Where is death?
Have you ever seen it?
I mean, looked right at it?
It is still here.
It surrounds us and intrudes every once in awhile.
No matter how many theme park cemeteries we build,
or how many three minute videos on MTV you watch,
no matter how deep the hospital basements,
no matter how fast it is picked up off the street by quickly moving red and white vans,
no matter how much money you put into your mutual funds.
It’s the rotweiler on the freeway that has fallen out of the back of a speed freak’s flatbed truck late at night.
By early morning his carcass has been smashed and pummeled by every truck, car, motorcycle, and semi-trailer combo on the 3 lane of the 405 South.
His name was Guts.
It’s the two week old corpse of a grandmother alcoholic, not so silently,
expanding and stiffening in a small back house.
Heat wave summer and a busted air conditioner mean that the flies are big and crowd on the inside of the windscreens.
When the police come with the landlord and break the door down,
the smell is a physical force that pushes them all back and makes the younger one gag reflexively.
The smell will never come completely out of his uniform,
no matter how many times he has it dry cleaned,
lightly starched
and pressed.
It’s the tight firing pattern of a .22 semi-auto rifle.
The rabbit has been shot many, many times.
Fur and child-like screeching float on the air.
She tries to scramble into the bush but, can’t.
The hunter runs up and crushes its head under his waffle-stompers.
The light going out of her eyes as the head slowly floats to the floor.
It is in the old man’s lungs slowly filling with blood underneath a black moonless sky.
The paper bag spills oranges on the rain-slicked road slowly mixing with the oil dropped from traffic-jam cars.
The good Samaritan that stops to administer pointless CPR will find bloody knees are his.
The eternal questions being asked (on the freeway, in a back house, in the brush, in front of the mirror and other places):
Did you love well?
Did you contribute?
Did you make a difference in someone’s life?
Did you find out the answers to all of your questions and doubts?
Did you get everything that you really, really wanted?
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The Night of the Living Dead
Ouch.
Please, don't ever say that I don't give you nice things.
"Night of the Living Dead lapsed into the public domain because the original theatrical distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, neglected to place a copyright notice on the prints. In 1968, United States copyright law required a proper notice for a work to maintain a copyright. Image Ten displayed such a notice on the title frames of the film beneath the original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters. The distributor removed the statement when it changed the title.[80] According to George Romero, Walter Reade "ripped us off."[81]
Because of the public domain status, the film is sold on home video by several distributors. As of 2006, the Internet Movie Database lists 23 copies of Night of the Living Dead retailing on DVD and nineteen on VHS.[82] The original film is available for download at no cost on Internet sites such as Google Video and Internet Archive.[83][84] As of September 29, 2007, it was the Internet Archive's most downloaded film.[85] Elite Entertainment released a director-approved and fully-restored version of the film. The first Elite release was a laserdisc in which Romero participated in the supplements. The first Elite DVD was released as a single-layer DVD and some of the extras from the laserdisc were dropped due to space limitations but they were included in Elite's current Millennium Edition."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Dead#Copyright_status_in_the_U.S.
Please, don't ever say that I don't give you nice things.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2956447426428748010
run time: 1 hour and 35 minutes and 17 seconds
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2956447426428748010
run time: 1 hour and 35 minutes and 17 seconds
Friday, November 16, 2007
Dancing on a Knife's Edge
Deliberate magical duels between sorcerors are generally regarded as 'black magick' by westerners, yet magical combat can be an extremely powerful way of bringing a trainee magician to full operancy. Such 'tests of fitness' can be found in the trials of Zen pupils under various masters, the shamanistic explorations of Carlos Casteneda or Lynn Andrews, and the legend of Nimue and Merlin.
As part of an initiation, a candidate may be expected to defend a spot or object, despite all the combined efforts of the group to flaunt her. Long-range magical attack may employ telepathic destructive impulses, projection of thought-forms or sympathetic (unsympathetic?) magick.
Magical Combat should be differentiated from psychic attack, with which a large proportion of 'fringe' occultists concern themselves with, and is largely a product of self-delusion and varying degrees of megalomania. True magical combat has its own rules and boundaries, which are known to the skilled, while the trainee must quickly learn them if trauma is to be avoided. Caught up in a situation which s/he finds incomprehensible and alien, the trainee only knows confusion and terror. Stripped of the smug self-assurance of "it can't happen to me" s/he learns to perceive the environment with clarity, to give attention to the rhythms and pulses of the world. Truly, Death is a great teacher. If you can reach forwards and see the moment of your 'death', then that moment will give you a glimpse of your potential.
In this, the magician is less of a warrior and more of a thief (granted, 'Chaos Thief' isn't as attractive a label as 'Chaos Warrior'). Prometheus is the appropriate mythic image - the stealer of fire. No-one can fight Death and win, but s/he can be outwitted. The magician is one who capers and antics, the wise fool. No-one takes a fool seriously. Become a fool and lay a false trail. Drop the po-faced mask of 'initiate' and take your partners for the masque!
The progress of western magicians does not seem as terrible as the travails of magicians in other cultures. Since so much 'knowledge' can be bought, the idea of striving against trials for power seems foreign. This is not just a glamour; life-threatening or mentally-traumatic situations can open the floodgates of magical ability in a way that no weekend workshop or correspondence course ever can. Living on the Edge is an appropriate phrase, as there is no room for half-measures. A magical combat, if properly arranged, will force you to relearn what you need to be able to do in order to survive. If a Magus is going to pass her power to another, she must be sure that the candidate has the qualities (i.e. a survival instinct and staying power) necessary to accept the responsibility (karma?) that attends the position. The aim of such combat is constructive, but if the candidate fails - so must it be.
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/apik07.htmlAS BEFORE...THE MORE PEOPLE THAT VIEW THIS THE MORE POWERFUL IT BECOMES:
Harpo Marx and Dungeons & Dragons
Mass of Chaos "H"
by Phil Hine
This short 'rite' can be used as an 'earthing' sequence to close off a 'heavy' group session. It's aim is to promote laughter by exposing the perils of self-importance.
Discordians have long identified Harpo Marx as a contemporary avatar of Harpocrates, the God of Silence. Harpo is Lord of Silence, trickster and sacred clown.
Preparation
Priest to take on manifestation of HARPO may be adorned with woolly wig, top hat, and horn. Any other props for the use of the god may be placed on the altar, such as a feather duster or tickling stick.
Statement of Intent
It is our will to invoke HARPO, Sacred Fool and Lord of Silent Mockery, that the glamours of magic be dispersed, and Laughing Anarchy enter our hearts.
Priest: "Let the pomposity begin.
Celebrants then proceed to strut about the room, making self-important proclamations about the 'serious' and 'holy' paths of magic, and attest loudly that, as magi, they should be admired and respected by all.
As the celebrants do this, the Priest, in the center of the room, begins to prance and whirl about, making appropriate gestures and faces (visualizing himself as Harpo) until the avatar, drawn to a space where so much pomposity and self-importance is evident, chooses to manifest.
As the Priest feels the avatar come upon him, he brandishes the horn and gives the litany:
Honk, Honk, Honk, Honk, Honk (ad infinitum)
Upon hearing the sound of the horn, all celebrants must 'freeze' into statues of pomposity and self-importance. HARPO then has free reign to play whatever tricks and capers he will, his aim being to reduce the assembly to laughter. An effective way of doing this is, when Harpo's ministrations has forced one person to 'crack up' into laughter, they assist him in teasing and mocking the celebrants, until the whole assembly is laughing.
The rite may end here, or alternatively, Harpo may choose to deliver a sacrament in some fashion. If a Banishing is required, the Priest should be divested of his props, and coaxed from silence into speech.
This ritual appears in Prime Chaos by Phil Hine, available from Chaos International Press, BM Sorcery, London WC1N 3XX. ISBN 0-9521320-0-1
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/rites/cmassh.html
oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
Monday, November 12, 2007
Carl Jung, an Acting Exercises and Jihad
From the wiki entry for Carl Jung:
"A number of childhood memories had made a life-long impression on him. As a boy he carved a tiny manikin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pupil's pencil case and placed it inside the case. He then added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves of, and hid the case in the attic. Periodically he would come back to the manikin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. This ceremonial act, he later reflected, brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. In later years, he discovered that similarities existed in this memory and the totems of native peoples like the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim, or the tjurungas of Australia. This, he concluded, was an unconscious ritual that he did not question or understand at the time, but was practiced in a strikingly similar way in faraway locations that he as a young boy had no way of consciously knowing about. His findings on psychological archetypes and the collective unconscious were inspired in part by this experience."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung
Anyway, I recently came across chaosmatrix.org while doing a search on Fotamecus on a friend's advice and came across "The Jihad of Chaos" ritual and committed to a seven day excursion into the Lesser Jihad duties. I felt that this might help me regain some of the energy I recently lost due to a break-up.
