Gods, Demons and Imaginary Friends
Philip H. Farber
When I first began my study of magick, almost thirty years ago, I was fascinated and bewildered by the numerous, often conflicting, systems for cataloging entities. Every school of thought and every religion offered a pantheon of entities, avatars, teachers, and earthly representatives. There were catalogs filled with icons, pantheons crowded with gods and goddesses, angels organized in hierarchies more complex than government offices, and demons lined up behind their bigger, badder brethren. Even the most ostensibly monotheistic religions still had lists of saints, prophets, teachers, legendary characters, and further subdivisions of their One True, yet nonetheless divisible, God.
All these systems were fascinating, of course, and I spent many days, weeks, months and years focused upon exploring them. I studied Jung’s Man and His Symbols, pored over Crowley’s 777, spread tarot cards on my living room floor, tossed coins among the piles of tarot cards, and created magic marker enneagrams, veves, and hieroglyphs. I soon found that a few of these entities had the ability to affect me in surprising ways. Some I found I was inexplicably drawn to – I wrote short stories and created tarot cards for the god Pan for many years, performed rituals involving Aleister Crowley’s triumvirate of Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit and placed candy, rum and cigars on altars for Voodoo loas, for instance. Similarly some entities repelled me--although most simply did not touch me in any immediately significant way. But ultimately my question about all of these was, “Why this stuff?” The teaching was that these entities were symbols, archetypes from the collective unconscious--from a Platonic dreamworld in which the proper shapes of all things were stored.
I'm fine with the idea that our unconscious minds intersect someplace and that we share the common implicit information that is the world beyond our immediate awareness. It makes sense to me on a very practical level – that everything in the universe influences everything else, no matter how slightly or significantly and that information about everything is available everywhere, if we have the ability to decode it. That still doesn’t offer an answer as to how we came up with this particular stuff from among all the potential shapes and forms, gods, angels, demons and symbols of the unperceived world. What is it about that memetic complex that we call a god that makes it a god? How was this stuff first derived? I wanted to understand the nature of the gods and goddesses from books and esoteric lore that I had come to love – ultimately, I wanted to find a pantheon within my own life and experience.
After some years of contemplating this issue of the origin of archetypes, I decided that the emphasis on the "stuff" was only half the equation. The stuff – the names, shapes, clothing and bedroom habits of the gods – represents the content, the collection of ideas and perceptions that we circle in a metaphysical Venn diagram to delineate exactly what constitutes a particular entity. The answer to my question lay as much within the circle as in the hand that pushes the pen to draw it – or rather in the mind that guides that hand.
The question became, “What is it about a particular collection of stuff that fires off the part of my brain that recognizes it as something meaningful?” What makes the character of Ganesh recognizable to worshipers as a god, for instance? It’s a more complex question than it might appear on the surface.
The first level to be peeled back deals with how we recognize anything as conscious, as something with which we can communicate. An intuitive Turing Test performed by the unconsciousness mind seems to immediately categorize things into “conscious entity” and “inanimate lump.” We look at each other and, hopefully, we recognize one another as human and conscious and at least reasonably intelligent. Some very simple visual patterns, for instance, seem to fire off this sense of recognition – a smiley face, have-a-nice day symbol is recognizable to us as a human face; a South Park cartoon character can be identified with--for a half hour at a time--as a conscious entity with the ability to communicate, make decisions, and act-- however stupidly--upon the world.
Linguistic patterns also seem to have a similar ability to reveal the conscious state of an entity. A sentence formed with proper syntax suggests that its writer or speaker is possessed of some measure of intelligence. Based on such unconscious intuitions, we recognize writers as conscious entities when we read their well-formed sentences. We recognize other humans as such when we communicate with each other in text environments such as Internet forums. And we even recognize fictional characters as entities for whom we might predict behavior and sympathize. (What would Captain Kirk do?) There are many behavioral patterns and cues that help us to, unconsciously, tell the difference between a conscious entity and a brick of cheese.
This all made much more sense to me when I came across the concept of mirror neurons. These are physical structures in the brain which enable us to build predictive models of intelligence or consciousness. In effect, mirror neurons build models of entities and use our own consciousness as computing power to run those models. We look at another person and we a) recognize them as another person, and b) try them on for size to some degree. This suggests that mirror neurons are not only the operative force behind empathy, sympathy, and most forms of communication, but may also explain some of the phenomena involving gods and demons with which I was struggling to understand.
First, let’s demonstrate how mirror neurons work. The following exercises are excerpted from the Meta-Magick Invocation Workdbook (© 2008 Philip H. Farber, used with permission).
Watch Yourself Relax:
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Imagine that you can see yourself, or hear yourself, or feel yourself, as if observing another person. Make it like looking at a movie or a picture of yourself. If you are better at hearing or feeling, then hear yourself talking or making sounds, or feel where your presence would be.
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Imagine that this other self that you are observing is in a place that is very comfortable and very, very relaxing. It’s not necessary to see, hear or feel the place, just keep your attention on this other self.
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Watch, listen, and/or feel as this other self becomes more and more relaxed, more and more comfortable, and exhibits the effects of relaxation: softer muscles, different posture, different facial expression, and so forth.
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Make changes to the structure of the image (but not the content):
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Make the image larger or smaller
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Make the colors brighter or more muted
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Emphasize the foreground as opposed to the background, and vice versa
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Make the sounds or speech louder or quieter (if the emphasis is on hearing rather than seeing)
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Speed up and slow down the action (works for all senses)
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Move the image closer or farther away (works for all senses)
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Give the image a soft glow or sparkles
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Notice any changes to your state as you experiment with these changes.
