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| Nude Descending a Staircase #2 by Marcel Duchamp |
1.The history of thought as we have inherited it is
dominated by two ideas that are really one and the same. These are substance and monotheism. The first idea states that for any event or change
something unchanging must exist as the foundation. It is assumed that actions can only be performed by things.
Monotheism is the idea that ultimately all events have one foundation or,
alternatively, the truth of reality is unity and singularity. Science and
atheism are as much the offspring of these ideas as religion and mysticism.
2. It seems Eastern thought no more aids us in this impasse
than Western. The burgeoning divine hoards of Hinduism are founded on Brahma.
The wheel of Karma is one. Even the truth of Buddhism is always all and one. This is also true of the Tao, that great conjecture of unity.
We perhaps have the most hope in Shinto, which can direct us back to the rich
paganisms predating the Biblical Innovation. Or, perhaps, Buddhism’s ultimate
manifestation in Zen can teach us something.
3. Zen offers us the idea that there is no secret, no need
for foundation, and no source. It is here now. Thus speaks Zen.
4. What is ultimately the case? Shit happens. A leaf blows
by on the wind. My left heel aches slightly. There is a winding and an aching.
There is a glimmer and a whooshing. Leafing occurs.
5. There is occurrence. There are occurrences. I occur, from
time to time, now in this way now in that, amidst other occurrences. There is
leafing for me and me-ing amidst the leaves.
6. Monotheism and Substance Ontology infect every system of
thought into which they enter like viruses. Old ideas are given new meanings.
7. The forces of Order as we know them come from this, that
it is assumed the highest value is to partake most in the One which is Unity.
All must answer to a number of simple principles. Thus is born coherence and consistency. To co-here,
to hold together. To be con-sistent,
to stand-forth-together.
8. Desire is the drive to differentiate, to incohere. It sets-out, it tears-off, it
is ex-static in opposition to stasis. Neither desire nor life are consistent.
That which desiring-lives stands-forth-apart
and holds-apart.
9. Perhaps it always comes back to desire, desire which
gives the lie to monotheism or else itself must be given up. Even in the
mythology of the monotheist’s creator one is driven, at the most primordial
level, to ask “why?” What desire motivated creation and does not this desire
and its outcome mark the ultimate failure of monotheism? The story: Once there
was One, but the one was insufficient to itself and so made others. Or: Once
there was One which now amuses itself by pretending to be Many. We are left
with the eternal and necessary failure of any unity and singularity or with a
shadow-play farce.
10. Before the Biblical Innovation, Chaos was the first.
Look to Tiamat or the Greek Theogony.
Of this Chaos we cannot say “One”. Of it we can say “Nothing”, or “Unbounded
Many”, “Plurality free of Unity”. Indeed, the Greek Chaos from whence all came
means a chasm, a gaping abyss. But this primal Nothing is just the context and
the real first was Eros, i.e. Desire. First there was Desire, and the Desiring
Earth. First there was several and the several became many through Desire. The
Earth birthing children from desire. Eros – the will to multiplicity.
11.The Ancient Greek religion, indeed all true polytheism,
are Religions of Remainders. Monotheism must privilege the One, the Origin, the
Unity, the End. For the Religion of Remainders, however, priority is always
shifting, unstable and fragmentary as the Many continue to overflow. Zeus is a
third generation patricide. Half of the gods are illegitimate and most share no
clear family connection. Here is a religion of Bastards and Late-Comers. Here
is only the illusion of hierarchy and the breakdown of genealogy. Before the
Biblical Innovation or Parmenides’ Speculation there was no “One and All” but
rather “…one and one and one and one…”
12. The Dilettante as the Chosen of Being:
We must be one, we are told. The truth of our existence must approach the
ultimate truth, the unity, of Reality. We are bombarded with both an is and an ought. We are an “I”, we must have a meaning, dedicate to a
purpose. We must discover that one meaning which was already there. Our True
Will.
Look at me, this knot of vectors.
The strands that weave this web produce no one work. My vectors produce no
single straight outcome. Amidst the many me-ings there is no “I”.
The truth of the self is a polytheism
of identity. I walk many ways sacred to the thousand and one gods. To the
poly-vocal tone of my prayers a crowd replies in dissension.
Dissension is the mark of being and
contradiction the signature of truth.
