Tuesday, January 30, 2018

The 231 Gates Project 2018 - Thought Experiments II


I am continuing to practice the thought experiments, exercises mentioned in the last post and continuing to convert more of the theory from Raziel into meditative exercises.  I want to provide a little feedback from my thinking, mind-state and ''results'' this week:

- Contemplating the world as if a museum, your journey through it as if on tram tracks and inducing de ja vu for extended periods of time, leaves one feeling ghostly and the world as if ''hollowing out''.  Continuing with this work of active contemplation the above feelings have continued to intensify, through the ''ghostliness'' I am beginning to sense my ''wave'' self, a feeling of catching up to myself and a sense of leaving myself behind.  It feels quite jarring, like a 4d car kangarooing (?), as this mind-state is really just developing and I assume I will get used to it as ''time passes''.  Also the shell or husklike effect on objects that made them ''feel'' ''hollow'' hasn't gone away but they have begun to glow (?) from within - a kind of grey/blue light that is either seeping out or shining through, could this ''light'' be produced by the transtemporal friction?  This is disorienting in the least, maddening at the worst but I can't help but feeling Eternalism or (more likely) some kind of bespoke Compatibilism is a more truthful (?) way of living.  At the moment it feels comparable to a personal Copernican revolution, in that people living as if Philosophical Presentism is the truth are somehow the equivalent of Flat-Earthers.

- A way of preserving the museum of the sandbox universe and not allowing potential time travellers to cause Grandfather Paradoxes (which would interfere with the invention of time travel itself) and also to explain the apparent absence of time travellers would be the limitation to observation only through those entities that are frozen in time, i.e. that there are (other?) eyes looking out through ours or that we are the eyes that are looking out and we are not ''ourselves'', either way its disturbing right now.  Wouldn't this kind of voyeurism be a very spectacular form of futuristic TV?  While discussing this someone brought up the idea that it would have to be ''filmed'' or simulated first before it could be accessed but I disagree, I think this museum is ''the real thing'' and maybe the way in which that ''real thing'' is accessed by the time travellers is built into the physics of anti-time (?) itself - we know people can remote view, we also have experience (including myself) of (feeling very much like) remote-viewing through time, maybe this can be somehow induced in the future which already has happened (?).

- Trying to create thought experiments/exercises on Fourteen Minotaurs, I am actively contemplating the idea of a very small number of surviving variant selves and other limited potential journeys that could have ended up where I am now, in terms of the city where I am living in the sense of ''All roads lead to Rome''.  To begin with I imagined the fourteen selves to be a little more scattered across the world so I am constraining/restricting that still further.  I am actively wondering how a variety of highly limited different decisions in various life paths could have all ended here and how different would those journeys to the same place actually be.  In a previous post I talked about tram tracks and robust branching moments so I am working on exercise now to see what I can ''mine'' from that in terms of different ways of thinking about magical methodology.


Thursday, January 25, 2018

The 231 Gates Project 2018 - Thought Experiments


In Spain, the dead are more alive than any other country in the world.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Anti-realism in theatre was a movement that sought to recapture some of the essence of the art that had been lost to the overwhelming dominance of Stanislavsky and realist/naturalist playwrights like Ibsen and Chekhov.  It sought to restore verse, poetry, imagination and above all else magic to a form that was increasingly dominated by an obsession with the real.  Rather than face ''reality'' head on as was increasingly the trend it wanted to return a sense of wonder and escapism.  It recognised a weakness in itself as although it was anti-that it hadn't clearly laid out what it was for.  When asking itself what it was instead of what is was against Anti-realism ended up transforming into a variety of powerful different movements in theatre from the Epic Theatre of Brecht to the Theatre of the Absurd of Pinter, Stoppard, Albee and many others that continue to influence art and civilisation to this day.

