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, to 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 not 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.

It's a total blast – before social media, let alone talk of banning teenagers from it; even before the parabolic acceleration of Dotcom boom.

This is a glimpse of the glorious dawn of this strange day of digital revolution that we're now living amid the ruins of.

While I've listened to McKenna for years, this is the first time I've really analysed his “rap” in any great depth. I initially encountered an .mp3 library of his talks through a blog post from comic book writer / tech gadfly Warren Ellis, in the early 2000s.

At the time, McKenna was the smartest, coolest, most adventurous person I'd ever heard of. I understood none of it, but this almost made it better – there were worlds of potential experience here, and this guy was a knowledgeable, if mercurial and tricky, guide.

Later, I found the sonorous nasal drone of his voice helped me sleep during a period of insomnia, likely caused by overstimulation, taking meaningless shit too seriously, and not exercising enough. Truly, his talks are medicine for all ailments.

What do they mean by “Technopagan”, anyway?

As far as I can tell, in the context of this seminar, it's a cool title.

They reference a 1995 Wired magazine article by Erik Davis, that Davis subsequently expanded into his wonderful extended riff Techgnosis. Davis' article details some great rituals that captured the exuberance of the time.

In these talks, there isn't so much what I'd directly understand as “Pagan”, to my current understanding as a body of technique, practice, ideology as such – no explicit reference to gods, folk, spirits, ancestors, and so on, though there is a masterful ontological mic drop, with the “logos of the Gaian Mind”.

[Correction – actually, in Part 4, they get into this, in some depth – Pesce talks about how this is a working title, and also the assumption of godforms as “a loci for accretion of a personality around a particular point”; McKenna talks about DMT creatures as akin to faerylore, but perhaps also fractal elements of some sort of transpersonal self. It's good stuff, and they're both eloquent as hell.]

These sessions traverse a freewheeling sprawl of then-cutting-edge concerns: nascent digital technologies (some vaporware, others lost to time), psychedelic compounds and experiences, nanotechnology, the psychological impact of constant context changing, cool books, heaps more.

It features lots on VR, especially fascinating for me, at this point – when this was the big transformative technology that would usher in the new age of human potential.

Even then, though, they were delicately expanding definitions, qualifying expectations. Then, as now, the most enthusiastic advocates of the possibilities of VR are usually those who haven't spent much time together in it, much less trying to make it work. Pesce had, and deftly leads this conversation.

Over the weekend-long seminar, the frequency of presentation of big ideas blows away most anything on offer in today's low-density information buffet, too – it manhandles vapid TED talkers and podcast parasociety alike with heavy psychedelic riffage. It's a most curious message in a bottle, from a time before.

Eating the Dessert of the Real

Most of all, for me, it has reminded me of when this tech was fun, wild, liberatory. The rules hadn't been so firmly set; it was human-scaled; the higher educational institutions were still largely benign and people were still doing great work in them.

It hadn't descended into what many experience as the tech world of today: a world of surveillance capitalism, zero-to-one monopolism, the hellscape of offshored callcentres and dubious “helpdesks”, zero hour contracts, and bland doctrinal management by utterly uninspiring, largely incompetent people.

When it all seemed, for a moment, that the information revolution would erase all differences, national boundaries would dissolve, and we'd all live in peace, harmony and endless light...

The challenges of transcription

In terms of transcribing this – working from the auto captioning, and reformatting and correcting this, through the 10 or so hours of the recordings from the weekend.

They're great speakers, and the content is compelling. But the work is hard. This is the biggest insight so far – how much my brain has changed, how weak my focus has become.

As a former journalist, before the profession devolved to its current parlous state, I used to be able to sit, transcribe and type, for hours on end. Day after day. Seeking the truth, or whatever. It was more of a trade than an art, or craft.

So – as a challenge, this transcription, logging an information artifact from a lost time – is revealing unexpected outcomes.

Most of all, it is a powerful and worthwhile exercise in rebuilding atrophied muscles – and sharpening the essential ability to just lock the fuck in and focus on a single, simple task, for hours upon hours straight, until it's done.

I anticipate writing more on these talks, too – there's forgotten gold here. A way forward is in the past.

#technology #futurism #psychedelics #vr #paganism #exercise

In Eustance Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard's tightly written 1959 classic The Elizabethan World Picture, the master scholar lays out three visions of the English Renaissance world, as experienced in the time of Shakespeare, Dee, Donne and Milton.

