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On the Nature of Magic Pt. III by Youngermoon Foolshare This is the final of a three part series.
The experiences that defy rational explanation that I am referring to in general involve what is typically referred to as extrasensory perception. I would break these down into telepathy, empathy and prescience (knowing things before they happen). These experiences largely involve the workings of the mind, and I will speculate on how they relate to the workings of the Spirit Body. Now, I do not claim to be a telepath or empath or to be able to see the future, but I have had what I would describe as telepathic, empathic and prescient experiences. That is, I do not (as yet!) have developed abilities that I can control, but have had experiences that suggest these abilities are possible and within my grasp. So, here are some examples of these experiences. I have had numerous examples of what I would call telepathic experiences. Many involve my life partner. It would often seem that we would have simultaneous thoughts; now this is not uncommon for people that have spent a considerable amount of time together and could be rationally chalked up to having similar thoughts as a result of similar shared experiences. However, there was one time when we had arrived back at our apartment after grocery shopping. We lived on the second floor. I had gone ahead of her, unlocked the door and checked the answering machine. At this time, we had been receiving many messages, and I had been expecting one but was surprised that there were none. Seeing this, I "played" the automated recording in my mind ("Mailbox...ONE...you have...ONE...new messages") and noted how clear it sounded in my mind, as if it had actually played. Later, my partner comes up the stairs, and wants to know who the message was from! She was quite adamant about it, and we argued over it. There was no message, I had not even touched the machine, yet she had heard it loud and clear to the point that she was accusing me trying to hide something from her. She had heard something, and the only place that what she had heard existed, was in my mind. This experience not only suspended my disbelief, but thoroughly trashed it. Another incident occurred later when she was late in the pregnancy with our daughter. We were both in the kitchen, preparing dinner. She was in an absent-minded, dreamy kind of frame of mind, and was talking out loud while watching the food that she was stirring in the skillet (she was not looking at me). Something she said triggered a question in my mind, which had something to do with some aspect of her personality that I did not think she was conscious of. The question in my mind did not fit in with the narrative she was giving, and given that I felt it might trample on her sensitivities, kept the question to myself. Nevertheless, she proceeded to respond to this off-the-wall question that I had not vocalized. At that point, I was convinced that telepathy was in fact a real phenomenon, although I credited my wife with this ability and not myself. I also had some experiences in which I was the recipient of another's thoughts. The most eye-opening being one that occurred a little over a year ago, as I write this. I was walking into a super market and began to have thoughts about my neighbor, that I was going to meet her in there. The feeling persisted, and I became disoriented somewhat, and began to feel slightly feverish, even; my consciousness was altering. I was walking down the large space between the cashier lanes and the aisles, pushing my cart and looking down the aisles ( I was not looking ahead of me). Presently, the feeling of disorientation increased and my field of vision was hazed out, as if by a bright, white light, which momentarily blinded me. During that moment of blindness, a thought entered my mind, that was totally out of step with my interior monologue: it said, "there he is" (I'm adding the emphasis on "he"). I looked up, the haze fell from my eyes, and you guessed it, there she was, the neighbor I was thinking about. What surprised me even more than the fact that I seemed to have heard her thoughts, is that she was apparently experiencing a similar premonition about me. It very much seemed as if we were literally of one mind. An earlier experience was fairly similar to the one I just recounted. It involved me thinking about a person simultaneous with a disorienting alteration of consciousness, and then soon meeting that person. I was preparing for a class I was giving a lecture in (the usual professor was at a conference and I had already given one substitute lecture and was about to give the second) in the early morning, and began thinking about a student in the class I had run into and conversed with the day before. As I was thinking about him, I started walking out of the room, and was overcome by this dizzy feeling, then ran into him in the doorway.
