility of the induction of psychoactive effects in a whole neighbourhood, by introducing rhythmic spikes into the power supply. This is genuine modern 'black' magic, in the old-school sense of 'very bad for humans and other living things'.

In Ch 10, Machines, we are treated to a classification ranging from the dowser's forked twig, via using fast channel changers for divination, to the modern necromancy of the Psychomanteum.

In Ch 11, The Great Work, Bruere shows his Transhumanist hand, defining that philosophy as 'using our technologies to transform ourselves into Beings that transcend the merely Human. To extend the capabilities of our minds, bodies and spirits to such a degree that we become as gods...'. Setting his Transhumanism against the 'overt atheism' of the organized movement, he sees that 'Transhumanism can be seen as a manifestation of an ancient spiritual force.' In that, I'm with him. However, his thoughts then take a rather quirky turn: after a quick historical review of the insane vileness of Yahweh's minions, he utilizes a Christian mythological perspective in a Gnostic-like exposition which leads up to how come the Transhumanist Association (TH) ended up borrowing the 8-rayed Star of Chaos for their logo.

He goes on to examine some of the core projects of the TH. It always reminds me how unequal a world we live in when people talk about life extension as if it's going to be available to everyone. The author writes: 'For those who are children now, I make this prediction - you will never die of old age. Your death will be by disease, accident or violence. It will not be 'natural'.'
I agree, reluctantly: unless you are 20 and already a billionaire, you will probably die in a stinking favela from a fight over a cup of clean water, or from one of the new diseases that will rip through the swarming 60 billion the author seems comfortable with as a future population. No doubt, if a critical mass of humans and technology can survive the coming century, then we will no doubt achieve the wonders Bruere - and I - dream of. But, to get a bit more work out of the Christian metaphor, it's looking like we'll have to cross Hell first. However, I'm inclined to think he's right about one thing: we humans have to change ourselves, or face extinction.

The final Chapter, 12, is called Fermi, Doom and Simulation, and starts from the premise that there is something deeply flawed about our view of reality. In support of this, he discusses the famous Fermi Paradox - what happened to all the extraterrestrials? What is so privileged about human life on earth that we never see any aliens? I agree that this paradox presents serious problems, and Bruere outlines some of the most interesting solutions, including the one that we already live in a simulation, a concept explored by Ramsey Dukes in his novel 'Words Made Flesh' and in some of his essays. In fact, the ideas are so similar that it does seem that the theorist whom Bruere quotes, N. Bostrom, must have nicked Dukes's concept of The Johnstone Paradox and renamed it - Bostrom is quoted as writing in 2003, and Dukes (under one of his other noms de plume) wrote about his version in the 1970s. Bruere does a good job on this - his thinking, once again, is thorough, even exhaustive, and he digs right down into the paradoxes of simulation, including the intriguing notion that the person who is running the simulation is our own True Self.

This leads on to asking the question: How can we crash the simulation and view the next level of reality?, and one of Bruere's best answers speculates that we are doing something rather like that when we practice being aware:
'...by exercising our Will and forcing ourselves, and those around us, to act and think in what Buddhists call a Mindful manner we soak up available processing power and drain it from the world around us. This in turn renders our perceived reality far more malleable and fluid.'

To conclude, what is significant about this book? Looking particularly at the Appendices, it seems the author has embraced a kind of 'completism', an encyclopaedic ideal. He does in fact warn in the Intro that 'each chapter can be considered as a condensation of the core information of several books, or research publications, in the area it covers.'
This could be thought of as the book Chaos Magic has been waiting for the birth of, having fathered it in an unnatural liaison with forbidden mutant technology. In some ways, this might be the most important book on magic published for years.
On the downside, it is a large book, and for all its virtues, is not easy to engage with. I predict that no-one who is not highly tolerant of technical detail will manage to finish it, which will limit its area of influence. So what could be done, with such a tasty menu, to get it out to more people?

Basically, I think the reader could do with less detail to get bogged down in. This could perhaps be achieved by splitting TechnoMage into at least 2 things: a smaller book, retaining all the headings, subheadings, and enough of the text to justify the framework, with references from each section to pages of a website, where more details are available. This is already happening to some extent - Dirk Bruere's website, Neopax, (URL at top of this review) includes pages from each chapter. He could even consider splitting the book up along the lines of topics, into a number of smaller 'introductory' books, (out of which he could probably make more money).

So ultimately, who would I recommend to buy it? Despite its intellectuality, this is not a book for the academic, unless he is capable of taking his head out of his arse, a postural problem which seems irreversible for many sufferers. If there's one big element of the book that impinges directly on how we might do our magic, it is the examinations of psi research, something that very seldom gets done in books on magic. TechnoMage is also full of fascinating facts, like an episode of QI for magicians, including some fine tales of madness and scandal, like the bloodshed and mayhem around the making of the 70s horror classic The Omen and the just-possible link between George W. Bush and his just-possibly grandad Aleister Crowley. On a style point, I like his year formalism; sticking 'CE' right after the date, as in '1936CE', somehow makes that silly dating system look less absolute.

What do these psi studies mean for the way we think about magic, how do they impinge on our magical thinking, on the problems I was discussing a few weeks ago on this blog? Psi experiments do not overcome the gulf between magic and parascience (see blog entry http://chaotopia-dave.blogspot.com/2010/11/magical-thinking-science-and.html ) - because nothing can, parascience being a religion, not a true scientific attitude. However, if psi is proven, then physics has to work a bit harder to make room for that in the theory department. This is very good news for magical thinkers. I suspect the kind of evidence we are talking about here would be more likely to reduce the resistance to magical thought of an engineer rather than a theoretical scientist.
Maybe the 'ideal reader' this book is designed for is an engineer, standing on the edge of magical thinking. It is certainly worth buying for a friend who might be about to take his first steps outside of parascientific materialism.
It is also highly recommended for anyone who wants new ideas for their magical practice; my copy still bristles with post-it notes, where I've marked things I want to try out. Along with a lot of ideas that force me to think, that is the best sign of all for how good a book is.

Energy Magic course at Arcanorium

2011-01-02T18:15:00.000Z

A Happy New year to all my readers!

In shall be running a course on Practical Energy Magic, 6 weeks, starting 8th January, 2011, at Arcanorium online College. Come along and learn how to sense and move 'magical energy'.

Week 1 - Breathing and energy. Learning to sense energy.

Week 2 - Hands-on energy healing on others

Week 3 - Combining energy work with sound

Week 4 - Projecting energy

Week 5 - Projecting vocal spells

Week 6 - The Subtle Energy Question and advanced work

Arcanorium info at www.arcanoriumcollege.com

I'm happy to answer enquiries, at dleeahp@inbox.com

See you there!

Stopping tobacco

2010-12-13T20:52:00.000Z

'Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.'
Mark Twain

About five weeks ago I stopped smoking tobacco. It was quite easy, involving no real suffering. I know, Mark Twain said 'giving up' was easy, but 'giving up' is doomed to fail, because you're depriving yourself of a source of pleasure. In my view, one of the purposes of being alive is to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Generally, if something is pleasurable, I see no reason to deny it to myself on a dubious promise that I may live a little longer. So, my giving-up efforts with tobacco were short-lived, and marked by the misery of the internal civil war brought on by self-denial.

Of course, like Austin Spare, you can make magical use of the stress of giving up. Spare would cast a spell, then place his cigarettes on an 'altar', denying himself that pleasure until he got his result. So, if you're going to put yourself through the pain of self-denial, at least do it in the service of some really worthwhile goal!

This time I stopped, rather than gave up. I used the method of Allen Carr (no, not the toothy TV comic), in his book 'How to Stop Smoking the Easy Way'. (http://allencarr.com/central/). In 40 years of smoking and 13 of attempting to stop, it's the only method I've found that makes sense to me. I didn't manage to sustain the internal civil war of willpower, for the reasons outlined above. Methods based on fear are also non-starters - you only have to stand outside a hospital for a short while to notice that not only visitors but also staff are unmoved enough by the imminence of grisly death to be smoking their lungs out between witnessing terminal sickness. Warnings simply don't work.