I am the dilettante. Foster family
of multiple purposes, each unweaving the previous or pre-empting the next. I am
the dilettante, blessing the verdant overflowing of life with the watchword
“Flourish”. I will not prune the jungle-garden of myself nor limit the
spreading rolling wave of multiplying being.
13. Change.
The question of what change is and how it is to be understood, has haunted the
history of thought. The answers, our enemies, arose from the problem of change
and, indeed, derive their importance from it. Substance, Monotheism, both are
born from the confrontation with change and a terror in the face of it.
14. Witness
Aristotle, father of Substance and Monotheism, insisting that change requires
unchanging substance as a substrate and all motion requires the impetus of one
unmoved mover.
15. But
Aristotle saw another possibility as well, and laid the foundation for a path
we have not taken. For he made change more basic than time.
16.
Aristotle, in the book which founded western physics, announces that time is
but a measurement of change. Time, which was to become an inescapable tyrant,
was beholden to and dependent upon alteration. Time, which from Newton and
Galileo on was to be the medium along with Space for all Being, was for
Aristotle an effect of beings. Even Einstein didn’t go as far, suggesting only
that the medium is altered by its contents.
17. If time
is a measurement of change it is not One, i.e. itself unified, unless change is
unified by principles first. Here, of course, Aristotle fails by turning to
Substance to ground change. But what occurs when we recognize change without
Substance or universal principle? Without our fantasies and fear born
conjectures?
18. The view
of time as a measurement of change remained throughout much of the medieval
period but always as bastardized to some one unifying unchanging, and thus
timeless, force. Thus Monotheism and Substance.
19. Change
without Substance, without Principle, without Origin, is Event.
20. The
Plurality that is Being breeds through correlation. Individual events, unique
and incomparable, coalesce through whims of their own. They coalesce as new
events, new singulars after previous singulars as new particular unities. Far
from connections, each new correlation is a multiplication of difference and a
dispersal. When you and I come together there is you-ing, I-ing and now us-ing.
One and one and one and one…
21. The
realization of plurality ends the rule of reason. Each event is unique,
unprecedented, and uncaused. Each overflowing which is a being arises of
itself, or rather from nothing. Self-moved, or rather simply moving, there is
no cause or reason. All is utterly contingent, utterly sufficient, utterly
fragile. With each occurrence time begins for the first time.
22. Desire
is an event’s drive to become another event. All events are change. Thus desire
is the being of event. But here our language fails, there are only desires and
events, no “Desire” or “Event” generally. Here, this, now is the eventing, the
particular unique eventing of a failed discussion of the illusory generals
“Event” and “Desire”. These generals only appear and exist in this particular,
and this one, and this one…
23. Elements of Chaos Magic, and especially
the sigilization of desire, represent striking breaks with, and escapes from,
the traditional dominance of Substance and Monotheism. What was magic and
mysticism before this? A desire for unity. A desire for the Whole, to be the
Whole, to conquer the Whole. Magic was about the unity of the self, the secret
heart of the self, and the method of making this self more and more God. To
know God, unite with God, become God.
But there is no God as there is no
Self. There are only gods and selves, the endless happening of the many. But
this is what Sigilization leads us to, for the manifestation of desire has
everything to do with the explosive cataclysmic transformation of the self.
Sigilization takes a desire found in
words, born of a desire foreign to words, and translates it out of words by
returning it back to the pre-linguistic. Sigilization transforms desire, it
does not simply achieve or manifest desire. This is because all desire is
ultimately desire-to-change. Sigilization destroys the self by exploding and
multiply desire.
This is why it is important to
recall Siglization, as born in Chaos Magic, was derived from Freudian
psychoanalysis. The Ego, in Freud, is the illusion arising from the war between
two Others: the Unconscious which, if it isn’t perhaps without language at
least speaks a language other than our own, and the force of Social Control
found within the symbolic structure of our language and social context. The war
between the impossible “I” which I will never know, i.e. the unconscious, and
the Social Master I internalize as the Ideal-I and which I can never satisfy,
i.e. the Super-Ego, is the everyday self of the Ego. It is an escape from this
that Sigilization offers by sacrificing the “I” to the Unconscious, and the
Super-Ego along with it.
24. Chaos Magic was born from the Thelemic
sacrifice of all belief systems to the True Will. But what is this “True Will”
and must it not be born from Substance and Monotheism? Despite appearances,
this is in fact not necessarily the case.
