His work was the catalyst that brought a crew of us together, really – initially, we formed as a reading group for Star.Ships, and a working group for The Chaos Protocols, and especially a drinking group for rum, which fuelled the whole jagged, swaggering affair.

The group and its history endure, though we meet less, and our interests have evolved, as they can only be expected to. Horizons tend move as they're approached, and none of us were staying still.

It was a wild time – I certainly gained a lot from it; I'm sure the others did too, and each in our own way. I've found huge value in having peers and fellow travellers in this enterprise – even though we've been on radically different trajectories, that have only diverged further over the years.

Dissenters anonymous

None of us agreed whole-heartedly with all of Gordon's positions, either – and, with his work rate, there were a lot of them. His work elicited, provoked, and suggested exceptions and divergences. We all felt he was a fellow traveller, for sure.

We'd all signed up to his premium membership, when it launched, explored his material, taken what applied and left to go our own way. Some resonated more than others. I appreciated his whole “restoration of context” angle. That early history of the grimoires course was an absolute banger.

Then and now, I personally disagree with his various collapse theses, though got a lot out of his “World Without Sin” writing, and loved the All Red Line. I liked a lot of the stuff in Chaos Protocols, but couldn't really make the operations work for me, to the extent I'd become used to with other methods. I liked that he referenced source materials – and deeply enjoyed reading Witzel's The Origin of the World's Mythologies, which inspired so much of Star.Ships.

I appreciated White's journalistic flair and sense of adventure. His blog posts inspired my own appreciation and, later, significant collection, of rum. This led to cocktail making, then distilling spirits – and my own small experiment, Elixir Arborvitae.

An offhand mention in in one of his blog posts led to tiki culture, and through this, to many drunken, delightful nights recreating forgotten and recovered cocktail recipes, originating from now-long-closed bars. The respective revivals of the Grimoire tradition and Tiki mixology have some curious similarities, that become even more apparent after communing with strong spirits. Missionary's Downfall, indeed.

The Wake

So we met, on a hilltop, where we could see the harbour mouth, and the sea, and the point where the water merged into the horizon. The sun was in our faces and the jagged ridgeline of hills at our backs on cold, clear Saturday Winter Wellington morning.

We burned incense, drank coffee and rum, and talked about our beautiful, brave new world, that has such people in it. A persistent squawking bush parrot hung around, even as dogwalkers gave the animated, daydrinking characters in the park a wider berth. Those weird kids? Hell, the weird adults were hanging out, getting louche that particular morning.

With this man's death, something significant and special has ended. A most strange and transitional time. He called the changes, and spun good yarns.
The Sons of Hermes raised and drained dry our glasses to the mighty wizard and adventurer, Gordon White.

Fair winds and following seas, traveller.

In a line – A challenging, freewheeling series of essays exploring cybernetic and systems theory, that blow apart what you thought you knew about context, change and communication.

This work is a tough one, that I’ve been meaning to read for years; now, finally engaging with it, I can see why people regard working through it – and its implication – almost as a rite of passage. As per Bateson’s far more accessible Mind and nature: A necessary unity, the polymathic genius riffs across theories and experiences with bracing kaleidoscopic boldness.

Steps shows his notes and development far more than Mind and nature though, and offers more tools and worked examples, applied across a huge variety of situations.

The man passionately loves the World, and is fascinated with everything in it. More than anything else, this was what I have come away with, and have been deeply revitalised by.

The book starts with slightly awkward, contrived didactic dialogues between a nominal father and daughter. These originally ran in publications run to promote and explore Korzybski’s General Semantics; the sort of thing that Very Intelligent People would read. I didn’t like this bit.

After this though, the guy gets into everything – from communication with seals and dolphins, to treating schizophrenia and alcoholism, to analysing Papua New Guinean tribal dancing, to ponderous analyses into differences in morphology of insect legs.

Embedded in this is a series of brilliant, startling, slippery ideas about learning, communication and mind; these are the threads that hold it all together. He lays it out quite plainly, though it’s hard and deep work to really get to grips with.

Why this, why now?

Bateson ostensibly uses the discipline of cybernetics – to the extent there’s a singular discipline there; I’m understanding less of what it is, the more I study it.