Carr's method starts where all the others leave off. He doesn't require you to give up anything. In stead, you stop doing something to yourself that isn't even pleasurable. If you can convince yourself you don't enjoy smoking, you're home and dry.

The first time, I managed it for four and a half years. Then, one night in New York City, it occurred to me that a cigar would go splendidly with my glass of Knob Creek bourbon. My gracious host indicated a temperature-controlled humidor, and before I had time to regret it, I had a perfectly-kept Havana in my hand. Three months later, I was still feeling deprived, and the habit crept back.

It took me three years to get back on top of the situation and stop again. Had I known how easy it would be, I wouldn't have waited so long.

The craving has died down now. The key for me was realising how little I enjoyed it and how short the addiction cycle is: there is virtually no physical addiction - as Carr points out, smokers abstain for 8, 9 or 10 hours every night, between the last fag and the first of the day. The cycle is: smoke, nicotine leaves body, desire resumes, is satisfied briefly, and so on. The entire physiology of nicotine 'addiction' is a cycle of less than an hour in length.

This was really apparent this last time: there really was no physical distress, even on the first day. In the weeks since I stopped, I've had a few moments of craving, especially after a couple of glasses of wine, but it's been easy to believe it when I tell myself I would get nothing but a very short-lived buzz of nausea, numbness and swooping hypoglycaemia, followed by a vague desire for some more.

What keeps the whole habit afloat is what we tell ourselves about what we're feeling in the time between smokes. There is no physiology standing in the way of quitting, which is why substitution with patches or gum or e-cigs is a poor strategy, merely prolonging the agony. And yet substitution is the current medical fashion, and what the NHS bases all advice for would-be quitters on. Medics and policy-makers, arise and read Allen Carr!!!

A O Spare on YouTube

2010-12-10T17:36:00.000Z

For those who missed the wonderful S London exhibition, or who would like to glimpse bits of it again, here's a short video with interviews with Alan Moor, Robert Ansell, Phil Baker, Stephen Pochin and Geraldine Beskin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXOt215GCWI

Soul in the Flesh; or, Where's the rest of my nervous system?

2010-12-05T20:14:00.000Z

You will likely know what I mean when I refer to 'gut feelings'. These are a species of what NLP-ers call congruence/incongruence signals. Kinaesthetic - or more precisely, enteroceptive - sensations that tell us, very quickly, if some situation is good or bad for us at that moment.

We all know them - the first impression that runs counter to conscious logic but turns out to be correct; the voice that, once heard, prophesies trouble, which only emerges years later.
I taught congruence techniques to various groups for years, and nearly everyone's congruence signals consist of feelings located between the heart and the lower abdomen; the phrase 'gut feeling' is indeed a fitting one.

What part of us is doing the feeling here? I always naively assumed that the brain was processing masses of fuzzy information about the situation below my conscious awareness, and then presenting me with a signal that, for some reason, was either a swelling or rising feeling around my diaphragm (good) or a sinking, shrinking or clenching feeling in my lower abdomen (bad). Maybe this unconscious processor, once it had completed its job, used my abdominal nerves as a signaling beacon.

But why the abdomen? Maybe these sensations are the way we perceive processing in the enteric nervous system. This is the vast neural system, sometimes considered as part of the autonomic NS, which controls the intestines and other abdominal organs, as well as chest cavity organs.

Do we experience this neural place in some way, like we experience the brain as the seat of conscious thought? Otherwise, the use of the guts to express the result of some pretty deep processing seems arbitrary, like grabbing the first thing to hand. Much less arbitrary would be the picture of the enteric NS actually doing the processing, and communicating its decision, yes, no or maybe, as a feeling in that part of the body.

A TV programme a while back on transplant memories invited us to take this idea a step further. When a heart is transplanted, it needs to get started in its new chest cavity. The transplanted heart contains a large number of nerves - the researcher on the show referred to a 'little brain' existing within the heart.
These nerves respond to emotions from elsewhere in the body - apparently, an electrocardiogram will register a strong emotion before brain electrodes detect it, indicating that it is to this 'unconscious' part of our NS that emotion arrives first. This is of a piece with the speed of processing of congruence/incongruence signals - these are mechanisms that exist to warn us quicker than conscious processing can manage.

The researchers in the TV programme had found evidence that the information needed to 'reboot' a heart when, for whatever reason, it has just stopped, is carried in this heart-nerve complex, so that when a heart is transplanted, its 'reboot' is controlled by itself, not by the host's organs. Taking things a step further, they speculated that some 'core memories' of the donor's life may be stored in the heart-nerves, to the extent that they can surface and overcome the personality of recipient. Examples from such cases involve food preferences, musical tastes and other qualities we tend to think of as personal.

In stead of just the wiring for a sack of offal, the enteric NS is revealed as another part of ourselves that we live with and through, another source of experience. And this kind of experience is of primary, unmediated knowing; the subjectivity of the enteric NS is what our ancestors would have called another soul.

Magical Thinking, Science and PostModernism

2010-11-22T21:50:00.000Z

I remember vividly the first time I abandoned magical thinking. I was around 4, and my dad asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I replied: a magic wand, a real one, like Sooty's got, one that can do real magic. My dad told me then that magic wasn't real. I recall the moment precisely; we were facing a row of shops on a mundane street in the West London suburb I grew up in. At that point, something big happened inside me, and the next time I thought about that incident it was from the point of view of someone who had turned wholeheartedly towards science.

The topic of magic exists in a strange half-light, some of its practitioners coming out with pronouncements that make religion seem sensible by comparison and others straining to bring some kind of intellectual respectability to their weird endeavour.
Because weird it is; irruptions of improbable events are the language in which the universe talks back to the magician. The ideas that support magical belief are non-standard, rogue ontologies and epistemologies.
Yet some of us try to justify magical thinking, and in this we go against the grain of science, religion and even psychiatry - 'magical thinking' is listed everywhere you care to look as a symptom of psychosis. My dad had to do as he believed, and protect me from a 'psychotic' belief system, when he told me magic was not real.

Some magical writers have attempted to justify magical thinking by invoking the radical relativism of postmodern philosophers. Whilst I salute the intention behind such attempts, I remain unimpressed by such short-cuts to magical belief as the following:
'... if everything we believe about the world is an arbitrary, socially-constructed symbol; if nothing inherently means anything; if reality itself - as many postmodernists claim - is just a collection of such arbitrary symbols, then magic becomes not only possible, but inevitable.'
('Postmodern Magic', by Patrick Dunn http://www.amazon.co.uk/Postmodern-Magic-Art-Information-Age/dp/0738706639 )

The trick here seems to be to degrade the objectivity-status of consensus reality in order to make it more vulnerable to magic. We might call this the Chemotherapy Ploy: with cytotoxic drugs, we hope they will poison the cancer cells rather faster than the healthy host cells. Similarly, with PoMo anti-science we attack consensus reality in the hope that the irrationalism of magic gets a foothold before our universe crumbles into total incoherence.

Postmodern philosophy brought in a breath of liberating ideas, especially in analysing how philosophical positions are affected by the social reality of the writer. However, some of these tendencies have become profoundly toxic and downright silly where they've tried to deal with scientific epistemology.

On the toxic side, PoMo critiques of physical science have delivered tools into the hands of the religious ultra-right, who are only too glad to be told that the theory of biological evolution (one of the scientific theories most consistently supported by the evidence), is just another possible viewpoint, to be placed alongside non-scientific views like creationism. The PoMo science agenda also benefits the rapacious corporations and their political puppets who would squirm out from under the mountain of evidence for global warming.

I flirted with the notion that PoMo thinking enables magic, but concluded that this is a trick, a lazy way of justifying what we magicians do. A far more rigorous and exciting path is to respect what science has discovered about the physical world, and fit our magic around that.

Anyone who is still mucking about with PoMo drivel about science would do well to read theoretical physicist Alan Sokal's critiques of that tendency's worst excesses. In 1996, Sokal's article 'Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity' was accepted, and published in all seriousness by the prestigious American cultural studies journal Social Text. After its publication, Sokal 'fessed up to the hoax, declaring that every statement in that article was either trivial, nonsensical or meaningless, provoking a storm of often-acrimonious debate. One of the more delightful exchanges to emerge from this brouhaha was when one of the editors of Social Text declared that Sokal was 'under-educated' in the branch of philosophy he was critiquing; one of Sokal's supporters asked that editor: 'How does it feel to be duped by the under-educated?'