These visions, in short: the Chain of Being, the distributed-but-mediated correspondences, and the Cosmic Dance. I find the Dance the most useful.

The idea of creation as a dance implies “degree,” but degree in motion. The Static battalions of the earthly, celestial, and divine hierarchies are sped on a varied but controlled peregrination to the accompaniment of music. The paths of each is different, yet all paths together make up a perfect whole.

– EMW Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture

The more experience and experiments I pursue following paths back into the past, the more apparent the process of de-alienation from a profoundly living Cosmos – and my unique place within it. There is joyful work to be done.

Dance instruction from the Black Dragon

When examining the Sigil of Solomon from the mighty grimoire, Black Dragon (published in Crossed Keys, this almost could be read as a top-down view of dance steps.

This is also one of the infrequently expressed benefits of actually reproducing these, with one’s own hand; the act of trying to replicate the figures, letters and line, spending precious time and focus, this opens the floor for all sorts of oblique insight.

In particular, I really got the sense of the three worlds – the natural, the celestial, and the philosophical – as well as a fourth. To me – this is where the Operator stands. At once, the Operation, the identification with the virtue of the Creator, and the realisation that, in the words of Sassy the Sasquatch, the Universe begins with You.

All points in delicately balance and utterly polarised, across each circle – with the three outer circles revolving around the centre, the hexagram, the union of opposite.

In my reading, to my current understanding, the Event, and its two composite parts – the endlessly repeating schema of how things are, and the Potential for anything, something, everything, to change.

If the world is some sort of Gurjieffian pain machine, or the perpetual path of atonement for some fundamental failing of first forebears, this limits the possibilities to a certain range of usually dour outcomes.

But – when the world is a giant, beautiful, baffling and wild dance, and you’re at the centre, the interactions that happen between dancers in the eternal night become something quite different indeed.

#grimoires #theory

So, we take home from the house altar in the spirit room, move him into the lounge, and set his statue up in a good place. Give him a good view, and a good open space.

My lovely wife has made him an inspired, bespoke vermouth, and we serve him cake and coffee, and fresh, cool water; present fresh flowers, candles, incense, a new beaded necklace; treat him special. We sit with him, talk about our projects, plans, wins, negotiations of challenges, and stories of getting things done.

In this house, St Expedite has delivered repeatedly and quickly for all of us, and we honour him. He’s a true champion of delivery-oriented people; strong, inciting, fun to have around.

He teaches, advises and gently challenges too – about accountability, navigating tough situations cleanly, overcoming procrastination, and many other things.

It’s more than a transactional business deal – he’s warmly welcomed, appreciated and even loved in a house of professional project delivery specialists. An aspirational short-order miracle worker.

St Expedite is mighty and fleet. Not tomorrow – make it happen today. We are ones who get it done.
Hodie! Today!

How and where things began

Simply. With a need, and a candle.

Years ago, a most wonderful friend had given me a fixed candle – part of a box of stuff from the Lucky Mojo Curio Company, shipped from the far side of the world.

I’d had no experience with, nor particular desire for, working in what I thought was an exclusively Catholic domain, or part of what I thought was a hoodoo faith. I was wrong, about this and a lot of other things in these intemperate times. These are details; foremost, he delivers.

I was nearing dead broke. My attempts at starting a business had failed miserably and understandably, with no prospects. I had no house, was living with family, and emerging from a bad breakup.

My efforts at fixing things, so far, had been ineffective, though constructively so – I’d done a lot of study, exercise, self-reflection; also Reichian bodywork and magical experimentation. I’d contacted a powerful magician, who taught me many things.

It was a brutal and necessary curative period; I’d been over-inflated, thought too much of myself. A self-centred, arrogant hotdog.

So, my life had fallen to pieces; now, amid the wreckage, I had nothing to do but sit with humility.

This was an incredible period of growth in many ways, but right now, I needed a job.

So: I lit the candle, in my room, following the instructions on the label. It burned for a long time. As it burned, I had the sense of St Expedite working, somehow. I recall seeing him, too. He was different to the picture.

By the end of that week, I had a great job. He was indeed mighty, and quick. I made the promised donation, given in his name, before even my first paycheque landed, with the last of my money.

The beginning of a wonderful relationship.

A final word, though – honour the promises you give him.

And, if he delivers for you, let others in need of speedy resolutions know about him, too.

And, above all: Do great things, starting today. Do not wait.

#saints #festivals