Monday, February 22, 2016

Time Travel, Temporal Entanglement, Retrocausality and ''Offerings''


Good Angel - Faustus, repent; yet God will pity thee
Evil Angel - Thou art a spirit: God cannot pity thee
Faustus - Who buzzeth in mine ears I am a spirit,
Be I a devil, God will pity me,
Aye God will pity me if I repent

Dr Faustus, Act 1 Scene 4, Christopher Marlowe

We have been discussing the explanatory force of time travel/entanglement in understanding certain spiritual activities and I wanted to write up a few notes before it gets lost in the comments sections*:

- Temporal entanglement relies on retro-causality** whereby the future causes the past as much as the past causes the future, the fundamental nature of time is not linear but entangled block time.

- In communicating with a spirit of the dead***, for instance Osiris or Oberon, we are not communicating with the ghost in some spiritual/astral dimension we are communicating with the actual individual in the past.

- In communicating with animal spirits we are communicating with our deep past

- Our attention or offerings are sent back from the future and vivify the aspirations of the original person and conversely we are connected to that spirit through their dreams and imagination, we are entangled with the spirits through time.

- We earth the dreams of an individual in the past, they earth your remembrance of them in the future, Osiris would be entangled with the future of Egypt and Egyptian civilization throughout the world, he dreamed himself into the future and we remembered it into the future we live in by offering to him in the past.

- Correctly understood all magic is prophecy.

- Higher dimensional entities such as angels are from our future - here the principles are reversed, they remember and honour us, we imagine them, they are entangled with our spirits through time.

- Banishing breaks entanglement

- With  retrocausality egregores form the individuals who make them up in the same way the individuals form the egregore, the chicken and the egg appear simultaneously and cause each other.

There are lots of other factors which can be explained through temporal entanglement but I feel to go any further with the explanation we must look at free will - destiny argument which a lot of magicians are uncomfortable with.  I think one of the things I like about this theory is at first glance it seems to remove the necessity of ''a spirit dimension'' where spirits ''live'' in order to explain a lot of magickal phenomena****.   I also like how this seems to compliment the theory of the Time Phone in the 231 Gates project - a piece of ''magickal technology'' which allows you to ring the past or the future, entangling yourself with it through a ''timehole''.


*I have omitted a few things discussed from this post - especially material regarding Zurvanism, closed time streams, biblical time lines and prophecy.
**One demonstration of retrocausality is the anti-matter we see spontaneously appearing and annihiliating itself with matter in the void. This is not negatively charged matter but matter going backwards through time.

FEYNMAN DIAGRAM - QED
***A great deal of the spirits were once people.  Name a spirit that cannot be an individual from the past (deep or otherwise) or future.
***In the Last Days of Socrates, during the death scene in Phaedo Socrates discusses where the soul goes to and where does it come from - as nothing can come from nothing.  Where does the soul go?  The reversiverse!

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Raziel - Time Travel III

If time travel is possible,
Then it will happen;
Therefore it already has.

Friday, February 19, 2016

The Tree of Life - Good and Evil, Light and Darkness

The dead are born, they don't die.  The worlds are switched in our eyes.
We're dead when we think we are living; we start living when we die.
Fernando Pessoa, the Book of Disquiet

When talking about the Depths of Good and Evil, I want to be clear that I am not using the classical and outdated gender identities that are associated with Chokmah and Binah. I do not think men and Chokmah are Good or that women and Binah are Evil.  In fact I question the usefulness of the traditional Kabbalistic names of Chokmah, Binah, Hod, Netzach etc altogther, they seem to distract us from discussing the Depths themselves.*

As I mentioned in the previous post I struggle with the concept of Good and Evil because its often a matter of perspective.  Yersinia Pestis, the bacteria responsible for the Black Death, is not inherently evil; the plague years were boom years and antibiotics are evil from its point of view.  Nutrition and poison/toxin is a useful polarity, though as alchemists we are aware that too much nutrition rapidly becomes dangerous and a little bit of poison can be medicinal.  Advantage and disadvantage, or to quote the Sefer Yetzirah, Merit and Liability, might be the most flexible terms for these depths. Raziel talked about action vs inaction is the choice we face every single moment and I want to broaden the meaning of this to life vs un-life, wakefulness vs sleep or thoughtfulness vs thoughtlessness** to explore the idea more completely.

