shifting soul states

I just posted an article over at Key23 on the work I have been doing with the subtle layers of consciousness. Enjoy!

"A question that keeps coming up in my magical practice is how we represent different states on an energetic level. Not just basic physical, mental, and emotional states, but all the subtleties in between that make up the vast range of human experience. What are these states, how can we access them, and what are they good for?"

tripping in the 21st century

Is Taking a Psychedelic an Act of Sedition?
[via nerdshit.com]

"So long as such stormings of heaven are outlawed and dismissed, the greater the likelihood for relapse from the cosmic consciousness they engender to the coarse materialist outlook that is consensus reality. With religion-inspired hatred on the loose, many see religion itself as a culprit for the Sept. 11 troubles, and point to psychedelics — or entheogens, divine-generating agents — as a means of bypassing religion to get to the wellspring of spirituality. Because they produce the primary experience on which faith is inspired, "entheogens prove that no intermediary is necessary," states Clark Heinrich, author of God Without Religion (yet unpublished) and Strange Fruit (Inner Traditions), a speculative history about the role of the Amanita muscaria mushroom in several world religions. After his own drug-induced awakening, the late British Ecstasy advocate, Nicholas Saunders (see www.ecstasy.org), surmised that religions may very well have been invented to explain entheogenic experiences.

"Still another nondenominational yet transcendental usage seen for psychedelics is as a tool of hyper-ratiocinative perception, a means to deconstruct media charades and help the intellect to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, according to Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information (Three Rivers Press). "I wouldn't necessarily want to trip in the aftermath of Sept. 11," concedes Davis, "but I can now use my psychedelic training for coping with the epistemological cyclone of a cataclysm such as this. I grew up in the cushiest reality in the history of the planet. Now I see demons pouring over the lip of my existence, but I've learned through psychedelics how to breathe through it and not believe its story."

an assassin staring at the sufi stars

While doing some research on the spiritual beliefs of the Hashshashin I stumbled upon this in the wiki's sufi entry.

"Although there is no consensus with regard to Sufi cosmology, one can disentangle various threads that led to the crystallization of more or less coherent mythic cosmological doctrines. The first is based on purely Quranic notions of the Afterworld (Ahiret), the Hidden (Ghayb- sometimes associated with “hidden” or “invisible” dimensions of human existence, but, more frequently with the state of God before creation or Unmanifest Absolute. Another term for the latter is “Amma”, ie. Divine Darkness) and seven-storeyed Universe explicitly referenced in the Qur’an (and cherished in Prophet Mohammad’s “Miraj” or ascent to the God’s face -- the powerful spiritual motif that inspired generations of later Sufis and ordinary believers). However, these relatively simple Quranic concepts that gave basic structure to Islamic worldview had soon become exposed to Neoplatonist and Gnostic influences, as well as Zoroastrian religious imagery. As a consequence, Sufism developed a welter of frequently contradictory cosmological doctrines."

The article goes on from there to describe several key notions of sufism and thethe six lataif in more detail, creating quite a similair map to the eight layered one I've been working with to chart a path through the subtleties between us and the divine. Mentions of Aalam-e-Misal (the Allegorical realm - reflection of knowledge of the preserved Scripturum), Nuqta-e-wahida (point of unity), Tajalliat (Beatific visions), and Rooh-e-azam (the great soul), sure sound like some of the more remarkable places I have found myself on this long strange trip, but more poeticly described. "It is a bright ring of light in which all the information pertaining to the unseen & seen cosmos is inscribed..."

Peter Lamborne Wilson gives perhaps a more liberatory slant to their spirituality. "For the Sufis, the road to spiritual knowledge - to Certainty - could never be confined to the process of rational or purely intellectual activity, without sapiential knowledge (zawq, "taste") and the direct, immediate experience of the Heart. Truth, they believed, can be sought and found only with one's entire being; nor were they satisfied merely to know this Truth. They insisted on a total identification with it: a "passing away" of the knower in the Known, of subject in the Object of knowledge. Thus, when the fourth/tenth century Sufi Hallaj proclaimed "I am the Truth" (and was martyred for it by the exoteric authorities), he was not violating the "First Pillar" of Islam, the belief in Unity (tawhid), but simply stating the truth from the mouth of the Truth."

