2/7/01

Magic. It is quite alluring from the outside. We first see magic as children, it is as a fairy tale. Fancy wizards cast mighty spells atop pointy towers, calling down the stars. Wicked witches curse travelers, brew potions, and transform into cats. Majestic dragons sweep acros the sky, and prove the mightest of challenges to a warrior. Pretty. Fantastic. Yea! I want some of that! I want to throw fireballs and talk to happy-meal animals. Who wouldn't?

What a tease. You can even live it to some degree, in RPGs. D&D lets you be all of this, and it can seem so real. But how does it work *here*? There *must* be magic in the world. I think it was either Thomas Legotti or Lovecraft (so easy to confuse the two sometimes) who said the worst horror is facing that the real world is not as fantastic as we wish it, that there are no monsters at all. We just can't accept that this is all there is.

So, magic. Well, its out there, if you look for it. You draw in on fantasy, maybe learning something that calls itself Witchcraft. There are crystals, and herbs, and gods, and everything represents something important. Maybe you get lucky and find one who knows the Old Ways (as everyone knows, those before us must have known more about magic than anyone today, right?). Perhaps you learn the Shaman's ways, embark on vision quests and gain spiritual animal companions, each with their own medicine, stories, and realms of influence.

Maybe you go the route of the psychic, bred from tabloid tv and superstition. Hunches, clues, visions you don't understand. Tests with reading cards you can't see. Automatic movements of the Ouiji pointer or ghostwritten pen. Auras flare, voices gibber in your head, and the line between what you percieve, imagine, and receive from unknown sources becomes blurred. If your lucky, you'll follow syncronicity to impossible leaps of coincidence.

Maybe you'll just find Jesus and be done with the lot. Always an easy out. Looking for magic and the comfort of the supernatural? Behold the power of prayer! You have to focus on what's really important, right? Best not to truck with so many pagan Gods, you might offend someone. Magic is just a form of religion anyway. Even psychic powers are really those of the spirit.

But is your God any better than another? If you want answers, putting a name to something like God will only hold you back. Welcome the universal consciousness! Meditate on your higher self, and know that God is all things, that you are a part of God, and can see things from this perspective. Om. Look within, and circulate your Chi. All things flow with energy.

Energy flow. Interesting, just as the witches taught, only they deal more with it outside of the self. Gods and prayer and totems and spirits... One interacts with these in every tradition. Energy flows to and fro beings made of energy. It starts to make sense...

Maybe there's something to this afterall, if we strip away the mysticism. Science has always had the answer. Drop all the faces and religions, see things for what they really are: numbers. Energy fields, probability, Quantum mechanics. But in looking too close, we find that we indeed live in an observer oriented universe, and numbers make themselves up sometimes when we need them. Things are not discrete. God *does* roll dice with the universe, and he doesn't look. There may well be wonders to be made by taking advantage of these, but this is in aplication, not understanding. We're still left without a meaning for our existance.

What if we apply science to magic? Formulate, identify, relate, systemize. Understand. All these approaches are trying to do the same thing, from so many directions. We follow them all, but do we find the answers we are looking for? Its all the same, none of it matters, you can make it all up as you go along, and it still works! But some things are consistant. Some things have meaning attached that may demonstrate the existance of energy we cannot measure. Talismans, rituals, energy within and without, beings, invisible fields around us. Meaning placed in objects and actions, words and states of being.

Its all so much. Its so much more than we ever bargined for. Where are the dragons and wizards? Its all about meaning and understanding. Consciousness, dreams, visions, tricks to think in different ways so as to manipulate your own neural programming and that of others. Transmitting information to others on levels unseen, causing change in the mind and spirit, and sometimes in the body as well. I can't throw a fireball, but what if someone can see and feel me do so all the same. Is this the magic I was looking for?

So you want to make a love potion. You'll need to use these items, as they represent these elements you need present. You wish to call the favor of a particular God? They represent these things, so you must do these actions to appease them and bring yourself into a state to make their aspect a part of yours. Your stomache is in pain? Move the energies this way to remove the pain, and facilitate healing. You have complete control over your body if you wish it. You too, can be multiorgasmic and spasm every muscle and nerve in your body at once in ecstacy.

How did I know you were coming? All things are connected, and your pain is mine as well. I feel that you need to know this, and I don't know why. It was in the way the truck blared at me crossing the street that reminded me of this, so I tell you now. A group wishes to come together as one mind and energy to unite purpose? Rituals of this nature follow this sequence to clear, prepare, call, use, and return the forces desired to pray for this change.

