"One who creates should be especially wary of success, though needs it"
- CG Jung, the Black Books
A stone, excelled to the ocean
Convicted for resembling the spirit of its people.
The fires are lit, the homes are ash.
The songs grow sad, the tongue forgot.
The dance as gifted a call with a string.
Tomorrow buried beneath concrete,
Where the exhaust muffles the cries.
Souls bridled with treaties of rot.
Until an ocean of grief scores thundering waves.
Exhuming a stone, braving a face,
Releasing a congregation,
To raid the shores of commerce,
Releasing a contagion,
Armed with a fury of forgiveness.
One thing and then another: perceptibility is always mutual, we deal with the world by making mental machines. YET ONCE AGAIN FOLKS!!:- the magical deposition of the self in (a) space! We are some(w| )here(?), but where? And where the fuck are you? Right now, I'm sitting on a couch typing somewhere in those finest not quite United States.
It's a tad dreary; low energy, you get the gist. And that couch, goddammit, had better know I'm there or I'll be falling through it to the floor... then on to outer space or something I guess. In any event, the couch and myself have some mutual understanding that I'm (some sort of|a) human and it's a couch - that bounces a bit if you jump on it... But I may have gone a bit overboard with saying perceptibility is always mutual... maybe I should have said that a mutual relation always has within it the possibility for bidirectional apprehension of the other.
Call and response - you know there's an extended body already, right? - My outward going sensory complex meets the world, and the world reacts upon my sensibilities, and emotions etc. I push out, the world pushes back... maybe? Usually? fortunately, I'd hope. Maybe a little push here or there can bring me what I want; after all, everything(?) the will accomplishes is through moving some type of shit around.
Unless I'm what I characterize as a plant, I have to move this body to get some digs and feed myself. Maybe I have to push through thorns to grab some berries, or chip a rock into the tip of a spear. Or maybe walk down to the supermarket and exchange some human energy tokens for an orange or something. We push, pull, poke, or prod some thing and we shift the trajectory for that bundle of stuff. NAY! We shift the entire universe for that thing in all its relations extends into both the infinity of (just our?) space and (our?) time.
And, don't get me wrong, moving shit around isn't just confined to putting a potato chip in your mouth. In the world of mind we can push concepts around, combining them into trains of thought, which probably have to loop off into infinite recess if one ever gets going. I can grab a mental structure, not thinking in terms of thought forms ATM ($$$), and search for connections to some other idea, tangibly expressed or otherwise. I direct my mind - really I don't separate mind and bodily perceptions, but here we'll separate the two since they can be more-or-less bisected from the unitary perception - (or it is directed for me) to something: a word.
This seed or condensation of the whole universal expanse into a succinct series of phonemes, though it may ossify and separate from the general mass, still retains all its links in the conceptual space. These trails and dangling threads can be followed, like a monkey swinging on his vine through a jungle of thoughts somewhere. On the page our letters and their combinatorics are records of various histories: Roman Letters.
Books of Law and commercial ledgers - marks scrawled on magic paper that dictate realms of action: We live inside these organisms that we've created for ourselves, if not also our physical bodies, then those extended systems of law and economy. Maybe machines? They are only natural as having arisen from people themselves, and it should be remembered that those people were NOT you. And in so far as we are constrained by the operating procedures of the social organism - we are cells, or the energy that feeds these things.
You know, moving around and doing shit........... Not even that alone though, the actual environments in which we live are built out of people's energy and labor - usually ones we do not and will never know. Who built your house, huh? What about that pan where you fried some eggs and how in freaking hell did that olive oil get here?
Unless it has nothing to do with people, and even then unless a wild dog bites you or no-one planted that tree, there were a whole mess of people variously involved in literally taking stuff from one place to some other place and fabricating whatever, maybe only a fractional piece of some final product, that eventually you plop over some cash for it and take to your home - or drink / smoke it or whatever. Like a giant mechanical brain, where the people are cells and the streets are veins.
STEP BACK!:<- If a thing can perceive you, you can perceive it; if you know the operating space and are aware of your body in it. Really, I'm thinking about non-human, non-animal, entities, or those that only seem to be such... anyone remember Don Juan?
So if all we're doing is moving things around to make them unto our lik(ing|eness) we've got to have a stable nexus (body) from which we can push and pull. But who says we've got one body, eh? Well... not me anyways, but I'd better hope you know that already and that you've got one such body at least - bend that spoon goddammit! It's all a pushmi-pullyu but we've forgotten how to listen to (wild) animals, yet alone talk to them.
STEP INTO THE 4TH DIMENSION!: so these bodies leave trails, not two ways about it, going from one place to another implies a path. We've got this long t(r)ail "behind" us - that's our personal history. And so does everyone else; they've got their backstory too. Each of the people we come into contact with, either walking down the street or while drinking in a dive, has been led there by some sort of story that actually extends WAY back into the past to our prime ancestors, but try not to think of Darwin here...
Now take a dip, so to speak, and imagine that we actually have control over this body - 'cause we do; unless you forgo freewill, and that's not what magic/life is all about. You should have realized it already, but we're in a choose-your-own-adventure novel and we're all coauthors.