Good and Evil are traditionally associated with Light and Darkness.  In my understanding these Depths are also associated with the pineal gland and the secretion of the hormones serotonin and melatonin. Serotonin rises in response to light and vice versa with melatonin***.  Serotonin levels spike when you take certain classes of drugs and/or experience ecstasy through other means such as dance or prayer - I associate this hormone with a life lived to the full. Conversely melatonin lends itself to abstraction of the self and to the bird's eye view of your own body that happens in the dream world or OBE (similarly some people might sleep, hazily, dreamily, through their entire life or act as if it is happening to someone else).  There is no moral judgement on action vs ''inaction'' here, I am just comparing, contrasting and trying to understand them as modes of being - a dreamer lives fully in their dreams.



Individuals naturally high in serotonin do tend to live life to the max, as is commonly understood - they favour intense experiences, speak passionately and inhabit their own bodies.  Individuals with high melatonin, on the other hand, though ageless and slim, look in the mirror and find imperfection - they judge themselves from the outside, think about themselves in the 3rd person, make objects of themselves and in this way they dont live inside themselves but stand in judgement of themselves. Exploring this tension, actors tend to approach their craft from two perspectives, either from the inside-out where truthfulness and presence are central, or from the outside-in which is more like seeing yourself as a string-less puppet and where illusion and deception are the most important. An individual on the melatonin spectrum still acts in the sense of they do things, they just don't have the same type of ownership over their actions as someone with high serotonin - they experience action as the remote control of themselves.

Association and disembodiment, inhabiting and abstracting the self, presence and absence, wakefulness and sleep - action vs inaction all seem ultimately tied to the play of light on the physical body - a Depth of Light and a Depth of Darkness.  Can we say that the dimension of the observer can best be described as a Depth of Subjectivity and a Depth of Objectivity?  People do not talk much about the differing types of consciousness that exist in the spectrum of humanity but believe me there are people out there who live like objects (you might be one!) and people who live like subjects and consequently they have very different modes of thinking about themselves.

I feel as I am always on the verge of waking up.
Fernando Pessoa, the Book of Disquiet

*Bearing in mind that the Sefirot are not described by these traditional titles in the Sefer Yetzirah and these terms first appear nearly a thousand years later.  It can be read from the Sefer Yetzirah that the Sefirot really refer to the vowels.
**Tzvi imagined a duality within the infinite which was torn between the thoughtful infinity and the thoughtless infinity.
***The clock can be set to opposite cycles for those who work at night but they do suffer health problems as a consequence.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Raziel - Daughter Dimensions and the Binary Universe

Over the course of the last few years I have been explaining how the structure of the biological cell maps over to the structure of consciousness - from early principles to complex associations.  We have explored the concept of cellular receptors and how they can used to summon from the bloodstream of time, the letters acting as gates in the membrane of our consciousness and coding for particular types of phenomena/events.  We have explored how physiongnomical cues can reveal how individuals in our lives may be addressing an underlying biological need or acting as messengers from the larger organism we are all part of.  Very recently I have discussed chronobiology looking at how we can view the Alefbeit (and the Tarot) as a clock - this mystical cycle corresponding with the cell cycle*.




The cell cycle governs how cells divide by mitosis into two daughter cells but what does that division mean for our consciousness - how does consciousness divide?  The Metabolism of Time, the core work of the Hermetic Lessons, shows how there are ten phases necessary to the development of each moment in consciousness - altering the future, reducing the future, changing the future, experiencing the moment, analysing the moment, responding to the moment, the inner mind, remembering, forgetting and altering the past (memory).

These ten stages occur in every given moment but as moments stack up we can define some moments as being more of one type than another e.g. if you spend five mins analysing a text we can say that although the moments that make up those minutes each go through all of the above cycle they have taken on the general character of analysis.  These concepts map over to the Tree of Life and would be considered an attempt at understanding the world of Atziluth and the way in which these clusters of moments then aggregate into archetypal selves such as analysts is an attempt at understanding Briah.

Does our consciousness divide every moment** and what are the practical side effects of this?  As ever Raziel is difficult to decompress so this is my interpretation about the communications regarding the mitosis of consciousness and the resulting daughter cells.  When considering parallel universes in the traditional sense we tend to think of the multiplicity of possible actions yielding an infinite possible number of worlds branching off from every moment but what Raziel seems to be saying is that there are in fact only two branching worlds - the daughters of each moment.  In any given moment the only two possibilities are the Depth of Good and the Depth of Evil.  In terms of cellular consciousness I have traditionally thought of Good and Evil as better understood by advantage/disadvantage or nutrition/poison.  For simple microbes these are pretty much the parameters of their being - use space and time to head towards sugar and away from antibiotics, if you will.