Over a decade later, Sokal has collected these discussions and the development of his ideas into a new book, 'Beyond the Hoax; Science, philosophy and culture' (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Hoax-Science-Philosophy-Culture/dp/0199239207 ). This makes interesting reading for the magician, attacking as it does not only the nonsense about science spouted by Lacan, Deleuze and Kristeva, among others, but the ways in which fringe medicine is presented to the mainstream. He writes:
'Does it matter if some people believe in homeopathy or Therapeutic Touch? Perhaps not a great deal... My libertarian instincts urge a hands-off attitude towards pseudoscientific acts between consenting adults.' (p340)

Likewise, he's fair about his criticism of statements about physical reality; not only does he give fringe therapies a drubbing, but also mainstream religion, where it makes objective truth claims. Having armed himself with the observation that '...honest talk about the epistemic status of the dominant religions... is generally considered bad manners at best, blasphemous at worst', he wades in against the silliness of the Catholic church's doctrine of transubstantiation.
However, bless him, he can't bring himself to believe that many of the Pope's flock actually believe they are eating human flesh and drinking human blood when at Mass. (Neither can I, really. Is this a failure of imagination on my part?)

In this book Sokal demolishes the worst excesses of relativism where it relates to statements about the physical universe. In that, I am entirely with him. However, he does shows signs of sympathy for the curious subculture which is popular with some scientists, the best known of whom is Richard Dawkins. This is the point where I have to part company with the astute and entertaining Sokal.

When Dawkins writes, in 'The God Delusion', of Jahweh as 'jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully', he is nowhere wide of the mark. In fact, he could have added 'psychopathic' in there with no loss of believability as far as I'm concerned. However, reform of religious belief is not for Dawkins - he goes flat-out for a denigration of the religious impulse altogether, as if it is something that can be banished by the fiat of right-thinking rationalists like himself.
Clearly, he has some serious blind spots about how human beings operate, and declares himself disturbed by the persistence of irrational beliefs in the human world. He reminds me of the Victorians who denied the importance of sexual desire because they didn't like the idea of fornication, or the ludicrous unreality of public policy over the human drive to intoxication and ecstasy. He seems to want to reason the religious impulse away, as if some ancient and powerful part of our nature can be tidied away by sensible talking.

The route that Dawkins and his ilk are taking is profoundly worrying. They seem to be committed to belittling the realm of the subjective, to have already decided that our subjective experience is an unimportant froth on the surface of vast, impersonal cosmic truths. When scientists talk like this, it's easy to get the impression that they don't need science to tell them that what they say is true.
There is more than rational truth at stake here, and the Dawkinsites seem to have constructed an argument which is superficially like science, but lacks it rigour. They have descended to a religious position that owes everything to christianity's simplistic monochrome, in its energetic denial of some part or other of the human being, in its sterile inability to embrace the totality of what a human being is. They take science as their starting point, but then go way beyond its remit, much further than the evidence warrants, to present their hysterical-sounding denials. They are cops, patrolling the limits of reality with big sticks falsely labelled 'Scientific Reason'.

An impressive critique of this position is provided in Marilynne Robinson's book 'Absence of Mind'. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/03/absence-mind-marilynne-robinson-review) Considering Dawkins's heavy-handed propagandism, she notes that:
'...the polemical impulse to assert the authority of science, understandable when the project was relatively new... is by now an atavism that persists as a consequence of this same polemical impulse.' (p126)
She coins the term 'parascience' for this kind of argument, and, comparing Newton's writings and Auguste Comte's (extreme) positivism, writes:
'A difference between ... science and parascience, is the desire in the latter case to treat scientific knowledge as complete, at least in its methods and assumptions, in order to further the primary object of closing questions about human nature and human circumstance.' (p129)
That pretty much pins the demon down: the closing off of questions which have in no way been adequately addressed by science.

She also points out the cultural toxicity of this viewpoint:
'A central tenet of the modern world view is that we do not know our own minds, our own motives, our own desires. And - as an important corollary - certain well-qualified others do know them. I have spoken of the suppression of the testimony of individual consciousness and experience among us, and this is one reason it has fallen silent. We have been persuaded that it is a perjured witness.' (p59).
This reminds us of the mental violence done to the public by the arch-manipulators of the last century, particularly Edward Bernays and Emma Freud. Between them, these two demonised any inner authority humans might have and attacked autonomy and community, in order to reduce people to docile consumers. Where subjectivity is devalued, we have no position to fight from, no other source of authority to oppose the rapacity of government, big business and vested professional interests.

Robinson is coming from the humanities side of the argument, and the whole territory of the arts is threatened with trivialization by the parascience position. However, ammunition is also arriving from another quarter; for a materialist thinker who hasn't thrown the baby of subjectivity out with the bathwater of dubious material truth claims, check out Galen Strawson's book 'Selves: an essay in revisionist metaphysics.' (http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Metaphysics/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5ODI1MDA2Nw== )

Strawson draws a picture of how we assemble selfhood from neural processes less than a second in length. He goes to great lengths to define terms - when he talks about selves, he's not talking about personalities, but the sense of selfhood in the moment. Much of the underpinning of these ideas takes the form of challenges to our 'confusion' about what materialism really is:
'To be ... a genuine, realistic materialist, is to hold that experiential phenomena ... are part of this total physical existence... There is ... a vast amount left to say about the living experienceful brain once you've said everything that can be said about it using only the terms of physics and neurophysiology... There are vast numbers of truths about what its existence consists in which you haven't recorded at all, although they are, according to real materialism, truths about its physical being.'

So REAL materialism does not equal reductionism.
'When I say that the mental, and in particular, the experiential, is physical, and endorse the view that 'experience is just neurons firing', I mean something completely different from what some materialists have apparently meant by saying such things. I don't mean that all aspects of what's going on in the case of conscious experience can be described by current physics, or even by any non-revolutionary extension of current physics. Such a view amounts to some kind of radical 'eliminativism' with respect to consciousness and is certainly false. My claim is quite different. It is that the experiential considered specifically as such ... just is physical. No one who disagrees with this claim is a serious or remotely realistic materialist. One might put the point by saying that real materialism is not reductive but adductive. It doesn't claim that experience is anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be, but that matter is more than we ordinarily conceive it to be.'

This materialistic monism is very close to panpsychism, which Strawson admits as his personal belief, and continues:
'The first thing one needs to do when addressing the question about the relation between the mental and the non-mental is to recover a proper sense of our ignorance of the non-mental. ... we have no good reason to think we know anything about matter that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental or experiential phenomena are physical phenomena.' (p285)
And, p288: '...realistic - real - materialism involves full acknowledgment of the reality of experiential phenomena. Experiential phenomena are as real as rocks... '

He goes further, and shows that he's prepared to take subjectivity seriously, by prescribing a kind of meditative introspection. He suggests:
'...focus ones thoughts on one's brain and try to hold fully in mind the idea that one's experience as one does so is part of the physical being of the brain... It's worth trying to sustain this forcing one's thoughts back to the confrontation when it slips.' And:
'It's useful to listen to music and focus on the thought that 'one's auditory experience is a form of matter or energy'.'

So, let's cut to the chase; this started out as a review blog, and turned into something much bigger. If we've eliminated postmodern nonsense from science, and distinguished real materialism from parascience, where does that leave magical thinking?

The real-materialist position allows exploration of subjectivity, even unto mysticism. Indeed, since in panpsychism every part of the universe is, in a very special sense which Strawson outlines, a 'subject of experience', we have a very mysticism-friendly philosophy.

Taking things a stage further, how are we doing with 'real' magic, material results stuff?
For a start, let's take the 'inside-the-skin' 'magic' I've referred to (in Chapter 7 of my book 'Bright From the Well') as Body Alchemy. This involves the fairly mainstream assumptions that the expression of specific genes and gene clusters can be turned on or off by acts of will, this action being mediated by unspecified subconscious mechanisms. The causal chain, from the mundane point of view, is impulse - subconscious process - gene change - body change. This is completely unchallenging to conventional science, and doesn't even require any of the above arguments to help it be believable.

