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Notebook

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do people never tire of foreclosing meaning?

Man always wanted to conquer nature, to annihilate space and time. It started as a biblical mandate to subdue the Earth from a god who is now dead. Well, here we are. What do the new gods want?

Art must challenge the linear thinking that has been engrained in us by the paradigm of “progress”

Immortality is obviously a state of mind.

It is a kind of medicine to think a little of death every day.

Terror and the threat of destruction may yet prove preferable to malaise.

Remember…Never forget.

Uncertainty is a virtue. It curtails anger. Contradiction is a highly creative state.

NATURE is the ghost in the machine.

“Nature, O Master of the Table” (Muqaddimah)

Self-destruction in service of the external ideal of an infinite universe is more of an eastern cultural value, one that is central to the Tao. In the west, the idea of infinity was always closely tied to the other, God. Infinity later emerged in a secular way through modern astronomy and astrophysics, but images of deep space may only have further undermined a sense of belonging to the cosmos.

defense magic = resist glamor magic

Technology is magic
magic is power
technology is power

Digital technology challenges the practice of magick more often than it aids it. Digital technology is magickal (“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) but it also displaces older forms of magic by stealing our attention from the realm of nature and dreams. Magical cybernetic practice = resist control; expand the bod.

psychedelic politics = the political act as artistic, expressive, [chaos magic]

Breathing is both a voluntary and involuntary process, and thus a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious.

In human beings, the animal instinct to survive is transmuted into existential dread.

Pictures are necessary to convey certain knowledge that is beyond words, or which would be destroyed by words.

Inspiration is a spiritual state.

Make death sexy again.

“Why die when the savior grows in your garden”? (Susun)

The deepest and most difficult transformation is the inner one, and it must come before outer transformation. (Betsy)

“a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks in to materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.” (Paglia)

Rainbow: a rare alchemical union of water,  fire, and air [fertility]

The whole idea of human sacrifice is a misinterpretation of god’s command to consume the divine body, which is consummate in the magic mushroom, and in plants more generally. Sacrifice has also been an intentional metaphor; Crowley used it as a cipher for sex, and the ancients used cannibalism as a metaphor for ingesting sacred hallucinogens.

gods personify forces of the cosmos, and thus are worth knowing. gods themselves are not beings, but forces that take shape in our imaginations as personae, because that’s how our dreams/spirits/minds work.

Asclepios, the god who heals in dreams.
Caduceus = transformation of spiritual consciousness

‘The devil cannot stand to be mocked’ / ‘on the contrary, I think demons like all kinds of attention.’ (tNotR)

I have oriented myself to the mysteries…

Not every question has an answer, which is why oracles (including magic mirrors) respond to questions in riddles or rhymes that require interpretation

Nature is inherently magical. A ghost can be a sign that the natural order is disturbed in some way. 

You talk to the dead because they know about things that are underground.

Spirits can scam you just like people.

No one voice has the answer; truth is a polyphony.

Embodiment is a pagan concept; paradise is now.

“the open ended morphology of a plant objectively expresses its aacts of attention over time, as its body plan is adjusted to its environment” (Michael Marder)

Fatalism and puritanism are pitfalls of the spirit.

“IT” is not necessarily about giving people answers, “IT” is about acclimating them to uncertainty, shifting expectation of reality.

Revelation, in the biblical sense, is the terror of change. You seek to be a revelator.

“Scent is the closest our material world comes to a manifestation of spirit on a molecular level…the food of angels.” (H. Roth)

the “druidic” mode: each devotee cultivates a complete knowledge of humanity. Philosophical knowledge is of equal value to practical knowledge i.e. farming, both are essential to the spiritual path.

“In the love goddess religions, sex in place of salvation is the allure and reward for followers…promised a transcendental experience that did not require a barrier between worshipper and gnosis” (Gray, Red Goddess, 36)

An idol is a form of magickal technology.

The art of belief has been lost.

“No man has seen ‘self’”, and yet we believe in it. “Myself, I have not seen a man who is not god already” (Spare, Book of Pleasure)

“Time has not changed it, hence I call it new” (Spare, ibid.)

“They that soared so loftily,
How contentedly they return to
dust again, laid low, resigned
to lie and decay at the foot
of their tree, to afford nourishment
to new generations of their kind
—they teach us how to die.”
(Thoreau, Oct. 1862)

The impotence of stories / the importance of stories…

the story of love must be told many times.

all Gothic narratives are about reckoning with modernity, while folk horror asks: were the old ways right?

idea for a magickal act: leave a work unfinished when you die, intended to be finished by someone else.

the dangers of magic in four degrees: 1) isolation  2) obsession  3) delusion  4) madness