One of the components of this ritual is to do a daily Vortex Ritual with the one in the morning being dedicated to the Immanentizing of the Eschaton and preceded by the following Chaoist Catechism.
A CHAOIST CATECHISM
We believe in Almighty Chaos
Mother of Matter and Aether
Nothing is True
and Everything is Permitted
There is no God but Chaos
The Pact, its Ministry on Earth
There is no Being
All is Doing
There is no Self
We do all the Gods and Goddesses
Freedom over "truth"
Probability Rules, Chaos Reigns
Pestilential Religions, Putrid Ideologies
To Entropy! Make my Aeon!
We are its Staff, Sword, Chalice, and Shield
We Know, We Will, We Dare, and we are Devious
Today the World
Tomorrow the Solar System
We Immanentize the Eschaton!
We Invoke the Pandaemonaeon!
Okay, so now I've got the feeling that I can make this more powerful by memorizing it instead of reading it from a piece of paper...to me this feeling of power is what is most commonly referred to as "achieving gnosis".
I sit down and spend an hour or so memorizing and remember an acting exercise that I used to do --without going into details I come from an acting and acting teaching background and am greatly encouraged to find that Austin Osman Spare considered himself equally an artist and magician.
Anyway, here's the exercise.
After you've got the bit you're trying to memorize about 90% committed to memory, begin to read it differently.
Do a run through:
1) As fast as you can.
2) As slow as you can.
3) Laughing the entire way through.
4) Crying the entire way through.
5) As angry as possible.
6) As scared as possible.
It was most interesting to me to find the entire meaning of the piece change when I did it smiling and laughing the entire way through.
"A number of childhood memories had made a life-long impression on him. As a boy he carved a tiny manikin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pupil's pencil case and placed it inside the case. He then added a stone which he had painted into upper and lower halves of, and hid the case in the attic. Periodically he would come back to the manikin, often bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. This ceremonial act, he later reflected, brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. In later years, he discovered that similarities existed in this memory and the totems of native peoples like the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim, or the tjurungas of Australia. This, he concluded, was an unconscious ritual that he did not question or understand at the time, but was practiced in a strikingly similar way in faraway locations that he as a young boy had no way of consciously knowing about. His findings on psychological archetypes and the collective unconscious were inspired in part by this experience."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung
Anyway, I recently came across chaosmatrix.org while doing a search on Fotamecus on a friend's advice and came across "The Jihad of Chaos" ritual and committed to a seven day excursion into the Lesser Jihad duties. I felt that this might help me regain some of the energy I recently lost due to a break-up.
One of the components of this ritual is to do a daily Vortex Ritual with the one in the morning being dedicated to the Immanentizing of the Eschaton and preceded by the following Chaoist Catechism.
A CHAOIST CATECHISM
We believe in Almighty Chaos
Mother of Matter and Aether
Nothing is True
and Everything is Permitted
There is no God but Chaos
The Pact, its Ministry on Earth
There is no Being
All is Doing
There is no Self
We do all the Gods and Goddesses
Freedom over "truth"
Probability Rules, Chaos Reigns
Pestilential Religions, Putrid Ideologies
To Entropy! Make my Aeon!
We are its Staff, Sword, Chalice, and Shield
We Know, We Will, We Dare, and we are Devious
Today the World
Tomorrow the Solar System
We Immanentize the Eschaton!
We Invoke the Pandaemonaeon!
Okay, so now I've got the feeling that I can make this more powerful by memorizing it instead of reading it from a piece of paper...to me this feeling of power is what is most commonly referred to as "achieving gnosis".
I sit down and spend an hour or so memorizing and remember an acting exercise that I used to do --without going into details I come from an acting and acting teaching background and am greatly encouraged to find that Austin Osman Spare considered himself equally an artist and magician.
Anyway, here's the exercise.
After you've got the bit you're trying to memorize about 90% committed to memory, begin to read it differently.
Do a run through:
1) As fast as you can.
2) As slow as you can.
3) Laughing the entire way through.
4) Crying the entire way through.
5) As angry as possible.
6) As scared as possible.
It was most interesting to me to find the entire meaning of the piece change when I did it smiling and laughing the entire way through.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Azathoth/Mainframe Rite
Azathoth/mainframe rite
by Fireclown (monasteros@aol.com)
Thee following should be taken as spoken only if relevant to your question! I believe it, because it works for me! Use at will! Alter! Discard!
Thee Transient Azathoth Zone-
Wherein we have Deeds with the B.I.G. (Blind Idiot God) Thing that Lurks in the Heart of Chaos. Azathoth is described as 'Blind' It is Eyeless, it Reads and Writes with magnet and laser upon and from thee Whirling Disks fed into, or, in the case of the True Believers, those who could not stand to be apart from It, Built into Its Very Body!!! Great (B.I.G.) Azathoth, yeah, it's an Idiot God! It's an Idiot Savant God! You give it the Proper Words of Power, TELNET-FTP-WWW, for example, and it spews forth, well, spew. Like I said, It cannot Understand What It Hath Read, for it is Mighty. It is Many-Bodied and many Tentacled, feeding tubes stretched accross our world in twisted Leys (Leys= leis, Hawwaiian offerings to the aliens, symbolizing the Sacred Noose. Hello! Goodbye!). It has been said somewhere, (INSERT BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INFO HERE) that Azathoth dances to 'the piping of Idiot Saxaphones'-wow! how did they get a saxaphone into the little box that sings Its Arcane Tune, forcing benediction from That which Lieth Beyond the Beyond to speaketh with me? Ask not that which thou does not care about! Choose, if that is your Will, and be done with it.
The Rite: (note that directions in these Aethyrs shift, and what worked last week may no longer hold true)
Props needed-
* Incense only if you hate it. Otherwise, something else you hate. I use onions.
* Sigil of Target Mainframe
* Sign of your Will to destroy
* Computer, conected and with Line open to Target (not really neccessary or reccomended)
Banish if you're pervy and into that kind of thing, otherwise, relax, stretch out the body, get loosend up, in prep for getting LOOSE. When you feel centred, relaxed, and slightly sexy, begin relevant Mantra Of Opening the Connection. (all examples are merely that and should be altered according to need or desire)
Vibrate, sonorously:
NICFUNETFI
NICFUNETFI
NICFUNETFI...
continue until mild to severe gnosis is entered at which point, on the Indrawn breath, Indraw AZATHOTH... so now you are running a cycle of
>NICFUNETFINICFUNETFINICFUNETFI
until the edges blur and you move into appropriate level of possesion (you know, massive trembling, glosslalia, vomiting)
Now, you should be experiencing a shifting possesion, of the mainframe, and Azathoth. Let this blur into a state of loss of differetiation.
Charge the Sigil of the Target
when charging is a tangible state
Charge Sign of your Will to Destroy
ignite incense, or ingest the Hateful Onion
Focus your disgust and hatred of the Hateful thing into the combined Sigil and Sign. Eat the Material bases, Laugh uproriously, and close the Temple.
Thy will be done.
This has been a production of Curious Yellow (Z)
Replicate Freely.
by Fireclown (monasteros@aol.com)
Thee following should be taken as spoken only if relevant to your question! I believe it, because it works for me! Use at will! Alter! Discard!
Thee Transient Azathoth Zone-
Wherein we have Deeds with the B.I.G. (Blind Idiot God) Thing that Lurks in the Heart of Chaos. Azathoth is described as 'Blind' It is Eyeless, it Reads and Writes with magnet and laser upon and from thee Whirling Disks fed into, or, in the case of the True Believers, those who could not stand to be apart from It, Built into Its Very Body!!! Great (B.I.G.) Azathoth, yeah, it's an Idiot God! It's an Idiot Savant God! You give it the Proper Words of Power, TELNET-FTP-WWW, for example, and it spews forth, well, spew. Like I said, It cannot Understand What It Hath Read, for it is Mighty. It is Many-Bodied and many Tentacled, feeding tubes stretched accross our world in twisted Leys (Leys= leis, Hawwaiian offerings to the aliens, symbolizing the Sacred Noose. Hello! Goodbye!). It has been said somewhere, (INSERT BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INFO HERE) that Azathoth dances to 'the piping of Idiot Saxaphones'-wow! how did they get a saxaphone into the little box that sings Its Arcane Tune, forcing benediction from That which Lieth Beyond the Beyond to speaketh with me? Ask not that which thou does not care about! Choose
The Rite: (note that directions in these Aethyrs shift, and what worked last week may no longer hold true)
Props needed-
* Incense only if you hate it. Otherwise, something else you hate. I use onions.