But still the question of whether the Assassins were indeed a heretical sect hiding within the heretical sect of sufism remains to be answered, though Wilson's notes on their spiritual beliefs certainly paint them in a similair light.

free agents in fractal space

Free Agents in Fractal Space [via DRT]

"A fractal is generated by a recursive process. So are landscapes and trees. DNA replication, population flux, heart fibrillation, the stock market -- all are based on iteration (cyclicity) and feedback. So are you. And how about language? And, sorry to jump the gun here, but consciousness -- self-consciousness -- is now presumed to be a recursive process.

The butterfly effect is due to a small change in one cycle getting fed back into the process, amplifying itself each time until it is quite significant...

Power, like climate, is a dynamical system, and as such is subject to the forces of feedback and iteration. Male-dominance hierarchies tend to centralize power, to simplify the channels of feedback so that further iterations further centralize power. And they try to minimize the "noise" -- that pesky hiss of human freedom, like escaping steam...

The fractal is a symbol of freedom. It is inifinte within a finite space, sprouting Form as waves rise from the sea. It is the abstraction of Energy as it is enfolded by the material plane. It hints at realities previously reserved for mystical visions."

more spirals...

and just when I wanted a conch shell to draw, a mysterious basket of rare seashells appeared in our craftroom...





The purest , most universal form of motion is the spiral: the counterclockwise spiral, the levogyre, is the one found most often in nature. We discover it in the growth of trees and in other members of the vegetable kingdom, in the majestic sweep of the great spiral galaxies, in the long bones of animals, and in seashells. There are also many instances of double spirals--the two intersecting curves in the seed heads of ripe sunflowers, in the centers of daisies., the seed cones of fir trees. Like curves, spirals are not all the same. The equiangular or logarithmic spiral of the elegant chambered nautilus is one type, seen also in ram's horns. It is interesting to note that the double spiral of the sunflower corresponds to the ratio of the Fibonacci Series. If you count the number of seeds in a clockwise spiral and in an intersecting counterclockwise spiral, the two figures will be that of a sequence in Fibonacci's magic chain.

like ducks in a row

So Pope Benedict XVI has been elected to office.

Does this mean we're one pope closer to the end of the world?

Stay tuned for the this next exciting episode of world powers vs. the apocalypse.

sacred techniques and occult technologies

I just posted this on my livejournal, but figured it was fitting enough to be included here as well...

Yesterday after drinking way too much coffee then I needed I biked down to CMU for the art sale, at which James and Laura and Matthu had a table displaying all the work they threw together the day before while Matthu and I were recording. Right across the aisle Alberto was set up, and I couldn't help but let myself fall into his strange spiraling landscapes and technorganic geometries. As much as I wished I had the money to buy one of his masterpieces I contented myself with flipping through a stack of photocopied pages from his notebooks. To my shock and pleasure I discovered that he had not just copied some of his more beautiful hand drawn pieces but several pages worth of instructions for drawing golden spirals, phyllotaxis, and hypercubes and other sacred geometries all in relation to each other. Alberto taught me phyllotaxis awhile back and I recently passed it on to James and Luara, and for the past several days I had been experimenting with golden spirals based off of fibonacci's sequence and was only beginning to scratch the surface, but here in my hand were secret techniques that would allow me to push these lines to the horizons. I felt like I was holding pages torn out of some ancient grimoire, magical knowledge hidden in the layers between ink and page, and when Alberto saw me scrambling through the pages he laughed heartily. Of all the people who had walked past the table that day and rifled through the sheets I was the only one so far who saw them for what they were, magic spells, and a chance to tap the mind of one of the greatest living alchemical artists in the world, or at least on this side of the room. How am I so blessed that my closest friends, the people gathered in this ten foot bubble of art and energy, are the ones who will revolutionize the medium and push art past whatever boundaries it has currently been languishing? And is it coincidence that they've all gone to CMU and live in Pittsburgh? I think not.

I am not a trained visual artist myself, or even a seriously dedicated one. I am a dabbler for the most part, and have chosen language as my primary medium, but when it comes to sacred geometries I can't stop myself from working with them. They are like maps to the universe, little bits of ordering tossed up from the chaos that help it make just a little bit more sense. A petaled circle, a graceful spiral, to some they may be pretty lines, but to me they really are magical devices, and worth infinitely more than simple money.