To take things to the next stage, how about magics based on 'energy', 'life force' etc? These may well be allowed merely by adding detail to the organic swirls and lines of microwave transception I blogged about a few weeks ago. Again, they don't need any more weirdness to be added to our world-model.

Beyond this point, we are in more difficult territory. Magical results that manifest as synchronicity ('Weirdness levels 3 or 4') are a test case: a sceptic would say that the 'magical result' is illusory, i.e. it proceeds from the magician's construction of events. In the absence of any possibility of accurate estimation of the probabilities of a desired event occurring with and without magical interference, we cannot say whether the magician affected the outcome.
A non-sceptic, armed with a panpsychist view of the universe, might argue that, since consciousness is a basic property of matter, it is not surprising that our own configuration of consciousness can affect other regions of matter.

The difference is, at base, only a case of how surprised we might be at a magical result occurring. Nothing we know about matter completely and forever forbids direct influence by conscious will.
It makes it improbable, sure; sorcery is a numbers game, and sorcerers are comfortable with that assessment of low probability of success, and a panpsychist is likely to take magical belief in his stride more easily than a parascience sceptic.

Beyond that, when we seek to embrace into our worldview events like apparent telekinesis (an example of 'Category 5 weirdness'), we have to come up with different theories. We may have experienced these things, but we are in the theoretician's dilemma when we try to think about them: 'That's all very well in practice, but how would it work in theory?' Our conventional thinking isn't weird enough; we have to make a link between conscious will, which is a very special case of thinking-matter in action, and lumps of non-thinking matter. If we choose to believe we have influenced the world with our magic, then we are on our own, philosophically. We've left behind the Kansas of materialist consensus and are in the Land of Oz.

Some writers - in particular, Pete Carroll - have come up with magic-friendly models of science, such as Carroll's Chaos Magic Theory. CMT connects will to non-thinking matter via some rather exotic (though basically mainstream) interpretations of quantum mechanics.
These connections are far from secure, so for the time being, we magical thinkers are still irreducibly monstrous souls. We have to keep secret our dirty beliefs about how the world works.

Maybe that is how it has always to be - magicians as heretics, holding out for a more hopeful view of the universe, providing shaky, beautiful bridges for other heretics to step onto as they take their first steps into forbidden thinking.

Mysticism and the Northern Way

2010-10-18T12:39:00.000+01:00

My new essay 'Mysticism and the Northern Way' is now available at http://runegild.org/?p=533.
Comments and discussion welcome!

Fallen Visionary, Rising Dark Star: Austin Spare seen in South London

2010-10-17T14:04:00.000+01:00

Just in case you only read this far, I shall cut to the chase: If South London is at all reachable for you, do yourself a massive favour and, before November 14th, go to 'Austin Spare: Fallen Visionary', at the Cuming Museum, near the Elephant and Castle tube. Details at http://www.southwark.gov.uk/info/200162/the_cuming_museum/1607/temporary_exhibitions/2

This exhibition is the first in a public gallery since Spare's death in 1956, and situated on the Walworth Road it brings the rich contrasts of his life into focus better than any I've seen. On the one hand, we have a description of Spare by one journalist as 'a scruffy tramp living in a cellar,' and on the other, we see a fantastically rich inner life, the world of a truly free man.

This contrast between material poverty and artistic and magical riches is a central source of Spare's impact. He rebelled against the fame-machine of the art world, choosing instead to live among 'ordinary' people, people whose history is not recorded.

He immortalizes faces and bodies from this invisible world, celebrating life's immediacy in portraits of those who, in the words of an advert for models, have 'no claim to beauty'. In so doing, he celebrates the world and the flesh just as it is, in all its scruffiness and vulnerability to age and death, as well as all its openness to fleshly ecstasy, and rescues it from being colonized by abstract perfection, by bourgeois Edwardian values. Spare's people are real beings, whose flesh has not been virtualized into an ideal. Instead, his art reaches towards renewal of the secret springs of our vitality, his formula of the New Sexuality.

This was also the first time I'd seen his war artist paintings. The figures of men and women seem photographic, yet faded, leached out into a grey world, wrapped in camo or bandages, muted by military secrecy, yet here too he finds life, in the form of a nursing orderly, a young woman caught in the moment of turning to look at the artist.

Spare explores a very different dimension of female beauty in his portraits of film stars. Radiant goddess-faces from the film fame industry gaze out from his 'siderealized' portraits-from-photos. He referred to some of these studies as 'Experiments in relativity', and the irony of his approach is strikingly postmodern. An actress with eyes so wide and deep she is seen to be gazing inwards, becomes the face of an apotheosized human being, a woman made into an image of female perfection; and yet Spare is not just having a shallow dig at the fame factory here, he is also acknowledging its power, the rulership of image over life. The paradox is underlined by Spare's pun-word 'sidereality', applied to the portraits drawn from photos viewed aslant. He was onto the paradox of image long before Pop Art.

Maybe like me, you'll spend a few minutes marvelling at the curious world of mainstream art, in which the Tate Modern buys Damien Hirst's dull one-line joke 'Pharmacy', but doesn't exhibit anything by Spare.

Energy Healing, Breathwork and the science of life-energy

2010-09-14T20:20:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago I delivered a public seminar on energy magic, at a retreat centre in rural Germany. The thirty or so participants had, by the look of it, at least as good a time as I did, which is saying something.
That's not all, though. After a warm-up and some open-ended playing-around with the glorious sensations of the energy (which for now, we'll call 'life-force'), we got down to the serious work. I called for volunteers who had pain, right now. Three brave people stepped forward, and we broke into three groups to transfer healing energy into their sick parts.
The results were not a little impressive: two healees got instant relief from chronic sinusitis and a nine-month-old strained wrist, respectively. The third sufferer noticed little at the time, but had found considerable relief by the next morning. I followed up all three people for a week, and the healing persisted.

The technique for raising the energy is extremely simple, and came out of my nineteen years experience of connected breathwork (Rebirthing, Vivation and some Holotropic) and consists mainly of an uninterrupted, continuous ('connected') cycle of breath - as soon as you finish an inhale, you start breathing out; as soon as your lungs are empty, you start breathing in. Unlike with most forms of pranayama, you don't hold the breath at any stage. This practice leads rapidly to a shift in your attention, featuring a much stronger awareness of physical sensations and energy flows in the body. Your hands and feet may tingle, and you have a sense that you are in an ESC (Extraordinary State of Consciousness).

In connected breathwork, this attention is used to follow the dominant sensations in your body until 'blocked' sensations are felt to have opened up, resulting in emotional healing and bliss. I noticed years ago that these sensations of energy can also be used to 'direct healing' at other people. I also worked with other experimenters, in the area of not-yet-respectable research known as 'magic', to find out how this sense of energy could be used in group situations. In the late 90s one such group gained some very interesting effects by structuring energy flows through themselves and each other, and came up with the term 'chaotron', for the energy-magic of spatially-positioned people in a group.

Around this time, I learned about George Pennington's Breath of Light circle. A lengthy and fascinating article about this can be found at http://www.lenzwald.de/Artikel/artbreath.html , but basically it consists of a group of ten or more people lying on their backs with their feet to the centre, holding hands and doing intense breathwork for long periods, up to a few hours. As the energy flows build up, participants experience some consciousness of the entire circle of people - for instance, it is vividly obvious not only when someone in the circle breaks hand-contact but also where the break is.

What happens is a souped-up version of the breathwork experience, of which one of the interesting features is that 'energy surpluses' from one person are felt to flow into areas of low energy in another person. The sensation of 'energy surplus' usually manifests as muscular cramping, the (harmless) condition known as tetany, and this usually comes about because the client has started spontaneously hyperventilating. Tetany is somewhat uncomfortable, and the client will need reassuring that it's OK, and tends to be followed by bliss states. The issue of hyperventilation is dealt with differently by different coaches: Holotropic breathwork coaches don't discourage hyperventilation and treat the subsequent process as an 'energy release'. Coaches from the Rebirthing lineage will tend to encourage the client to breathe more shallowly, to shorten the bout of hyperventilation, but also respect the client's process and encourage them to make best use of it to release energy blockages. In the Breath of Light circle, hyperventilation does not tend to lead to tetany, or if it does, to much shorter bouts of it; it is not a problem, but one of the ways in which the participants become aware that energy of some kind is being passed around the circle of bodies, and is going where it is most needed.