* Sigil of Target Mainframe
* Sign of your Will to destroy
* Computer, conected and with Line open to Target (not really neccessary or reccomended)
Banish if you're pervy and into that kind of thing, otherwise, relax, stretch out the body, get loosend up, in prep for getting LOOSE. When you feel centred, relaxed, and slightly sexy, begin relevant Mantra Of Opening the Connection. (all examples are merely that and should be altered according to need or desire)
Vibrate, sonorously:
NICFUNETFI
NICFUNETFI
NICFUNETFI...
continue until mild to severe gnosis is entered at which point, on the Indrawn breath, Indraw AZATHOTH... so now you are running a cycle of
>NICFUNETFI
until the edges blur and you move into appropriate level of possesion (you know, massive trembling, glosslalia, vomiting)
Now, you should be experiencing a shifting possesion, of the mainframe, and Azathoth. Let this blur into a state of loss of differetiation.
Charge the Sigil of the Target
when charging is a tangible state
Charge Sign of your Will to Destroy
ignite incense, or ingest the Hateful Onion
Focus your disgust and hatred of the Hateful thing into the combined Sigil and Sign. Eat the Material bases, Laugh uproriously, and close the Temple.
Thy will be done.
This has been a production of Curious Yellow (Z)
Replicate Freely.
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/rites/azathoth.html
Of Madness and Mystic Journeys
Of Madness and Mystic Journeys
The work of anti-psychiatrists such as David Cooper and R.D.Laing has popularised the view that the complex syndrome known as schizophrenia is similar, in many ways to a mystic journey, with close links to the inner journeys undertaken by shamans and heroes in cultural myths worldwide. However,one point is very clear, that while the shaman or initiate is the active agent -the fearless one - this is rarely true of the individual in the throes of schizophrenia.
Like the descending "initiate", schizophrenics often report feelings of a loss of agency over their environment, loss of ego boundary, and a sense of somehow being "different" or set apart in some way. Many cannot, it seems, sort out what is meaningful stimuli in their environment, and report feelings of being overwhelmed by what is happening around them. There is a wide range of speculative theories regarding the "causes" of schizophrenia, ranging from a purely genetic to a purely environmentalist perspective.
From the neurological perspective, a form of therapy known as Sensory Integration has led to some interesting speculation about the nature of trancedental experience. research in the last decade has indicated that some of the problems that schizophrenics experience, relate to the process of information selection: sorting out which input is important. This is due to the abnormal functioning of a region of the brain stem known as the Vestibular Nuclei, which is again, related to the Reticular Formation. The Vestibular Nuclei integrates information from the different senses, and so if there is a problem at this level of sub-cortical processing, it will manifest as "confusion" of one sort or another at the conscious level of awareness. The neurological defecit could be due to genetic anomalies, leading to atypical brain development, or due to stress reactions.
Activity at the subcortical level, that guides the information that becomes the content of conscious experience, is thought by some neuroscientists to be the key to ASCs. Some have postulated that such experiences may be programmed at the genetic level, but that individual experiences determine whether or not the program manifests as an evolutionary experience (leading to enhanced survival capacity) or a "systems crash".
Illumination
"Illumination ... the inspiration, enlightenment and liberation resulting from success with these [Gnosis] methods."
Pete Carroll, Liber Null
Illumination is the much-desired goal for which many thousands of people worldwide, have employed different pyschotechnologies, and developed their own psychocosms. Illumination has also been linked with the use of LSD & similar drugs, and perhaps most mysteriously of all, it can occurr seemingly spontaenously, to people who have no knowledge or expectation of it.
What characterises an experience of illumination? Nona Coxhead, a researcher into "Bliss states" lists some of the prevalent factors as:
1. unity - a fading of the self-other divide
2. transcendence of space & time as barriers to experience
3. positive sensations
4. a sense of the numinous
5. a sense of certitude - the "realness" of the experience
6. paradoxical insights
7. transcience - the experience does not last
8. resultant change in attitude and behaviour.
In neurological terms, such experiences represent a reorganising of activity in the brain as a whole system. The loss of ego boundary and involvement of all senses suggests that the Reticular Formation is being influenced so that the brain processes which normally convey a sense of being rooted in spacetime are momentarily inhibited. The "floating" sensation often ssociated with astral projection and other such phenomena suggests that the Limbic system of the brain stem (which processes proprioceptive information about the body's location in space) is also acting in an unusual mode.
What are the fruits of this experience - the insights, perceptions and messages brought back down to earth by the illuminate? Evolution of consciousness, by such means, could well be an important survival program - a way of going beyond the information given - a way of learning how to modify the human biosystem via the environment. Ilya Prigognine's theory of "dissipative structures" shows how the very instability of open systems allows them to be self-transforming. The basis of this idea is that the movement of energy through a system causes fluctuations within it. These fluctuations, if they reach a critical level (i.e. a catastrophe cusp point) develop novel interactions,until a new whole is produced. The system then reorganises itself into a new "higher order" which is more integrated than the previous system, and requires a greater amount of energy to maintain itself, and is further disposed to future transformation. This can equally apply to neurological evolution, using a psychtechnology (ancient or modern) as the tool for change. The core stages of the process appear to be:
1. Change
2. Crisis
3. Transcendence
4. Transformation
5. predisposition to further change.
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/orchaos.pdf
The work of anti-psychiatrists such as David Cooper and R.D.Laing has popularised the view that the complex syndrome known as schizophrenia is similar, in many ways to a mystic journey, with close links to the inner journeys undertaken by shamans and heroes in cultural myths worldwide. However,one point is very clear, that while the shaman or initiate is the active agent -the fearless one - this is rarely true of the individual in the throes of schizophrenia.
Like the descending "initiate", schizophrenics often report feelings of a loss of agency over their environment, loss of ego boundary, and a sense of somehow being "different" or set apart in some way. Many cannot, it seems, sort out what is meaningful stimuli in their environment, and report feelings of being overwhelmed by what is happening around them. There is a wide range of speculative theories regarding the "causes" of schizophrenia, ranging from a purely genetic to a purely environmentalist perspective.
From the neurological perspective, a form of therapy known as Sensory Integration has led to some interesting speculation about the nature of trancedental experience. research in the last decade has indicated that some of the problems that schizophrenics experience, relate to the process of information selection: sorting out which input is important. This is due to the abnormal functioning of a region of the brain stem known as the Vestibular Nuclei, which is again, related to the Reticular Formation. The Vestibular Nuclei integrates information from the different senses, and so if there is a problem at this level of sub-cortical processing, it will manifest as "confusion" of one sort or another at the conscious level of awareness. The neurological defecit could be due to genetic anomalies, leading to atypical brain development, or due to stress reactions.
Activity at the subcortical level, that guides the information that becomes the content of conscious experience, is thought by some neuroscientists to be the key to ASCs. Some have postulated that such experiences may be programmed at the genetic level, but that individual experiences determine whether or not the program manifests as an evolutionary experience (leading to enhanced survival capacity) or a "systems crash".
Illumination
"Illumination ... the inspiration, enlightenment and liberation resulting from success with these [Gnosis] methods."
Pete Carroll, Liber Null
Illumination is the much-desired goal for which many thousands of people worldwide, have employed different pyschotechnologies, and developed their own psychocosms. Illumination has also been linked with the use of LSD & similar drugs, and perhaps most mysteriously of all, it can occurr seemingly spontaenously, to people who have no knowledge or expectation of it.
What characterises an experience of illumination? Nona Coxhead, a researcher into "Bliss states" lists some of the prevalent factors as:
1. unity - a fading of the self-other divide
2. transcendence of space & time as barriers to experience
3. positive sensations
4. a sense of the numinous
5. a sense of certitude - the "realness" of the experience
6. paradoxical insights
7. transcience - the experience does not last
8. resultant change in attitude and behaviour.
In neurological terms, such experiences represent a reorganising of activity in the brain as a whole system. The loss of ego boundary and involvement of all senses suggests that the Reticular Formation is being influenced so that the brain processes which normally convey a sense of being rooted in spacetime are momentarily inhibited. The "floating" sensation often ssociated with astral projection and other such phenomena suggests that the Limbic system of the brain stem (which processes proprioceptive information about the body's location in space) is also acting in an unusual mode.
What are the fruits of this experience - the insights, perceptions and messages brought back down to earth by the illuminate? Evolution of consciousness, by such means, could well be an important survival program - a way of going beyond the information given - a way of learning how to modify the human biosystem via the environment. Ilya Prigognine's theory of "dissipative structures" shows how the very instability of open systems allows them to be self-transforming. The basis of this idea is that the movement of energy through a system causes fluctuations within it. These fluctuations, if they reach a critical level (i.e. a catastrophe cusp point) develop novel interactions,until a new whole is produced. The system then reorganises itself into a new "higher order" which is more integrated than the previous system, and requires a greater amount of energy to maintain itself, and is further disposed to future transformation. This can equally apply to neurological evolution, using a psychtechnology (ancient or modern) as the tool for change. The core stages of the process appear to be:
1. Change
2. Crisis
3. Transcendence
4. Transformation
5. predisposition to further change.