If we're leaving marks on reality with our choices, aren't we then some how like a pencil, or pen, really - I don't know how to erase the past other than to let the oncoming future wash it away, and it's probably not a good idea if it is possible: repressed memories, trauma, etc. don't really help people. But, can we pick up a big sloppy paint brush dripping with some turpentine and make this thing a bit more like Dali and Dada, instead of a series of switches and pushing each other's buttons? Maybe some kind of acid will do the trick.
Painting a picture with our thoughts and actions, through our bodies "and moving shit around"™️. We've got story lines and histories, factual ones and may-as-well-be-falsified recorded ones, and people are walking these story lines and sometimes getting into trouble together. Every story needs an antagonist, right? But, I at least, don't want to appear in every blockbuster action movie - give me something more like a 16th century alchemist in silent repose patiently watching some six month reaction taking place in an alembic.
With our mental "machinery" there are different structures that variously pattern our activities and perceptions - don't go smashing them all to bits now, would you? - Two such conceptual summations pertaining here are the notions of "what is real" & "what is possible". First you should dismantle that bit about "what is real" - you're not being a very humble human if you think you know what is actually going on, now are you? - I'm just a man, not the universal architect - You know that quantum nonsense being used to build Teevees?
Anywho, we've got a whole lot of assumptions going on that we regard as describing the factual reality that lies beyond our immediate apprehension. But really, we don't know. Using the admission that we really don't know what-the-fuck™️ is going on, and combining it with a distention of the possible, you can find some pretty strange stuff out there in that big mess of story lines.
You get into *real* trouble when you link up with a crew where the possible is outside the strictures of "the mass" (of [story line?] inertia). That "mass" points to a method, however, in that we can hook into the train as it keeps rolling on. It is easier to interface story arcs where there is repetition. Same old faces, you know? Gotta watch out for the randos that pop in just a minute, those can carry you away.
Approach and recession - distance (in time & space). HEY YOU! Now you'd better drop that new-fangled hippie notion of the eternal NOW, godammit (for the time being) -> the more near a thing is, the more real it is, and reality is a bit tricky to bend (that spoon), now isn't it? But, if things that are far away [think of space] are less real, maybe more like a dream? then maybe we can work a bit of magic there by pulling in from that "possible space" out there, far way.
The possible is not real, but may become real according to the nature of that possibility. Seems probably easier with things that already move and don't have to be built or engineered. The local space of the real is actually very small. Take vision, for example, there is a very obvious frame where peripheral vision fades to black. For vision, the only thing that is real is within that field of view. Enter stage right: A bird passes across to left.
Well, well, well - I think it's time to loop back and let this train disappear into the distance for awhile. PAY ATTENTION! It's already been said: The act of perception causes a change in the thing perceived; or, the feeling is mutual.
.. shades (.. thus named randomly; arbitrarily, basically .. ; ) thought back to a time when he was possessed of innocence; in a sense ..
.. it struck him, the parallel between the development of individuals & that of cultures, societies & their technologies .. & the valid point that those critics of progress raise against this 'myth', that there always seem to remain intractable problems & challenges that seem to defy the most far-reaching & wide-ranging of innovations ..
.. & it further struck him that there are two ways to look at such challenges: one could either see them as insurmountable obstacles, immovable objects that will not yield to force, or as temporary impediments for a view of progress that argues that these also will be overcome by new 'technologies', new (reified) ways of thinking about the world that have yet to be either developed or adapted on a large scale ..
.. admittedly, looking at the state of the world today, it's surely the 'easier' route to think of progress as an outdated myth that's past its sell-by date .. but how many times has this same thought echoed in the past, & how many will think so in the future ..? .. surely it's clear that the world we now inhabit is so different from some in the past that it would seem to visitors from there like another planet, or even another dimension of reality altogether ..
.. & yet, now as it was then, certain qualities & attributes of reality, the world, persist .. certain (inner or hidden, i.e. esoteric or occult) mysteries will not yield to a discursive, rational approach .. they must be apprehended subjectively, & assimilated into one's inner experience(s) to be 'known' at all ..
& when or where has there ever been a society or a culture that didn't somehow be lie ve in magic(k) ..? .. the short answer is that there has never been, nor will there ever be; not only that, but such self-styled ideological rivals as scientism, being the belief that *everything* falls under the scientific purview, & which once proclaimed the death of magic as such, are now in decline, even as the esoteric outlook and its ideas pervade every (social) medium ..
.. & so it will certainly be in the future .. whatever innovations, inventions, technologies or ideologies develop in time, there will always be a space for the inner & hidden matters, & there will always be seekers of initiation into & experience of these timeless & boundless mysteries ..
.. never mind electric sheep, do AI dreams predict the future..? .. no matter where we look, we will find the occult, the esoteric .. & those adepts of matters esoteric will without a doubt be the best prepared to meet such future chaLLenges con fidently wherever (& whenever) they find themselves ..
.. don't fear success ..
.. but don't expect it to be exactly as you expect ..
This is where I am today…..
….islands away.
Never to stay.
Never not to try,
Never to truly be….here.
No more deals with distraught.
Fountain pen head,
Struggles to skewer,
Dreams to sea,
Freya to invoke.