Put your hands to mine. Do you feel that? See the arc between my fingers, like lightning from Eg Shen in Big Trouble in Little China? If I take the evergy away from you, how easially you stuble. If I throw it at you, how you jump. Here, let me remove that black spot in your aura, it causes you pain and impedes your health. Your troubles manifest as demons? I will persue them in dreams to amazing realms, and slay them in titanic battles of magic and weaponry. I saw you there, do you remember?

How is it I know what it feels like to run on four legs through the brush, or to soar on the wind? I look, and know of things to come. I see places that are too real to me imagined, and events I would not have dreamed of. How do I relate this to my subconscious, when I have never been there nor thought about such a thing before?

Maybe I have found the magic I'm looking for, afterall. Can these things be explained? Maybe. If I put it all together, I understand for a moment, but risk godhead to do so. There is more than we know. Cycles of consciousness exist in all things, though we percieve few. If we look hard enough, we can move our patterns through theirs, and be a part of larger things. Everything at once, even. God. It is ironic how in rejecting the idea of God to study science and magic, that we only find ourselves proving God all over again, as almost pointlessly obvious? In restlessly moving from one thing to another, we find that each individually is just as beautiful, and each moment forever. Be here now, for now is always.

The dragon, the wizard, the witch, the warrior, the enchanter, the seer, the priest, the angel, the shapeshifter, the medium, the superman. We chase the ideals, are dissappointed that the reality does not stand up to the dream, and sometimes realize just how close the reality actually is, and how much more.

2/13/01

Awakening. Sleeping. Dreaming. What do these things mean?

At night, we sleep. We rest, become imobile, and do nothing. We do not move, we do not think, and we block out external stimuli to enforce this state. We turn off the machine. Power down. Go off line. Sleep.

Of course, not being completely dead, we never stop moving entirely. Our mind still buzzes about, and tries to work through things. Our consciousness comes online at times, and we dream. Here, we interact with ourselves, we go through routines, we explore new ideas. For the most part however, expirements in lucid dreaming aside, we are not in control.

In dreams, we follow paths. We respond, we observe, and we react. We don't really act much. Little is initiated in dreams. We shuffle about from one scape to another, dealing with whatever our subconsious feeds us. What we do is often so unimportant to our waking consciousness that we don't even bother to remember it all.

How different is this to your average day at the office? One shuffles about, following orders, completing tasks, moving from one assignment to the next. One works. One is active, one is doing something. One is also active in dreams, and thinks one is doing something at the time.

Routine saps our creativity, our imagination. We get up, go to work, do our jobs, go home, continue to follow a pattern of rest, eat, watch tv (yet more unconscious programming), and sleep. Maybe have some sex before shutting down entirely. One doesnt' even need be present for such a day, one can accomplish automatic tasks in one's sleep easily enough.

So why bother being present for it? One can sleep, turn off, and follow patterns. How well does a typical office worker remember what they did that day at work once they get home? The routines we follow are so similar to the dreams we muddle through while unconscious, and often as unimportant.

Life slips by, and we fail to notice. Time passes. The routine continues. The machine trundles on. Maybe something important happens. Maybe you have a child. This is quickly assimilated into the routine. More tasks to complete. Maybe your wife up and leaves you one day. Did you notice why? Does this really change your life any? The routine continues. Small changes are assimilated, and the schedule is recompiled around them.

The fact is, you won't bother to snap out of the routine and actually be awake unless you need to. If everything is in order, you'll mindlessly follow it because its easier that way. You are really only awake when something happens to change the pattern. Someone taps your space bar and you have to put power back into the monitor to deal with the new information coming your way.

You come online. You gather input, you process it, you assimilate it again. Maybe, you even get excited about it. It takes more energy to run the main processor, after all. For a brief time, you are actually awake and dealing with something. You are conscious. You are LIVING.

Of course, this type of stimuli can come in many forms. A baseball game is a rush of new chaotic information to process. One puts emotional investment in one side, and is excited by the outcome. So you're awake. Are you? Really, only awake for a limited scope. Outside of the game, you're still asleep. Did you ever bother to notice yourself while you were cheering?

So what can we do to be awake? Its not as easy as it sounds to just shake yourself out of bed, is it? You are a compilation engine that seeks the most efficient solution to any given problem. Naturally, you will tend to follow the easier road, and power yourself down in the process. Its not easy to fight this. One has to be dedicated to the idea of it for it to have any lasting effect.