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/orchaos.pdf
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
GO UNDERGROUND and be a CHAOS MAGICIAN
From Joel Biroco's "The Exorcist of Revolution." (1986)
What is this world of hatred and strife and war and hatred and strife and war. Is it, perchance, a world of hatred and strife and war and of hatred and strife and war. The answer is YES it fucking well is and I want out. I want the underground of life where I am now, the underground of life. But where is this you may ask and how can I get there. Well, if you are working then walk Out straight away, get on a bus and go home and say fuck you employer and be quick with my last pay cheque. Say fuck to giving notice, if you can't walk out just like that then you won't be able to hack the underground. Then get yourself a garret to starve in and sign on the dole. Be prepared for being fucked around for weeks and months before you see any money, especially if you walked out on your job. Now say to yourself I'm finished with all that shit. So that's about the equivalent of dipping your big toe into the waters of the underground before wading in. Now stuff your central nervous system with hallucinogens listening to Beethoven's Ninth/The Cure/just about anything at full blast for months. Buy a second-hand aquarium and set it up in your garret, it doesn't matter if the glass is cracked you're going to use it for growing psilocybin cubensis mushrooms. When the weather gets warmer start sowing the marijuana seeds. Think of yourself as being on the run from the law, or forever one step ahead of the posse, or the landlord of a brothel. You're not "living" any more, you're "holding out". Then find an artform in which to work, start drawing in pen and ink, buy a battered typewriter. Become reclusive, don't shave, grow a beard, keep your hair unkempt, throw things on the floor, keep chickens in your room. Recite "Property is theft" ten times a day or until it seems obvious. Read books like Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground", Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London", Raoul Vaneigem's "The Revolution of Everyday Life" and Miyamoto Musashi's "A Book of Five Rings. Swot up on your Burroughs, Beckett, Celine, Kerousc, Coctesu, Rimbaud, Hesse, Poe, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Nietzsche, Joyce, Stein. That's a decent start, now the water's up to your waist and the tide seems to be taking you further away from the shore and "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" seems strangely subversive. Now read "Desert Island BIFF" just to make absolutely sure you don't turn into a jerk. At this stage there are two directions you can go in - back to your parents' home and beg to be taken back in because you've found the big wide world too harsh, or onward. Or the former followed by the latter if you need a breathing space. Now get stuck into Crowley, read "Magick" and "The Magical Record of the Beast 666". Read the works of Austin Osman Spare and start casting sigils. Spend more on incense than clothes. In fact don't buy any new clothes at all. Give money to tramps even though you can't afford to on the grounds that you might be a tramp yourself one day and you're the kind of person who will be able to help you out of a jam. This is the way you start to see the world of the underground. Wall all around Central London every week or two and simply observe. Just stand and stare. Sit on the pavement in Covent Garden all day long watching people come an go, watch street entertainers and practice saying you're broke when asked for money merely by the look on your face, do it until it no longer feels like an affectation of poverty, feel what is rich about being poor. Never spend more than a fiver in one go unless it's in order to distribute your art, print your writings or produce a magazine. Eat less meals if by doing so you can have a more diverse range of Letraset at your disposal. Learn what can be done with lentils. After a while you'll start to experience the underground as a real place, and you'll get more and more enmeshed in it, then will come the point at which you can start making your own rules, you don't have to be a tramp, you don't have to be living with bedbugs for your only company, but as a result of enduring this kind of lifestyle for a while you'll learn to see what the underground is and you'll be able to move freely within it. You won't need more than a glance to pick out the pimps the plain-clothes cops the pushers the three-card-monty lookouts the spivs the touts the knifeboys the freelance journalists the computer whizz-kids looking for recruitment by a master criminal, all these people will tell you what they are uncontrollably. You, on the other hand, as a chaos magician, will have the subjective impression you project to others completely under control, you can at will project the aura of any one of the above and more, or blend invisibly as just another face in the crowd, according to your desires and purpose. Here is the secret of the underground - to merge - to stalk it without affectation. You can only merge into something when you know what it is you're trying to merge into, and there is nowhere where there are more lessons to be learnt than the underground, it exists on a different magical plane to that environment frequented by those who try to be magicians in the hustle and bustle of commuters, the nine-to-fivers. Magick works with greater effectiveness in the underground because the urgency caused by chaos is substantially greater than that experienced by those who immerse their lives in the framework of an imposed order. Just as an ordinary man has the potential to become a hero when thrust into a dangerous position by fate that he would have thought he was not up to if there had been time to think about it, so can an average magician become a great magician when his environment is chaos, the difference being that the chaos is deliberately procured and approached slowly and stealthily like one might try to walk past a sleeping tiger. One places oneself in dangerous situations carefully in order to gain the co-operation and strength of the tiger, and eventually its stealth - the merging with one's surroundings in order to walk unseen and unheard, to literally pounce upon the object of your desires. That is chaos magick.
Sure, you can be a magician in the world of work and mundaneness but you'll never be the kind of magician you could have been, a chaos magician is an underground magician, those magicians who tell you that you can be a chaos magician whilst still tied to conformity are simply those magicians who lack the strength and conviction to let go of their conformity, for which they have battled for years to possess through a misguided allegiance to hard slog. They are excited by the idea of chaos and of plunging themselves into it but they are afraid of letting go and so they make of their chaos magick something without chaos, something which can be carried on over a weekend in order to fit in with the demands of a working routine. Don't let anyone convince you this is chaos magick, don't let anyone glamourise magick of a lesser character through use of the epithet "chaos". Chaos magick can't be marketed and sold to the masses, it can only be lived. Anything else is nine-to-five magick, which you may use for securing payrises and promotion.
What your life is immersed in will be what you use your magick to affect. If your life is immersed in the underground and you become concerned about such nebulous subjects as rebellion and revolution and romance your magick will naturally be directed into this arena and enable you to live what others are only content to talk about. This then is the underground. If you are holding down a steady job and pursuing a "career" it also stands to reason that your magick, your drives and desires, will be fuelled to take you in a direction you think you want to go in, to further you in what you are presently pursuing, without regard to your more romantic hopes of which you are so convinced that you never make the slightest effort to realise them. No, onward to your very own mortgage and bank loan for that wonderful car and the ever more rabid consumption which follows as a natural result of following the path that you are following. Such people recognise art only through the emotion of acute jealousy.
It can't be helped and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter to me that is, but it might matter to you if this is you I am writing about. What is, after all, your motivation for getting into magick, your motivation for reading a CHAOS text. Insight? Power? Most power-hungry magicians fuck themselves up sooner or later, so no doubt it is insight you're after. Ask yourself what insight there is in pursuing a useless career, kidding yourself that your high-flight aspirations lead to wondrous marvels. I'm not talking to the doomed, manual labourers and people who dig the roads and read electricity meters, I'm talking to those who glorify dead-end jobs in publishing, the media, banking, social work, advertising, and convince themselves their lives have meaning, purpose, and, above all, that most magical of dead-end words - prospects. Ask yourself, just how long will it be before you start buying your first shares? What a life! Give me the turmoil of chaos anyday, rather allow my magick to resemble the goings-on in a subterranean Chinese kitchen cum alchemists cave than the goings-on in your average air-conditioned office complex. Do you think about these things? Do you think you ought to think about these things? What do you want your life to be, do you know most people never ever think about this, rather they settle for the short-term option qf seeing something develop out of a lifestyle they hate, their catharsis being the accumulation of material goods. Ask yourself, what will ever develop out of an existence you hate? Isn't it better to turn your back on all of it and plunge yourself into a lifestyle you love and say fuck to poverty this is what I want my life to be, let my art be my catharsis for the malaise such poverty invokes. Isn't it altogether more likely that something will eventually develop out of a lifestyle you love, that your need to raise yourself above poverty will eventually be satisfied, by magical means, because you have had the courage to throw yourself into the driving urgency of chaos. These are all important things to consider. By all means be a nine-to-five magician, you don't have to be a chaos magician, it's not compulsory, but don't be a nine-to-five magician if you secretly desire to be a chaos magician because one doesn't lead to the other. This is the fundamental difference between chaos magick and other forms of magick and why chaos is the magick for now, for as long as now lasts. The magick that evolves out of chaos magick (for even chaos magick will only last as long as it does) will be the treasure of those who have had the courage to embrace chaos now,all the rest will have to content themselves with the realisation that they will be peddling a bicycle with a puncture uphill for evermore. Chaos is happening now, not next week, not next month, not next year. You can't get into chaos later if you've come across it now, this is your one and only chance, the only people who can get into chaos later on are those who are yet to hear about it. Real Pied Piper of Hamelin stuff this. You see, chaos is that thing which is instantly recognised by those it is meant for, that is what it is all about. If you are reading this and saying to yourself now that this is for you then find that strength within yourself to grasp it and make it your own. If you are reading this now and saying this isn't for me then that is because it isn't for you, you're an outsider who has got ahold of this publication by an unfortunate accident, so back off, that is an appropriate reaction. We will feel no sense of loss not to have your company I assure you, we will happen without you and inspire of you. If you can't see the urgency and what needs to be done then you are blind and I cast a spell to cast you into the pit. May Satan spike you with his dung fork and place hydrofluoric acid in your contact lense containers. You bastards live through what we do and what we die for, so we have no sense of regret in cutting ourselves off from you and saying "Fuck You Conformist!" What is it you conform to but conformity itself? Fuck You!