Pennington tells the story of the discovery of the Breath of Light as happening when one of the participants at a weekend healing retreat had waited too long for her dialysis procedure, and had gone into a very scary kidney crisis. People in the group were inspired to form this new arrangement, did so and the sufferer was restored to health for at least long enough to get to her next dialysis without mishap.* ,** .

Obviously, I'm not the first breathwork coach to notice physical healing effects apparently associated with the breathing, occurring in clients and in myself, effects which seem to be amplified in group work. So why aren't more people following this work up?
One reason is, no doubt that, like specialists in many other fields, we don't communicate much over the walls between our various disciplines. (We can add to this effect the fact that the number of breathwork coaches in the world is probably a tiny fraction of the numbers of, say, hypnotherapists or Reiki practitioners. I shall be coming back to this issue in these pages.)

So I went on a wall-hopping spree. First, I looked around at the healing modalities that claim to work with 'energy' in their healing, the energy that usually goes under the names of 'life-force', 'chi' or 'prana'. What I was looking for was someone who appeared to be getting repeatable results and had a theory about it that I could work with.

No surprise - I found a fair few schemes involving exotic and often ill-understood notions like charkas and auras, not to mention the - to my mind - more fantastical schemes involving angels and devas. Among these I did, however, find a practical and theoretical scheme which wasn't overburdened with exotic or goofy explanations - Richard Gordon's Quantum Touch Healing. (http://www.quantumtouch.com/). This is a clean machine - for the price of a book Gordon will tell you how to do this kind of healing work.

In a nutshell, QTH involves doing connected breathing (no pauses or holds), and additionally, making the length of the outbreath much longer than that of the inbreath. Typically, the breath rhythm is 2-6 or 1-4. This breath very rapidly fine-tunes the sense of energy experienced in connected breathwork, to the extent that it is easy for most people to locate a steady awareness of energy flows, especially through the palms of the hands and the fingertips. This is the breathing pattern I taught at my recent seminar in Germany and that experience, taken together with experimental work I've done before and since, convinces me that this breath pattern is a major contribution to the techniques of hands-on healing.

My next Google frenzy arose from a back-in-the-day TV memory, a programme about Chinese traditional yuan qi healers who work alongside modern scientific medics. They showed tests in which a yuan qi practitioner could alter at will a flux of microwave radiation emitted from the palms of his hands. Some very interesting connections turned up, making me realise there's a whole new kind of medical research going on out there.
However, this was the point where I had to turn back. We only have so many hours in the day to do what is important to us, and I could see in front of me a rabbit-hole which I could only navigate with a lot of time and some familiarity with a few different fields. Then I would be able to discriminate in favour of the good stuff that is no doubt out there. On this note, I request anyone out there with good links on a 'hard science' treatment of chi or prana to please leave a note. In the meantime, I've put a paper entitled 'The imprinting and transmission of mentally-directed bioinformation' somewhere I can read and attempt to make sense of it when I've got the time.

Some readers might find the 'hard science' approach disrespectful to their favoured models of energy work. Myself, I side with the pragmatism of the Chinese researchers who are just interested in getting better medical methods out there into the world. If there is going to be a paradigm shift in medicine, in which hitherto-unthought of energy transactions take part, involving perfectly measurable (respectable!) kinds of energy such as microwaves, we need to interface our models. If 'chi' is, in some contexts, measurable as microwaves, then how does that work in the body? Why does an acupuncture point on my foot affect my liver function? Imagination takes flight: transceiver nodes in the skin, specific microwave frequencies generated by some organ or other and transmitted along waveguides through our flesh... The world of the body promises an even greater cornucopia of unsolved puzzles. There will never be a shortage of mysteries to seek.

*The principle of the energy-group and the breath circle must have been known to shamans for years. At least one of the paintings of Pablo Ameringo, Peruvian visionary artist and ex-shaman shows circles of healing surrounded by structured light; clearly the participants have consciously or spontaneously arranged their positions to generate healing flows of energy. (Check out http://headoverheels.org.uk/ especially the painting 'Los Archontes Volares'.)

**Unfortunately, opportunities to experience such an event are few and far between. Those who are interested might wish to join a weekend event I'm organizing in November this year in Glastonbury, Somerset, called 'The Conscious Breath'. Details at www.chaotopia.co.uk/TCB.html

Paddington Farm and the Counterculture

2010-09-06T16:04:00.000+01:00

Back in July I visited Paddington Farm in Glastonbury (http://www.paddingtonfarm.co.uk/) to check it out as a venue for my forthcoming weekend of breathwork - The Conscious Breath (www.chaotopia.co.uk/TCB.html).
My friend who helps run the charity events there told me about the farm's countercultural history, gleaned from records held at the farm and stories from those who'd stayed there. In 1985 the farm, then called Greenlands at Maidencroft Farm, was owned by an extraordinary old lady who opened some of her fields to festival travelers, ignoring the protests of her neighbours. (Apparently, the incident is still talked about in that area). My girlfriend Judy immediately suspected it was the farm she'd stayed at, in the orchard at the bottom of the lane, when she was on her way to Stonehenge Free Festival in 1985. She went to look at the orchard, and indeed it was.

Those of you who are countercultural history buffs will recognize 1985 as the year of the Battle of the Beanfield, the brutal attack by unnumbered, unidentified police on a field full of travelers' homes at the Stonehenge site. I left the Henge festival early that year, before Thatcher's uniformed thugs, possibly some of the same scum who occupied mining villages like invading troops during the coal strike, arrived, so I didn't witness the gratuitous attacks on children, pregnant women and anyone else they could find to terrorize.

Anyway, it turns out that those not arrested had moved on to Glastonbury and were given sanctuary by Greenlands' generous owner. Some more of the history emerged when I posted The Conscious Breath up as an Event on FaceBook (http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=150275014996498 - but would somebody please tell me what happened to all those posts, they seem to have been wiped?), when Alistair Livingstone (check out his blog at http://greengalloway.blogspot.com/) added some of his memories of those weeks of refuge.
If anyone else out there has any of that history, I'd be interested to hear it. If those who lived these events don't record them, they will be lost.

Podcast of talk 'Ginnung and the tools of concsiousness'

2010-07-29T19:06:00.000+01:00

A podcast is now available of a talk I gave in 2008, entitled 'Ginnung and the tools of consciousness'. The event was a day of talks given by Eormensyl Hall of the Rune-Gild, at London's Conway Hall in September 2008.
For anyone interested in the Northern Mysteries, there's lots of other excellent podcasts there too.

http://edred.net/community/index.php?t=browse_vault

2010-07-10T19:21:00.000+01:00

Lies and Statistics

I never said I'd only be reviewing newly-released books; here's one from 2005*.

Freakonomics, by Steven D Levitt and Stephen Dubner.
I am by no means an economics buff. In fact I'm mildly hostile to most economics, parading its theories as science, often justifying the worst excesses of government economic policy with ideas that soon go out of fashion.
This book is definitely not mainstream economics, though, and earns its subtitle - 'A rogue economist looks at the hidden side of everything'. This is a book which challenges accepted wisdom.

Some of the results of Levitt's analyses are predictable. For instance, who doubted that estate agents lie, not only to buyers but also to sellers? Similarly, it comes as no surprise that the career structure in crack gangs is exactly analogous to that in McDonalds - a few people make serious money, the vast majority make almost nothing. The personalities of those at the top of the heap in either organization is no doubt also comparable; fans of The Wire will probably recognize the similarities, in Levitt and Dubner's profile of a business-studies-educated crack boss, to the Wire character Stringer Bell, probably as nice a sociopath as any investment banker you'd ever care to meet.

Other analyses do not, on reflection, surprise, but it's interesting to see them demonstrated in action. The '9/11 effect' is named for the spike in ordinary human decency that followed the attack on the Twin Towers; people feel mutually aligned in a condition of common threat.