Raziel though was suggesting that Good and Evil are really best understood as action and inaction with every single moment resulting in one or the other - either you move, through will, or you don't - you either live the self, or you don't. I move my arm in front of my face and from the point of view of time this is a massive collection of moments that have all chosen action.   The Depth of Evil then is defined by maximum inaction and in fact both Depths can be characterized by imagining the branched off end-world where every single decision in every single moment was for Evil or for Good - an active self vs an inactive self.*** The vast majority of our lives are spent navigating these tensions and when a cell line becomes extinct it can be considered fully inactive - the Depth of Death.

What does this do to the structure of the universe(s)?  Rather than infinite pontential at any moment we have ascending powers of two - start with one moment that divides into two, then these two become two again and so on and so on.  Imagine (our consciousness of time as) a series of caves that are linked by tunnels, with two tunnels leading away from each cave.  Combining this with the notions of fixed time streams we can see this system of cellular caverns as preexisting, rather than being tunnelled out by our actions in a moment, and our choices for good or for evil only determine the caves where we sample the time and therefore the possible opinions we can make about our actions.  Remember that at the level of our three dimensional selves we are not free and our actions are predetermined in these closed time streams, but we are free in how we judge what we did, in what we sample and in what we take away.  At the level of the Depth of Good and the Depth of Evil we are ultimately Observers****.




*This is in implicit in the associations between the Zodiac and the 12 basic genetic rhythms.
**For the sake of argument we will consider the moment to be the shortest possible unit of time - the Planck moment - equal to 10 to the power of -43 seconds.
***The leech signifies the Depth of Evil, and the archetypal character (the fully lived self) the Depth of Good.  In a communication with Uriel from a very early project I was shown an anti-self and this could possibly be understood as the maximum evil self.  There is more theodicy here.
****The archangels traditionally associated with Binah and Chokmah are Tzaphkiel and Raziel.

Monday, February 1, 2016

The Tarot and Chronobiology


THE CELL CYCLE

After writing my dissertation at university on chronobiology I have been interested in the interplay between genetics, light and time ever since. In the Western Magical Tradition the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alefbeit are arranged around a DNA like diagram called the Tree of Life while the nucleus of the cell contains 23 chromosomes*. It is also interesting to note that the Greek Alphabet contains 24 letters while our modern clock is divided into 24 hours.  Can we say that the Tarot and the Alefbeit are somehow clocks?


THE 231 GATES

As discussed in Replication and Deviation most of our life is dominated by replicated action - sleeping, eating, excreting, breathing - and even action which seems original can in fact be replication at a smaller or greater scale - for example meeting the same type of person over and over. This cycle of need/appetite fulfilment can be altered by living without light entrainment i.e. underground or by removing certain genes which acts like taking cogs out of the clockwork and alters the 24 hour cycle to between 22 and 26.

From chronobiological research scientists know that there are light sensitive molecular clocks scattered throughout the tissues of the body, with master clocks in the suprachiasmatic nuclei, (a cluster of cells behind the eyes next to the pineal gland), the liver and the gonads. These clocks react to light signals by altering the levels of serotonin and melatonin, two hormones produced in the pineal gland which not only alter the physiological functions of the body by influencing other glands in their hormone production, but our very consciousness itself - affecting our appetites and sex drive. These clocks are tuned by the wavelengths of light they receive, the predominantly red end of the spectrum in the morning activates the serotonin while the blue light of the evening reduces these levels, and vice versa for melatonin.**  Depending on when you rise then each hour the corresponding wavelength of natural light calibrates the clock. Some phases of the cycle may be extended in duration because of environmental factors and some phases may diminish but it is very likely that all will take place throughout the day at some point or another.