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/exor.html
What is this world of hatred and strife and war and hatred and strife and war. Is it, perchance, a world of hatred and strife and war and of hatred and strife and war. The answer is YES it fucking well is and I want out. I want the underground of life where I am now, the underground of life. But where is this you may ask and how can I get there. Well, if you are working then walk Out straight away, get on a bus and go home and say fuck you employer and be quick with my last pay cheque. Say fuck to giving notice, if you can't walk out just like that then you won't be able to hack the underground. Then get yourself a garret to starve in and sign on the dole. Be prepared for being fucked around for weeks and months before you see any money, especially if you walked out on your job. Now say to yourself I'm finished with all that shit. So that's about the equivalent of dipping your big toe into the waters of the underground before wading in. Now stuff your central nervous system with hallucinogens listening to Beethoven's Ninth/The Cure/just about anything at full blast for months. Buy a second-hand aquarium and set it up in your garret, it doesn't matter if the glass is cracked you're going to use it for growing psilocybin cubensis mushrooms. When the weather gets warmer start sowing the marijuana seeds. Think of yourself as being on the run from the law, or forever one step ahead of the posse, or the landlord of a brothel. You're not "living" any more, you're "holding out". Then find an artform in which to work, start drawing in pen and ink, buy a battered typewriter. Become reclusive, don't shave, grow a beard, keep your hair unkempt, throw things on the floor, keep chickens in your room. Recite "Property is theft" ten times a day or until it seems obvious. Read books like Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground", Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London", Raoul Vaneigem's "The Revolution of Everyday Life" and Miyamoto Musashi's "A Book of Five Rings. Swot up on your Burroughs, Beckett, Celine, Kerousc, Coctesu, Rimbaud, Hesse, Poe, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Nietzsche, Joyce, Stein. That's a decent start, now the water's up to your waist and the tide seems to be taking you further away from the shore and "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" seems strangely subversive. Now read "Desert Island BIFF" just to make absolutely sure you don't turn into a jerk. At this stage there are two directions you can go in - back to your parents' home and beg to be taken back in because you've found the big wide world too harsh, or onward. Or the former followed by the latter if you need a breathing space. Now get stuck into Crowley, read "Magick" and "The Magical Record of the Beast 666". Read the works of Austin Osman Spare and start casting sigils. Spend more on incense than clothes. In fact don't buy any new clothes at all. Give money to tramps even though you can't afford to on the grounds that you might be a tramp yourself one day and you're the kind of person who will be able to help you out of a jam. This is the way you start to see the world of the underground. Wall all around Central London every week or two and simply observe. Just stand and stare. Sit on the pavement in Covent Garden all day long watching people come an go, watch street entertainers and practice saying you're broke when asked for money merely by the look on your face, do it until it no longer feels like an affectation of poverty, feel what is rich about being poor. Never spend more than a fiver in one go unless it's in order to distribute your art, print your writings or produce a magazine. Eat less meals if by doing so you can have a more diverse range of Letraset at your disposal. Learn what can be done with lentils. After a while you'll start to experience the underground as a real place, and you'll get more and more enmeshed in it, then will come the point at which you can start making your own rules, you don't have to be a tramp, you don't have to be living with bedbugs for your only company, but as a result of enduring this kind of lifestyle for a while you'll learn to see what the underground is and you'll be able to move freely within it. You won't need more than a glance to pick out the pimps the plain-clothes cops the pushers the three-card-monty lookouts the spivs the touts the knifeboys the freelance journalists the computer whizz-kids looking for recruitment by a master criminal, all these people will tell you what they are uncontrollably. You, on the other hand, as a chaos magician, will have the subjective impression you project to others completely under control, you can at will project the aura of any one of the above and more, or blend invisibly as just another face in the crowd, according to your desires and purpose. Here is the secret of the underground - to merge - to stalk it without affectation. You can only merge into something when you know what it is you're trying to merge into, and there is nowhere where there are more lessons to be learnt than the underground, it exists on a different magical plane to that environment frequented by those who try to be magicians in the hustle and bustle of commuters, the nine-to-fivers. Magick works with greater effectiveness in the underground because the urgency caused by chaos is substantially greater than that experienced by those who immerse their lives in the framework of an imposed order. Just as an ordinary man has the potential to become a hero when thrust into a dangerous position by fate that he would have thought he was not up to if there had been time to think about it, so can an average magician become a great magician when his environment is chaos, the difference being that the chaos is deliberately procured and approached slowly and stealthily like one might try to walk past a sleeping tiger. One places oneself in dangerous situations carefully in order to gain the co-operation and strength of the tiger, and eventually its stealth - the merging with one's surroundings in order to walk unseen and unheard, to literally pounce upon the object of your desires. That is chaos magick.
Sure, you can be a magician in the world of work and mundaneness but you'll never be the kind of magician you could have been, a chaos magician is an underground magician, those magicians who tell you that you can be a chaos magician whilst still tied to conformity are simply those magicians who lack the strength and conviction to let go of their conformity, for which they have battled for years to possess through a misguided allegiance to hard slog. They are excited by the idea of chaos and of plunging themselves into it but they are afraid of letting go and so they make of their chaos magick something without chaos, something which can be carried on over a weekend in order to fit in with the demands of a working routine. Don't let anyone convince you this is chaos magick, don't let anyone glamourise magick of a lesser character through use of the epithet "chaos". Chaos magick can't be marketed and sold to the masses, it can only be lived. Anything else is nine-to-five magick, which you may use for securing payrises and promotion.
What your life is immersed in will be what you use your magick to affect. If your life is immersed in the underground and you become concerned about such nebulous subjects as rebellion and revolution and romance your magick will naturally be directed into this arena and enable you to live what others are only content to talk about. This then is the underground. If you are holding down a steady job and pursuing a "career" it also stands to reason that your magick, your drives and desires, will be fuelled to take you in a direction you think you want to go in, to further you in what you are presently pursuing, without regard to your more romantic hopes of which you are so convinced that you never make the slightest effort to realise them. No, onward to your very own mortgage and bank loan for that wonderful car and the ever more rabid consumption which follows as a natural result of following the path that you are following. Such people recognise art only through the emotion of acute jealousy.
It can't be helped and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter to me that is, but it might matter to you if this is you I am writing about. What is, after all, your motivation for getting into magick, your motivation for reading a CHAOS text. Insight? Power? Most power-hungry magicians fuck themselves up sooner or later, so no doubt it is insight you're after. Ask yourself what insight there is in pursuing a useless career, kidding yourself that your high-flight aspirations lead to wondrous marvels. I'm not talking to the doomed, manual labourers and people who dig the roads and read electricity meters, I'm talking to those who glorify dead-end jobs in publishing, the media, banking, social work, advertising, and convince themselves their lives have meaning, purpose, and, above all, that most magical of dead-end words - prospects. Ask yourself, just how long will it be before you start buying your first shares? What a life! Give me the turmoil of chaos anyday, rather allow my magick to resemble the goings-on in a subterranean Chinese kitchen cum alchemists cave than the goings-on in your average air-conditioned office complex. Do you think about these things? Do you think you ought to think about these things? What do you want your life to be, do you know most people never ever think about this, rather they settle for the short-term option qf seeing something develop out of a lifestyle they hate, their catharsis being the accumulation of material goods. Ask yourself, what will ever develop out of an existence you hate? Isn't it better to turn your back on all of it and plunge yourself into a lifestyle you love and say fuck to poverty this is what I want my life to be, let my art be my catharsis for the malaise such poverty invokes. Isn't it altogether more likely that something will eventually develop out of a lifestyle you love, that your need to raise yourself above poverty will eventually be satisfied, by magical means, because you have had the courage to throw yourself into the driving urgency of chaos. These are all important things to consider. By all means be a nine-to-five magician, you don't have to be a chaos magician, it's not compulsory, but don't be a nine-to-five magician if you secretly desire to be a chaos magician because one doesn't lead to the other. This is the fundamental difference between chaos magick and other forms of magick and why chaos is the magick for now, for as long as now lasts. The magick that evolves out of chaos magick (for even chaos magick will only last as long as it does) will be the treasure of those who have had the courage to embrace chaos now,all the rest will have to content themselves with the realisation that they will be peddling a bicycle with a puncture uphill for evermore. Chaos is happening now, not next week, not next month, not next year. You can't get into chaos later if you've come across it now, this is your one and only chance, the only people who can get into chaos later on are those who are yet to hear about it. Real Pied Piper of Hamelin stuff this. You see, chaos is that thing which is instantly recognised by those it is meant for, that is what it is all about. If you are reading this and saying to yourself now that this is for you then find that strength within yourself to grasp it and make it your own. If you are reading this now and saying this isn't for me then that is because it isn't for you, you're an outsider who has got ahold of this publication by an unfortunate accident, so back off, that is an appropriate reaction. We will feel no sense of loss not to have your company I assure you, we will happen without you and inspire of you. If you can't see the urgency and what needs to be done then you are blind and I cast a spell to cast you into the pit. May Satan spike you with his dung fork and place hydrofluoric acid in your contact lense containers. You bastards live through what we do and what we die for, so we have no sense of regret in cutting ourselves off from you and saying "Fuck You Conformist!" What is it you conform to but conformity itself? Fuck You!