Anti-materialists in the esoteric sciences find themselves in a similar position - full of spleen and rhetoric against mainstream materialism but they seem full of fluff and wool when it comes to defining what they are actually for.  Spirituality is such a nebulous term that it is effectively meaningless. The vast majority of the work on the Hermetic Lessons are about transferring the gains of material science particularly Biochemistry and Genetics into a mind-only model i.e. not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  In Running and Returning I recount various thought exercises that allowed me to run into a mind-only point of view and then return to a materialist point of view, increasing the length of time that I was able to stay in the mind only state for longer and longer.  Changing the foundation of my state of mind in this way allowed my intuition to provide different food for thought.

As we explore anti-time throughout 2018 I should apply the same kind of exercises in order to allow my mind to harness ideas in similar ways explore what it is as well as what it is not.  We need to explore exactly what Raziel means by Anti time: a physical/material retrocausal flow of time or ''reversiverse''; combined with the ideas of consciousness being a time traveller producing ''anti-time'' when it imagines the future and remembers the past; or only in that self-same imagination?  We're aiming for a unity, in the sense of the Hermetic One Thing (where the apparent opposite is the same thing reversed) but we might not get one as our final answer.  If consciousness itself is seen as anti-time in this way then the work will be in refining the raw material of that consciousness that produces poor predictions and hazy recollections into the refined stone which allows astral passage to different actual positions in time for observation and experiments, crystal clear prophecy and perhaps the ability to impede or alter the (apparent) flow of time itself - with the mind only.  If not, then bring on the moldavite...

Just like we had to induce a sort of Alice in Wonderland syndrome through our exercises in order to escape delusional materialism by imagining for instance that there is no movement or size and otherwise reversing the relationship of matter with the self (i.e. to see the world as ''flowing'' through us instead of us as objects moving through the world) now we have to reverse and distort our ''natural'' yet probably mistaken relationship to time.  In order to challenge the assumptions of philosophical presentism, and the way in which those assumptions dominate the current view of magick I need to ask myself much more frequently whether the events I am experiencing have happened before or not.  So far I have found museums and tram tracks to be useful tools in these thought experiments - as I walk the various paths of this life, I reflect on whether what I am seeing is an exhibition and how free I actually am to choose what I see.   Looking more closely at my experiences with the Museum Thought experiment for a moment I have found that two things happen, firstly you can induce de ja vu for extended periods of time, as opposed to mere flashes, and secondly that everything begins to become extremely ''ghostly'' or ''spectral'' - maybe a kind of ''hollowing''.  More largely as I consider my basal sense of freedom, I feel that although there is some freedom of movement within museums (like first person RPGs) I am being guided, in one way or the other, that exhibits are signposted and there are restricted signs over all kinds of paths - effectively that the museum I walk through has invisible tram tracks.

You must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

Luigi Pirandello


Wednesday, January 17, 2018

The 231 Gates Project 2018 - Working Definitions and Important Archives

Leonard - This is Hot Tub Time Machine all over again.  Look if future Biff goes back to 2015 after he gives young Biff the almanac, he could get back to the 2015 with Marty and Doc in it, because it wasn't until his 22nd birthday that he placed his first bet.
Sheldon - But whoa whoa is placed right?
Leonard - What do you mean?
Sheldon - Is placed the right tense for something that would have happened in the future of a past that was affected by something from the future?
Leonard - Had will have placed?
Sheldon - That's my boy.