The above exercise deals not just with our ability to recognize entity-hood in our dealings with external stuff, but also with the things that we imagine, the dissociated images and entities that we create in our minds. The very (im)material that gods, demons, and imaginary friends are made from. Also notice how subtle changes in the form and quality of our internal image have the ability to change our response to the entity. Different configurations affect our consciousness in different ways. Making the representation larger or smaller, brighter or dimmer, etc., will often continue the process of making us more or less relaxed. Hopefully you found a configuration that was wonderfully relaxing.
Although the above excersise was about our self-image, it gives us a start towards finding clues to the anatomy of entities of any kind. And even better, we may notice some direct connections between the anatomy of an entity and our own states of consciousness.
Let’s consider for a moment our criteria for recognizing something as god or goddess, demon or angel. There are, generally, two major magical operations that involve these critters: invocation and evocation. Invocation is the drawing into oneself of a quality or entity; evocation is the externalization of a quality or entity. In a traditional invocation of Hermes, we might visit a temple of Hermes and contemplate his image, or recite a descriptive poem in his honor, or create a magick circle and bring into it only those things of Hermetic nature, so that we might become more Hermetic ourselves. In a traditional evocation we might summon a Goetic spirit into a triangle and question it about what would make life better for us or constrain it to perform some task for us to that same end. We perform these operations quite naturally in daily life, outside the context of magick or mysticism. When we are inspired by another person or a work of art, that is a kind of invocation. When we imagine conversations with people who aren’t present, or attempt to verbally convince our computer connection to go faster, we are engaging in mild forms of evocation.
Let’s say that, for the purposes of this discussion, our entities become useful when we can use them to perform invocation and evocation willfully and with well-defined intent. An entity suitable for invocation could, ideally, change you in some desired way by contemplating the entity and drawing it into yourself. An entity suitable for evocation would be able to impart information or perform tasks according to your will. In our Meta-Magical explorations, we hope to discover entities in relation to our own states and our consciousness, rather than necessarily learning some previous explorer’s version of a pantheon. (And when we all do this, perhaps we’ll find that we have many of these entities in common.)
As in the preceding exercise, we begin with an image of the self. Our hypothesis here is that a self image is the very essence of entity-recognition. It is our basic reference point for consciousness and can also help to reveal our own innate pantheons, the entities who already inhabit our world of consciousness. To change that image from our human self to that of a god, we have to tweak the parameters in order for that image (or voice or feeling) to rise to the level of something useful in invocation or evocation, something with the potential to change us through interaction.
Instant God(dess):
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Decide on a quality that you either have and would like to enhance, or one that you don’t have and would like to acquire. For instance, creativity, compassion, patience, strength, assertiveness, financial skill, adaptability, understanding, concentration, flexibility, love, sex appeal, or whatever you decide upon. Make sure this quality is a positive one, that is, it is one that stands on its own and is not expressed as a lack of something else (for instance, “reduced stress” might be expressed here as “relaxation”, “no more bad luck” might be expressed for these purposes as “good luck” and so on).
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Breathe and banish. Imagine a circle around yourself, at about the diameter of your spread arms. Sit or stand in the center of that circle. Fill your lungs completely, with a slow, even inhalation. As you inhale, allow your attention to expand to fill the circle. As you exhale, slowly, evenly, and completely, allow your attention to contract to a single point in the center of your chest. Repeat at least three times.
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Create a dissociated image of yourself (an image, voice or feeling of you as if perceived by another person or in a recording), standing or sitting. Eliminate background and any accessories, objects, props, and so on that might be in your image, so that the image is just you.
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Begin to adjust the physiology of the imagined person to include more and more of your desired quality. Pay attention to and adjust facial expression, posture, breathing, movements, skin tone, muscle usage and anything else that might pertain.
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Adjust the structure of the image (submodalities) for greater impact. Experiment with image size, color depth and quality, image location, and special effects such as glows, sparkles, shimmers. Take each of these to its greatest intensity – for instance, the image could be increased to much greater than life-size. If this image were a god of that particular quality, how would these submodalities manifest? Just how big, bright, loud, strong and sparkly is a god(dess) of x?
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Begin to add in extra features and aspects from other humans, from animals, machines as appropriate to a god(dess) of this quality. For instance, if cunning and strength are useful to this entity, give it some qualities of a tiger or other animal that might represent those qualities (head, body, teeth, eyes, whatever). If enhanced intelligence or processing speed is important, then maybe a computer chip or having a computer as an accessory might work. Take as much time as is necessary to test out some of these qualities. Notice which ones feel the best and keep them. Have fun with this and make your image fantastic.
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Adjust physiology to account for the additions. If you added a computer chip to the brain, how would that be reflected in facial expression, breathing, posture, etc.?
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Contemplate the image for at least 30 seconds.Pull the image into the circle with you and draw it into you. Wear it like clothing, wrap it around you, let it interpenetrate your body and mind. Let your own body, posture, breathing, facial expression, etc. reflect what you saw in this image. Let the memories of this (future) self who has already resolved this basic need be your memories. Breathe and banish. Be open to thoughts, epiphanies, and suggestions from your unconscious mind that may occur throughout the day as a result of this practice.
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This exercise and the early one are offered here for demonstration purposes, to give some practical experience of the relationship between entities and consciousness. For the most part, entities produced or contacted in this way are personal ones, not necessarily god or goddess archetypes familiar to us from the astral storehouse of sacred images. However, sometimes they do rise to that level and first-time practitioners occasionally find themselves face-to-face with deities who offer names and abilities drawn from known pantheons and belief systems.
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The exercises demonstrate an extremely stripped-down and basic mode of working. There are endless modifications and enhancements to these processes of deriving personal pantheons from our unconscious minds. At some point, they become much more than simple demonstrations of a point – but I’ll leave that, for now, to your own imagination and experience...