"You will put these to good use" Alberto said, as I handed him some creased bills, "and teach me anything you get out of them." Of course I would, and I smiled that on one of the pages was his son's small footprints, themselves a study in complexity. Sarah was there with Javier and I looked into the child's eyes and realized that they were not really blue or black or any color at this point. They were like hematite or mercury, shimmering and flowing over the world that to this little one will always be an incredibly mindboggling wonder. The son of artists and shamans, those eyes will see more than any of us could possibly imagine.


tangled attractors

I went home where we celebrated Joan's birthday, and I spent the rest of the evening drawing, trying out new lines and angles and permutations till I could no longer think straight and the ink began crawling off the page. At one point James came over, and we finally got a chance to talk about a few of the visions we had had during the other week's session. Well, mostly I rambled about matrices, seeing rooms and beings with closed eyes, downloading instructions from the akashic records, and being a mask on the film of the iridescent bubble of reality or a cell in the talon of some vast intergalactic sphinx-like hyper-deity. Finally we settled down to draw some possible appearences on what we both came to decide was a psychic hub that connects each of us to everything else we have continued contact with through the angles of certain usage patterns; a device very similair in description and purpose to Castaneda's assemblage point, which interprets a reality from the lines of the world that pass through it. James remarked that we didn't have to be physicists to make breakthroughs in the field, at which I laughed and said that's because we're metaphysicists and that if there was a breakthrough, chances are it would break out other places as well, which seems to be the norm for inventive memes. Who knows, perhaps this too is another sacred geometric passed down from shaman to shaman throughout the ages to map the precious fields of chaos.


assemblage point

riding quantum waves

Here's the aforementioned diagram of the human energy octave represented as a wavefront, based off an unfolded golden spiral confirming to fibbonaci's sequence (for aesthetic reasons only, I kind of doubt the harmonic ratio between the layers is really 011235813). Click on the picture for a larger and labeled version of the diagram. I picture it as a single wave spinning around itself, like if you took a conch shell and spun it on its tip like a top, so that the 3rd 5th and 7th centers extend out from the central axis to form the qabalah map. The center axis is the main tree and the left and right sides the body and mind trees respectively. And I couldn't keep myself from spicing up the drawing with a fractal series of golden spirals. If I had a really large sheet of graph paper this could show how multiple waves become connected (in the blank space above the quantum layer and extending out in each direction). Like always though, my ability to put these concepts into visual form falls far short of how I percieve them internally. But hasn't that always been the curse of the artist? Feedback greatly appreciated.

(a look at) the 8 layers of human consciousness

8. Spiritual-fractal energy - heaven	non-local quantum neuroatomic	cosmic metatypes	god/ ILU – avatar application	black C - aura
7. Mythic-ontic thought - wind	archetypal morphogenetic	akashic genotypes	shaman session	white b - crown
6. Psychic light - fire	imaginative neuroelectric	psionic memotypes	metaprogrammer presentation	violet a – pineal
5. Sensory-creative sound – mountain	communicative neurosomatic	hedonic processes	yogi transport	blue g - throat
4. Socio-political air – lake	connective self-organization	civilized protocols	domestic human network	green f – heart
3. Conceptual-experiential fire - water	directive timespace-binding	paleolithic semantics	exploring child symbol (identity)	yellow e – solar plexus
2. Emotional-sexual water - lightning	responsive movement	mammalian parameters	dualistic child sign (stigmergy)	orange d – gravity axis
1. Physical earth - earth	environmental bio-survival	invertebrate medium	infant signal (channel)	red c - coccyx

I've been working on this chart for weeks now, trying to draw up suitable graphics to represent the eight layers of human consciousness as a waveform, but decided just to post the chart as it was anyway, which might perhaps encourage me to finish my drawings post haste.

Anyway, these ideas are mostly out there, and I drew a lot from traditional chakra mappings (with an 8th total field chakra), the qabalah (can you find it?), the I Ching guas, Wilson's 8-dimensional take on Leary's circuits of consciousness, metachor's recent work on mapping the OSI model of computer network protocal stacks with the occult stacks, and of course my own lived experience of the different layers, which like always seems to contradict previous maps of this territory. I'm sure most of this will be out-dated before I even post it.

While helping me compile this work Metachor pointed out that several of the layers form dialectic pairs across the body-mind spectrum. Particularly the 3rd, 5th, and 7th layers which end up forming the side spheres of the qabalah when mapped out. I'll have that diagram done soon...

illusions of madness

I haven't been posting much here this week. Along with the spring I have been in an extended state of euphoria that makes reflection difficult and analyzation near impossible. It also doesn't help that I've been working on my hypersigil regularly. When ever I'm writing a story it is my life, it's world is my world, even if that isn't exactly the world my body is in. And worse, I can't look at any other text without reading them as the lines in my head, or as fodder and inspiration for that plot. But most of all I've just been feeling wholly ecstatic, in a way that far surpasses my usual manic states.

