Apophenion
Page 5
Other cultures and individuals and schools of thought will obviously have quite different paradigm footprints or psychograms on the figure shown.
Chaoist philosophy in general, usually has an epicentre focussed on the lower left quadrant. It regards existence as basically random and chaotic but subject to the possibilities of Psychic and Physical anticipation and manipulation, and to manipulation by Belief. Thus it has tendrils extending into the Science and Pantheism quadrants. Chaoist philosophers conspicuously avoid the upper right quadrant, the domain of the Sky Fairies, the mainly monotheist gods and devils, and the whole associated plethora of other 'literally real' spirits.
The Sky Fairy quadrant differs from the others in that faith alone maintains its paradigm in the absence of evidence. Science either makes material things happen, or gets it wrong. Magic either gives useful results or it doesn't. Pantheism either supplies an agreeable narrative to live by or it fails to do so.
Fundamentalism on the other hand makes a virtue of contra-intuitive and contra-evidential faith. Indeed, only irrational beliefs can actually work for a 'literal' religion because people will not make emotional investments in defence of perfectly obvious truisms, only in defence of highly questionable ones. Faith exists only in the context of a continual internal dialogue with doubt.
Favourite topics for contra -evidential faith usually revolve around such absurdities as that you will live happily for ever whilst bad people will get their just deserts in eternal hell, and that you will get all the things you wanted in this life but didn't get, after you're dead.
Faith needs to fail to deliver the goods most of the time to attract investment of thought and emotion in it. Faith abhors blasphemy and fears apostasy because these raise those very doubts which the faithful spend so much time suppressing with ritual and prayer. Prayer basically consists of talking yourself into believing something you understand as rationally false, and then asking it for the occasional favour.
So where does the widespread idea of literally real gods and spirits come from?
It comes from the same 'theory of mind' facility that has evolved to equip us with a working hypothesis about the existence of minds in other people, (and animals), and a self-image.
Do other people actually exist? Well they exist to the extent that we either invite them into our heads or they manage to force their way in. Friends, family and colleagues may have more reality for us than people that we have not met, but politicians, celebrity figures from the media, characters in novels and comic books, people appearing in dramas and entertainment, personal heroes, all these have some sort of existence for us. Note the deliberate mixture of fake and genuine, real and imaginary, and dead and alive characters here. I describe anyone I've not actually met as 'imaginary'. (Only lunch can translate imaginary people into real people.)
Out of such experiences we build our own identities by a process of dialogue and accretion. We listen to real people and absorb their attitudes and mannerisms but we also do this with 'imaginary' people in all the various media of oral stories, art, theatre, books, radio, film and television etc. Afterwards as we reflect on our experiences of real and imaginary people we find ourselves using theory of mind on them and they acquire a reality of sorts inside our own heads.
Unfortunately our suggestibility can easily derail this highly useful ability, particularly when the suggestion gets applied heavily in youth with the full force that a culture can bring to bear. For much of history people have grown up with alarmingly large parasites living inside their minds, Monarchs, Emperors, Gods, High Priests, Dictators, and Gurus.
Unsurprisingly all of these characters have striven to control the media of the cultures in which they live. They want precise control of their own personality cult, and they don't want any competition. The growth of uncensored and uncontrolled media has done a great deal to weaken the hold of the major parasites on people's minds in democratic countries, but elsewhere, tight control of the media has strengthened it.
In a relatively free country you can fill your head with a vast selection of real and imaginary people with radically different identities, and end up with a much larger self image, or you can retreat into dialogue with something simpler like a single god or personality cult figure. In many traditional cultures and in some recent and contemporary hard-line religious or political states, you either believe in the god or demagogue or suffer serious consequences.
Perhaps for the first time in history we live in a world where a substantial fraction of humanity has freedom of belief, and hardly knows what to do with it.
Some adopt a fundamentalism or a single-issue cause or creed to create self-definition, others just seem to wander around lost in the cosmos with no metaphor for self, squandering their belief on one fad or fashion after the other in postmodernist style. Some seem to define themselves entirely by their relationships to other people, and to consist of nothing internally. They have to remain constantly engaged either socially or with 'imaginary' people from the media, or they practically cease to exist in their own minds.
As one exasperated monotheist observed, 'when people cease to believe in god, they will believe in anything', but this begins to look more like the solution than the problem.
Postmodernist, Post-monotheist culture has yet to formally explicate its ideal spirituality, although we can observe many preliminary attempts to achieve this from the New-Age movement, to Neo-Paganism, and Chaos Magic.
Despite their varied degrees of emphasis on transcendence, philosophy, and occultism, all three of these new traditions exhibit a strong current of Neo-Pantheism.