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(...And before you’re off to read the next article, I’ll just note that to fully understand the point that this piece dances around, no matter how well you think you get it on an intellectual level, it is most likely necessary to actually perform the experiments. You have to look through the microscope and adjust the focus before you really know what a micro-organism is like. And it likewise helps to change the focus of your mind before you really understand the nature of the entities all around us, including gods, goddesses, demons, angels, imaginary friends, ideologies, corporations, schools of art, mass movements and those mysterious bipeds we call “human.”)
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Communion of Spirts
Great article.
If the human species could telepathically communicate these introverted experiences with one another either through meditation or technology, perhaps then we could ascend our physical bodies.
Tuning in
...the origin of archetypes...
Given that consciousness seems to transcend time and space...retro-causality may make understanding the "origin" of the archetypes difficult...if not impossible. For now, at least. From a temporal point of view...
I doubt even the Gods and Goddesses know the origin of the archetypes. I recall a Hindu story, recounted by Joseph Campbell, in which a beautiful woman enlightened the Gods about the transcendent mystery source from which they (and us) came.
Hidden in plain sight
i don't know what kind of world
we live in, when i was reading books about occult subjects in the beginning, it all went hand in hand with reading philosophy, and psychology, and of course poetry.So i just sorta fell into magical things, i believe that the place i was living in, the place where Robert Anton Wilson passed,was a vortex, or it held vortexes, those energy spheres where to simply go through to another dimension.So even though my learning about these things was through the medium of the written word, perhaps i was more into Hermes then say Ganesh, i did not really focus on particular practical methods, my life was too street person like, i never had a stable situation long enough, to really knuckle down. For some reason i was drawn to Crowley, maybe was because he had such cool looking books, and when i read Diary of a Drug Fiend, i was very hooked on his writing.Some years later when i was involved in doing group ritual and performing the Gnostic Mass i still had no particular relation to any formulated ideas of some way all these rituals to invoke certain Gods or Goddesses, my relation to Magick was intuitive.
I never did evocation, never took it that serious.I liked doing the lesser banishing, reading the other writings by AC out loud, the star ruby, star sapphire, other easy to do type things, but the Gnostic Mass was an elaborate invocation that one had to do before a crowd, and that took a lot of concentration, especially because people were always trying to maneuver in and around the ritual in the place it held in the order. All i know is that in the few years i was involved in the magick scene, i saw a lot of power trips, ego trips, and sometimes the magick actually came through, i did not really have time to systematically study the workings of these things, except to move about them, and partake of it, i guess the first batch of the Rites of Eleusis was the crown jewel in my days with contact with these events.After that my interest in all those different rituals and others versions of rituals, became less of an active interest and more of interest from the point of view of a poet.
Which is where i came in to all this,but my understanding of poetry was with more of a psychic connection to the imaginations of people like William Blake, Crowley himself was quite a poet, but i don't think he had the feel for it that say, Yeats did,or James Joyce for that matter.But AC held his own candle up to the sun.So i see it all from the point of view of these writers and poets that always seemed to capture the essence of what all these occult forces are about. The world we live in is moving so rapid fire through all these Archetypes, God forms, Cartoon Characters...And through the Book of Thoth, which if truth be told is where i came in to all this.It was like the Book of Changes but following that route through the eyes of the fool with a tiger by the tail.
No mater how one comes to all this, it is certainly well informed to not get cought up in all the power plays that surround it.But on the other hand as soon as you call on some God or Deamon or Fairy, you open yourself up to deeper levels of your psyche, just to be in the world we are confronted with constant manipulation through media and religion/politics, therefore, anybody that has a consciousness, and is not just another troglodyte, wants to have some access to their own psychological make up , to their birth charts, and to some personal relation to natural forces of the earth, sun moon, stars, so as to be a creative influence rather then merely just the next batch of toy people that are poor drafted to march off to wars or rich drafted to corporate pirate land ships.
If i could summon up all the psychic changes i experienced in those early days, when 'The Morning of the Magicians' seemed to hold out a promice of a better world with more informed people who are not brainwashed by religion/politics as usual, and have some grasp of the real magic that holds it all together, if i actually experienced different God forms and followed Goddesses down paths through the woods, then, i am a poet.And Pan dances the chaos dance with all the stuff that goes back to the origins.
To all your imaginary friends, Peace , Love, and Diggers.
Well Said, Thank You
so, what i said
then, is that we have these psychic complexes there inside us, but they need to be brought into some kind of focus, however invoking God Forms or demons to learn strange things from, or to get that deamon/daimon of the poetic genuis up and dancing, or fairy magic which perhaps is for the more sensitive ones, whom need to work through childhood trauma.I would simply point out that with the incredible complexity of beginning to grok the magical traditions, east of west and when the twain meet, i would merely add that no matter how you do it, if you use some practices that get you all psychic fired up, yes practical methods of seeing these techniques in a more fun and thoughtful light seems to be the key here now.I remember a very smart poet friend that could read the most intense writers and poets, still being superstitious when it came to my involvement with Thelemic Magick.So people need to not only have consistent ritual that makes then feel excited enough to visualise different elements in projecting their will, they also need to get beyond all the trappings that people get stuck in, yet it seems that at this point in time the trappings are still part of the atmosphere. Another point, i want to say here is on a personal level, you Philip obviously are too busy, to really take my post as a whole, so you just cut out the part that fit, it's like i'm back in OTO all thsoe years ago, again and Bill is teaching about Enochian, or Tarot.And i am being treated like a kid at the back of the class room, i remember one time Bill broke his pencil, because people were not excited by his teaching method. anyway Thankyou.
and say hi your imaginary friends for me...Peace Love and Diggers
oh, and so mote it be!