Dedication. It may come in the form of spiritual importance. You are doing this to serve a higher power. Maybe you have a reason, something you wish to attain. Magical research is always a good one. Make it a part of your work, to effect awakened consciousness. Maybe you just enjoy the feeling of being alive. Hedonism is its own reward, afterall, and excitement feels good. There's also power to consider. Being awake, one has the ability to choose their path and destiny. Power over one's self is a mighty alluring thing, and power is always seductive. Just a few reasons to dedicate the energy to maintaining it. There are many more, doubtless.

But how to do it? That's ever a point of study. The simplest examination is that stimuli and information input cause the machine to have to work. More input = more work. Somewhere, there's a threshold where you might consider yourself "Awake". Theoretically, if one bombards and overloads on information, one might break through to a higher state of awareness. Ecstatic states are a common path to this.

But one doesn't need external input, necessarially. Music, lights, dance, sex, pain, snuff, drugs... All of these things are workable as sources of input. But we forget the most obvious one: ourselves.

There is an endless supply if information available to us, if we only consider our own situation. When we consider ourselves awake, it is required that we have looked upon ourselves to make this realization. In self analysis, we can see that we are asleep. We can notice the things we might have overlooked in our trundling march of routine. We can bring them to our attention, and fix them. We can improve ourselves. We give ourselves the power to break out of the prisons we place ourselves in.

When one awakes from sleep, how does one know one is awake? One looks down and sees that one is laying in bed, and is not in a fantastic dream space any more. One looks at one's self and realizes one's condition. One excercises self awareness to know that one is awake, and one wakes.

Now, excercise this self awareness more. Examine everything you do, everything you think, everything you say. The tasks you complete, the routines you follow, the rules you obey. Why do you do these things? Question everything. In questioning, reasons are found. Awareness is gained. Awakening is had.

When one knows a thing, one has power to change a thing. When one watches what one does, one expierences it all the more. When one is aware of every minute of every day, the day is so much longer. Life is so much longer. Don't we owe it to ourselves to milk as much as we can out of it?

Don't let 20 years pass you by in a blur of persuit over a career. Yes, this is an important thing to persue, but does it require you to sleep through your day? If it does, how easy is it to sleep through your evening as well? Your weekend? Your life?

You've got to make it stop. Shock yourself awake if you have to. Every minute you sleep through is a minute you didn't live. How much is that time worth to you?

2/15/01

Nature is running an exaustive compilation routine. Every possibility is tried, every combination attempted. Most species created in this manner die out as unsurvivable. Those best suited to the current environment survive.

This goes beyond simple form of creatures. The composition varies. Every possible chemical combination will be tried in some form, if life is let to run long enough. Recently, a fire retardant was discovered in salmon oil. Is this any suprise? If nature is allowed to do its thing long enough, everything we need will eventually show up somewhere. The cure to cancer in the dellicate wing of an Amazonian butterfly.

Nature does it better than we ever could. The entire world is nature's experimental lab. Chaos brings new things into being. If you do everything at once, the good bits will survive. This presumes nature doesn't manage to mutate a variety of lawn grass that triggers a fission reaction upon polination.

As above, so below. The mind follows a similar route. Every piece of information you know is compared to every other. Well, is attempted to, anyway. This takes awhile. There is a lot more data in your mind than processing power.

Data is compared, patterns matched, information compiled into a denser form. The "aah!" of understanding the sound of data that once took up 20 kb being stored in a location 2kb long. When it all falls together, the number of refrences needed to understand something diminishes greatly. Patterns fall together into patterns, requireing less storage space. In theory, if everything linked to everything, we might develop some sort of "super pattern" that can explain everything.

Magicians have searched for this since time began. The quaballa is a fine example of an indexing system that can include theoretically everything. Is it perfect? Probably not. It doesn't store algorythms very well. But it can be overlayed on almost anything as an indexing pattern. Very usefull.

The escoteric process of understanding a relation involves applying that idea to everything in your life. For example: when meditating on a taro card, one should apply the concepts of this card to everything they think of. Everything should be done from the perspective of that card. This links the concept in the card to more patterns in your mind. Thus, the indexing system of that concept is stronger, and makes more sense. The amount of sense made is a product of the number of concepts and patterns this idea is related to.

