Apophenion Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  WARNING. This book of Magic also contains a certain amount of Physics.

  Chapter 1 Apophenia - Introduction

  Chapter 2 Panpsychism - Philosophy

  Part 1. The Metaphysics of Non-Being

  Part 2. Panpsychism

  Part 3. Quantum Panpsychism and Magic

  Chapter 3 Multimind - Psychology

  Part 1. The Myth of 'Consciousness'

  Part 2. Constructing the Self

  Part 3. Dicing with the Randomaton

  Chapter 4 Neopantheism - DIY Religion

  Part 1. Against Logos, 'The Literal Word'

  Part 2. Neo-Pantheism

  Chapter 5 Metadynamics - Practical Magic

  Part 1. Quantum Weirdness

  Part 2. Three-dimensional time

  Part 3. General Metadynamics and magic

  Part 4. On The Nature of Time

  Chapter 6 Non-Singularity - Cosmology

  Part 1. Against Singularity

  Part 2. The Hyper-Spherical Universe

  Part 3 Hyperspherical Metaphysics

  Part 4. The Map, the Journey and the Meaning

  Chapter 7 Illumination?

  Part 1. A Fifth Principle of Thermodynamics?

  Part 2. What Can Have Evolved?

  Part 3. Science Fiction Gods

  Part 4. A Panpsychic Universe?

  Chapter 8 An Invocation of Apophenia

  Part 1. Introduction

  Part 2. General Observations

  Part 3. The General Form of the Invocation

  The Apophenia Invocation

  A Table of Dualities

  A Table of Trialities

  A Table of Quadrads

  A Table of Pentads

  Appendix I Three-dimensional time and quantum geometry

  Part 1. The Prologue to a Quantum Geometry

  Part 2. Fundamental particles in eight dimensions

  Part 3. Summary.

  Appendix II Hypersphere from Radius Excess

  Appendix III The Hyperspherical Universe

  Appendix IV The Shape of the Universe

  Appendix V Apophenia's Birthday

  Part 1. Theosynthesis and syncretism.

  Part 2. A Surprise Birthday

  Epilogue

  Notes, References, and Bibliography

  * * *

  The Apophenion

  A Chaos Magic Paradigm

  By Peter J Carroll

  "Stokastikos"0

  Past Grandmaster of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros.1

  Chancellor of Arcanorium College.2

  Copyright © 2008 Mandrake & Peter J Carroll

  First edition 08/08/08

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form by any means electronic or mechanical, including xerography, photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage system without permission in writing from the publishers.

  * * *

  Invoking Sigil of Apophenia. By the authors hand, - after the method of Ausin Osman Spare.

  * * *

  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to thank the Muse in all her guises.

  Ingrid Glaw for her excellent interpretations of the chapter themes which appear in her illustrations; and David Gough for so generously allowing us to use an image of his painting 'Gods and Monsters' for the cover. These artists can be contacted at:

  http://iggygirl.deviantart.com

  http://www.davidgoughart.com

  The Maybelogic Academy (www.maybelogic.org)and my Psychonaut and Independence crews who sailed the ether with me online, they inspired me to write again. Arcanorium College (www.arcanoriumcollege.com) my thanks to staff and members, particularly 8 Wasps and Res, who read the drafts, revised my idiosyncratic spellings and drew my attention to areas requiring clarification. Rarely since the Bible has a book had so many people arguing about its contents.

  A number of world class physicists who replied to enquiries about the hypotheses in this book during their construction. Most of them receive a daily avalanche of nut mail; nevertheless some gave helpful criticism or further references to chase up. Some expressed concern at the high degree of symmetry in the hypothesis, most thought it needed more maths to fully justify it, but none could see any obvious holes in it despite that it appeared a bit of a longshot. In return for their kindness I shall not cast a shadow over anyone's professional eminence by mentioning any names.

  Mogg Morgan of Mandrake for his editorial advice.

  * * *

  WARNING.

  This book of Magic also contains a certain amount of Physics.

  "A Witch is a Rebel in Physics"

  Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia Theomagica, 1650.

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  Apophenia

  - Introduction

  Physics means no more than a set of ideas about how the world works; everybody has some sort of theory of physics, based on anything from simple experience and intuition to sophisticated experiment and hypothesis.

  As magic works, at least occasionally, it must form part of any complete theory of how the world works.

  I regard physics as that subset of magic that works fairly reliably. I regard magic, in the traditional sense, as a kind of physics that we strive to understand and render more reliable. So it all comes down to the same thing, a quest to understand and manipulate the world with a self-consistent and coherent theory.

  Magic implies an extension of 'ordinary' physics which should tell us more about how the universe works and perhaps suggest how we can refine the theory and practise of magic itself.

  As the third millennium begins, most of the certainties that have guided thought for the previous two millennia now begin to look very questionable. A revolution started to germinate in the 20th century with the advent of Relativity and Quantum physics and the birth of a completely new esoteric theory, Chaoism.

