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BarrenAOS2 by Studio Raziel

Magic is "...self-delusory fixation at the oral-anal stage of phases of adaptation, with purely fantasized operation of the omnipotent will."    - Weston La Barre

"Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”    - H.L. Mencken

"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense."    - Mark Twain

    Magicians have always striven to refine and improve their arts, and the popular understanding of what underlies sorcery has changed as our cultural views have evolved. The ancient animistic view regarded all magick largely as the work of spirits, and most religious structures still more-or-less cling to this in some form; it may still be one of the most useful approaches to take. Later thought relied upon a model of vital energy driven by the human will, perhaps in part supernatural or spiritual, in part physical or mental. This essential energy has many names: kundalini, mana, chi, vril, heka, baraka, ashé, mojo, dynamis, wakan, orgone, libido, or magis, for example. Much of the current discussion has turned to a purely psychological point of view, and regards all these psychic processes as an internal manipulation of Jungian archetypes and arbitrary thought-forms; yet this does not account for any possible physical results of occult operations, and now quantum physics seems to be raising the ante as it implies that the mind of the observer has much to do with creating the observed. Chaos magick now suggests a meta-system drawing freely upon any of these multiple models (spirit, energy, psychological, or quantum) as convenience may dictate.

    If magick as a body of knowledge is in the process of evolving into the science of the future, then the study of parapsychology may be a useful place to start. Isaac Bonewits' seminal work Real Magic was among the first truly modern attempts at synthesizing the conclusions of the academic world with the ancient and forbidden lore of the arcane. He points out that actual experimentation from J.B. Rhine onwards has pretty much been forced to conclude that yes, telepathy and perhaps precognition and even psychokinesis do appear to be proven facts, especially among some talented individuals but to some extent in all of us. This seems to imply a ‘rational explanation’ for many effects claimed by wizardry over the centuries, and takes us out of the realm of hearsay. Much of divination regarding those close to us, or magical influence upon them, can thus be attributed to a subconscious interplay between our minds via simple telepathy (how does a mother instantly sense that her child is in trouble?) and may also have a genetic component (as studies of the connections between twins suggest). Bonewits has suggested the concept of the Switchboard, a somewhat more dynamic version of Jung's Collective Unconscious, which implies that everyone is constantly transmitting their own thoughts and simultaneously receiving those of the people surrounding them. It appears that to some extent humanity exists as part of a psychic network, and I don't mean the one on TV. Families, villages, cities, nations, all form an interlinked telepathic community that, if it ever awakens, will become the global human consciousness or World Mind called N'Aton by Soror Nema. The appearances of ghosts may simply be the residual psychic imprint of other personalities on our minds.

    Other useful works interpreting fairly recent science for the layman might include The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the somewhat more readable The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukov. The current vision of modern physics in some ways also seems to resemble the ancient esoteric view of this world as being largely created and interpreted by the mind. The experimenter may affect the experiment. Michael Talbot's writings on the holographic universe, for example, indicate that both consciousness and creation seem to store memory and information holographically (each part containing the whole) and to have an ongoing interaction. This is reminiscent of the tantric concept of Indra's Net as the complex weave of the universe itself, and at each intersection of this net is a brilliant jewel that reflects within itself the entire cosmos. Fred Alan Wolf's books on shamanic physics also have useful insights, as do those of Rupert Sheldrake and his hypothesis of a morphogenic field. I also enjoy the writings of the more sober UFO and conspiracy oriented authors such as Jim Keith, John Keel, Jim Marrs and others, including the fascinating The Dark Gods by Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson, which provides a unique vision of these issues. Nor can we forget the pioneering work of Charles Fort. And I always get a lot of information out of futurist Robert Anton Wilson's works; his most excellent Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology cover among many other things Leary's important 8-circuit model of the stages of human consciousness. The New Inquisition is a discussion of the psychological implications of quantum physics, and another work has a fascinating entry on issues raised by a very interesting book  called Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events (Persinger and Lafreniere, Nelson-Hall, 1977) whose conclusions Dr. Wilson summarizes as follows:

"Persinger and Lafreniere, behavioral scientists, did a computer analysis of 1,242 UFO cases and 4,818 other "fringe science" reports (Poltergeists, anomalies, Fortean data, etc.) - 6,060 instances of things that scientific orthodoxy says could not have happened. The computers, scanning for patterns, found a few: Such reports tend to cluster around earthquake fault lines; there is some peaking before earthquakes; and a certain topology appears in the wider and better documented cases. For instance, those at a distance report only strange lights, or light moving strangely; those closer in report poltergeist effects (as in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind): electrical and electronic malfunctions, machinery turning itself on and off, jumping furniture, etc.; those who blunder into the center of the phenomenon come back with strange yarns full of Freudian and/or Jungian dream symbolism (sexual assaults, abductions, encounters with Jesus or "beings of light", rebirth experiences, etc.).
Persinger and Lafreniere suggest that the strange lights and poltergeist effects represent real energy anomalies triggered by Earth's occasional magnetic and gravitational fluctuations, and that the mythic elements - Persephone abducted by Hades, rebirth, resurrection, etc. - come from the back brain when these abnormal energies alter the brain's normal wave patterns.
This theory has a certain appeal to some occultists, who have a long tradition about psychic "windows" - times and places when the "other world" impinges on this one."   
- Everything Is Under Control, Robert Anton Wilson