Thanks again
oops, sorry , my bad
oh i could say something else
but well, being impersonal is not my style.I mean right, my personal experices are my own.And after doing any kind of ritual, it still would be your own personal experiences.IT is there that we begin the work, to try to find some context to fit these experiences into a greater experience.I always thought that is what the "great work' was, about.But, and, i suppose, if people can do exercises that explore all this with out having to go through the initiations, then we still have to find a context to sort through the personal and the other.I think that is why i attempt to use the context of the poetic marvelous. Quite frankly, i am more interested in your personal views of how you came to feel that these exercises fill in the gaps between the various God Forms and what they meant to you when you started and what they mean to you now, in relation to the western magic world, and the whole vast realms that these forms come out of and go back to.
also, i guess i should be up front, i did all the rituals, that i was meant to do, as if if did not do enough, i don't know how many Gnostic masses, and the Rites of Eleusis, and i don't know how many people are left from those times, from those days, but, anyway i am not looking for any "excecises" but, i was more looking to see if you could share more of your own personal insights.
but at any rate, great good fortune with your Books.
all onto Nuit...cj
Square peg, round hole?
I seriously doubt that my personal experiences in this regard would make any difference to anyone... except as I am able to offer them as an experiential process. In fact, even when I was teaching traditional rituals of the kind you are familiar with, I rarely talked about my personal results as these tend to prejudice people about their own experience. If you're interested in that, however, do a websearch. There are quite a few interviews with me in which I share anecdotes.
If you choose to do your learning in a different way, that's fine... just recognize that discussing this particular material without actually doing it entirely misses the point (which is spelled out in the last paragraph) and I probably won't join in except with remarks of this type.
Well, I think
Well, I think this article is delightful if only because it bears the stamp of truly free and brazen fearlessness.
That we might have some pragmatic approach to our own kind of 'self enslavement' or is it an 'inner impulse' to be 'honest'?
Or, maybe, something deeper even than that?
Are we really willing to be kind? To be loving?
What if to be 'loving' means, we are open enough to see that any species of 'self' can change varieties of individual experience in terms of 'selfness'?
Maybe our favorite 'hero' of the moment at one time was a worm, or a maggot or a butterfly or, shall we forbid? an amoeba?
What if 'progress' has nothing to do with mere physical form but such 'imaginary friends'?
And what if, such 'friend' is a form of an intrinsic principle that leads towards greater freedom for a molecule of 'consciousness'? An 'outer' non-centric form of consciousness that presses inwardly with 'love' to an inner form of 'itself'?
What's the deal? We took some 3,000 years to come to a place of thinking that 'atoms' actually existed. Imagine that! Doubt of 'atoms'!
Yet, today, who actually knows that 'atoms' really exist based on first-hand experience?
Today, we are told "HGH" will bring you back to childhood, make you 'young' again!
Who has an 'apetite' for "HGH" (human growth hormone)?
Yet, I'll lay my bottom dollar that everyone who is reading this has had some period of time in their lives of really believing in, and communing with an 'imaginary' friend. That is a kind of 'play' we too easily discount as 'valid'.
I'm no big fan of 'shamanists' of the American ilk who go down 'south' to investigate our neighbors there, who actually think and speak in terms of first hand experiences of invisible 'friends' or a 'friend'. They don't use the term 'God'. They say 'friend'. They wouldn't know anything about capitalization of a term. For them, it isn't something special. It has nothing to do with 'shamans' or special seers. Everyone has it. It is the 'inner voice' of our culture in specialized language. Yet we have relegated a number value-system with this. We have the possibility of 'many voices' and 'possession' by spheres of 'heaven' and 'hell'. We have a dichotomy.
In some regions of the wildernesses peoples have some of this, some not. We cannot define how this goes.
Why? Because unless you were born 'there,' you are a 'visitor' and what they think, you can never really think or even 'know'.
So I am sorry: I don't care what people have said here about this. It is varied and some of it is valid, some entirely fictional and motivated by an interest for profit. Not to be trusted.
You can only know by going on your own into the most remote regions and making your own observations.
Otherwise, you are trusting mere anecdote. Circumstantial evidence. Not good enough for me. For one.
You may sympathise or relate to such, but you are never gonna be 'them'. At the same time, a willingness to TRY and see, to enquire and TRY and understand: that is based on some sympathy.
Such must be based on something beyond mere 'scientific' interest to be valid. Otherwise it is simply a kind of invasion and subjugation and abnegation of consciousness in one or another of it's species or kinds or flavors
Such is nothing other than objectifying in the same way we abhor objectifying a sex, male or female. Mere impulse without even regard to propogation. It is a kind of 'voyeurism' or 'tourism' with a tinge of 'green' interest or 'kindness'. Really? Do we want to be kind? Then STAY AWAY.
In the 'imaginary friend', however, we have a language based on something highly valid, primal, and perhaps the most important form of transformative 'information' we 'educated' folk might explore.
Yet it requires of us to be willing to be taught. To stay within. To be quiet, still, and stop running about.
But we have pride. We have models, we have forms which obstruct pure 'observation'.
We obey the 'worldly' desire to run about, to go and see, and 'enjoy' and go back home and talk about those 'strange' folk, even if it is in 'sympathetic' tones and terms. How rude. How gross. We are shallow. We ignore our 'imaginary' friend. The stranger within.
It almost makes me want to cry. I'm cryin'. I'm crying.
We are so smart. We aren't so smart. And we're unwilling to say: I'm wrong. I don't know. I want to know. No. That seems beyond us. 'Cause we "know".
