tek-knowledgry

It's limiting to assume magick must enchant in apocryphal aleph bets and wear the masks of dead gods in order to be "magick". Magick describes an evolving set of technologies that 1) allow access to and provide context for transcendent and liminal states of awareness, 2) function to bring the individual into some greater degree of connection and alignment with the macrocosm, and 3) enable the translation of imagination and will into material change. I'm on the side of Grant Morrison and Doug Rushkoff: magick is everywhere and we're all magicians. We just need to take responsibility for that power and manifest the world that's most in line with the collective will and the balance of nature.

The term "magick" itself is encumbered with associations and connotations, perhaps too weighty for it's own good. Labels are ultimately misleading and confining so it's probably best to simply let go of them. The language of magick needs a complete upgrade, anyway. Experience fuels insight. Insight breeds action. Action begets experience. This may be all we need to know about living. The esoteric toolkit is a set of technologies that can drill through the ego complex of identity to reach the core depths of the self. Magick may hint at demonic powers but the true strength is in self mastery. Without the steady smoothing of the stone of mind (or the sudden shattering of the mirror of self) we walk around like cattle, driven by base want and fear of the blade.

Jack Parson's realized the revolutionary value of magick. Ramsey Dukes understands this as well. True knowledge of self eschews all law and servitude. Corruption is a festering wound eating at the soul of Democracy. Laws are for sheep incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. Control fears illumination of the populace. Why do you think American education is so underfunded?

Supposedly, the state once represented the populace, acting in accord with the will of the people. If this was ever true, it's not anymore. In the modern era, power is underwritten by money and it quickly came to pass that industrialists possessed far more of it than governors. So they began buying up the seats of power. Our democracy nurtured and tutored the great corporate archons who've now come of age and left the nest. There's no corporate allegiance to Mother America. We're simply a marketplace with too many laws. But we've got a kick-ass military which can be readily employed to defend global market interests and force the adoption of "democracy", a term that has somehow become interchangable with "capitalism".

But while the corporate barons grab seats of power to push around other seats of power, the collective will is wiring up into the global mind, sharing it's dreams and fears and realizations and technologies. And it's moving far more quickly than the reptilian cunning of the archons. The tools that serve information seem overwhelmingly in support of it's grand ambition to be free. Free information allows technology to iterate on itself faster and faster. Restrictions are seen as maladaptions and quickly bypassed. As memes applied genetic selection to ideas, so too must this evolutionary trait affect information technologies. The backbone of cable and fiber and wireless (and the human brain) are co-evolving to serve the replication and transformation of memes. The whole apparatus of recursive information moving through distributed networks of mind and machine is a dynamic, evolving natural system fed and tended by humanity.

Control systems buckle under information overload. Bureaucracies shudder and grind to a halt if the data becomes too cumbersome or doesn't adhere to the prescribed format. The archons kept us brainwashed through the media, controlled as it was by their own CEO's. Now the media has broken free, the technology was limiting the flow of information, restrained and coerced to carry only dis-info and corporate propaganda. Reality TV is the last gasp of a failing corporate media hoping to capitalise on the ceaseless human hunger for experience.

The web is usurping media control, tearing it away from the corporate governors and putting it in the hands of everyone. Daily Kos does not tow the party line like Fox or fear the wrath of sponsors like CNN. GNN will run the articles that the Times fears will hurt circulation. And someone will always post video of riot cops kicking the crap out of non-violent protestors.

The light of truth runs through fiber optics. Human TV broadcasts 24-7. Culture feeds on novelty and experience, connection and community. The water in our cells swells to the full moon along with the salty tides and the turning heavens. So much change is happening so quickly, but life just wants to keep living. Use the tools you have to experience it all, as much as possible. Then upload it to the global mind and share it with your neighbors on the other side of our planet. We'll all find that we're far more similar than different. We might even start to realize the urgency for a collective vision of the human path into the future.

Posted by LVX23 at August 1, 2005 01:21 PM