Big Bang Theory, Series 8 Episode 5

The following is a set of principles which will form the current working definition for the 2018 231 Gates Project although this will change as I acquire more information from various sources.
  • Magick rituals intended to contact entities or produce results are preexisting events that served to entangle their operators in two or more distinct points in time  
  • Synchronicities and desynchronicities were evidence of the temporal entanglement increasing as you approached the ritual and decreasing as you left it behind, like mass warps space-time 
  • During the moment of entanglement there was an information or energy exchange which fuelled the experiences and results on both sides
  • All time happened at the same time, there was no before or after, or one spirit in the past and one in the future, but both entities engaged simultaneously in the ritual experience - willingly or otherwise
  • Seen from a global perspective magickal rituals were one of the ways to describe the mass entanglement of all sentient beings
  • This universe is a determined sandbox pocket universe with finite but repeatable time which only has a few alternate paths through it, tied together by the invention of time travel
  • The only surviving universes are ones where time travel was invented, this serves to tie together that universe with its reversiverse at temporal pinchpoints
  • The vast majority of so-called ''infinite possibilities'' are dead, uninhabitable or otherwise un-realisable
  • You only have access to a few timelines where you exist, rituals produced robust branching moments where it was possible to change from one timeline to another like tramlines
  • Small decisions of yes or no, left or right, etc aggregate towards the same conclusion and keep you on the path until the next branching moment, during this pathwalking there is no genuine free will 
  • There is no spiritual otherworld where spirits live, all beings are spread throughout time
  • All ''spiritual beings'' share DNA and all existed at some point in the timeline, DNA is the root through which temporal entanglement occurred, the ''tangled threads''
  • Contact with the dead (or spirits that were originally real people) is contact with the living
  • Contact with ''elementals'' is the result of entanglement with entities living in the deep past, contact with angels is the result of entanglement with entities from the far future 
  • The Astral Plane is the reversiverse, a trans-temporal river of ''memory'', subject to extreme distortion, that allows you to move out of time and observe another period of time; the ''Bloodstream of Time''

Below is a list of all relevant material from the Hermetic Lessons regarding time travel undertaken over the last few years by myself or under the guidance of Raziel.  Over the next year I will be working to sort through this material and fashion it into some kind of ''paper'' and work with various entities to fill in the gaps, complete experimental data. The first two links are a little bit of the backstory as to how ''we'' got here and how it ties into the Qabalistic work with Sefer Yetzirah and the experiences at Edward Kelley's Tower.


The following are explorations of the dialogues with Raziel about the mechanics and structures of time travel, how and why it works, and why it is necessary.  Some of this material is the ''compressed'' info from Raziel, some is my attempt to ''unpack'' it.


These are posts relevant to the 231 Gates Project for 2018 on temporal entanglement as a unifying explanation for esoteric phenomena particularly on contact with so-called ''spirits''.


Miscellaneous posts musing on the intersection between an Eternalist perspective and common features of the discussion and experiments about magick - the astral plane, ''boons'', synchroncities, etc - and how Eternalism can have more explanatory force than ''unexamined probabilitism''.  Some of this material overlaps with work on the Metabolism of Time. 


A few examples of attempting to explain magickal results from an eternalist perspective with a view to temporal entanglement.


Blogger does not really structure the information in a searchable way so this is for my own use as much as readers of the Hermetic Lessons who wish to review or recap before following the 231 Gates Project for 2018.



Tuesday, January 16, 2018

De-Spherification


The word Sefirah is not related to the Greek word sphere although as early as the Bahir it is related to the Hebrew word sappirot, or sapphires. 

Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah



I've been ''campaigning'' against spheres for some time now and once again the topic has resurfaced* along with a lot of the other baggage of the 'Hermetic Qabalah'.  I am not saying that spheres are entirely useless but they do stand in the way of a lot of other useful concepts that are at least as worthy, if not more, of your time.  In Brickwork of Sapphire I explored the link between the word for Sefirot and Sapphires illustrating how this brickwork could be referring to the Tree of Life itself which resolves into a series of rhombuses/diamonds once you remove the spheres, which are only there in the first place to serve as text boxes.  Removing those text boxes you are left with the Sefirot as vertices, or points where the lines meet on the cut stone or crystal.  This idea and the accompanying language of quarrying, engraving and carving stone(s) permeates the Sefer Yetzirah the key source text in the development of the QBL as a whole.



Look at nature - bubbles are spheres, sure, but Earth isn't, its a misshapen blob.  Cells aren't spheres in tissues like some perfect bubble wrap either they come in all kinds of blob shapes.  Speaking of cells bearing in mind the idea of vertices when overlaying the Tree of Life on your body you are much more likely to benefit if you focus on your nervous system and the connections between the main nerves, and those connections are the ganglion which are hardly ''spheres''.