======================
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation." HERBER
Gods
I was talking to my son a few days ago and he said he had prayed to God to ask him to make it a good day.
I said 'Which one?'
'Well I was going to pray to Zeus but I didnt want to make the others jealous' he replied.
Does he know his Greeks or what?...lol
Alias as the death of the ego?
I've always been fond of the games that can be played with the framing of realities. Grasping at the catalysts of invention, building vast sums of knowledge as we spin, twist and spiral through the unnameable stuff of the unknown. It seems the faster we go, as we Coriolis our way along the spiral, the less we are able to hold onto the framework of knowing... Centripetal jettisoning of increasingly irrelevant notions and means due to the newly acquired ways of knowing? Or slowly trodding along the outter obtusities of the spiral, grasping, gathering and playing with our toys as we go.
I've always felt the framing itself, the alias or archetypes, and it's importance is disproven the moment it is understood to be being. The alias rejects itself once its being is achieved, once it has achieved center. Why then is it of any importance to achieve this centered being if the framework or vehicle is to abandon itself once whole? Micro Cosmic Pole shifts in Consciousness? It's in our nature? A bold notion either way.
Once all this stuff of myth and legend is understood then why would anyone ever want to encourage someone else to stick themselves in the framework of the framework of inevitable abandonment? To place another beings reality in a stylized mobius of tedious monotony of destroy, erase, improve? To discover for themselves that it's an arbitrary waste of their existence?
I find directly experiencing the unfettered elemental is the way to an untethered being. If anyone is to 'teach' a way of knowing and experiencing that is to break the bonds of artificial framing than it is by showing the bonds are illusion by simply being. Be an illusion of yourself if you insist on being a framework. I believe it was Aristotle that made this popular with his line of questioning. Wanna teach? Just be dumb, stupid.
What's Kickin'
These exercises are in part my way of participating with the way. They are offered here simply to elucidate a point about entities and mirror neurons that is better experienced than described.
"Centripetal jettisoning of increasingly irrelevant notions and means due to the newly acquired ways of knowing?"
I'm not entirely sure about the judgment of notions being relevant or irrelevant... But I am very much in favor of periodic notion-jettisoning. If only that by experiencing through a variety of different perceptual frames, your perception of each remains in proportion. We may begin to understand the origin of these notions and frames in our own consciousness and neurology and the real/illusory nature of them.
I see
"We may begin to understand the origin of these notions and frames in our own consciousness and neurology and the real/illusory nature of them."
I like attempting to understand the origin of things myself. What do you make of the archetype humans have placed on this planet? Mother. I feel it should be shed like a snakes skin. The smarter we get, or the more we become students, this old way of knowing about our flesh origin seems to be increasingly useless. How would you apply this method to humans projecting archetypes upon others? Would there be an archetype/framing to break from for the individual who is projecting, perhaps the 'teacher'? Or perhaps it's the planet who needs to shed the old skin, so to speak?
Humans/Projections
As for the 'Mother' archetype... it hasn't always been that way. Some cultures have related to the Earth as a Father, for instance some of the Egyptian cults in which the sky was a goddess and the Earth was a god. I like to think that our individual unconscious and collective unconscious tends to select images, icons, and archetypes that are appropriate for our situation. Will we eventually have to shed our current images and beliefs? Very likely.
I think all of us have something to teach, all of us have something to learn, all of us embody father/mother/sibling/sage/trickster/fool/hero and the full range of human experience and expression. The ability to shift from one to the other, again, puts each in perspective. And the greater range of such experiences that we have, the more well-rounded and integrated we become - thus the traditional methods of working through each element/sephiroth/metal/sign of a system, rather than becoming fixated on one.
Likewise, the planet similarly has that full range of expression.
Thank you
beacon through smog
Changing our Attitude Towards the Imagination
If we can change our attitude towards the imagination, then I think we have one of the keys that unlock a lot of doors.
As a point of reference- How philosophers have changed our attitudes regarding language: It is now pretty mundane to note that choice of language and metaphor is consequential.
So I see the next step as changing our attitude towards imagination. Then we'll clearly see how we're imagining the world into what it is, rather than (say) market forces, or politics, or what have you.
No contradictions with or evasions from science required.
Mmmm
That sounds like Kerouac. "Words have no meaning"
What of a communication without artefactual definition? Last I heard of this was from McKenna exploring with Dennis and his wife or at least I recall him bringing it up in one of those cerebral rap sessions. I can't exact the name of the technique only that there are traces of it through out our story usually popping up in the muddled scribblings of the twice fringed misfits. Yea the juicy stuff, with some pulp. Someone help me out here... The conscious stream of expression without intent, and it ain't jazz. What the heck's the WORD... It's not the flowers, not the leaves... It's the fruit, the stuff of wombs... But there's a word when applying it to language... Logos? maybe... ah, forget it
Communication w/o Artefactual Definition
By "communicating without artefactual definition," do you mean "some way of communicating that has none of the biases or unintended communications that come with language as it is" ..?
It's a neat puzzle, but I personally suspect something like that isn't even possible. We could believe it's possible, but I don't think it actually could be.
Scientists and math people work really hard when they write their papers to put anything that's irrelevant to the subject at hand, off to the side. So they develop these very specific languages, for talking only about what they're intending to talk about.
But even then, your choice of representation (of language) matters immensely. A lot of Feynmann's genius was in re-representing what was already being represented, in a way such that certain conclusions became obvious. (For example.) Not so much "changing the model," but rather just "changing how we represent the model." It works the same way before and after, but the new way lends itself towards different patterns of thought. (Polar coordinates and Cartesian coordinates describe the same two dimensional surface.)