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/exor.html
It is so Big and I am so Small
From XXXX to me:
It is my belief that there once was real magic. Our history is littered with examples such as Merlin, Simon Magus, Faust and others. I would define real magic as being that which existed before magic tricks & magick split from each other. It died after Aleister Crowley died.
Real magic is exactly what you think it is. It is the ability to fly. Real, physical effects. Moving objects without touching them. Etc.
How you go about obtaining these results is through intense practice.
One of the greatest examples of a person who was able to do this was Daniel Dunglas Home.
Witches, monks, yogis, shamans, etc. flying is one of the CORE tenets of being a magician.
Practice is KEY.
I hope you understand what I am trying to say. Real, objective results.
Therefore I am gonna do 2 things from this day onward.
1 build my muscles
2 levitation exercise
Even if I die without flying, it will be worth the exercise....
oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO
From Anthony Trammel to XXXX:
When I was about 22 years old I finally got a chance to go up to Berkley, CA from Los Angeles.
I hoped to take advantage of the many Buddhist monasteries there to learn more about Buddhism. I had just come across references to Mahayana Buddhists and hoped to find some there.
I didn't know exactly what they were but, that they looked at it as their duty to bring enlightenment to all beings I felt it MY duty to find them and learn from them.
I went from temple to temple asking after Mahaynism but, it wasn't until I got to a zen temple that I got a partial answer. They were in the middle of a weeklong zazen retreat and a few of them sat outside taking a break.
I asked one of them about it and he looked at the others and said, in all seriousness, "The mahayans. There used to be Mahayanist Buddhist but there aren't any anymore. I think the hindus killed them all in India about two thousand years ago."
I walked away heartbroken.
g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^g^
Here's another video for you:
http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm
Hello Mr. or Ms. A.A.D.D
Contemplate this:
"Two of the most powerful warriors are patience and time."
--Leo Tolstoy
Read this:
From: Don't Blame Me --Blame My Servitor by Fenwick Rysen
Watch this:
"Two of the most powerful warriors are patience and time."
--Leo Tolstoy
Read this:
"I'm not sure whether I should be worried or not. You see, Chronos is a nice enough God of Time, but he is a bit old and I'm not sure he stands a chance against what's about to hit him. Of course, he has enslaved all of Western society to the clock, so maybe he deserves it, but still yet I feel kind of sorry for him.
You see, it all started when I began playing with the idea of time magick. Not that I'm responsible for what's coming, mind you--- I'll pass the blame off to Fotamecus before anyone blames me. I turned him loose a long time ago, and I take no responsibility for his actions, especially with him ranting "Chronos, your time has come" every time I see him. Perhaps I should explain.
My own involvement with time magick was actually quite accidental. One day I got to thinking about time and how it flows, and how each hour is supposed to be the same length as all the others. Yet this didn't make sense to me--- sometimes an hour flies by as if minutes, and other times it drags on for ages. The end result of the thinking ran something like this: If we can use magick in any area of our lives, and if Time is a mutable substance, why can't we use magick to mess around with time? And thinking usually gets me into trouble sooner or later.
So one afternoon, running behind schedule, the thought passed through my mind to use magick to speed the journey. Listening to the radio as I drove down the freeway, I created a suitable Statement of Intent: "Force Time Into Compression." Because driving doesn't lend itself well to artistic sigilization, I instead reduced it to a four-syllable mantra that I could chant to radio music: "Fotamecus". Despite little preparation, it worked exceptionally well, and I thought that this would be the end of it.
The next day a good friend of mine, Quinn the Mad Prophet (don't ask), approached me and asked about sigilization techniques a la Austin Spare. Requiring a demonstration sigil, I chose to use "Fotamecus", explaining the previous day's success with it. From the mantra, I created an artistic sigil that Quinn put in his wallet for future reference, inadvertantly placing himself under its influence. Many stories of truly rapid transit followed, culminating in a Metallica concert where Quinn's goal was to "suck up all that free gnosis."
All of that free gnosis that Quinn sucked up was dumped into the Fotamecus sigil to speed the trip home, and a two hour journey took only thirty minutes. Even more surprising, the energy was enough to push the sigil over the border to servitorhood. I've used this technique before, of feeding a sigil enough gnosis until it created an independent servitor, but neither the Mad Prophet nor I had ever done it by accident. So without a home and with nowhere to go, the Fotamecus servitor, young and unintelligent, started following us around. Whenever we needed to compress or expand time we would feed it a bit of gnosis and it would do the job. It started "growing up" as we fed it, growing a little more intelligent and a bit stronger each time we used it. We thought this good and well, for the stronger he got the better he did his job.
Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1996, I crammed with six other chaotes into a van headed for Death Valley. Calling on Fotamecus while in the San Francisco Bay Area, we travelled fifty miles in fifteen minutes through both heavy traffic and the MacArthur Maze, the most dizzying interchange of highways known to man. Immediately after Fotamecus began to work, we lost a car of friends that had been following us.
Even though we killed 45 minutes at a rest stop afterwards, when we re-entered the freeway we met right up with the other car even though they had never stopped. We thought the magick had worked very well until we received the backlash later that day.
For time compressed, an equal amount of time was expanded. The balance was kept. Travelling at sixty miles an hour, a fifteen mile stretch of desert highway took nearly an hour to cross. If we had already reached our destination, the expansion would have been fine, but Fotamecus was only able to hold off the backlash from the initial compression for so long.
After several similar events we mulled over various ideas to correct the problem of backlash and hit upon the idea of viral servitors--- the key to a process of mutation that would allow Fotamecus to eventually grow beyond our control. We worked several rituals in which we altered the sigil to make it possible for Fotamecus to make copies of itself. These copies wired themselves into a network that made them incredibly effective at preventing unwanted side effects. If one of them needed to compress time and another to expand it they would pass it off to each other through the viral network, maintaining balance and reducing the possibility of backlash.
Our only problem was that we didn't limit how large the network could grow. There was no check against it--- nothing to keep it from getting out of our control. And the only problem with a reproducing virus is that sooner or later it mutates.
It was about this time that news of Fotamecus started spreading through the Internet, and an online graphic of the sigil was printed out by many for personal use. Hundreds of copies were spawned and the power of the Fotamecus Viral Servitor Network continued to grow.
As the network grew, so did the power of Fotamecus. The whole thing started acting less and less like a legion of indpendent servitors and more and more like an individual entity. He started showing greater signs of intelligence--- he would hold interesting conversations, show up when needed without request, and applied greater precision in his use of time manipulation to get the most mileage from the least effort. It became obvious to the Mad Prophet and I that he was slipping out of our control and was about to become something else. The mutation had begun, and there was little we could do to stop it.
Only a year after his initial creation, he ceased to be a network of pieces and became more than the sum of his parts. His parts were still identifiable, but they were becoming less and less distinct. The viral network itself was now stronger than the individual servitors, and looked more like a spirit in its own right with each passing day.
The full mutation took place during the hour long Midnight to Midnight when Pacific Daylight Time became Pacific Standard Time in October of 1997. Using mundane time expansion of an hour that didn't technically exist, we performed a ritual in his name that was designed to charge him with power for whatever use he saw fit. Seven people and one smashed clock were the only witnesses to the ritual.
For three days he just disappeared. Petitions for help went unanswered, conversations were one-way talks to nothingness. Divination confirmed that yes, he was still alive, but that no, he wasn't responding to anything. So we waited, and three days later he rose from the dead more changed than we had ever expected.