I found Steps particularly insightful in exploring some questions critical for me at this time, especially around agency, mind and context.

I especially enjoyed how it was so non-human-centric – but not mechanistic or technocratic, either. The application of his ecological models of thinking about systems seems especially pertinent to the weird, especially the sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting lines of digital and magical.

Bateson kind of careens through both and neither; definitely operating at a level is rare these days. It’s so refreshing to engage with thinking like this – a guy who was just figuring things out, while hanging out with characters like dolphin communicator and ketamine expert John C. Lilly, or possibly the world's greatest hypnotist (yet), Milton Erickson.

A critical NLP sourcework

Also, so many of his ideas were deeply influential on the development of Neurolinguistic programming (NLP), though in not-necessarily obvious ways.

My immediate payoff was a deeper understanding of what the creators (or cartographers) of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, were engaging with, when they melded its various disparate parts to make this most curious method of changing minds.

Bateson’s model of learning, as a system stepping out into bigger and bigger sets of contextual awareness was brilliant. So simple when explained – but completely impenetrable, or invisible, before.

This is the gift of this work – it can be a grind, but necessarily so; this prepares the way to capture flashes of indelible insight.

Steps to an ecology of mind is a challenging text – and even more so to find and actualise the practice within it, but if you want to get better, do hard things.

If you want to understand differently, take the steps.

As usual and to be expected in this shady twilight business, something else happened entirely. First, what there weren’t (for me, YMMV):

• No Grantian visions of elaborate tunnels of Set or similar exuberances, as per his wonderful traveller’s guidebook, Nightside of Eden.

• No massively apparent presence from each sigil – probably a skill issue; I’ve not been perceivably bargaining with eldritch entities in sunken or stellar halls, tunnels, chambers etc; I certainly didn’t get the full “Dungeons and Dragons 11th Edition” visions I’d been expecting/hoping for.

• Not really an observable harrowing of Hell that, by my own admittedly sometimes provincial “She’ll be right” spiritual ontology I could say “this has been my experience of the Shells of the Qlippoth, as per the Sigils of Liber 231”.

(Would we even know, amid the general uneven transition into hyper-accelerated, hyper-abundant technocapital singularity that the rest of the Western World is enjoying?)

Takeaway: Maybe this was attributable to loose and lazy technique, or just falling out of this particular current of highly imagistic, visionary magic.

At this stage of (my enjoyable, practical) life I’m far less drawn to the dramatic excesses and flourishes of the various Hermetic Orders of the Immaculate Vinegar Strokes.

What I did find, while not wandering around in Amenta:

• Consolidation: Fairly obsessive focus on old, unfinished pieces of business from earlier decades in my life. I don’t like the “psychological magic” paradigm, but there was a strongly autobiographical element to all of this.

• Closing loops: Specifically – lines of inquiry I opened at the beginning of my occult career, like completing professional certification in Neuro-linguistic Programming and Hypnotherapy.

• Physical metaphors: Health surprises – umbilical hernia surgery, a procedure I last enjoyed during a beautiful, terrifying, Year of Mahavidya puja. A strange dermatitis around my eyes. Also, diagnosis of wear and tear of a life lived deliciously.

• Opposites aren’t necessarily so: Returning to Michael Bertiaux’s cryptic riffs from the VGW, collapsing supposed dualities into a shattering, releasing delightful insight. Beyond/Within. The Archaic and the Futuristic. The Deep Ones and the Outer Ones – and the power, knowledge and gifts they offer.

Above all: renewed, albeit wearied, optimism

The time we’re entering has more possibility than we can ever imagine, accessible to any with the appropriate hunger. A series of momentous, speciation-level events are upon us. A time of quests, with promises of deep knowledge and starry wisdom.

The way is open, though there are deals to be done and oaths to be sworn. There will be costs. Not everyone will make it. But – the adventure is too exciting not to attempt.

Though physically extinct, on this act of reverence for something so utterly alien and foreign to our lifewave.

Maybe even pre-linguistic – something from before the incursion of the entity we call language.

Making Kin.

Technique

Memory, stone, formation, the persistent impression. I scry into this – a stone does not need to be lustrous or reflective to speak.