MAJOR ARCANA

Does the Great Wheel of the Tarot represent a chronobiological clock - the cards acting like the numbers on the face of the clock and relating to key parts of our daily cycle?
  • The Fool - Dreaming in astral universe
  • The Magus - Lucid dreaming, early morning hypnopompic hallucinations
  • The Priestess - Waking up
  • The Empress - Passive awareness of internal needs (excretion, cleanliness, hunger, cramps, etc)
  • The Emperor  - Active awareness of external needs (days tasks - breakfast, shower)
  • The High Priest - Recognised need for source of nutrition - social, financial, etc - i.e. work
  • The Lovers - Finding location of source of nutrition 
  • The Chariot  - Movement towards source of nutrition 
  • Strength - Acquisition of nutrition
  • The Hermit - Satiated appetite
  • Fortune - Recognised changing conditions of nutrition source
  • Adjustment - Adaptation to changing conditions of nutrition
  • The Hanged Man - Tired individual, least effective hour of work, 'end of the day'
  • Death  - Separation from nutrition, journey home, exhaustion
  • Temperance  - Relaxation
  • The Devil - Degeneration of consciousness - pleasures of the evening
  • The Tower - Exhaustion of the body, yawning, tiredness
  • The Star - Memory ''filing'' - light sleep
  • The Moon - Sleep paralysis to deep sleep, hypnagogic hallucinations 
  • The Sun - REM sleep
  • Judgement -Answers to dream questions, judgements on days action
  • The Universe - Connection to astral universe, unconscious mind
Although we can divide the 24 hours of a day into 22 tarot cards yielding just over an hour per card we should understand that some of these phases will last more or less time  and some of them will overlap - for example we may be sleepy for a number of hours after waking up.  If we get up late and rush to work, our preparatory time of waking up, cleaning, dressing, breakfasting, etc are compressed and overlap with the consequential ill effects on the success of the organism.  A long commute can stress the Chariot... If we put off sleep for a long time our consciousness blurs as well - so the sleep/dream/hallucinate phases outlined above will become active even though we are still technically awake.  We also need to bear in mind that this system best describes, in terms of the time spacing, the lifestyles we have evolved to live in i.e. hunter gatherer, as opposed to those we are forced to work within because of the needs of modern society - I would argue that many of the illnesses and stresses we experience are down to the fact that our working lives are completely out of step with the way the body naturally processes time.



In exploring this metaphor then, the hormonal gear shift is controlled by The High Priestess who switches the pineal from melatonin production to serotonin as the first rays of dawn fall on the sleeper. The light and increasing serotonin arouse first the ''feminine'' part of the mind (the Empress), that part which can receive influences or passive awareness and the recieved signals in turn activate the ''masculine'' part of the mind, the active awareness (the Emperor).  It is at this point when fully awake that one recognises The High Priest, who issues the demands of daily life - food, money, sex and other essential needs of reality that you must obey.  These cards will roughly cover 5am - 9am on a typical day.

As we reach the Lovers stage of the great wheel, serotonin has outgrown the influence of melatonin and a source of nutrition, be it social, financial, or simply biological has been recognised, be that a work place or play place and one is compelled to move towards it on The Chariot. Once the individual has arrived at the source of nutrition they begin to nourish themselves with its energy, and gain Strength. The Hermit represents the fully satiated individual, midday rest, but as energy levels drop again, they are forced to look for more nutrition and recognise the changing conditions (Wheel of Fortune) of the source - the Justice card represents the subsequent adaptation to these conditions - think of the changing demands from a hunting/fishing zone.  

The Hanged Man represents what is probably the least effective work hour, when the body is exhausted and the mind a little depressed, Death represents the close of work, accompanying exhaustion and the return home to relax (Temperance). The Devil signifies the further degeneration of the mind in preparation for the evening's pleasures/indulgences and yawning and tiredness are the symbols of the body's collapse (The Tower).

The Star symbolises all the memories of the day, and your subconsious sifts through them in a pre-sleep/light sleep state in order to concoct dreams, forget the meaningless and remember the meaningful.  As we enter the phase of The Moon, we enter sleep paralysis and then a state of deep dreamless sleep, our mind is dead in the barge sailing for the underworld.   The light of an astral Sun meets us at the end of this voyage and as the gates of our dreamworld open before us into REM sleep our dreams then stand in Judgement of our actions of the day, or we make our own judgements based on where we are and what we have done.  The World card symbolises the final step into the larger astral universe and The Fool shows us lucid dreaming there, but not remembering - careless and innocent.  Contrast this with the lucid dreaming and hypnapompic hallucinations of The Magus in the early hours before we wake, bearing in mind that the secret of magic is to dream into reality.*** 




*In Kabbalah we are taught of the mythical four headed Shin of the world to come - a 23rd letter of the Alefbeit

**  Our Tree of Life is often associated with different colours - Chokmah and Binah, grey and black respectively could code for whether light is present or not, and Chesed and Gevurah, blue and red could code for various ends of the spectrum. 

***Dividing 24 into 22 and then looking at the cycle from The Star to the Magus we get a figure of 7.7 hours for the full sleep cycle.