From a mathematical perspective, as we move up through dimensions, we have circles, spheres and then glomes or higher dimensional spheres to play with - if you are working with spheres you are intrinsically working in 3d excluding the dimensions of time and perspective from your work.  When it comes to the Sefirot themselves you might find more traction in toroids and vortices - if not, try blobs.




*Re-surfaced is probably inaccurate, its always on the surface like so much ocean plastic, it just happened to drift into my field of vision again.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Evidence - Transtemporal Friction


Gravity is working against me
Gravity wants to bring me down
Oh I'll never know what makes this man
With all the love his heart can stand
Dream of ways to throw it all away

Gravity, John Meyer

Quantum mechanics is common currency in modern esoteric practice, dished out like it readily explains all the hard problems of magickal work.  Widely evoked, barely understood but funky as all hell, QM does provide scientific testable ''evidence'' of things and therefore is important to include alongside the eye witness testimony that we often have to rely on.  If we are putting magick on trial here, QM et al will constitute an expert, if relentlessly confused, witness.

The most popular of the interpretations is the Many Worlds Theory whereby every moment, multiple realities are being created and co-exist - in one universe the cat is alive, in another it is dead, etc - as the wave functions are being collapsed into observable reality.  We may witness only one version but how do we know that not all possibilities are happening some other where in their own fragment of time and space?  In this thinking magicians influence probability to end up in the universe they would like - a kind of probabilistic surfing.  Although the most popular there are other ways of interpreting the results of Young's Double Slit and other quantum experiments, with serious consequences for Magick, and it is to one of these that we turn in our last post on Evidence - TIQM or the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.  The reason this interpretation stood out in my long hours of reading on the bus was the way it resonated with what Raziel says not only in the way that Superdeterminism explains away such things as non-locality, spooky action or infinite worlds but also in the more obscure areas like the message on Anti-Time Clones or on the Reversiverse.

There is a way to escape the inference of super-luminal speeds and spooky action at a distance but it involves absolute determinism in the universe and the absence of free will.  Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind the scenes clockwork, but also our behaviour, including our belief that we are free to do one experiment or another, absolutely predetermined, including the 'decision' by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears.  There is no need for faster than light signals to tell particle A what measurement had been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A already 'knows' what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.

John Stewart Bell

Bell Test Experiments are ways of testing the various interpretations of the data of Quantum Mechanics and their results suggest that theories that depend upon local hidden variables (i.e. faster than light communication and other funky ''quantum'' stuff) should affect these experiments in certain constrained ways and they don't.  Particles lose energy into the vacuum itself though so what is causing this energy loss - could it be that the particle is entangled with itself leading to the ''everything is one electron'' type of thinking? In Q.E.D. (Quantum Electro Dynamics) it is shown that nothingness spontaneously splits into particles and anti-particles which then annhiliate each other.  One interpretation, depending on some retrocausality, is that the anti-particles are actually particles going back in time when we see them manifest it as if the reversiverse is directly contacting this one.  What then if that energy loss in the void is not to do with a particle somehow interacting with itself persay, but interacting with, to quote Raziel, its ''anti-time clone'' - what if that energy loss is actually the result of a kind of transtemporal friction mediated through some extra orthogonal time dimension?  The universe and the reversiverse literally rub against each other, and this ''spark'' that Raziel talked about is the heat energy lost from that self-same friction?  Is time literally burning you out?