Others are decidedly counter-intuitive. For instance, it seems that the death penalty has no deterrent effect on would-be murderers. Levitt and Dubner write: 'Even in a death penalty advocate's best-case scenario, capital punishment could explain only one twenty-fifth of the drop in homicides in the 1990s.' (p125). So if we want judicial killing, we'll have to come up with other reasons or base punishment policy on a lie.

Which brings me to the argument that makes up the core of the book. Many of Levitt's studies use regression analysis, the careful parsing of groups of statistics to freeze all but one of the many variables that apply to the raw data of socio-economic research. This is the chief tool Levitt used to approach the vast, multi-variable question of the spectacular drop in crime in 90s USA. To cut a long story very short, it seems it was not due in the main to new policing strategies (such as New York mayor Giuliani's programme of 'zero tolerance') but to the increased availability of abortions from the late 1970s onwards.

The chain of causality and its underlying social tragedy are easy to see: More women who did not want, and could not bring up, a child, had abortions. For obvious reasons, the main distinguishing socio-economic factor was poverty. Combined with, or as the main cause of, a mother's inability to raise a child, is it any surprise that these conditions predict behaviour in later life that attracts the attention of the law. Another study, applied to the years of the Ceausescu regime in Romania, supports this connection.

There is a grim satisfaction to the discovery of a truth that is going to be hated by such a wide spectrum of people; and hated it was - the campaigns against Levitt became angry and personal. The public reaction to certain kinds of uncomfortable facts or well-researched theories tells us why politicians lie so much. Most of them seem to take the view that it's their responsibility to keep the public away from uncomfortable truths, and this is one of the weaknesses of democracy - if you're a politician, and you don't lie about some issue, your opponents will, and it will be they who get elected. This leads to a consensus of misinformation, a political culture of mendacity. A recent UK example was the disgraceful sacking of David Nutt, the Government's chief scientific advisor on drugs. He published and defended a well-evidenced scale of the levels of damage caused by drugs both legal and illegal. The best knowledge that could be gathered about this subject did not agree with the official picture, the consensus lie, and Prof Nutt was given the boot.

So this book is good, because it helps us to think. It is, ipso facto, rather bad for the stupid and those who would lead them.

*On loan from my local library. Apparently, library book borrowing increased by 1% this year, the first increase in a decade. Get some in now, before the government gets down to its real function and kills off this too.

Online course review - The Essence of Germanic Soul-Lore

2010-07-04T15:33:00.000+01:00

Here's an excerpt from my review, The Essence of Germanic Soul-Lore by Ingrid Fischer (taught online by Ian Read), Arcanorium online College of Magic (www.arcanoriumcollege.com).

The full version is published in the Rune-Gild's new online magazine, at http://edred.net/2010/07/01/rune-gild-magazine-summer-2010/ . If you have any interest in the magical traditions of Northern Europe, then I urge you to go and take a look at this excellent publication straightaway.

The fact that you, dear reader, are reading this is evidence of some degree of familiarity with the virtual worlds offered by the Internet. You are unlikely to let out a gasp of astonishment at the knowledge that such a thing as an online college of magic exists. However, considering the quality of much online content, you could be excused the cynical expectation that it's either a Harry Potter marketing stunt or just another Emperor's New Clothes, another fat tranche of cyberbollocks aimed at the occultizoid market.

Not so, by a long mile. Arcanorium is run by seminal chaos magic author Peter Carroll, staffed entirely by experienced magicians and offers courses (and less formal discussions) of a consistently high standard. The courses take place in virtual classrooms, the course content delivered as weekly threads initiated by the teacher. In a practically-based course like the one under review, threads are created by students to record and discuss their results and ideas.

The experience of taking part in such a course can be an unusual and highly fruitful one; you are sharing thoughts with a class full of lively thinkers who are actually doing their own magical work.

This course is no exception. Taught by Ian Read, Rune-Gild Master (and Drighten; see interview in Issue 1 of this magazine) it delivered in its six intense weeks an astonishing level of original work by Rune-Gild Master Ingrid Fischer on the Germanic soul-complex whose Master-Work of Runelore, Germanic Psychology, is on its way to being published. For those unfamiliar with this fascinating facet of Northern lore, I've appended the reading list from the course.

Masters Read and Fischer are not only(!) magicians steeped in the Northern tradition and with decades of magical experience but they are also both trained in modern psychological and psychotherapeutic practice. So this course sheds new light on the complex subtleties of traditional soul-lore, and in a superbly practical way. The student is given conceptual tools and exercises to help him map his own subjective experience onto the old names for the soul-components. More about this important work later.

Like most Arcanorium courses, this one ran over six weeks. The lesson-topics covered were: Development of the Personality, The Core Triad, Dreams, The Fylgia or Fetch, and Fate.

The Core Triad is one of the original concepts in the course, and one of the core ideas. The triad consists of hugr (approximately intellect, dominant hemisphere activity, the seat of the mundane self and conscious will), minni (memory, reflection, the subordinate cerebral hemisphere) and odhr (inspiration and ecstatic consciousness, among other functions).

I have been aware for some years of the approximate parallels between these modern terms and traditional ones, but I had not mapped these soul-components onto my own subjective states with anything like the depth and detail that I gained when I applied the Core Triad concept in the course exercise.

It is hard to exaggerate just how important this kind of work is, the fine tuning of subjective discrimination, and how thoroughly it can integrate into daily experience. Drifting on the edge of sleep, I came to feel the events of the day flickering from consciousness into the beginnings of REM-sleep, hugr's thoughts being processed into minni's reflections, like the pages of a book being riffled for the bits worth casting into long-term memory. Experiencing this, I am aware of the observing faculty hovering over that dyad, one of the functions of odhr, and one of the gateways into higher consciousness.

What could be more valuable in this kind of study than that, to gain a correlation between subjective feelings and a map of soul-elements? We cannot get anywhere with a soul-map until we start to correlate it with the territory of how that soul feels in action.

Big Black Holes Found All Over Model

2010-06-26T18:09:00.000+01:00

Last Friday night, on my way from the Old Kent Road to a meeting of advanced, pragmatic sceptics of the dominant worldview (chaos magicians), I took my seat on the bus and picked up the copy of the Metro that came with it. Among the news and celeb gossip was an article saying that science is entering a crisis in its way of viewing the entire universe.

Unless you practise or at least keep up with science, you probably haven't been following the woes of the Standard Model of cosmology. Let me take you on a brief flight over the territory.

In 1929 Edwin Hubble interpreted the redshift in the light from disant galaxies as a sign that the universe is expanding. In 1931 Georges Lemaitre proposed that the universe originated in a 'primeval atom', which idea led to the Big Bang theory. The idea was a contentious one until 1965, when the discovery of the cosmic background microwave radiation convinced nearly all cosmologists that the universe originated from a hot, dense starting moment.
By 1980, the theory had already accumulated an oddity: inflation. It seems that the universe was, or is, expanding much faster than was predicted from the mechanics of the Big Bang, and an extra factor had to be brought in to make sense of these new observations.
Elsewhere in cosmology, other weirdness was gathering. In 1934 Zwicky proposed 'dark matter' to explain the rotational peculiarities observed in galaxies. Dark matter has never been observed, and is thought not to consist of atoms and not to interact electromagnetically with 'regular' matter like the observable universe. What's more, there seems to be far more dark matter than observable matter in the universe - around five times as much.
In 1998 new observations suggested that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To account for this, there had to be much more mass or energy than we'd ever observed; even taking into account the extra mass dark matter supplied, there was still a massive shortage, so 'dark energy' was postulated. As if it wasn't bad enough that 80% of the solid stuff of the universe is invisible, there has to be about three times as much dark energy as all the matter put together, dark or otherwise. In other words, only about 4% of the total mass-energy of the universe is directly observable.
An attempt has been made to pull together the ideas of dark matter and dark energy into a single concept of 'dark fluid', which is something like a fluid mechanics of space. And it gets weirder still: recently, bits of matter have been observed to move very fast and in a way that suggests they are being pulled about by matter outside the known universe. This has been given the name 'dark flow'.

Is there a pattern discernable here? These are what an old physics lecturer of mine* used to call fiddle factors, arbitrary quantities or constants you put in to make the equations work. Applied physics and engineering are full of them, but when they appear in the deep, fudamental theories they are something of an embarrassment.