So in thinking on things, we throw ideas together, fit them against one another, and look for pieces that match. Anything can relate to anything, the question is only in how. Humor is had in relating two things in an unexpected manner, causing a rush of excitement in realization of the connection. HAHA!

Art takes relations we may not consider, and presents them in a different medium to provoke meditation and contemplation of the idea or relation being presented. A recent photo show in a New York gallery entitled "Yo mamma's last supper" depicts Christ as a naked black woman, with black apostles around her. Sacralige? The idea of a black mother is linked to the idea of Christ, presented in the form of this image. Does thinking about Christ and a black mother at the same time diminish the idea of God?

If it does, one would do better to think on their concept of God than rally against being forced to consider a naked black woman. Heaven forbid, blacks and women should have nothing to do with God, right? Jesus is related to wealthy white men. This image means that black women might become wealthy, and we can't have that.

Each idea links to another that links to another. Sometimes we notice it, sometimes we just react based on it. These relations are your neural programming, the patterns of data that define YOU. Choose them well, but don't spend too much time keeping them out. Just like nature, every combination will be tried at some point. If not by you, by those we call "artists". Its up to you to judge if the relation has value to your system.

2/23/01

The speed of light is observed to be the same in all frames of reference. For example, if you are flying in a ship at close to the speed of light and have headlights in front of you, the light measured from your perspective will still be at the speed of light. If you are approaching another ship heading towards you, they will also measure the light at the speed of light, even though by standard physics it should be measured much faster. A third person standing to the side of both ships at rest will also measure the light from your headlights at the normal speed of light, though your ship will be close behind!

More wierdness. According to relativity, as mass is accelerated to the speed of light, its relative mass approaches infinity. Also, relative time from the perspective of the traveler will slow to a stop at the speed of light. So, if you were to reach the speed of light, you would be infinitely heavy and time would stop. This tends to imply a relation bewtween speed, mass and time, where time is actually a function of speed, and affects your mass. Theoretically, mass traveling faster than the speed of light will travel backwards in time, but this has not been observed.

So what the heck is light? It is observed to be massless, and travel at a constant speed regardless of refrence. Likely, it is also immune to time. One interesting theory is that light is actually matter fully at rest. If the speed of light is a constant in the universe, perhaps it is a state of rest. Reversing relativity, approaching speed of zero reduces mass to zero, and accelerates time to infinity. That does about describe the properties of light.

But how do you bring something to rest? You cool it to absolute zero. It has been observed that helium atoms cooled to near absolute zero will activate Heisenburg's uncertainty principle. That is, one cannot know the velocity and position of something beyond a certain level of accuracy. Thus, if you reduce velocity to zero, its value is known, and position starts to fuzz out. The atom jumps around in a random manner. Observable, supercooled helium will crawl around, over, and through things as the position of its atoms is not a constant. Creepy stuff.

So if something is cooled further, so its velocity is more greately known, its positoin will become less knowable. One theorizes than the uncertainty principle is not a standard, but an equation. As matter approached zero veolcity, its position approaches infinite mystery. Except, that if it does come to full rest (velocity zero), its position is known. Thus, the system reverses, and velocity becomes unknowable: the speed of light. This could fairly easially explain the properties of traveling at the speed of light, were matter pointed in one direction when it comes to rest.

So Einstein's relativity and Heisenburgs uncertainty principle are actually the same equation, but applied to either end of the scale. At the speed of light, velocity becomes a constant as well, and thus position is unknowable, just as at absolute zero. Only at the speed of light position is unmeasurable because light is in a wave. You have to stop a photon in a detector to measure its velocity, and thus be able to see that it is a particle at all. Otherwise, it continues to behave as a wave, one of probability.

So how do you make light? If two particals of equal mass and opposite velocity collide, by basic physics both will come to rest. If they come to rest, they are transformed into light. Energy is released in all directions from this collision, as we have already detected. The only difference is the reason for its release.

Of course, the particles don't really need to be equal. In a collision, some of the subatomic particles will by chance come to rest, which will cause the observed explosion of energy and subatomic particles measured in energy colliders. That which came to rest explodes out as light. The rest, just explodes out as subatomic forces tear the particals apart.

So really, only a small percentage of the energy of an atom is released in a collision. Were fully equal particals collided, matter and antimatter, the entire energy of the particals would be released at once in one explosion of light. Truely, a greater yield of energy than from any method we use currently. Full transformation of matter into energy. The trick is aligning and pairing matter and antimatter so it can happen at all.