So this isn't just true in the world of human subjectivity, but it's true in science and mathematics as well. There's no "just seeing things the way they are," much less communicating the way things are.
linguistic tethers
glossolalia
It is now pretty mundane to
It is now pretty mundane to note that choice of language and metaphor is consequential.
No doubt--but would you mind naming some of the champions of this theory?
The Whorfian Hypothesis
Lakoff, Orwell, Burke, ...
The whorf hypothesis is one, for sure.
More broadly, off the top of my head, there's George Lakoff, as a theorist. Jean Baudrillard. George Orwell had a few things to say. Umberto Eco, I understand, (but have not read,) talks about this. Kenneth Burke, used the phrase "terministic screen." How much of post-structuralism, post-modernism, blah blah blah -- is dedicated to language & it's consequences?
Outside of philosophy, there's the whole school of political framing, practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike. Much of public relations is about carefully minding the language and the metaphors, and interpreting and shaping the interpretation of such. There's an enormous body of self-help books out there for couples, that pays very close attention to "what are you saying" and "how are you saying it. That, and pretty much anyone who believes in the power of a spell or affirmation.
Beating hearts& last gasp farts
Broad Swords Bwrote To Show
Watch Myself Relax
You got it!
liberate the lingo
exercise the imagination, that's why, the whole time i spent in the study of magick, in the order, it was about making something happen, in the space provided, so you have a house, with a room that is made into a temple, somebody needs to do this ritual, it requires a man and a woman, a priest and a priestess, so bingo, your there, you have a will to art, and a man and a woman, a married couple, and some cool looking robes, a sword, a alter, and hey, just do it.But you have to memorise at least enough of the ritual to have an innate feel for it, you have to vibrate sounds long and loud at times, ok, i can do that, i was in a chanting choir at the University of the Trees, so i can vibrate the invocations, ok check,i have to perform this beautiful ritual before the gathered people, and place my mate on the alter, there is the cakes of light, and the formula for that, and well i have to lose my shyness about being in front of people, but i already did a lot of that in reading poetry in front of people on open mics, so, yeah this should be a piece of cake of light, for sure, "And there is no part of me that is not of the Gods".
Then there is the other part of this, the actual position, of the Gnostic Church in the Order, and all that paper stuff, and politics and religion stuff, but to heck with that, this is performance art, i call it will to art, so banish the four directions of the Temple, light the candles, and let the show go on."how may i be worthy to administer the virtures to the brotheren(and sisters)?"
...
Glassido
glassido
I look out of interest for this 'futile' word, yet i cannot find it. Might it be spult tutherwise?
teh veed
Yea
I've been searching through the audio tomes for a while now and I'm still looking for the reference point but for the mean while I'll slap my interpretation on the table.
Glassido (if that is its real name), as explored by McKenna, was a stream of unguided sounds manifested from no thought or intention. I equate this to free form jazz. No boundries, no call and response, experiencing nothing but the instance of constant transition. Observation would obstruct the action as much as anticipation. Experiencing unimpeded action.
I'm gonna keep searching for McKennas' explanation though. He's an eloquent translator of experiential phenomena.
Re Yea and Glassido
Hi Edutainment,
Could McKenna's glassido be related to the term 'glossolalia' which is the vocalization of fluent,speech-like but unitelligble utterances?
Also called 'speaking in tongues' by the religious.Sounds similar to 'a stream of unguided sounds'
i think this refers to Crowley
and how he slid down K2, i can't remember the exact word.I recall reading about it in his Autohagiography, 'The Confessions of AC' he described a kind of practice of sliding that he learned from his mountaineer mentor,Oscar Eckenstein
Glissading, i think is the word.
we, could put glossolalia, and glissading together, and get a kind of controled chaos that gets its cue, from chance and beauty.
like coming down the holy mountain after touching the peak, and riding that mastery and mystery, like a God(Yetti?) or a Poet.(Yeats?)
Re: Monkeyblood, glossolalia
like SunRa say
The plot thickens
chaos of being
right
actually i think Tom Waits
had it, "it has to be a Chocolate Jesus" "the immaculate confection"
oh, we are so off topic...
Well, I don't think so off
For my money, any question is ligitimate.
This is no 'police state' of curiosity or 'what' or 'what not' aught be asked. If it were, I'd be inclined to say something I've been asked not to say on this site: blankety blank (fill in the blanks).
CJ, you asked something about the 'ten commandments' somewhere, and I can't find it now. So I'll just express some of my thoughts about this here:
I'm of the opinion that what we know as the '10 commandments' or 'decalogue' was probably an outgrowth of a 'key' that later was obscured either by accident or on purpose in some ways.
Originally, perhaps it said: IF one does this, one 'won't do' that.
The key was: IF you honor consciousness as your father and mother you will see this same principle in all others. Thus, you will NOT 'kill', commit adultery, steal, covet, etc.
What exists as current versions of these 'commandments' even seems to say: If you worship your own consciousness as "god" or "good", you will see that all others are this same thing. Thus, we will not worship images, or idols or any inert thing as 'good' or 'god' and bow down and worship them.
At the same time, we would not bow down and worship any other person while demeaning 'That' within which we know first and foremost: our first-hand experience which none can deny . . . and none can really impose on another. We are what we are. We have what we have. Maybe we 'halucinate' 'others', but we cannot deny we are.
It is up to any or each of us to decide if we are such an 'halucination' or 'creation' of 'another'. That is pure speculation. That is imaginary life. Maybe some of us give such fantasy probity or validity, but it is a choice not based on 'fact'. It is a BELIEF or maybe a FAITH.