The “True Will”, we might say by way
of preliminary formulation, is an effect of the totality of the universe’s
causes and effects. The orbit of the star is determined by the gravitational
warping of space-time by every object with mass in the universe, it is the
complex web of every effect woven into all the others. In this way the movement
of the star is the movement of the totality and the freedom of the star rests
in its recognizing itself as the manifestation of the Whole.
But this is an analogy, a story, a
mythos. It serves understanding by way of illustration but it is not itself
truth. This is clear when we recognize that Totality and Whole are images and
not experiences, hypothesis unsupported by life.
What becomes of our myth when we
restructure it in conformity with life? It is necessary first to state the
obvious. In neither the conception of True Will as total universal effect nor
our renovated conception will there be anything at all like a “personal
individual will” which can be thought in terms of choice or power. In our first
analogy all Will will have the full power of the universe and, as the essence
of my nature as an expression of the universal totality, there is nothing “I”
can do to choose or change my Will.
In moving to our new understanding
let us first recall that Nuit is limitless, the circle without circumference,
and Hadit is everywhere and nowhere, the indiscernible center of a limitless
circle. The True Will, as the concentration of Nuit’s force at the point of
Hadit, has something inescapably indeterminate about it. Indeed the
limitlessness of Nuit and locationlessness of Hadit perfectly capture the
lessons from life we are attempting to depict.
25. The Thelemic Derivation of Principles:
1. Events rather than subjects or
objects.
2. Events tell us nothing of
supposed unity or substance.
3. It is from events, their
ever-shifting partial relations, that time arises as a generalization and
illusion. Time-ing is one event amidst others.
4. The circle is defined by the center
and the center by the circumference. The indeterminacy of one reveals the
indeterminacy of the other. Nuit’s limitlessness is Hadit’s locationalessness.
The determination of one, shifting and momentary in and as an event, is the
determination of the other, i.e. an event determines space as well as time.
Indeed, as Aristotle suggests, time is a measure of change and space a measure
of time.
5. The True Will, Horus, is the play of
Limitless Nuit and Locationless Hadit. But the relation must be reversed. The
Event, Horus, projects the play of Limit and Location.
6. True Will is Eventing without
illusion of substance or unity. As there is no True Self, but rather event and
event and event… There is no personal True Will. To surrender to this event now
is to be one with True Will and one with this momentary particular Universe projected
incompletely by this event.
7. Each event is a partial whole, an
incomplete indeterminate whole, the suggestion of an impossible whole. There is
no final Whole.
26. The Toltec Formulation:
1. The Toltec system as expounded by
Don Juan Matus or Carlos Castaneda divides Reality in two, there is the Tonal
and the Nagual.
1.1 The Tonal is the coherent world of
everyday experience and the Nagual is the indescribable mystery that lies
beyond it.
2. The Toltec system is an Idealism
similar to Berkley or Husserl. In other words, in the Toltec system all that is
real is perception, i.e. experience of feeling. In other words, the only things
that exist are experiences of perception and thought.
2.1 The Nagual is the limitless sea of
experience, the unthinkable collection of every possible perception.
2.2 The Tonal is what occurs when
various perceptions draw together into a unity.
2.21 This unification of perceptions is
called Life and its point of unity is called the Bubble of Perception or Center
of Attention. The appearance of this unity conceals the Nagual.
2.22 In other words, the coherent world
of everyday consciousness is a limited unification of an endless multiplicity
of all possible perception.
2.23 Reason is the pattern that arises
from the chance unification of perceptions. It relies upon cause and effect,
stability, similarity, objecthood and ego while in fact these are illusory
constructions of a chance unity of previously disconnected perceptions.
3. The unity of perception that is life
can change or dissolve entirely. When the unity of perceptions that is one’s
life dissolves entirely we call this death. When changes in the unity, or
dissolution and reassembly, occur one has experienced the Sorcery of the
Toltec. Sorcery consists in changes to the unity of perception.
3.1 The world only is the unity of
perception so changes to this unity are changes to the world, including body,
self and others.
3.2 One experiences the Nagual when one
dissolves then re-unifies the collection of perceptions.
4. In an ultimate sense, from the
perspective of the Nagual, there is no cause, structure or law for the
unification, change or dissolution of unities of perceptions.
4.1 Unification, dissolution, and
change to unities is an Event in our sense i.e. without grounding, cause or
justification beyond itself.