It was probably with some fortuition that Metachor posted the Hedonistic Imperative, which is a clarion call to genetically engineer suffering out of our systems and bring out a golden eon of total bliss. Within the first section it mentions that the bi-polar disorder manic state is one of the few instances today where people experience such prolonged euphoria, and goes on to characterise it is as "accompanied by hyperactivity, sleeplessness, chaotically racing ideas, pressure of speech and grandiose thought. Hyper-sexuality, financial excesses and religious delusions are common. So is rampant egomania. Sometimes dysphoria may occur. In dysphoric mania the manic "high" is actually unpleasant. The excited subject may be angry, agitated, panicky, paranoid, and destructive. When in the grip of classic euphoric mania, however, it's hard to recognise that anyone might think anything is wrong. This is because everything feels utterly right. To suppose otherwise is like going to Heaven and then being invited to believe there has been a mistake. It's not credible. "

That about sums up my recent high exactly, but without the finances to use to excess. Everything feels utterly right, not perfect by far, but really damn good. And it was a long time coming. As bi-polar disorder runs in our family it would be easy to say that I'm just reaching an all-time peak in my manic cycle, but I would like to think that I am just learning how to raise the threshold of enjoyment all together. Maybe that's a delusion and it will all come crashing back down when the wave collapses back into depression, I know it would already be so easy for it to do so. I suppose that's where the magic comes in, to hold the whole charade up and make it work against all odds.

Personally I am still not convinced that these extreme states are just in my head, that they are not reflections of the cycles in the world and my life, even down to the daily cycles of eating and sleep, which perhaps have the most direct effect on my mood. My last major depression occured shortly after 9-11, and lasted through two years of being broke, directionless, and in a terrible relationship. And there's too much feedback to tell whether the situation or my mood were the cause of the other. But it was a low to come out of, and I certainly thought I was going mad through a lot of it. Luckily my caring psychologist friends turned me on to R. D. Laing who claims madness is just a response to our insane society, and Casatenda who asks why anyone would want to be sane in the first place and what can we do to get out. I could say that I just feel these cycles more intensely than other people, that my genetic pre-disposition makes me somehow more receptive to them for better or worse. If life is a record mine has deep grooves (or a precision needle). Except I want> to feel the extremes at this point, and after years of trying to dull my senses and dampen the overload of experience, including the highs which had always been few and far between, I am beginning to suspect that there is something really powerful in being able to bear all of it.

Well, it's far past a suspicion at this point. I know I'm pushing my limits here, but I'm curious to see if I can sustain this euphoric "mania" further, if I can manage a controlable level to function without crashing. Riding society's flatline consciousness is hard from the edges of the spectrum.

Black holes 'do not exist'

These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims.

"This strange behaviour, he says, is the signature of a 'quantum phase transition' of space-time. Chapline argues that a star doesn't simply collapse to form a black hole; instead, the space-time inside it becomes filled with dark energy and this has some intriguing gravitational effects.

Outside the 'surface' of a dark-energy star, it behaves much like a black hole, producing a strong gravitational tug. But inside, the 'negative' gravity of dark energy may cause matter to bounce back out again.

If the dark-energy star is big enough, Chapline predicts, any electrons bounced out will have been converted to positrons, which then annihilate other electrons in a burst of high-energy radiation. Chapline says that this could explain the radiation observed from the centre of our galaxy, previously interpreted as the signature of a huge black hole."

You know, I always sort of suspected that something like this would end up being the case. It just makes so much more sense that such strong gravity around a negative core would create enough kinetic force to keep the galaxies spinning. Like the void between electrons from which the virtual photon is formed that propels them apart. I imagine there's a little spot of nothing in the middle of most things, even in our own subtle energy centers, a microscopic void taking in the flux of particles and spitting it back out in some altered form, and binding the whole system together. Sartre might not have been quite wrong when he said consciousness was actually nothing.

[via posthuman blues]

welcome to the machine

I created a new lj, os_matrix for my latest work of journalistic metafiction, Open Source Existence, the first installment of which I posted here recently. This is the field notes of one free agent trying to break out of the matrix reality-construct in which he has recently found himself.

I figured if I'm going to be juggling all these different realities it was best if I gave them each the free reign they desire.