I for one give not hope such 'faith' will ever have any but cult-status. It would be accepted only as a means for uniting people who can't deal with direct experiences. They have to live by a social standard of acceptance to such society. Fine. Let 'em have it. I will be content to be a pariah from such.
We may mentally revere this same principle - - - what I call 'I AM' as meaning just simple 'consciousness of consciousness' - - - in others as we do our own first-hand experience of this.
We may even bow at our physical or adopted parents feet in an entirely different way without, at the same time, making them into 'idols'. That is an understandable form of love that can't be confused with 'guruism' or idolizing some childhood hero. We grow up and become like our parents or do even better at being parents or friends of 'kids'. The bottom line would seem to me to be that we not neglect something much nearer and so practice self-hatred in some form. As we treat ourself of selves we'll treat all and any 'other'.
The original message was probably more along the lines of what is espoused in the Katha Upanishad and other 'upanishads' and especially the Vashishtha Yoga: consciousness is all: power, substance, intelligence or life, love and wisdom or what you will in 'spiritual' terms. If one regards and honors what we have most intimitately as the only 'needed' thing, what need to 'covet'? or any other 'sin'?
I also see in the extant teaching of Jesus remnants of a message much more about an equalizing this kind of regard to consciousness: in ourselves and in all others. I see this as highly egalitarian and iconoclastic. We have no need that any should teach us.
But perhaps we, as a whole, don't spend much time attending to this inner teacher. We presume by familiarity a form of contempt and so we lose access to 'riches' and choose 'poverty' on purpose. How sad.
We judge consciousness by typical things in waking life: mom, dad, brother sister and neighbor. Play, work, invention and creation or just busy-ness.
I'm intrigued by the theory of a 'bi-cameral' mind . . . but not as something necessarily altered stictly or solely by genetic evolution or structural changes in the brain. It seems possible that the evolution of language and the select alteration of behavioral patterns or learned things can create very real schisms within any individual, groups, cultures. These then can be transmitted through 'entrainment' or socialized accession to 'ways' and as ways 'time honored'. Is this not just 'bad habit' writ temporal and transmitted? Why respect a bad idea?
Then here and there a 'genius' somewhow escapes these learned patterns and expresses in ways that would obviate any need for 'instruction'. And, even, 'instruction' may destroy this 'genius' or insight. Are such 'instructed' the 'converted'? The 'reformed'? In whose image? To what ultimate end?
The sleeping life, the dream life, though in some ways highly 'weird' includes in one of its phases a period of non-thought, but just stillness and hearing white-noise in our ears and seeing the 'snow-flake' and electrical patterns inside our eyelids. That is an electrical world that may make up the deepest aspect of our life in sleep or non-REM sleep.
It may be a merging into a kind of liquid or acqueous-gaseous phase of 'self' that is utterly self-content or 'lacking nothing'. So true sleep refreshes us. Yet we may 'unlearn' what was learned all over again by returning to the daily exposure to the 'ungrok' state or states of the 'mortal' paradigm. The 'practical' life.
From within this sphere of personal experience it is I believe that we reasonably question the format of the 'shalt not' or compulsive or even martial slant of an 'ancient' record. There may be yet more ancient ways lost to us that talk about these things in ways a child can understand . . . and without fear or punishments.
The newer formulations are misinterpretations and bunglings of something probably much simpler and must needs have been closer to what anyone can experience even if they couldn't read. That level of first-hand experience is highly demeaned in many ways by the current modes of human life in my opinion.
At one time, these differences were much more obvious and typically notable as a fact of everday life: country folk versus 'city' folk.
Today, with the insinuation of all the wiles of 'city-folk'ism through television and developer's methods of selling their purposes, people who once were much more content with the simplest rhythms of daily life and work and play and topics of talk now are discontent and so goes a seemingly metastacizing desire to see all the world be just one big 'city' and a culture of speed and 'mode' and 'change' as if 'change' is good for it's own sake.
Consciousness must have been somewhat conditioned by 'realities' or 'limits' which constrain its intrinsic ability to transmute an inert world.
Homeostasis imposes a definite limit on any urge for unlimited growth. Unlimited growth is another way of saying cancer.
At the same time, this natural principle of 'limits' isn't a 'shalt not' kind of stricture, but a component of self-preservation that sees that creation must not outstrip destruction or dissolution.
Dissolution must not outstrip creation or regeneration.
This is the 'anabolism' versus catabolism' as the ideal of 'metabolism' or steady-state in biology where creation and destruction or 'exchange' of form does not result in erasure of form, but ever-lasting renewal or permanence of form.
The 'human' form, as such, is only such an 'eternal youth' by sexual reproduction. But as we become more and more aware of the potency of the human genome and examples within nature, popularly referred to as research into 'stem cells'; here and there, we are awakening to the idea that this exchange can take place in place in the individual themselves. We might learn to regrow arms and legs, eyes or even damaged brain cells.
I found it interesting that Swedenborg in his forays into a 'spirit world' found that the 'angels' have sex, but they don't reproduce. They are everlasting in their spiritual bodies which are identical to their prior fleshly bodies, only in the spring of youth.
If we are to ever generally become aware of this potency in any practical way, we must learn this technique of sex without reproduction, or we will soon HAVE to resort to 'terra-forming' new planets just to accomodate an 'everlasting' humanity.
With them-folk: better not have kids like you who are ever young, or if you do, better have a space-ship or some means to get new land somewhere else. Off world. Or maybe they know how to expand this one. Maybe this explains the idea that myth of the 'little people'? Imagine that!