As advanced cultures pass out of a monotheist aeon rendered untenable by scientific thought, and as atheistic or nihilistic scientific positivism and modernism become progressively more questionable, Neo-Pantheism takes their place as the spirituality of choice for the dawning Fifth Aeon.10
Both Fundamentalism and Science have started to develop a profound and vitriolic hatred of Neo-Pantheism, and in doing so they have helped to define it. We can take that as a sure sign of the threat that it poses to them both.
Historically, the word Pantheism has covered a variety of beliefs,
That some sort of divine force manifests in all things,
That various gods and spirits pervade all aspects of the universe,
That god remains indistinguishable from nature, and does not consist of a person,
That the universe as a whole has consciousness, or life, or something like that.
Thus Pantheism has a long history, and it has tended to shadow orthodox thought as a species of mysticism for millennia. The emerging Neo-Pantheism of the fifth aeon has many manifestations and little orthodoxy, but nevertheless it has a number of recurrent themes which reflect its Mythos style of Belief. Perhaps it will eventually replace most existing religions. It certainly looks like a spiritual product that has evolved to meet contemporary needs.
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Part 2.
Neo-Pantheism
At least eight themes seem to characterise the emerging Neo-Pantheism.
I will present them here in their most extreme expression; few Neopanths except the hardcore mystics accept all of them in this uncompromising form. Many New -Age theorists subscribe to rather hazy or dilute forms of them, whilst some Neo-Pagans have sought to create fundamentalisms all of their own.
1) Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted
This phrase of course intentionally contradicts itself in multiple ways, to create some amusing paradoxes. We could equally well express the implied meaning as;
Everything is True, but only for a given value of Truth.
This does not reflect contempt for reason; rather it reflects an intuition that all truths remain provisional and context dependent.
When it comes to choice of extant religions, Neopantheists often find some sympathy for elements of Hinduism, Paganism, Shamanism and certain forms Mahayana Buddhism. Mainly because they can find plenty of useful symbol
ism, a wealth of psychological and physiological techniques and a flexible attitude to dogma and paradigm within all of these, despite some of the unpleasant customs in the cultures in which they arose.
Neopantheists usually hold contemptuous views of the three Abrahamic monotheisms. They regard anything that defines itself as absolutely true as obviously false.
If they do have an interest in the abrahamic traditions it usually comes down to looking for allegorical, metaphorical, or heretical material in Kabbala, the Essene mysticism, Gnosticism, and the suppressed gospels and apocrypha.
A similar attitude pertains to science. The best scientific thought always remains provisional and open to improvement or falsification, the worst easily descends to dogma and an absolutism all of its own. Science can only ever make things possible; it cannot in principle prove the impossibility of anything. Neopantheists tend to look upon science as a source of possibility, validation waiting to happen, and ideas often worth borrowing
2) Belief and Intent create Reality
This simple phrase reveals the one and only 'Secret' of magic, mysticism, and all varieties of 'positive thinking'. It's not absolutely true of course. We inhabit a random universe and we cannot always make all of it do exactly what we like. However it works so astonishingly well for much of the time that only fools ignore it. If you don't believe this, then try negative thinking for a while and see where that gets you.
Of course it takes courage and imagination and discipline to develop the beliefs and intents to change a situation, but of all these, imagination needs enticement and encouragement first in the quest for personal empowerment. Thus whilst Neopantheists recognise belief as a tool rather than as an end in itself (faith) they may nevertheless select beliefs which appeal to their imagination and stimulate it further, ritualistically acting out the belief 'as if' true.
3) Alchemy
Nobody believes in Alchemy these days, or do they?
Medieval alchemists seem to have had a variety of agendas. Some simply sought to make gold from other metals and generally failed because they could not concentrate enough energy on their starting materials, although they did discover much about metallurgy and chemistry in the process. Others sought transmutation in a more esoteric sense and tried to turn their own base natures into spiritual gold, they seem to have obtained mixed results although many of them discovered the importance of the Chymical Marriage, the inclusion of the feminine perspective, and worked with a Sorror Mystica, a mystical sister or wife.
Many other alchemists sought medicinal objectives from increased vitality to immortality. Some accidentally achieved quite the reverse effect with heavy metal poisoning, but others seem to have discovered the astonishing effects of what we now recognise as placebo or intent based medicine. The apparent absence of anything materially effective to the scientific view in alternative medicine treatments does not discourage Neopantheists. They delight in the principle of intent and devise analogical or immaterial theories of their own to bolster belief. As you might expect, alternative health practices often fail to perform well in scientifically controlled situations. They need to function as a package on their own terms, snake bones, crystals and all, if necessary.
When conventional medicine administers placebos with full medical ritual the results frequently show better outcomes than those of 'actual' treatments, particularly with medication.
4 The Female Perspective
It seems presumptuous for a male to attempt to define what the female perspective consists of. Nevertheless neopantheism values intuition as much as logic, dreams as much as waking thoughts, psychic experience as much as rational analysis, empathy and compassion and as much as disinterested objectivity, the goddess archetype as much as the god. The neopantheist rejection of the logocentric fundamentalisms with their male monotheist deities and their almost invariably male priesthoods mirrors its sympathy for the female perspective.