4.2 This is all the more the case
insofar as time and space, the necessary presuppositions of all cause and
coherence, arise from within unifications of perceptions and do not exist
independent of them.
4.21 There is no time or space in the
Nagual as there is no self, world or object.
4.3 However, such changes in the unity
of perceptions are approached from within the Tonal in terms of the logic and
patterns arising from the chance connections found within a unity of
perceptions.
4.31 These patterns appear in terms of
Will, Choices, Actions and Sorcerous Practices. Thus, from within the Tonal,
one can seemingly learn to unify, dissolve and alter one’s unity of perceptions
but in actuality all events are uncaused and the Will is an effect and not a
cause.
5. The concept of Unity implies a force
that unifies or maintains unity. In actuality there is no such force so that
there is actually no real unity. There is the occurrence, as it were, of intersection
but no ground for this seeming connection.
5.1 In other words, the unity of
perceptions is only a seeming unity. Within the Nagual, which is Truth, there
is no such unity.
6. The “Experience of the Nagual”
always arises from the reunification of perceptions following a dissolution. As
such, this experience of the utterly mysterious is structured nonetheless
according to a Tonal.
6.1 When so structured the Nagual
appears, for example, as the energy emanations or bands of a massive energetic
unity often called The Eagle.
6.2 From the Nagual, however, there is
no such unity, no One called the Eagle, and no emanation. There is only the
unthinkable multiplicity of events.
7. Insofar as the base level of reality
is the event of perception, dreams and hallucinations are as real as everyday
life.
7.1 Dreams are a repeated shifting of
the center of attention that structures the unity of perception. Dreams,
therefore, provide access to other ways perception can be unified, i.e. other
lives and worlds.
7.2 Mastery of dreaming allows one to
act from dreams upon everyday reality.
7.21 This is so insofar as changes to
the unity achieved in dream can remain upon waking.
7.22 This means changes to dream worlds
can cause changes to waking worlds.
27. The Sufi
teach that Allah is constantly recreating itself every second. Descartes taught
that the same amount of power needed to make something is needed to maintain
that thing in existence. It is the same, then, to think of the universe as
constantly preserved in existence or constantly recreated from one moment in
time to the next. Nietzsche once asked whether we could tell the difference
between possessing one soul or being the passage through which a river of
countless souls flowed one after another seamlessly. What we take for being the
Same may just as well by impossible Multiplicity and the endlessness of events.
28. Gurdjieff, Autonomy, and the Occult
Phenomenological Method
1. Our investigation suggests that
Selfhood is an event occurring amidst others and that it is an effect or
corollary of various occurring events. Most importantly it is multiple,
unstable, and groundless. There is no “I” over time, only different and often
disconnected I-ings.
2. The mystic Gurdjieff makes a very
similar point, claiming that a person has (at least) four personalities.
3. Modeled on the work of Plato and
Aristotle, the influence of which gave rise to Neo-Platonism and its offsprings
Qabbalah and Sufism, Gurdjieff alters various tripartite theories of the self.
These models claim the self is: “Emotion, Sensation, and Thought” or “Heart,
Body, and Mind”. To these, Gurdjieff sometimes adds “instinct and reflex” thus
producing “Emotion, Sensation-Instinctive-Response, and Mentation-Thought”. The
fourth personality is the totality and unity of these three.
4. It would seem this prioritizing of
totality and unity would be an anathema to what we have claimed concerning
multiplicity without unity. For several reasons, however, all is not here as it
seems.
5. Note that from the start Gurdjieff
insists that each of these are to be considered individual independent
personalities. They are not, as they were in Plato and Aristotle, parts or
components of the self. Here we have the rule of one and one and one and one…
In order to stress this let us look closely at the concept of freedom.
6. Gurdjieff stresses that each of the
first three personalities are merely the outcome of mechanical forces. They are
“only the result of external effect, Man is a transforming machine, a kind of
transmitting station of forces.” This is
as true for thought as for physical reflex.
7. In general, then, the several selves
are nothing but machines. The automatons swarm about the earth. But what,
really, does this mean? It means that each personality is an event that has no
reflexive power over itself. Events are not caused and so are not self-caused.
Events are their own law, or rather are utterly lawless, but they do not give
any law to themselves. Gurdjieff claims that each personality as an event is
“done” but cannot “do” anything independently itself.