My dedicated study of physics finished after college and although I considered applying for Physics and Philosophy at Oxford, I pursued biochemistry and genetics at university instead.  I do maintain many good friends who are physicists though and the thinking in this post has been run by them and any new material generated will also be factchecked with such ''real physicists''.  Anyway when most are confronted with this kind of thinking, physicist or otherwise, the argument against it starts with personal incredulity (I don't understand so that is not how it works) or when people ''get it'' defeatism (well if so then what is the point of science or anything, huh?).  What I will show this year is that by getting beyond our delusional idea of 3 dimensional freedom we can access, through Raziels compatabilist approach, another type of genuine freedom.  Based on the average current understanding of magick in our community, I reckon that most people will find this kind of thinking impossible, depressing or frightening but with Saturn in Capricorn, in these strange days leading to 2020, Chronos is coming for you.

Time is on my side, yes it is,
Time is on my side, yes it is,
Now you always say that you want to be free
But you come running back
You come running back
You come running back to me


The Rolling Stones

Monday, January 8, 2018

The 231 Gates Project 2018 - Skepticism

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself
I cannot do it: Yet I'll hammer it out.

Richard II, Act V Scene V, William Shakespeare


Definitions of magick range from ''everything is magick'', ''magick is the influence upon probability by strange attractors such as spells, altars, amulets, rituals'' to ''magick is the contact of and entreaty with otherworldly entities''.  Being skeptical as I was analysing what is considered to be a result  in such work was useful in that it let me question how much of my magickal experience was hysteria or delusion and challenge the usefulness of loose versus tight definitions.  If your identity and status are built around the quality of your demonstrable magickal experience it is less likely that you would want to question it as you are questioning the foundation upon which you stand both from a social and from a mental health perspective.  A certain brand of magician is keen to seize on anything and everything as success in contact or results so much so that what magick is ends up becoming highly diluted. 

For those of you who have been following this last couple of months of renewing purpose and consolidating the work on time travel you will know that I have also been pursuing extreme skepticism when it comes to the WMT's notion of what a spirit is.  According to my theory there is no such thing as an otherworld (or even astral plane persay) where spirits (elementals, demons, djinn, fae, angels, etc, ad nauseaum) ''live'', but spirits are all living entities in their own time and communication and effects are the result of temporal entanglement, both conscious and unconscious, as opposed to ''spiritual energy'' from ''another dimension'' or whatever.  I am a ''spirit'' as much as an angel, elemental or faerie is and I can be ''summoned'' knowingly or unknowingly.  The astral plane is the ''reversiverse'', where time flows backwards - although it might appear or feel, to our senses, to be something else.  As the temporal entanglement theory requires the future to exist it also casts doubt on one of the assumptions of modern magickal theory i.e. that what you are ''affecting'' with magick is probability of a given thing happening.

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
The treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am, then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better as a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by an by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased,
With being nothing.

Richard II, Act V Scene V, William Shakespeare

These exercises culminated in my yearly bus trip to England, a quality 19 hours with myself, the German night and the contemplation of time travel.  Moving around in my own mind felt so much more free and my thoughts more dextrous after such skeptical de-cluttering.  I used to ''joke'' with friends that I had deleted lots of memories from my childhood in order to free up room for ''other stuff'' and this felt very similar - in the space created new ideas could blossom.  I spent the hours reading about philosophical presentism vs eternalism alongside a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics and a lot of what Raziel had been talking to me about began to come into sharp focus.  I felt ''possessed by myself'' and was actually afraid of even thinking the theory that was beginning to form in my mind as I thought the thought alone might be enough to trigger the ''timetraveller swarm''.

In conclusion then, I have one more post on evidence to make before we begin the 231 Gates Project for 2018 and this is rooted in this analysis (and adaptation) of quantum mechanics.  This is not the Many Worlds idea (as Raziel already said this was highly misleading) but a different way of explaining the evidence we observe in science which links to concepts Raziel was sharing and which supports my theory of magick.  I'll post links to the material that I am working with but it won't be fun for those of you who prefer your magic loose, woolly and snugly, as opposed to tight and restrictive like a strait jacket.  Bearing in mind what has been outlined above - redefining magick and spirit(s) and abandoning probability - for some of you this may feel like a Theory of Anti-Magic.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For time hath made me his numbering clock.

Richard II, Act V Scene V, William Shakespeare