5 Synchronicity and Meaning
Neopantheists rely on their personal experiential definitions of reality rather than subscribe to societally sanctioned opinion about what constitutes reality and what doesn't. Thus if a superstition gives good results it gets reused, and coincidence rarely gets dismissed as mere coincidence. We spend most of our lives trying to engineer coincidence between intent and actuality. So if a synchronicity appears spontaneously we should consider interpreting it as an affirmation of deep intent, or a warning from the subconscious. Such 'magical thinking' often attracts the derision of scientifically schooled minds, but magical thinking often produces excellent results when you have exhausted the possibilities of common sense.
6 Sky Fairies or Psi Fairies?
Do gods, demons, spirits, elementals, and discarnate intelligences actually exist?
Well, YES and NO, and YES again, to most Neopantheists.
YES, in the psychological sense that people's gods and demons often do much of the talking in social interaction anyway. So they can pass from person to person.
So we manufacture such phenomena, but they also manufacture us. As biological and social and partially psychic organisms, we consist of bits and pieces from all over.
NO, panpsychism recognises that every phenomenon has consciousness to some degree from the simple consciousness of an atom to the complex consciousness of a brain, but as consciousness consists of a property of material phenomena then it cannot exist in entirely discarnate form.
YES, in the sense that parapsychology and quantum connections allow consciousnesses to effect each other across space and time. Thus in a sense the laws of nature comprise simple and powerful discarnate spirits. Thoughts can act as discarnate spirits also, but generally with less ubiquitous effect.
Sky-fairies in the logos sense exist only inside people's heads, but Psi-fairies, projected from one consciousness to another can create effects analogous to spirits in the classical sense.
7 Personal Narrative and Mythos
Ask most modern westernised people about themselves and they usually reply by describing what they do in terms of profession and interests. They usually lack metaphors for their self or selves although some will reply with some expression of a basic inner metaphor, like I'm a Christian or I'm a Capricorn.
Neopantheists on the other hand prefer an elaborate and extensive personal narrative and mythos. For example, Mercury conjunct with Pluto in Taurus, a Crow as Clan Animal, several half remembered Past Lives, a Spirit Guide, four servitors, a mission to rediscover Atlantean wisdom, and a range of possible future incarnations in mind, plus at least another six impossible things before breakfast.
All this doubtless seems quite deranged to the logocentric mind, but neopantheists would reply that if you are going to have an inner life then you may as well have a large and flexible one and an extensive vocabulary to explore it with.
Who would choose a prosaic inner life, when they could live one of poetry instead?
Magical Thinking of course qualifies you as 'mad' in terms of our current orthodox cultural paradigm. However it merely qualifies you as 'technically inept' if you cannot make it work, within the neopantheist paradigm.
8 Cosmic Holism and Transcendence
Does the universe as a whole; exhibit any kind of consciousness that we can interact with?
Does the universe seek to evolve greater complexity and more sophisticated consciousnesses?
Could it use some help from us in this?
Do all species seem worth preserving regardless of their economic value to us?
Does some mysterious circularity in time connect consciousness and the very existence of the universe?
Most Neopantheists like to think so.
Dice worlds,
Fractal self-similarity
From Quantum to Cosmos*
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*Indeterminacy in the orthogonal components of angular momentum. She does spin dice!
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Chapter 5
Metadynamics
- Practical Magic
This chapter questions the assumptions of causality and of one dimensional unidirectional time. It examines both the apparent causality failure and the apparent operation of hyper-natural forms of causality implied by quantum physics.
It seeks an Apophenia in a model of three-dimensional time that can model both quantum physics and magic.
'It is my opinion that our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a shake up - even greater, perhaps, than that which has already been provided by present -day relativity and quantum mechanics.'
- Professor Sir Roger Penrose11
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Part 1.
Quantum Weirdness
Quantum physics works beautifully in the sense that it allows us to build all sorts of amusing electronic devices and to model the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles to a very high degree of precision. However nobody really understands it. The maths gives excellent results, but it contains things like imaginary numbers which have no obvious perceptual meaning in the human scale world. Bizarrely contra-intuitive events seem to underlie the behaviour of the stuff of the universe. Objects can seem to have had several different locations or mutually exclusive states at the same time. Moreover some of the behaviour of quantum entities seems completely random and to arise without prior cause.
Thus many interpretations of quantum physics abound. Some interpretations claim that no underlying reality exists;12 we have reached down to the simplest level of reality and we just have to accept the strangeness we find there on its own terms. Others seek to find some kind of hidden variable to restore some sort of causality to the apparent randomness of the quantum domain.
Herewith some examples of quantum behaviour to illustrate the weirdness that underlies our reality.