This becomes the psychopomp. I learn it's character, as it learns mine. It wakes up slowly, speaks slowly, and in many voices – the other materials and minerals in its formation, perhaps?

Echoes of the eddies in currents of time and tide, at least.

Theory

That which is is that which acts. Even the Qlippoth acts – my own method of making any sense of these is as casting moulds of creation, with fragments of the immanent material of the first, last and only event still clinging to it.

They are necessarily reversed – as a mould is a reverse of that which it casts. Calling this “Evil” is like calling your intestines evil for producing faeces. Those who do are just full of shit.

This is the memory of the formation, from the perspective of the methods implements.

Without leaning too heavily into the acid bath of modern primate sociopolitical warfare – you want to know what's happening, ask those who do the work, the factory floor, so to speak.

This is how we can do our own gemba walk, cheerfully cruising on the factory floor of creation.

Grounding concept

There is only one Event – following Whitehead, (in so far as I can follow Whitehead, he's hard work) time is a secondary phenomena, and one that holographically evolves.

The past ain't what it used to be – it gets updated as the Event interacts with Potential.

And together, they be one in Truth.

In the country where I live, goats are regarded as a pest, and wild populations are hunted to control numbers, but also for recreation and food.

Wild goats are also delicious and nourishing – and eating is a perhaps overlooked way of learning from a creature that has known only freedom, and no fences.

So, as we seek exotic tastes, we ourselves may seek to make our lives and souls delicious and memorable, for the muses to feast upon. The spiritual experience of being eaten or consumed is primal and recurring, through many traditions and practices.

I digress.

The Judas goat: the process

A captured goat is fitted with a radio tracker.

It is dropped by helicopter in areas where other goats are known to be.

Goats are social animals – they cannot help but to find a herd to run with.

When they do, the hunters return, kill all but the Judas, then take it to find another group.

A Carcosan fable, by way of the Aesopica

Carcosa Bound is certainly no place for moralising – but these are strange days, and only getting stranger. If there is anything curative or instructive in this, it run something like:

We must be always on the lookout for the Judas Goat in our interactions, systems, ecologies – whether our own behaviours, our communities, our wider communion of souls.

We seek to run with those like us – but not all are conscious of who they bring with them.

A processing heuristic that seems to work across scales, that I’ve found useful so far, is:

• What value does it create?
• Does it add friction? If so, where and for what purpose?
• Where is the obstruction?

Most things seem to have these dimensions.

If it’s mostly value-adding stuff (especially short term – the first 90 days are all about stacking wins) – make it happen.

If it adds friction, it gets acknowledged.

If obstruction – noted, and avoided.

In a way, these almost offer responses to the positions outlined in Albert O. Hirshman’s short and elegantly scripted 1970 book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty.

Add value to “Trust” interactions. Add friction – noise, mess, deferral – to “Voice” interactions. Obstruct those operating in the “Exit” mode – whether they’re trying to break up your tribe, clan, constituency, whatever – or leave themselves.

Caveats and considerations

Does the friction add value? Sometimes. Measure twice, cut once.

Can obstruction add value? Being told you cannot do something often incites a creative frustration, the rage filled declaration of “over, under, round or through”: a hardening of the heart and mind and will.

Can the relentless creation of value create friction, or obstruction? Fundamentally, it certainly can devalue and debase itself – for instance, too much value, that is too accessible, leads to the cheapening of it.

Or – alternatively, value creates the opposite of friction: vacuum. All limit withdraws, allowing the flame to burn ever brighter – without adding more fuel. Then it goes out.

But this is the transformation game; its nature is to be a tricky, mercurial business.
And, played right, we can play anywhere.

#tech #theory

I’ve heard those exercising this tendency pejoratively labelled “crisis magicians” – those only doing magic when in desperate need – but I gently push back on this as an immature perspective.

Everyone needs. Most – and especially those playing all out, and playing for keeps – fall on extremely tough circumstances, at one time or another.

My position is these periods of need, much more so than wants and passing fancies, are what drive deeply meaningful, transformative insight and connection.

Bonds stronger than life and time and the need itself are formed on this Deadly Ground.

Magicians are not built in or for easy, predictable, safe lives.

