Paul, I definitely agree with your observation that much of Magick is brooded over by dark personalities. There is indeed a certain affinity between the two, though close inspection of wetsern esoterica reveals its true beauty and adoration of Nature and the Absolute. Many seem to miss this and get stuck in dark grimoires and the trappings of false will.

I came to magick via ecology, psychedelic shamanism, and communal trance experiences (i.e. Grateful Dead shows and raves). These experiences combined with a deep abiding love of nature have propelled me into a very positive magickal relationship with my world. Magick to me is the means for finding & following the trail of breadcrumbs back to the Soul.

Hi Paul

I too agree with you about unhealthy fascination of many magicians toward "the dark side". On the other side, I'm convinced that any manifestation from "the outside", to use a convenient name for anything which is not part of our everyday experience, manifests frequently as something disturbing, weird, in other words "dark". For instance, the manifestation of an alien superior intelligence would look much more like Lovecraft than to Vinge(and this, *even* if this Intelligence appears eventually to be benevolent) A.C. Clarke understood this in his "Childhood's end", by giving to higher intelligence the mask of the Devil. But that does not mean that we should run toward everything "dark", far from it (on the contrary, I think these feelings are negative and that it would be best to minimize them: banishing! banishing!)
Now, to come back to Marik's article, I'm not convinced. I really love many Marik's writings, especially his writings about sigils and servitors, but I respectfully think he is here on a wrong road.

Magicians explained everything by electricity and magnetism in the XIX century; in the beginning of the XX, it was 4th dimension. Right now, it's quantum physics and chaos theory. I'm unconvinced by any "paranormal" explanation of magick. It seems to me that Magick acts as an extremely powerful applied psychology. I think there are plenty of ways to explain magick "rationally" without making it loosing its value or its appeal. Magick would gain a lot by finding its references in biology, cybernetics, neurosciences and psychology rather than in quantum physics, which is too far from our level of existence and action.

Paul,

I agree with you! That's why I say that higher intelligence "appears", "looks like" as something dark, that it is a "mask". I speak less about a "real" higher intelligence, but more about the way we may perceive it, and the destruction which might occur in our psyche when we meet it inside our own brain. In the same way a psychedelic experience may appear first as a "freak out", (remember some of the terrific John Lilly's trips!), then becomes a complete bliss if one works on it. In other words, I think the "dark demons" of magick are similar to the "wrathful deities" of tibetan buddhists, which simultaneously mask and open the door to the Clear Light (higher intelligence).

Bye! Happy to "re-interact" with you after all these years!

Remi

Remi, I tend to agree with you that magick can be regarded as a powerful applied psychology, but psychology alone fails to explain how personal Will can manifest change in the phenomenal world. It's one thing to change yourself internally, but quite another to affect change nonlocally.

Its easy to see how matter can influence mind, easily illustrated by ingesting a handful of psilocybes. I think what Marik is trying to do is understand the reverse path - how mind can influence matter, but not just the matter of our our own physiology...We want to know how mind can influence the world around us. It's obvious that it doesn't happen in the realm of gross mechanics, so it must be in the subtler levels of the brain. If mind is to a large degree an epiphenomenon of the electromagnetic chemistry of 100 million neurons, and if vesicles of neurotransmitters and the width of synaptic gaps is on the order of less than 10nm, then it is highly likely that the substrate of consciousness lies in the quantum realm underlying these events. In a sense, the quantum substrate of the cortex could be regarded as the interface between mind & brain.

The neat thing is that once we're in the quantum realm, everything becomes an infinitely dense soup of probability. There is no real distinction between one "thing" and another.

The quantum model of magick then looks at ways the mind can manipulate and influence probability fields by using this mind-matter interface. The brain is like a lens through which consciousness can focus on the quantum web of probability and attempt to influence its geography.

I tend to imagine the brain as hardware that can access the hologram of Creation. Consciousness is the operating system and magick is a software routine for metaprogramming, to borrow from Lilly.

Just some rambling thoughts...Thanks for the talking points. :)