    This potentially ties a lot together, and the Chaos magi have also devoted some serious thought to these issues; see especially Pete Carroll's Liber Kaos and Apopheion, and Dave Lee's Chaotopia. On the question of a quantum cosmos, we may quote Carroll:

"It has been said that if you are not shocked by the implications of quantum physics then you have not understood it. This may be perfectly true for the scientist but for the magician, quantum physics provides elegant confirmation for many of his theories. Briefly in qualitative terms, we now have hard experimental evidence that strongly implies that physical processes are, at root, acausal; they just happen out of themselves; and that consciousness, or at least the decisions of the observer, can modify or control what happens. Secondly it would seem that pure information can travel anywhere instantaneously and perhaps persist indefinitely, providing there is some sort of affinity, or magical link as we would call it, between that which emits and that which receives. Very few liberties need to be taken with quantum physics to fit in virtually the whole of parapsychology. It remains to be seen if quantum physics can be presented in sufficiently accessible form to provoke another occult revival."     -  Chaos International #1

    Other sources of speculation might include the works on ley lines and geomancy such as Paul Deveraux's earth lights hypothesis, and the vast bodies of work on human psychology, psychedelics, entheogens, and states of consciousness expansion. If I look for clear-cut examples of purely physical manifestations of the inexplicable two phenomena immediately occur to me: poltergeists and spontaneous human combustion (kundalini gone amok?). These things do seem to happen, and they are pretty darned spooky, aren't they?

    Clearly, I have skipped rather lightly over these burning questions of how science and magick interact, as I am perhaps rather less informed on physics than I am on metaphysics (sorry, my major in college was Anthropology). In general I tend to discuss the arts of arcane enchantment on their own age-old terms, and these arts have survived those ages because of internal consistency and (surprisingly frequently) actual results.

    My own sense of things is simply that in some mysterious way or other the human mind (or should we say brain?) does interact with the apparent universe surrounding it. The work of the mage is to deliberately create a personal sphere of power or influence wherein insights, synchronicities, and constant fulfillment of will and desire continually manifest. Whatever model of the cosmos and its processes is most effective for activating our hidden talents may be utilized or discarded as results dictate. One must simply accustom the psyche to infinite possibilities and remarkable coincidences begin to accumulate, until our childhood programming breaks down and we admit to ourselves that the world is indeed much stranger than we are taught.

    The Taoist sage Chuang-Tzu had a parable: sleeping, he dreamt that he was a butterfly, and on awakening he wondered: was he truly a philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher? The new mathematics of chaos science has a parable: the fluttering breeze of a butterfly's wings over South American rain-forest cascades outwards to become a huge storm over New York City. In itself, this is really not a bad metaphor for the ways in which the seed-sigil of magical desire can grow into actual effects. To me, the question is: what if they are the same damn butterfly? In ancient myth the butterfly is often a metaphor for the soul, a wormlike thing that spins a cocoon and emerges metamorphosed into a creature of beauty.

    Quantum theory has been described as “the dreams that stuff is made of”. One amusing aspect of modern particle physics is that whenever a researcher predicts another new subatomic particle and goes looking for it, they tend to find it. Is it even remotely possible that they are creating it instead? Of course, one of the fundamental questions of recent science is "That's fine in practice, but how does it work in theory?" Frankly it is still practice that concerns me more; while scientists may not believe in magick, I would consider it rude not to believe in science, which has done so much to improve our attempts at civilization. Science is really just reliable and repeatable magick.
  
Often I have met those who think that things were much better in the good old days, or that science alone is solely responsible for degrading and polluting our planet, or that herbs are actually superior to modern medicine. In general I look at them and think to myself: "If you had lived a hundred years ago you'd have been pretty damn lucky to survive past infancy!" (although I do agree that herbal medicines and Asian techniques have a lot of real effects and are often gentler on the body). The human quest for knowledge has tripled life expectancy and made everyday life a thousand times easier. Indoor plumbing and technology, transportation and communication, transplant surgery, vitamins and antibiotics? Brilliant stuff. Any of the horrendous side effects are largely attributable to human idiocy, corporate greed, and corrupt governments; and there is a saying among physicians that no side effects means no effects. Why regect progress, in whatever form? Many of the best spiritual visions we have had in the last few years have appeared in science fiction, and history shows that these prophecies frequently come true. Frankly, we have so monumentally screwed up our lovely planet that our only hope now is rapid technological progress, especially in finding new sources of food, water and energy (and clearing the BP oil spill out of the gulf). I really am rooting for maximum evolution; if I have to choose a future, I’d really much prefer Star Trek over Road Warrior.