I know I’ve used this, and built powerful relationships. In a way, it is pretty central to my practice.

A desperate need is an opportunity to throw an imperfect situation into the crucible of one’s Arte, and with instruction, assistance and friendship of spirits, make something beautiful and exciting and new.

There is nothing wrong in asking for spiritual help – this makes the thing in itself a transcendental object, a spirit outpost in the world, an adventure that is unique and wholly yours.

A need was felt and resolved here. Something was learned here. A relationship was deepened here. We became something greater, together, here.

After seeking spiritual help with needs, I’ve found the whole matter obliquely transforms to seeking out needs so you and your crew can hang out, to explore new dimensions of spirituality, make new friends, and learn more and grow.

Perhaps, if the lightning hits just right – through explicit need and skillful means, we may even become something far greater than what we were before.

Generous with your family when you have no time and no energy.

Generous with your attention, when you're constantly distracted.

Generous with financial support, when you can't pay the bills.

Generous with encouragement and advice, when your opinion doesn't actually matter.

Generous with showing up when your attendance adds no value.

Generous with your protection when you're weak and soft.

Poverty: the most common, closest thing to evil in this world

Poverty is the most prevalent evil in our beautiful World today.

Above all, poverty of the soul is the worst. Nothing grows, or can grow, there.

Some people have this condition, and it's a shitty wyrd. But as Heraclitus said, character is destiny.

A corollary, then: the deep, hard work of persistent character change, self-learned, self-willed and enacted upon the self – has actual Cosmic importance.

The lotus blossoms in the swamp. The greater the trials, the greater the triumph. All it costs is everything you've got. We know all the lines, but this doesn't not make them true.

The solve: simple, not easy

To each of these, the solutions are roughly found in the same terrain – generate an abundance.

This means choosing growth cycles over doom loops – and shattering doom loops as soon as you see them emerging.

To be generous, first you must be generative.

Baited Hooks for the eye and mind; there is no nourishment to be had there, and no small risk for open, inquiring minds.

With the torn lips from getting caught too many times recently, I worked up a little exercise to navigate our treacherous, infohazardous landscape.

The 5-point Infodiet Rundown

This helped me regain focus. It might help you, too.

Time on task: 10-15 minutes. The first answer provided by your other-than-conscious processes is usually right, or near enough.

1. Audit: Do a rough recollection.

• Think over all the media touch points you've engaged with this week. (Generally is fine.)
• How long ago was it made?

2. Assess: For each item, estimate:

• How long it took to make.
• How long it took you to engage with it.

3. Analyse: Everything changes, in time.

• What, if anything, changed your understanding on a subject or issue you regard as important.
• What, specifically, you think you'll remember one month from now.

4. Action: What you did with it, or will do next.

• Which items of media enabled further action, or the solving of a specific problem, or the creation of more delight in the world?
• Of the content you remember that contributed to building cloud castles – whether owned, or rented – which were aspirational, and which had a negative valence?

5. Contextualise: From a step back, the frame, within which your intellectual project is displayed.

• What are the most critical texts for you, for the formation of your worldview and understanding?
• What you would recommend to others, especially younger people – or your younger self?

For each of these, take a moment to note the delta, and if anything arises from this comparison.

There's no mystic arcanum or grand reveal here, beyond “we are what we eat”.

Is your media diet really providing the nourishment to support what you are doing?

If not, what needs to change?

#tool #technology #media #exercise

Sounds completely plausible, exciting, big if true. A few years ago, I gave it a shot. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.

Did it work?

Short version: Sort of; inconclusive but promising; more experimentation and testing needed.

Longer version, with context: Flotation tanks are great for isolating, relaxing, and offering a fairly-controlled environment. Modern tanks have speakers, and the guys at the frontdesk will play your tunes if you ask, I’ve found.

I’ve been playing with hypnotic induction – on and off, on myself, and others – for years now, since doing a life-changing NLP Practitioner course in the mid-2000s.

I figured could be a pretty cool force multiplier.

Float tanks: one path from pale ape to Cosmic voltigeur

Float tanks are great, and the experience is something no one – not Altered States auteur Ken Russell, nor float tank evangelist Joe Rogan, can fully codify – or indeed ever want to. The tank gives like that. There’s no right way to float, only your way, and you work it out by doing it.