This is not the first time this has happened. The neat theory of planetary motion that insisted the earth was at the centre of the universe, and that planets had to move in circular orbits (because mathematics is the language of the mind of God, and the universe is meant to be comprehended by humans - the same faith that still drives science) had to add in little curly bits to account for apparently retrograde motions of Venus and Mercury. These were called epicycles. The epicycles grew more epicycles, and the theory lurched along for another few centuries before Kepler risked his life at the hands of the church and declared a heliocentric model which fit the facts much better and tidied away all those messy epicycles.

At the moment cosmology seems to be stumbling along fine under its weight of fiddle-factors, but how much longer has a major theory got when the tocsin of its imminent demise is being rung in a paper you pick up free on buses ? (Metro, Fri June 18th)
The writer, one Ben Gilliland, (a man who clealrly knows his physics and presents it well) is pretty fresh about it all, with subheads like 'Bang goes the theory' and 'Part of our universe is missing'.

So the cosmological world awaits a new paradigm. Will we have to give up the Big Bang? If it seems intuitively reasonable that it all started with a big bang, maybe that's because we're weaned on creation myths with a definite beginning. After all, Georges Lemaitre. the original proponent of the theory was a Belgian Catholic priest. Mythic continuity or just coincidence?
Some writers have sought a new theory which would allow a special connection between special states of human consciousness and action at a distance in the material world. In other words, that would allow magic. One such theorist, with more knowledge of physics than most authors who try to connect the two areas, is Peter J. Carroll. His 6-dimensional spacetime theory (http://www.specularium.org/ ) is not easy to understand and will not be to everyone's taste, but it may be an example of what the human mind can come up with when fashioning a theory to account for our experience of this weird universe. Maybe this time we don't have to leave out the magic.

* If you ever read this, Dr Crane-Robinson, I never thanked you for your gedankenexperiment about trying to boil an egg on top of a mountain, which resulted for me in a state of gnosis. So thank you, I finally 'got' the Boltzmann statistics.

Review - Phil Harper's Ritual Chaos Magic Workbook

2010-05-17T18:17:00.000+01:00

The Ritual Chaos Magic Workbook by Philip Harper

Phil Harper will be a new name to most of you, so the quality of information offered in this slim book may come as a surprise. Opening with the big questions - What is Magic and Why Do It? - he proceeds to an overview of Classical Western Magic and Chaos Magic. From the start, Harper writes with the authority of practical experience, in a competent no-nonsense fashion. The topics covered include reviews of basic Qabalah, basic magical training in the skills that will be familiar to anyone who has followed a well-rounded training scheme, the temple and tools, banishing rituals, sigils, divination and servitors.

This selection of material is, of course, not entirely original; if you are writing about using Qabalah as your main magical model, you have to give at least a review of a tradition of at least a couple of centuries' worth of magical literature. So the book goes over ground you could find in other books, but brings it all together in this one highly readable volume - adding the dimension of a rigorous Chaos Magick approach. The mix reminds me a bit of USA writer Steven Mace's blend of Thelemic qabalah with a critical, evidence-based CM approach (for samples of Mace's work see early editions of Chaos International).

Neither is this a mere flavour, the shallow eclecticism of the chaos magick dilletante - Harper is clearly serious about going the whole way, attaining all that can be attained on the magical path, and he shows abundant common sense in evaluating the magical orders on the market in the final chapter, Orders, Initiations and Grades.

So who is Mr Harper writing for here? Basically, a beginner, because it brings it all together in one book, but an intelligent beginner who does not want spoon feeding, and is not afraid of doing some disciplined magical work. In other words, a proper aspirant to the magical knowledge that can only be gained by working on yourself.

In other words, this book is sufficiently serious to put off most armchair magicians.

If this, his first book, is anything to go by, Philip Harper is likely to be heard of again. Check out his informative and courageous blog at http://ritualchaosmagic.blogspot.com/
I say courageous because how many magicians do you know who would post up a video of themselves skrying the Enochian 29th Aethyr? And he writes that:
'On the 10th of May 2010, at about 1:10am I successfully gained the Knowledge and Conversation of my Holy Guardian Angel....'

Phil's main website, http://www.ritualchaosmagic.co.uk/ is a treasure trove of resources for the curious magician and well worth a visit.

The Ritual Chaos Magic Workbook is available on lulu.com as ebook or printed copy.

2010-05-10T21:11:00.000+01:00

The Book of English Magic by Phillip Carr-Gomm & Richard Heygate.

Some readers may have read an earlier and very brief review I did of this book. That was based on the pages I was initially sent - the Introduction and a breezy and lucid introduction to the life of David Conway, which sits at the end of the final chapter, 'The Wizards' Return', more about which later. The first impression I got off those few pages suggested that it wasn't the kind of book that tells you much about how to do magic, more of an amusing overview of the scene for an absolute beginner.

However, when I received the full volume, I changed my mind. The intro promises 'suggestions for sites to visit and experiments to perform', and these invitations to actually get involved in personal magical research is one of the central strengths of the book. Each chapter also includes one or two personal accounts from a practitioner of that aspect of the magic arts. These mini-biographies give useful starting-points for further reading.

The magical names mentioned include the usual suspects, plus plenty of people I'd never heard of, including innovative female magicians such as the 16th century Mary Sidney and hedge witch Tamsin Blight. The connections made span high society to low, and ancient to modern times.
There are also some interesting details about the ancient world that take the reader on a quick flight over vast eras, for instance how the 850 BCE cold spell influenced the ancient cultures that suffered it, and what with some nice little asides and references to the various fictional treatments of the historical eras mentioned, this is a rich and tasty mix of ideas.

So how does it shape up in how it treats the various currents and styles of English magic?
Starting with ley lines and dowsing, the authors pursue a non-judgmental approach to
fantastical notions like continent-wide energy-lines. Their attitude to the varieties of witchcraft is also balanced and they give a sensible treatment of the dangers of the magical path.

Neither are the authors afraid to tackle contentious topics. They engage with the drugs taboo, kicking off the Aleister Crowley chapter with an account of AC's mescalin-soaked Artemis ritual.
Sexual magic is framed as 'modern English tantra', with references to Dion Fortune as well as AC. The text follows the thread of the erosion of restrictive sexual mores which facilitated an opening-up of useful information about the magics of sex.

Now for the few bones I have to pick. No surprise, these are in the areas I know something about - chaos magic and the Northern way.
The authors rightly condemn the ludicrous rune-fantasies of Ralph Blum. (There ought to be some kind of recognition for the dissemination of the most misleading esoteric lies - maybe we could call it the Ralph Blum Award?) But they fail to mention the most academically-rigorous rune writer in the world, Edred Thorsson, aka Stephen Flowers, whose work has established a sound basis for the current, much better-informed resurgence of interest in Northern mysteries.

The chapter on Anglo-Saxon magic starts promisingly, but then we are plunged into the highly dubious territory of so-called shamanism with the thoughts of Peter Aziz. This monologue not only exemplifies the pot-pourri of personally significant bits of technique that the word 'shamanism' has become associated with but is utterly irrelevant to Anglo-Saxon sorcery.
Michael Harner's 'core shamanism' - is also mentioned, and it's about time this movement was put into perspective. This kind of generalizing discourse serves largely to muddy up the waters of research into the genuine magical practices of ancient traditions by blurring it all together into something that can be learned in a few (costly) weekend retreats.

Since the book also misplaces Diane Paxson amongst 'rune masters', I'll take a brief detour to criticize her work. She presents a system of 'soul lore' to which she has added a 'higher self'. Now this isn't as ludicrous as Blum's addition of a blank rune, but there is absolutely no basis for it in the tradition, and it confuses research into the true basis of mystical attainment using germanic soul lore. It is as if Paxson is recommending we try a complex and subtly-flavoured dish, but only after slopping so much Heinz Tomato Ketchup on it we can't taste its special flavours. This is presumably because the sauce is the only flavour on the table that will be familiar to the poor, unadventurous diner.

Now to the chapter on Chaos Magic, 'The Return of the Magicians'. On the upside, the authors have clearly done their research on the origins of the CM current. We are told in the words of Sarah Whittaker about a loosely-defined group of magicians who worked together in Whitby over one summer in the mid-70s, including seminal authors Pete Carroll, Ray Sherwin and Lionel Snell.