Furthermore, I would hope that the 'enlightened' would not attain to such eternality lacking a morality that puts kindness and consideration of the good of others above selfish interests. In the concept of 'reverbration' or how waves return to their own center, we may not have 'karma' as such, but simply a self-limiting principle that crowds around any motivating center what it is they are expressing. It is self-informing. Maybe mediated by others to varying degrees. But I highly question the idea of punishments for past actions when one has altered ones' mode of behavior that may have prior induced in others a desire for some 'punishment' of that one or ones.
'Echo' or 'boomerang' refers to pure information moment to moment, not something dealing with a long forgotten past. We express, and what comes back is an 'informing the discresion'. It may or may not affect our chosen 'art'.
And so, in many words, I've said what Tennyson said in fewer: the principle that is important is
" . . . nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet."
"A Higher Pantheism". <
Crowley said
"i believe that truth is not only stranger than fiction but more interesting"
It's good to cover a lot of territory, before arriving at some place we call sacred.We can't always anticipate how we come to be in this human, all too human situation, to use Nietzsche's phrase.Even science can explain away God, so Nietzsche was right.But i think he was right for a lot more reasons then just science.If i see God in nature, if i have a psychic lucid vision of a Pan like character playing his pipes that transform into some stranger then fiction instrument that looks like a cross between a saxophone and some musical instrument in the future that looks something like a crocodile, i am at once seeing some relation to the formulation of a God from the ancient deeps of time, and also a projection into a future when these forms transform into a whole other vision.My experience as Sol, was to sit in a chair and Sol says nothing but rings a little bell at certain intervals, and the other characters do the recitations around Sol, except Sol is placed in a Tomb, and the God Bez dances on the box that is used for the tomb, so it becomes a sensory deprivation where the sun goes down into the darkness, or the underworld, like Kephra the Beetle to emerge later on the other side. My own experience, yes, after this i began to lose connection to the people that were part of the order, some people need to belong to a group to feel this their lives have a ritualistic rhythm, to provide a way to keep informed through recognizing holy days, as such.My own experience was to be the hermit poet, and not become part of any group on a permanent basis.The poet needs to find the Gods and Goddesses through a prolonged distance from their constantly changing masks, one can only wear these masks in certain moments, when the energy seems to come through difference, after that the masks become stuck.Depending on the need of each celebrant, one would not want to play Jupiter like a thanksgiving day parade balloon over and over.We chose art as we will to art, so the playing of Gods or "little People" would only be as good or potent as the mirror you hold up to the world, thus creating a two way mirror, or looking glass that is like the phantasmagoric musical instrument of the future.
Living Imagination
There is a way to fantasy that is not based in belief, or faith, but is also not "fact;" That is: heart.
("Do you have a heart, scientifically speaking? No, I'm not talking about the cardiovascular system, ...")
This is part of what I am referring to when I speak of changing our attitude towards the imagination.
We think of heart and imagination as disconnected things, and we relegate imagination to the miscellaneous drawer of "art." We box art with picture frames, and the preface & "fin" notes around the play, as if to ensure that the imagination doesn't "get out."
What I am exploring is that if we can create a culture that lives imagination, then we can finally connect the spiritual & intuitive with the rational, scientific, and real.
It's not about science clobbering imagination, ("religion is meaningless!"), or imagination clobbering science ("science will be taught to us by fairies!"), nor is it about a philosophical or personal realization that has no impact on culture and society ("study, meditate, realize the essential unity, and then close the book and stop meditating.")
Rather, what I am coming to, is living imagination and heart, while keeping rooted in the Real. (Imagination without the real is icing without a cake.)
"Who's imagination?" Everyone's, anyone's, as much as they'd like to contribute to the creative act. Life as a giant role playing game: And when you think about it, what else could it be?!?
We can dream up, create, and live in societies like Damanhur. We can make them with our hands.
Brilliant
Further verbal eructations
If one can consider that language, as words and semiotics, can be materially visual in an eidetic space, particularly the aggregations of language that construe robust ideas; theories, archetypes, godforms, etc. then the operant thought forms of what has been called magick, can be considered to manipulate and rearrange the objects which can be found here.
As ones knowledge of a model or idea becomes more sophisticated and complete, the model ideally becomes more functional, congruent and sympathetic with the thing in itself, at least in this notional ideaspace.
Terence McKenna has often described universe as being made of language, and that sometimes when he was waxing lyrical (glossolandria) he literally felt as if the world around him was recasting itself, to incorporate a novel idea. The plasticity of this eidetic environment is tangible to any with experience of it. The way we use language, profoundly influences the way we experience the world, hence why although seemingly a trite subject there is still the wide fondness for the E-prime of Korzybski, etc. Semantics can bind us to static, outmoded ontologies that limit the perceptor/operator.
Results are where it's at, and in that sense it matters not what you call anything, even that thing over yonder; armadillo overfiend; marshmallow-pongoid-planetary-projector; sirian or negentropic object?
http://www.decontaminated-continuum.blogspot.com/Vague Me and er...
I am very interested in hearing anyones ideas and methods for achieving results and was especially heartened to read your steps to realise/produce the other. Particularly because you began with the approach of stillness from a base of intent. The maintenance of intent whilst limiting action is a subject close to my heart and it's practice (or non-practice) intrigues me greatly.
The method of modal and qualitative intensification and temperance are something I have found my self 'doing' whilst preparing for meditation. However. At the centre of these experiences (or rather, very near the centre) is I think an issue of temporality. Where the intent meets the self seems to me to be a kind of temporal vortex. The infusion of some desired quality into this... place, has associations, in my mind, with the origin of the intent and the community of self-hood (read communitative archetypes (or whatever)) from which that intent arises.
So. What then is intent? My true desire to intend to modify myself wants to be expressed from the innermost part of my being. Is my conscious, desirous mind augmenting the structuring of my intent? Or would I have always done it the way I will?
Phi is not the only fruit.