Void Intention – card from my 8-circuit model neurotarot

Current applications – and popularity – go so far beyond even where originator John Lilly could have imagined. My hunch is this Cetacean-communicating extreme sportsman of the mind would never have expected this wonderful experience to be available in any major city worth the name.

I’d become a semi-regular floater, and was more than comfortable navigating with everything that can come up during these experiences. I’ve certainly had some strange times.

Hypnosis: It’s only a suggestion, it just works.

Hypnosis has a perhaps questionable reputation among some more conventional thinkers and those fearful of losing ”control”, insofar as they deem themselves to have it.

A fairly classic objection relates to various stage hypnotists, who lean into the timeless desire for the sketchy, and carnavalesque, with a dash of exhibitionistic control kink.

While all these objections are valid, and, in the right situations undeniably compelling and possessing a certain charge, the hypnosis I learned is a bit different; much more therapeutic, strengths-based, relaxing.

For me, it has done only good, and with no apparent downside, danger or risk – rare indeed when working with powerful change techniques. In a lot of ways, I’m the man I am today, through the work I’ve done. Self-made, and self-scripted, in no small sense.

This, more than anything else, is probably what I’d regard as the most valuable benefit of studying this – it’s an incredibly-practical body of knowledge for testing and expanding one’s own mind control.

Bringing it together: Spacetravel at the speed of Mind

Nothing comes from nowhere. I guess I took influences from Altered States, and Lilly’s wild texts The Center of the Cyclone and Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer.

Also playing a part in this, I think, was Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. In this millennial comic series, the good guys – the eponymous terrorist cell (but in an ahem good way) – and the bad guys – agents of the Outer Church – both use tanks as a tool for various astral projection, remote viewing and hypernarrative intervention.

Boiling all these together, the overall aesthetic seemed badass, my intent perhaps presumptuous: by cracking some sort of murky secret deep state black op techniques, I could:

• become some trans-dimensional boddhisatvic secret agent, in touch with my last incarnation at the end of all time;
• massively expand my consciousness, using a (slightly wonky) Qabalistic understanding to magically empower my body as a powerful magical battery;
• skip the boring, hard slow parts of theurgic practice to directly meet gods and goddesses, all in a few sessions.

I’d had the intent to try this for a while, and following the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, I figured I needed some shaking up and out of stale conditioning.

This seems a chapter in our recent history many want to forget, or forgotten. For me, the disruption and instant curtailing of freedoms had left a deeper psychic wound that I initially cared to admit. I’m sure I was not the only one, and am convinced that societally, we haven’t fully reconciled this yet.

Meeting the Goddess, using free and open source software

Preparation: So, I wrote a series of inductions, and recorded them on my phone. I did the basic mixing using Audacity. I’d got extremely into DungeonSynth during lockdown, and had a back catalogue of deeply powerful and intense tunes that seemed to fit.

These inductions variously focused on around ascending and integrating knowledge from the Qabalistic Tree of Life; informing my current configuration with knowledge from my final permutation at the moment before The End of Everything; radically reinstating personal authority; meeting the Lord of the Wild Hunt and getting amongst it, and achieving insight of and congress with the Black Goddess of Infinite Space.

Process: I carried out a series of 6 long floats, over 6 weeks. After each float, I’d repeatedly listen to the induction I’d floated with.

Probably too much, too quickly, but I had things to do.

Prognosis: Did it actually work? I’m not sure. Can I verify any insight from this? Again, I’m not sure.

Were my hypno chops up to the task? Probably not – though they were a lot better than when I began.

Am I now a trans-dimensional free agent, and eternal hunter of the void, beyond space, time and limitation? As far as I can tell, not so much, in waking hours at least.

It was fucking rad, though. It demolished the rut I was stuck in. I got loose, and life got exciting again. I met the beautiful woman I married, shortly after. My magical practice leveled up, too; I think I found treasures of immeasurable value, in the warm, wet darkness.

And – above all – it reaffirmed that sometimes, you just have to draw out and run with the ideas that whisper at the edges of your awareness, until they, and you, see where you wind up.

As with anything: If you take things far enough, I guarantee you’ll arrive somewhere interesting.