One thought I’ve had re: Carroll’s idea of the Aether is that it’s an attractive idea for an aesthetic and causal medium/realm—and it makes a certain intuitive sense, but I wonder if it ultimately has to make sense at all. After all, if reality is paradigmatic, wouldn’t accepting/believing in Aether be enough?
The Chaosiphere is ultimately a paradigmal rift and egregore created and charged to be a fissure into Chaos and potentiality, to destabilize a local area for magical (and ideological) purposes. This is an interesting idea. Certain technologies may also serve a similar, though limited, function.
C is correct, though, in positing that in this unstable, mercurial age, spiritual “wizards” and cult leaders emerge with various competing paradigms—competing to determine what the future (he goes with the Crowleyan “Aeon,” but I find this a bit histrionic) will look like. To date, many of the paradigms have been conservative religion (Catholicism, Protestant evangelicalism, evangelical Islam), political ideology (like Marxism, Sovietism, American corporatism, etc.), information science, secular humanism, multiculturalism, consumerism, Apple/techno-fetishism, technocratic, social media, digital humanity, cybernetic, pop culture fetishism, and low-grade New Age-ism. And psychology. Especially materialist psychology (Carvaka, really).
I have wondered where “Law” was, given Chaos Magic’s Moorcockian flavorings. “I am anti-ideological because the main products of ideology are repression and corpses.” Belief structures. Monotheistic religion. Psychiatry that seeks to patch over a broken soul so they can be plugged back into the machine. Politics and domination.
“repressive forms of order”
* * *
The psychic censor is one-part delirium, one-part disbelief, and quite a bit of quiescence. C says we are constantly surrounded by magical and chaotic phenomena, but the mind censors it out. This, though, makes me wonder about the things I ignore. Even writing about it now—it’s difficult, like my mind keeps looking to slide away and distract itself from considering the censor.
I think about the pookas[1], the summerlands[2] I’ve glimpsed since __________, and what I zone out about when I just—“pause.” Even now there’s a horrible reticence to pursue it.
And it’s so easy to slide away from considering it. C says it’s necessary to function—but what if—what if one could use it? SEP/obfuscation. The trick would be controlling the manifestation of it. You want to avoid the delirium response.
But—it might also be a path to the summerlands. Or faerie, in general.
Anxiousness is the first, initial response. Almost as if something should be there. It’s useful for ESP-ing, divining—
It is still sleepy here—the Land Slumbers in winter. But awareness is made to be enhanced. It requires a penetrating gaze—and it is tempting at first to only look with one’s vision. Aligning helps. [WTAW] also helps, as does [WTAW]. These, in particular, but [WTAW] and [WTAW] also—all the WTAW—but [CHAOS] may also help. Align kia/energy work with bypassing the censor.
There is something peculiar about this world. That the psychic censor exists in the first place says something screwy. It makes—made me—feel so much of this world was limited. But the censor amplifies that sense—that notion—reinforces it.
But ShF (and the rest, I think) knew or anticipated.
I wonder if UTs are an epiphenomenon—or a paradigmal correction, or even over-correction or glitch when something odd kicks in and should trigger psychic censor (PC).
PC, though, affects even mages and witches etc.
—what if it’s not a mental norm?
C frames it as necessary for normal, daily life, but what if it’s something more? What if it is a Thought Form—like Numbers and so forth. Consensus? If it’s one of the Demons—Quiescence, Disbelief, Lunacy, Delirium…
There are WTAW for breaking against PC. I think they’ll take more work to discern. But there’s also the FUTHARK. I know one of Odin’s can do it.
Compare Odin’s experience on Yggdrasil to gain the runes—or to gain the Mead of Wisdom—and fighting the PC.
So much of my last several years has been reinforcing the PC, for the PC also distracts us from true awareness of ourselves. We misapprehend who and what we are. Memory turns against us, becomes not who we were/are but instead—we become some chimera off enough to drag us down.
The runes on the sword are the wyrms that are wise
Shine the desperate chances into the dark
And upraise the masks you carry in your minds
For what lurks within the scar of memory
In the pain in your head is the cavity of form
That catapults you toward genesis and expresses
Cavity of Form
In the caverns of thought you will find the generation of years. Take up the star-forged scythe and carve deep into the psyche
And loose the dreams you’ve let fester there for seasons
Until they fall excised to the floor, devour if you wish,
But loose them from the cysts of desires so
The wyrms may desire and crawl.
These are the wyrms that are wise.
Embrace them.
Divine meaning through strange forms and Poesy. The Fire in the Head and the Fire in the Earth are much the same.
But what is your paradigmal name [for PC]—to name it would be to gain power over it.
Halya Halthaiya Halthaya
Halthaya comes out->is the haltha
PC Tirathinà vision
Tirathon—“I shall see”
[1] “Pooka” is a term for I use for whatever spirit or whatever took to trying to make food in the kitchen–but never quite finishing. Once, I found toast on the counter and sugar and cinnamon partly mixed to make cinnamon toast–but then abandoned, as if the pooka wasn’t quite sure what to do after that point.
[2] I saw, years ago, a vision of rolling plains and grasslands lit by bright but pleasant sunlight, with a woman on a horse in the distance talking to a man on foot. At the time, I was on a bus in the middle of a city. I took to calling this place the Summerlands–more in its association with Faerie and the Otherworlds in general than to some afterlife, and it genuinely seemed a place of summer–and I have seen it off-and-on over the years. These days, I have a different name for it, but that’s for a post in the future.