From: Arcadia (arcadia@lynchburg.net)
Date: Tue Apr 09 2002 - 16:59:58 MDT
> Arcadia "...some forms of "magick.<snap>
> [Blunderov]
> Howzit, as we say in SA, and welcome! "Magick" with a "k"? Mind
elaborating
> a bit? Sounds interesting.
> Warm Regards
Thanks.
Yes, as has been said, most people who try to do non-stage 'magic' spell it
with a 'k.' I think Aleister Crowley started that. I have a lot of respect
for Crowley, and some people say my writings sound a bit like his (not
always a complement.) I like a lot of what he says about the theory of
magick, _why_ it's supposed to work, but I don't like the feel of a lot of
the actual rituals. The old-style occultists worked a lot with terrifying
themselves as a way to raise emotional energy. That's not really me, as a
stylistic thing.
I'm not a 'Satanist,' but I'm not some new age white light wuss either. I
care a lot about freedom, my own and that of others, even the freedom to do
really stupid things, and then deal with the consequences. Most people who
know me consider me ethical to a downright inconvenient degree, but it's
only because I insist on being free to choose what I do, and behaving this
way seems to work best.
Also, I should note that among other Wiccans and Pagans I know, it strikes
me there's about the same proportion of folks I like and folks I don't as in
any other group. I don't necessarily recommend it. It's just the framework
within which I do the same self-development work that everyone does, to
whatever extent. At its best, it's not really a religion, but rather a set
of instructions for you to invent your own ... that and a few very broad
norms about how public rituals are done... and there's no one to require you
to take part in those rituals. If you're inventing your own religion,
someone might ask, what's to stop you from setting yourself up as a cult
figure? Well, the short answer would be 'nothing.' But in actuality, if
you were gonna do that, it'd be easier in a more mainstream idiom or mythos
... more like Manson or Jones or Moon or Falwell. Pagans tend to be
willful, pushy, anarchic, argumentative. They make lousy cult followers.
It's said, trying to organize Pagans is like herding cats.
It's also said "You can't 'cast a spell' on anyone but yourself." In actual
practice, you'd recognize what we attempt to do as memetic self-programing.
The tradition of doing spells in rhyme is a memetic trick advertisers and
poets understand. The 'head trip' aspects of magic, especially cursing,
(which I wouldn't do, except maybe as the last resort before physical
violence,) rely very heavily on the recipient of the curse to drive himself
crazy worrying about the curse. If one is a complete skeptic, then one
would say that's _all_ magick is. And I would answer, that should make it
even more interesting to the skeptic: because it does work. It'd have to be
a collection of information for the creation of extremely powerful head
trips for specific purposes. Maybe it only works because people believe in
it. In that case, it's a science dedicated to believing specific things,
real hard, for specific purposes.
Do you discuss what's called 'level 3' or 'type 3' thinking here? It's
basicly an approach where you regard yourself and your mind as cybernetic
instruments, and resolve to program your own thinking in order to achieve
specific results. (Obviously, this would be a learning process.) The point
of level three thinking is you transcend the questions of level 2: "What is
True, and Right?" At level 3 you don't worry about whether it's true or not,
since you don't intend to believe it 'forever;' you just want to know, "If I
believe 'this' will it get me where I need to go?"
Well, that's the intellectual position that most 'magickal' traditions seem
to emerge from. There they part ways, some arguing various formulae for
staying 'balanced,' and aligning your programing with the realities of
nature, and others saying that's hogwash, boldly do whatever you will to do,
etc etc.
Now, SOME of the reading I have done, following searches on 'Meme' seems
just to be people using the word to shoot down belief systems they don't
believe in, as if to imply that their own thinking were somehow pristene and
untouched by the culture they live in. (I guess you can see what I think of
that...) I find it more useful to think of memes as functioning art. The
most pernicious and damaging ones are also the most ingenius and beautiful
and profound. Rather than trash them wholesale, I think they should be
studied. What needs do they serve? Maybe people are getting something
there that we don't know about, and if we're going to fight these systems,
we need to understand very well their mechanisms to create loyalty.
I think it's absurd to work toward a 'meme free' environment or head.
That's like a computer running no software. Instead, we should be about
finding that proverbial root directory where we can choose what software to
run and with what parameters to acheive the desired results.
Matt
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