Within the past few months
prior to writing this essay, I have had my first conscious experiences
of empathy. For the past several years, and the past several months
especially, I had been frequently plagued by attacks of severe and dire
negativity. The world and my life seemed bleak, and yet, these attacks
seemed increasingly alien to me. I had no reason for feeling that way,
and I knew it. I began to wonder why, and sought help with dealing with
the negativity. One person who I encountered had a very strong psychic
presence, and we communicated via instant messaging. I found that I
could sense what she was feeling, and learned to sort my feelings from
hers. She also taught me some principles of grounding. In so doing, I
have not been plagued by these feelings negativity. It seems I had been
receiving the stress that others were feeling. Interestingly, emotions
seem to carry over much greater physical and temporal space than
thoughts, at least in terms of how I have experienced them. In regard to the past, present and future locations, in what sense do they exist, and to what degree are locations along to time axis predetermined by events that occur before them? That is, is our future predetermined and our fates immutable (this would be consistent with Norse beliefs)? Or do we have some ability to alter our destinies, to change the nature of these future places (consistent with the idea of karma)? Drawing from quantum mechanics, there is some evidence that reality is in some sense probabilistic, with states of matter existing in multiple states until perceived. I would assert that both the past and the future exist as probabilistic states. The past is a bit more certain, being those places in 4D space time where probability for any given event has become ergodic, that is, having a probability state of either 0 or 1. That is, these past places, out of all possible pasts, either do or do not exist (woulda, coulda, shoulda). Similarly, the future corresponds to those places where the probabilities are somewhere between 0 and 1, and are in constant flux. In the present, we roll the dice. We make choices. We determine the ergodicity of the past, and push the probabilities for potential future places toward ergodicity. That is, as we make choices, the likelihoods of various outcomes approach either 1 or 0, and at the point they become 1or 0, then they become the past. Actions in the now create both past and future. The more committed and far reaching the action, the farther into the past and future these actions extend. For instance, ergodicity is tied to ideas of thermodynamic equilibrium. Ilya Prigogine, generally credited with founding Complexity Theory, indicates that thermodyanmic equilibrium occurs with inert matter, such as crystals. In the world of inert matter, that laws of physics work rather seemlessly, and the motions of the various celestial bodies are well known and predictable. The world of inert matter thus extends millions and billions of years into the past and future, creating a vast pallette of (at least) 4-dimensional space for the less certain actions to create future places on. As systems become more open, and receive and transmit energy, they move toward "near equilibrium" systems (a homeostatic system like an undisturbed ecosystem) toward what is referred to as a "far from equilibrium" system, in which systems increase their internal organization ("negative entropy" or "negentropy") by exporting an additional and equivalent amount of entropy. These far-from-equilibrium systems are thus also called dissipative systems. These far from equilibrium systems require that systems must simultaneously link to external systems (for the export of entropy) while excluding these same connected entities (for the sake of increasing internal organization). What becomes the exported entropy for one system becomes an organizing principle for the connected system. Boundaries must be erected to exclude the connected entities, but these same entities push against this boundary because the connection implies inclusion. This contention over these dissipative boundaries is the very process by which the ergodicity of the future is contended in the present and resolved into the past. The further shift from inert matter (equilibrium) farther and farther along towards greater dissipation (farther-from-equilibrium, if you will) requires greater and greater levels of consciousness. Equilibrium is a function of inert matter, requires no life or consciousness, and weaves the fabric of space-time far into the future and past. Dissipation (far-from-equilibrium) increases with life and consciousness, knocks reality out of ergodicity, and is largely a function of the here and now, with the construction of ergodicity extending less far into the future and past. So, after a longer than intended discourse on the nature of reality, what I hope to have shown is that consciousness is woven into the formation of space and time, and that choices we make in the here and now alter the very fabric of reality itself. Thus, we exist as beings in at least four dimensions, and not just the three that we perceive in the immediate here and now. As outcomes become certain (i.e., ergodic), past and future places become physical realities in four dimensions, and not just three. Given that the past is more ergodic than the future, we perceive it to a greater degree. Nevertheless, through committed action and choices, we can extend ergodicity into the future somewhat, by making certain outcomes more inevitable than others. So are we the crude stuff of matter, where our future is far bound to the ergodicity of our past, or do we have free will, whereby the ergodicity of the past is lessened and different future outcomes become possible? The question, I believe, lies in our psychology. At any given moment, our personality is built up by the way that we have received awards and punishments from our environment (including especially other people); this lies in the domain of our bodies being composed of matter. The degree to which we give ourselves to our egos, and just go with the flow, has a direct impact on the degree to which our past determines our future. This can be good or bad, depending on the nature of our past, and what lies lurking in our subconscious. We also have the capacity to not be bound to our past, to let go of past pain or pleasure and alter the direction our future takes. Submission to matter is the low energy, high entropy (but highly ergodic) path, with further extension into the future (although, with less control over the outcomes, as a commitment to matter is akin to addiction in some ways); conscious release of the will from matter requires high energy, low energy (more organization, aka discipline) and variable ergodicity (low ergodicity at first, but with increased discipline, the new path becomes second nature and ergodicity increases). Increased ergodicity means that future places have a greater physical reality. Also, as these future places become mapped out, our bodies exist in these spaces as well. Given that there is continuity in space between the here and now to these newly created future places, our bodies not only exist in these places, but are physically connected and extended through this space. Our 4-dimensional bodies can thus be seen as contiguous extensions of our physical bodies from our past, through to our present and into the future, inasmuch as ergodicity permits. If we can perceive our past, why can we not also perceive our future? If our bodies exist in these 4-d places, why can we not perceive these worlds through our physical senses?