This is a convincing account, but I'm in no position to comment on its accuracy, since no-one in the CM scene I've been on for over 30 years had heard of Sarah Whittaker before she published it, and the protagonists of the drama she relates are mostly retired from active service, silent or otherwise out of contact. But it rings true, and is a worthy origin myth.

The David Conway biographical piece really puzzles me though. It's interesting enough, but would someone please tell me what Mr Conway has to do with Chaos Magic? The authors could have interviewed Ian Read, who nurtured the world IOT from England after Pete Carroll resigned in 1991, which makes him one of the most important figures in English chaos magic. Mr Read is well known for his courtesy in granting interviews to many worthy publications, so it would probably have been worth trying to get him on board.

The authors' research is also amusingly outdated in one other small detail. We all know how subcultural stereotyping is useful, working like branding as an extreme shorthand for a complex slew of associations. It made me smile to read, among a list of musical styles associated with different magical currents, to see chaos magic associated with heavy metal. My eyes defocus as I recall fond 1980s memories of demonic black t-shirts sweated in to a soundtrack of dark industrial rock. But please, that was a long time ago, and never heavy metal! A quick straw poll of chaos magician friends' current playlists nets Miles Davis, Wagner, Jimi Hendrix, Jajouka, neo-folk, dance music and the microtonal song styles of old Europe.

Having said that, there's still a big, vital narrative in this book. The Introduction states that '...of all the countries in the world, England has the richest and most varied history of magical lore', and it makes this point well, giving a glimpse into the enchanted undergrowth of England's culture, countryside and ancient cities.
This is a good thing; everyone but the English are proud of their cultural roots - as if English was the language of the observer, the special case of a non-magical tradition, viewing with a detached eye the weirdness of other cultures, when in fact we have the richest magical culture in the world.

Despite its flaws, I think this book is destined to become a beloved work of reference for a fair few magicians. I can imagine dusty copies reached down years hence from the shelf, a treasury of magical resources, a little bit like the role Julian Cope's magnificent 'Modern Antiquarian' plays in the exploration of sacred sites.

Dave's new blog

2010-05-08T21:56:00.000+01:00

Hello World,
I decided to start this blog to create a new space for the reviews I'm writing, rather than cramming them onto the back pages of my website (www.chaotopia.co.uk).

For my previous reviews, check out the 'Writings' page of chaotopia.co.uk.

I might think of other things to post up here at some stage, but for now here's my first review:

Magick Works by Julian Vayne, Mandrake of Oxford

Readers of books on paganism, chaos magic and psychoactive sacraments may well be familiar with Julian Vayne's characteristic mix of essay, ritual report and personal anecdote. This book reprises that blend – the subtitle is 'Stories of occultism in theory and practice' – and those who enjoy his vivid personal tales of magic will not be disappointed – he reveals a good deal of his personal magical history, telling how he came to magic and relating the magical dimensions of the birth of his son.

The essays are also very interesting, Vayne engaging with theoretical problems from his own special angle. Sex and drugs are woven into stirring and timely interpretations of paganism as a cult of ecstasy, a dimension generally neglected by more conventional (read 'bourgeois'?) pagans. As promised by the cover blurb, Vayne also writes about 'gardening', in a very informative essay on 'Permaculture, Politics and Paganism'. Another aspect of interacting magically with our environment is explored in pieces on psychogeography.

One of my favourite essays is ‘The Use of the Imagination’, in which he cleverly undoes the usual (and usually derogatory) notion that imagination is not real. For instance:
'The screen upon which we project our perceptions is imagination; it is the necessary condition of experience.'
The theme of imagination also impels a very rare feature of this book – a short 'Manifesto of the Magickians', a clarion call to engagement with the real world through the use of magick. A specific kind of engagement is suggested near the end of the chapter 'The Fourth Path – Drugs, Entheogens and modern Paganism', where readers are encouraged to support American Casey Hardison, imprisoned in the UK on a 20 year sentence for LSD manufacture.

Overall, this is a fine book, probably the best I've read of Vayne's work. The prose is highly readable and mostly clear, with one startlingly indigestible exception, when he writes: ' the baulked project of our inherent epistemophillia', perhaps after an overdose of Baudrillard.

However, I have to take issue with his curiously uncritical stereotype of the Left Hand Path magician, in which he sets up a straw-man-picture of Black Brothers, 'dwellers in the Abyss that wish to 'stop growing, to become rigid and unbending'', illustrating this with a quote from a Temple of Set website.
In order to make my point I shall explore some ideas about what the purpose and goal of the magical path might be.
The Perennial Philosophy has so far always been interpreted as having an endpoint in Union With God. Of the tiny minority who attempt the Great Work, many fail and few records exist. What has survived and gained the status of the canon of the Perennial Philosophy gives a self-selection that appears to offer a consistent picture of what attainment is like.
Some of this is gorgeously seductive – who would not be lured onto the path by Thomas Traherne’s:
'You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.'
I certainly was, and for years I worked a mixture of LHP and RHP. Now I know myself better, and having investigated RHP techniques far more closely, I confirmed in the process that I belong to a particular subset of seekers – those who are constitutionally unable to believe in Big God to the extent of ever having any faith in that abstraction. Such seekers as myself can only hope to develop faith in some transpersonal influence much nearer to hand.

Not only that – the closer I approach to what mystical attainment is supposed to be, the less I like the look of much of the territory sketched out in the reports, not to mention the methods of getting there.
For instance, I find sitting meditation itself a dubious practice, and am inclined to view with some reservations any interpretations of the sublime ecstasies that are proffered by someone who’s spent 2 hours a day doing nothing. Something in me not only detests sitting doing nothing for 2 hours a day but finds suspect any philosophy that emerges from such a practice.

I came to the firm conclusion that I do not seek union with God. The whole notion is dubious: Would you want to attain union with your lover? Because then you wouldn’t be able to love her/him any more and the world would have been diminished by one individual consciousness.
To put it another way, my Holy Guardian Angel is not a RHP mystic.

I strongly suspect there’s an inborn capacity to appreciate the concept of Big God. There is some vindication of this from studies on separated twins, particularly behavioural geneticist Thomas J. Bouchard Jr's famous "Minnesota twins" study, from which he concludes that about 50% of the differences among people in their religious attitudes, interests, and values is accounted for by their genes.
This is a contentious idea (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene), but if it's anywhere near the truth it means that when we god-minus genotypes explore higher consciousness we either have to shoehorn ourselves into a Procrustean bed of mainstream theology or write our own god-minus esoteric manuals.

And this opens up the question: What happens to the Self in the LHP?
The Setians have a pretty good model. I find their Satanic glamours offputting, the kind of thing that initially made it hard for me to take them seriously, but their model fits rather well with the Northern mysteries model expounded by Edred Thorsson, in which we forever 'Seek the Mystery', approaching an infinite succession of veils, each of which parts to reveal another behind it.
I suggest to Mr V that he might try reading 'Uncle Setnakht's Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path'. Don Webb’s calm and lucid manual of LHP attainment gives the lie to the Black Brothers stereotype in many ways, including supplying reasons to help other people! I can detect nothing more problematic in my reading of that book than a difference in personal style, and this is as it should be – each of us has to make our own way in these realms.

In contrast to this, it strikes me that the most empty, frozen, in-the-fucking-way-type people are very Right Hand Path. Alternative-medical guru Deepak Chopra is a good example, with his sententious advice to just be nice, meditate (to crush your individuality), and hopefully make loads of money along the way, just like he did.

One description of what I'm doing now is working on ‘building a soul’. This Work is common to Setians, Rune-Gild and many followers of Jung, who call this process Individuation. And that is far from an exhaustive list – Vayne himself writes (p74 ): 'the occultist cultivates an enchanted soul.'
The higher levels of consciousness have been almost all articulated by RHP for a long time (and will continue to be so, because it’s the easier path to understand in our strangely-warped world, where abstract notions so often trump living reality), but magicians like Webb and Thorsson are drawing together the threads of a Left Hand Path gnosis that shine (darkly) through the weave of the Perennial Philosophy.