Many chaos magicians speak of spirits as spanning a continuum of power from the tiniest unintelligent servitor, to egregores of moderate power, to godforms capable of controlling entire cultures. In one popular theory, all godforms were at some time on the short end of the stick, and through constant use they amassed power and rose from servitor to egregore to full status as a godform. When asked how long this takes, many chaotes shrug and guess that each step takes decades or even centuries. I would say that this grossly underestimates the potential for their growth, for when we next saw Fotamecus he was no longer a puny little servitor but an egregore powerful enough to shrug us off and make his own demands.
I still don't know what allowed him to cross that boundary. I suspect that when you give a servitor enough energy from enough different people it will become an egregore, much as a sigil can become a servitor after being the recipient of strong gnosis. But similar egregores I had dealt with in the past had not been nearly as strong as Fotamecus had become, though it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise. By this time, there were hundreds of people using him daily around the world, each of them feeding him a little more power with each use. Along with the ritual performed during the Daylight Savings time-change, it was enough to push him over that border with change to spare. He reintegrated the individual parts as his limbs, while the network became his mind. Granted, he wasn't a very strong egregore yet, but he had plans of his own at this point, and he would have been difficult for any one individual to control.
Lucky for us he was friendly and wasn't about to take revenge for any perceived abuse suffered as a servitor. Instead he showed up, let us know of his egregore-hood and what was going on, and then faded into the background from where he would manipulate events. One could petition him in the same manner as before, but his skill at time manipulation had reached mastery. Oftentimes he showed up unrequested, giving help before we could think to ask for it. There were even times when he was strong enough to get us to our destinations before we had left for them. Certainly not the work of a puny servitor!
I don't see much of him anymore, but he does show up when I need him. He usually has a better idea of when I need him than I do. And sometimes he just drops by for a chat. At 2 a.m. sitting in a Denny's just a few weeks after attaining his egregore-hood, I had a particularly revealing conversation with him. It seems that he's not satisfied with being an egregore--- he wants to head for godhood and the only thing standing in his way is Chronos.
Chronos, god of fixed time--- his talismans are the timepieces that control our daily existence, his clocks are the prison guards to which we have become slaves. And never do we question his authority. But what could some upstart servitor with delusions of grandeur hope to offer?
In my own case, my full-time job became much more pleasant when I began to compress the entire day with his help. An eight-hour day felt like four or five, and this compression was fed back as expansion of my free time. A two hour lounge around the house often felt like three or four. If I needed more sleep, I would ask him to expand the night-time hours, and I would awake after five hours as if I had slept in late. So much for those last nagging doubts in my head that time is fixed and immutable. In this way does Fotamecus battle Chronos. We may be slaves to our clocks, but there is nothing to stop us from changing the flow of hours within those clocks.
Word has spread. More and more people are using Fotamecus every day, and with each new user he grows in power. Already he is plotting his attacks against Chronos with what seems to be a passionate hatred centered on vengeance for some unknown slight. He keeps muttering something about the millenium, and has told me on more than one occassion to keep an eye on London's Millenium Dome, which will hold more than 100,000 party-goers on December 31, 1999. Such comments are usually accompanied with the astral equivelant of a mischievous smile.
At this point I have a better relationship with him than I do with most gods I work with. And he seems to like me. Occasionally he pops up to tell me things to do for him, to get him out to more people or to give him ammunition for his war against Chronos. In return for a little publicity here and there, he helps me stretch those hours around the clock to get the most out of them. He even pokes me and prods me to write essays about him so that others will use him. By using his name as a mantra or by creating a ritual using his sigil to call him, he grows stronger day by day as new users feed him in return for his help. So sure, it may be neat to tell a story about how a servitor that Quinn and I accidentally created eventually ascended to egregorehood, but these days I feel more and more like I'm a servitor to Fotamecus that he feeds candy for being a good little magician. An odd relationship at best.
Fotamecus has been out of my control for a very long time now. I do worry a little bit about his war with Chronos--- I have absolutely no clue what he's got planned, and he's certainly not telling me. But to be perfectly honest, even if I am a bit worried, I've been enjoying the show. And with the millenium just around the corner it looks like it's only going to get better. This is what the Immanentization of the Eschaton is all about."
You see, it all started when I began playing with the idea of time magick. Not that I'm responsible for what's coming, mind you--- I'll pass the blame off to Fotamecus before anyone blames me. I turned him loose a long time ago, and I take no responsibility for his actions, especially with him ranting "Chronos, your time has come" every time I see him. Perhaps I should explain.
My own involvement with time magick was actually quite accidental. One day I got to thinking about time and how it flows, and how each hour is supposed to be the same length as all the others. Yet this didn't make sense to me--- sometimes an hour flies by as if minutes, and other times it drags on for ages. The end result of the thinking ran something like this: If we can use magick in any area of our lives, and if Time is a mutable substance, why can't we use magick to mess around with time? And thinking usually gets me into trouble sooner or later.
So one afternoon, running behind schedule, the thought passed through my mind to use magick to speed the journey. Listening to the radio as I drove down the freeway, I created a suitable Statement of Intent: "Force Time Into Compression." Because driving doesn't lend itself well to artistic sigilization, I instead reduced it to a four-syllable mantra that I could chant to radio music: "Fotamecus". Despite little preparation, it worked exceptionally well, and I thought that this would be the end of it.
The next day a good friend of mine, Quinn the Mad Prophet (don't ask), approached me and asked about sigilization techniques a la Austin Spare. Requiring a demonstration sigil, I chose to use "Fotamecus", explaining the previous day's success with it. From the mantra, I created an artistic sigil that Quinn put in his wallet for future reference, inadvertantly placing himself under its influence. Many stories of truly rapid transit followed, culminating in a Metallica concert where Quinn's goal was to "suck up all that free gnosis."
All of that free gnosis that Quinn sucked up was dumped into the Fotamecus sigil to speed the trip home, and a two hour journey took only thirty minutes. Even more surprising, the energy was enough to push the sigil over the border to servitorhood. I've used this technique before, of feeding a sigil enough gnosis until it created an independent servitor, but neither the Mad Prophet nor I had ever done it by accident. So without a home and with nowhere to go, the Fotamecus servitor, young and unintelligent, started following us around. Whenever we needed to compress or expand time we would feed it a bit of gnosis and it would do the job. It started "growing up" as we fed it, growing a little more intelligent and a bit stronger each time we used it. We thought this good and well, for the stronger he got the better he did his job.
Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1996, I crammed with six other chaotes into a van headed for Death Valley. Calling on Fotamecus while in the San Francisco Bay Area, we travelled fifty miles in fifteen minutes through both heavy traffic and the MacArthur Maze, the most dizzying interchange of highways known to man. Immediately after Fotamecus began to work, we lost a car of friends that had been following us.
Even though we killed 45 minutes at a rest stop afterwards, when we re-entered the freeway we met right up with the other car even though they had never stopped. We thought the magick had worked very well until we received the backlash later that day.
For time compressed, an equal amount of time was expanded. The balance was kept. Travelling at sixty miles an hour, a fifteen mile stretch of desert highway took nearly an hour to cross. If we had already reached our destination, the expansion would have been fine, but Fotamecus was only able to hold off the backlash from the initial compression for so long.
After several similar events we mulled over various ideas to correct the problem of backlash and hit upon the idea of viral servitors--- the key to a process of mutation that would allow Fotamecus to eventually grow beyond our control. We worked several rituals in which we altered the sigil to make it possible for Fotamecus to make copies of itself. These copies wired themselves into a network that made them incredibly effective at preventing unwanted side effects. If one of them needed to compress time and another to expand it they would pass it off to each other through the viral network, maintaining balance and reducing the possibility of backlash.
Our only problem was that we didn't limit how large the network could grow. There was no check against it--- nothing to keep it from getting out of our control. And the only problem with a reproducing virus is that sooner or later it mutates.
It was about this time that news of Fotamecus started spreading through the Internet, and an online graphic of the sigil was printed out by many for personal use. Hundreds of copies were spawned and the power of the Fotamecus Viral Servitor Network continued to grow.
As the network grew, so did the power of Fotamecus. The whole thing started acting less and less like a legion of indpendent servitors and more and more like an individual entity. He started showing greater signs of intelligence--- he would hold interesting conversations, show up when needed without request, and applied greater precision in his use of time manipulation to get the most mileage from the least effort. It became obvious to the Mad Prophet and I that he was slipping out of our control and was about to become something else. The mutation had begun, and there was little we could do to stop it.
Only a year after his initial creation, he ceased to be a network of pieces and became more than the sum of his parts. His parts were still identifiable, but they were becoming less and less distinct. The viral network itself was now stronger than the individual servitors, and looked more like a spirit in its own right with each passing day.