Consider the nature of the
mind, as distinct from the brain, as has been discussed elsewhere. If we
were to freeze a person's head in a given moment of time we would likely
only see bits of chemicals in the structure of a person's brain without
a separate mind floating in and around the body (thanks to Sans Talbot
for this explanation). However, this does not account then for the
actual experience of what we individually perceive as the mind. I would
assert that what we perceive as the mind is the product of these
individual firings spread over time. That is, it is the extension of the
physical matter of the brain along the axis of the fourth dimension that
contributes to the quality we know as mind. Consciousness and mind are a
function not of the crude matter in time, but the ergodic expression of
this matter extended through time. Again, consciousness and the fabric
of space time can be considered to be functions of the other, if not
type-identical. But could it be possible that there would be a connection between separate individuals across 3-d space at a given moment in time, or across and between 4-dimensional locations? At any given moment in time, what we perceive as our closed bodies (including the brain) are actually open and exposed in the directions along the 4th axis, referred to as ana and kata (analogous to up and down on the vertical axis of 3d space). Does this by necessity imply that thoughts and feelings between individuals are physically connected? It could be that shared thoughts and feelings are the result of two individual Spirit Bodies touching in some way. Our minds are an expression of our Spirit Bodies; that is, that they exist as expressions of our physical bodies in the ana and kata directions. Two Spirit Bodies touching would therefore have the quality of two minds coming into contact. How we perceive that contact in our individual minds is a different matter, whether we would recognize the other's thoughts/feelings as belonging to that other person, or to hear the thoughts as if that person were speaking to us, or whether we were simply vaguely aware of the other (thinking about them, rather than perceiving the actual thoughts), or whether we would experience the thoughts and feelings as undifferentiated from our own, is a matter of training and experience. That is, we have the ability to sense other Spirit Bodies, using senses that are independent of our five physical senses and that operate strictly in the ana and kata directions of physical space (and are strictly internal to the mind). Think of the brain as a physical entity, that gives out an electromagnetic signal (which it does) based on how all of the neuron's are firing. The brain has an electromagnetic field. This is no different than a two wave radio, that has hardware designed to give off an electromagnetic field and also to receive them, with the information being conveyed in terms of how that hardware codes and decodes that signal. I suggest that the brain is no different. We are constantly giving off and receiving signals, but lack training in terms of coding and decoding the signals. Telepathic and empathic events occur when two minds are relatively in tune, so to speak. (This also brings up the question of light and energy as functions of the fourth dimension, and therefore their relationship to mind, but I am not prepared to discuss this topic at present). So, I do not know whether I have convinced you of anything or not as this essay draws to a close, or whether such convincing was even necessary. What I ultimately hope in presenting these ideas is to provide a conceptual framework for the aspiring magician on how to proceed with their practice. Perhaps I have shed some insight on the path that the magician must follow, and how to gauge one's progress on the path, as well as to give some ideas that might provide insight into the design of individual magical workings. The overall goal of the magician, that is, one who follows a magical path, is the development of the Spirit Body, to extend their consciousness beyond the physical confines of the here and now of the physical self and develop the senses of this body, and to perceive future spaces and other minds. We are all angelic beings in this sense, and have but to choose to fulfill this destiny.
So every human being's
abilities lie along some axis between passively going with the flow of
the ergodic reality as supplied by others or to actively construct that
ergodicity. At the one extreme, passive acceptance of ergodic reality as
supplied by others, an individual is content to fit within the
structures supplied by society and to accept the rewards and punishments
that society doles out. This existence is to be a cog in the wheel of
the ergodic reality that others have constructed - to be enchanted by
the spells of society as I called it in the first essay. As one matures,
gains life experience or otherwise consciously undertakes a magical
existence, they become conscious of the choices provided by society and
work toward making their own choices, and creating reality for
themselves. This can be dangerous, as the preconditioning of society can
set one up for extreme bad karma should they opt to depart from the
structures that society has conditioned for them. This path then
requires healing from the original configuration, that is letting go of
the past, and the ergodicity that it would carry over into the future,
such that new possibilities in the future become attainable, and the
practitioner learns to direct themselves toward these desirable
outcomes. This is a tricky road to follow, as there are many pitfalls as
the practitioner learns what they truly desire versus passing fancies,
and develop their sense of core values which ultimately form the
foundation upon which a new future is built. This lies in the domain I
have tried to cover in the second essay. Finally, as the practitioner
extends their consciousness through time and develop their spirit
bodies, they become more effective at actively constructing the future
(the subject of this essay). This can then feedback into the first
essay, in that the magician then becomes an active constructor of
society, with the idea being if a person can construct a harmonious
existence for themselves (contingent in a large part on relating
harmoniously to others), that there will be a positive benefit to
society.
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