8. What, then, is the key to autonomy
and freedom? How does one come to “do” anything? The answer rests in the proper
formation of the three personalities into the fourth, or totality. Again that
damnable word “totality”! How the prejudice of monotheism haunts all our steps!
But to escape this prejudice in Gurdjieff we must look at the content of the
actual practices whereby one escapes the automaton.
9. The practices of Gurdjieff consist
primarily in the very careful observation and separation of each of the
separate personalities. One might, for example, pay attention to the physical
sensation in one finger while counting a tempo with another finger while
feeling an emotion one connects to a third finger. The key is to do all three
at once in order to discover and reinforce that the self, and its attention, is
not one but rather three. One can be sensation, emotion and thought each at the
same time with each remaining entirely separate. Other practices involve
similar divisions, for example paying complete and equal attention to one’s
breathing and an external object at the same time. Again, the focus is on
clarifying that the attention of the self is several and not one.
10. These practices serve to show that the
infamous “totality” of the fourth personality is a division, an insistent
multiplicity, and not a unity or totality. We can strengthen this point by
demonstrating how this makes freedom possible within Gurdjieff’s system.
11. It seems that much of the automation
of the personalities derives from their interconnection. Smell triggers a thought
that triggers a memory that triggers an emotion that triggers a bodily action
and so on. Since we can’t control what we smell we find nothing of this chain,
so long as it remains intact, is really under the control of any one of the
personalities. Each personality must ultimately be motivated to respond and the
motive always derives from something outside of itself. Gurdjieff’s practices
serve to break these chains of causation. A multiple self can smell without
feeling and feel without acting and so on.
12. The key here is that there is no
magical extra power that grants one control over the personalities. They are
not governed by a fourth. The key to freedom which Gurdjieff calls Will is just
the disconnection of the different personalities and their interplay such that
one can cancel another (for example an imagined outcome can quell a fit of
rage). Freedom, Will and Totality are actually, then, just the embrace of the
multiple and disjunctive events which are various self-ings.
13. These musings lead us to propose
the following occult practice: The Occult Phenomenological Method or O.P.M.
14. The
O.P.M.
1. “To all impressions thus. Let them
not overcome thee; yet let them breed within thee. The least of the
impressions, come to perfection, is Pan.” Aleister Crowley The Book of Lies
2. Any impression, any event, is the
birth of a new universe and the explosion into being of a new you.
3. You are multiple and Gurdjieff’s
four personalities are just a guide for the investigation of the thousand and
one personalities.
4. Take a moment, this moment now, and
pay absolute attention. Note with care the Events out of which this moment, and
the you you are in this moment, are crafted.
5. Is there an emotion? What sound
assaults your ear and what emotion and thought and reaction accompanies this
noise? What do you feel in your body? What colors are coloring before your eyes
and what do they mean to you? Observe as many such events as you can.
6. Having noted each of these events
note their complexity, note how there is no color without memory, thought and
emotional response. Note how the feel of your body gives rise to non-bodily
events. Note how each thing happening around you carries with it the “you” who
notes it. Pure seeing, thinking, hearing, feeling are all abstractions and no
one event is a pure one.
7. In this we go beyond Gurdjieff’s
illusion of four pure selves. The many-more-multiple-self is not thought and
emotion but the inexpressible complexity of even one event in which we fancy we
find these woven strands.
8. Note the tensions between these
events and the you which yous in each event. Concentrate on the multiple yous
you find in one moment in the form of the many events. Focus on their
contradictions, their failures to blend, their battles.
9. This practice, brought to
perfection, leads to the multiple experience of the multiple-self without
center, unity or totality.
29. Somewhere Thebes is born.
A
hand scatters serpent’s teeth,
the seeds disgorge their gory
product,
and clash of battle commences.
Kadmus
calls,
Chaos
calls.
Ompehda
Balatah!
Somewhere
for someone
illusion
sets. A serpent stirs
and
scenes of wonder
scatter as stary sky.
Kadmus calls,
Chaos calls.
Ompehda Balatah!
Somehow shackles break,
this is the law of events.
No shadows last forever,
always lies languish.
Kadmus calls,
Kadmus falls,
Chaos is born.
Ompehda Balatah.
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| Cadmus Sowing the Dragon's Teeth, by Maxfield Parrish, 1908 |
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