The full mutation took place during the hour long Midnight to Midnight when Pacific Daylight Time became Pacific Standard Time in October of 1997. Using mundane time expansion of an hour that didn't technically exist, we performed a ritual in his name that was designed to charge him with power for whatever use he saw fit. Seven people and one smashed clock were the only witnesses to the ritual.
For three days he just disappeared. Petitions for help went unanswered, conversations were one-way talks to nothingness. Divination confirmed that yes, he was still alive, but that no, he wasn't responding to anything. So we waited, and three days later he rose from the dead more changed than we had ever expected.
Many chaos magicians speak of spirits as spanning a continuum of power from the tiniest unintelligent servitor, to egregores of moderate power, to godforms capable of controlling entire cultures. In one popular theory, all godforms were at some time on the short end of the stick, and through constant use they amassed power and rose from servitor to egregore to full status as a godform. When asked how long this takes, many chaotes shrug and guess that each step takes decades or even centuries. I would say that this grossly underestimates the potential for their growth, for when we next saw Fotamecus he was no longer a puny little servitor but an egregore powerful enough to shrug us off and make his own demands.
I still don't know what allowed him to cross that boundary. I suspect that when you give a servitor enough energy from enough different people it will become an egregore, much as a sigil can become a servitor after being the recipient of strong gnosis. But similar egregores I had dealt with in the past had not been nearly as strong as Fotamecus had become, though it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise. By this time, there were hundreds of people using him daily around the world, each of them feeding him a little more power with each use. Along with the ritual performed during the Daylight Savings time-change, it was enough to push him over that border with change to spare. He reintegrated the individual parts as his limbs, while the network became his mind. Granted, he wasn't a very strong egregore yet, but he had plans of his own at this point, and he would have been difficult for any one individual to control.
Lucky for us he was friendly and wasn't about to take revenge for any perceived abuse suffered as a servitor. Instead he showed up, let us know of his egregore-hood and what was going on, and then faded into the background from where he would manipulate events. One could petition him in the same manner as before, but his skill at time manipulation had reached mastery. Oftentimes he showed up unrequested, giving help before we could think to ask for it. There were even times when he was strong enough to get us to our destinations before we had left for them. Certainly not the work of a puny servitor!
I don't see much of him anymore, but he does show up when I need him. He usually has a better idea of when I need him than I do. And sometimes he just drops by for a chat. At 2 a.m. sitting in a Denny's just a few weeks after attaining his egregore-hood, I had a particularly revealing conversation with him. It seems that he's not satisfied with being an egregore--- he wants to head for godhood and the only thing standing in his way is Chronos.
Chronos, god of fixed time--- his talismans are the timepieces that control our daily existence, his clocks are the prison guards to which we have become slaves. And never do we question his authority. But what could some upstart servitor with delusions of grandeur hope to offer?
In my own case, my full-time job became much more pleasant when I began to compress the entire day with his help. An eight-hour day felt like four or five, and this compression was fed back as expansion of my free time. A two hour lounge around the house often felt like three or four. If I needed more sleep, I would ask him to expand the night-time hours, and I would awake after five hours as if I had slept in late. So much for those last nagging doubts in my head that time is fixed and immutable. In this way does Fotamecus battle Chronos. We may be slaves to our clocks, but there is nothing to stop us from changing the flow of hours within those clocks.
Word has spread. More and more people are using Fotamecus every day, and with each new user he grows in power. Already he is plotting his attacks against Chronos with what seems to be a passionate hatred centered on vengeance for some unknown slight. He keeps muttering something about the millenium, and has told me on more than one occassion to keep an eye on London's Millenium Dome, which will hold more than 100,000 party-goers on December 31, 1999. Such comments are usually accompanied with the astral equivelant of a mischievous smile.
At this point I have a better relationship with him than I do with most gods I work with. And he seems to like me. Occasionally he pops up to tell me things to do for him, to get him out to more people or to give him ammunition for his war against Chronos. In return for a little publicity here and there, he helps me stretch those hours around the clock to get the most out of them. He even pokes me and prods me to write essays about him so that others will use him. By using his name as a mantra or by creating a ritual using his sigil to call him, he grows stronger day by day as new users feed him in return for his help. So sure, it may be neat to tell a story about how a servitor that Quinn and I accidentally created eventually ascended to egregorehood, but these days I feel more and more like I'm a servitor to Fotamecus that he feeds candy for being a good little magician. An odd relationship at best.
Fotamecus has been out of my control for a very long time now. I do worry a little bit about his war with Chronos--- I have absolutely no clue what he's got planned, and he's certainly not telling me. But to be perfectly honest, even if I am a bit worried, I've been enjoying the show. And with the millenium just around the corner it looks like it's only going to get better. This is what the Immanentization of the Eschaton is all about."
From: Don't Blame Me --Blame My Servitor by Fenwick Rysen
Watch this:
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Of Super Heroes and Coloring Books
I giggled as I walked through the local Rite-aid and looked through the selection of Crayolas. When I asked the clerk where the coloring books were she pointed me to the children's aisle and it was quite the flash-back to look through the selection of Care Bears and Sesame Street coloring books. I finally settled on a Marvel's Super-Heroes one.
It's fucking sweet. It not only has pictures to color in and activities to do. It's also got a bunch of stickers, a growth chart and a poster I am going to put on my wall. I already gave a sticker away to a friend of mine. It said "Bruisers!" and had The Incredible Hulk, Colossus, The Thing and The Mighty Thor. He wanted the Silver Surfer one but, he is one of my patron dieties so, I politely told him he couldn't have it and that I was sorry.
I did the 'cross patch' very quickly. I've gotten a lot better at such things in the last 30 years or so.
I am amazing.
The secret is to color OVER the lines first and then fill in the blanks. I already drew in the Incredible Hulk with red skin and yellow pants. He is hoisting an orange car and throwing it out of the page. The metal is crumpled underneath his massive hands. I made the sky purple and the ground blue.
At first I was carefully replacing each crayon back in the box as I finished with it, but then after awhile I took them all out and laid them on the table. I thought I had lost the green one but it had just fallen on the floor. Do you remember when you were a kid and it always seemed like one got lost when you used them? --kinda like a preview of socks and dryers or girls and time.
I'm at a coffee shop and I am surrounded by people studying for mid-terms or going over their business plans. One person stopped, looked at me and said,"I'm not even going to ask.", right before he walked away. I know that, secretly, they are jealous.
My hands smell like wax right now and are very smooth. Tomorrow when I do the next couple of pages I will color outside of the lines on purpose.
I don't care if everyone thinks I am bat-shit crazy for doing this.
When I am finished I will probably give it to my mom as a gift.
It's fucking sweet. It not only has pictures to color in and activities to do. It's also got a bunch of stickers, a growth chart and a poster I am going to put on my wall. I already gave a sticker away to a friend of mine. It said "Bruisers!" and had The Incredible Hulk, Colossus, The Thing and The Mighty Thor. He wanted the Silver Surfer one but, he is one of my patron dieties so, I politely told him he couldn't have it and that I was sorry.
I did the 'cross patch' very quickly. I've gotten a lot better at such things in the last 30 years or so.
I am amazing.
The secret is to color OVER the lines first and then fill in the blanks. I already drew in the Incredible Hulk with red skin and yellow pants. He is hoisting an orange car and throwing it out of the page. The metal is crumpled underneath his massive hands. I made the sky purple and the ground blue.
At first I was carefully replacing each crayon back in the box as I finished with it, but then after awhile I took them all out and laid them on the table. I thought I had lost the green one but it had just fallen on the floor. Do you remember when you were a kid and it always seemed like one got lost when you used them? --kinda like a preview of socks and dryers or girls and time.
I'm at a coffee shop and I am surrounded by people studying for mid-terms or going over their business plans. One person stopped, looked at me and said,"I'm not even going to ask.", right before he walked away. I know that, secretly, they are jealous.
My hands smell like wax right now and are very smooth. Tomorrow when I do the next couple of pages I will color outside of the lines on purpose.
I don't care if everyone thinks I am bat-shit crazy for doing this.
When I am finished I will probably give it to my mom as a gift.
Originality in Art
"At this point I should like to pause a moment and to ask the reader to consider more particularly Wilde's method of building a piece of writing. Absolute originality in art is of course a delusion. Not only are we all the sons of somebody in whatever art we attempt, but the "higher" our aims the greater the number of predecessors to whom we are indebted. Willed originality is unconscious or at least unplotted --a fresh way of looking at the world, a new personality. All writers borrow from others, consciously or unconsciously. The succesful --I mean artistically succesful-- do it consciously, and justify themselves by claiming that they improve their thefts. Writers who try to avoid these obligations and labour to appear wholly original are inevitably either dull or preposterous."
--"The Portable Oscar Wilde"
Selected and Edited by Richard Aldington
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