  This book advances the thesis that all three of those new fields now converge to smash most of the assumptions that have guided humanity for centuries.

  Welcome to the paradigm crash of the third millennium.

  Magic and Science stand poised to overturn just about everything we believed about life, reality mind, consciousness, religion, causality, and the universe. If the word 'Magic' sounds too outrageous, then substitute psychological and para-psychological technology instead.

  Of course for the 93% of humanity that eschews abstract thought, the paradigm shift will come slowly, as the new insights filter down from those Illuminati who use them to practical effect.

  Each of the following chapters of this book begins with the assassination of an idea that has held for decades, centuries or millennia. Each chapter then seeks Apophenia in an alternative to the demolished idea.

  Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don't. Feelings of revelation and ecstasis usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful, or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness.

  A talent for Apophenia frequently characterises magicians, mystics and occultists. At its best it opens up whole new fields of human endeavour, it has close associations with Pareidolia, the mistaking of pieces of rope for snakes, seeing goats, bulls, and virgins in the positions of stars and in the personalities of people, the construction of unreasonable conspiracy theories, and the theology of sky fairies. Nevertheless Pareidolia plays its part in the development of art and religion.

  By convention we tend to regard inspiration as female because of its association
with holistic right cerebral hemisphere brain activity, rather than with left hemisphere linear thought. Apophenia does not always come when we call her, sometimes she rejects our seductions and entreaties, sometimes she calls when we're out, (of our heads), sometimes not. Sometimes her mad sister Pareidolia comes instead.

  Chaoism seeks to explore the inner riches and to expand the Inner Mythos, the pantheon of powers within. For decades I pursued the mythos of Ouranos, the magician identity that lay beyond the soap -opera of the seven classical motivations of sex-death, fear-desire, love-war, and ego. Lately I have come to realise that I love Apophenia, the female aspect of the Ouranian current, above all else.

  (Uranus-Ouranos lies outside of the classical seven planets and their fancifully attributed motivations, and thus provides a useful counterpoint to the 'normal' solar identity or ego).

  I have a modest taste in deities. I reject the hyper-inflated ego model of any monotheistic deity with a big 'D'.

  Some people believe that someone created a universe with a volume of at least a trillion-trillion cubic light years, containing at least a billion stars for every human, set in a radiation blasted vacuum. They furthermore believe that this 'person' gets either pleased or angry with them personally if they eat pork on a Friday, or masturbate on a Sunday, or massacre the enemies of the faith on a Wednesday, or whatever their current infallible theology dictates. This sounds like serious mental illness, a kind of megalomania by proxy.

  I prefer household gods, the ones that I can find inside my own head, and sometimes inside other people's heads as well.

  Above all I have come to love Apophenia, the goddess who showed me how to find meaning in the last place that I expected to find it, in a universe which runs on the only truly fair and equitable system, pure chance, randomness and chaos.

  I would kill for her, in fact I have attempted murder many times in her honour. See the following chapters. Being, Self, God, Causality, and Singularity; all of them get flayed upon her altar to see what illuminations and magical possibilities lie beyond.

  Stokastikos,

  Peter J Carroll. Albion Southwest. 2008.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  Panpsychism

  - Philosophy

  This chapter begins with a deconstruction and demolition of the concept of 'Being' and proceeds through an examination of Pantheism to seek an Apophenia in the paradigm of Quantum Panpsychism and its use in Magic.

  Part 1.

  The Metaphysics of Non-Being

  Metaphysics means the set of assumptions underlying the way we interpret the phenomena that we perceive. Big assumptions like the existence of mind, matter, gods, causality, and randomness all fall into this category.

  The word phenomena (or phenomenon for singular), merely denotes events that we perceive. By refraining from talking about the 'things' we perceive we avoid making too many initial assumptions, in particular we avoid the questionable concept of 'thing-ness'.

  Can we find 'The universe in a grain of sand'?

  Well perhaps, but a stone seems easier to visualise.

  Cursory examinations of simple phenomena like stones, suggest that on their own, they don't actually do anything much.

  From such simple observations we have built entirely false models of reality with languages and philosophies to match.

  A more detailed examination of a stone requires devising artificial extensions to our rather meagre sensory capabilities. For a few hundred thousand years we got used to the idea of stones not really doing anything much on their own, but in the last century or so we have come to realise that even the simplest piece of stone does a great deal. Beneath the hard apparently immobile exterior of any piece of stone lies a swirling world of high energy activity conducting itself at astonishing speeds.

  The Eagle Dragon of the Primal Chaos*

  Prometheus-Lucifer,

  Challenging the heavens

  with the fires of the Titans.

  * * *

  * Mass of Chaos, Liber Null

  * * *

  For a start, a stone actively interacts with light, selectively absorbing some frequencies and emitting others, which means that it exhibits a distinctive colour. The molecules within the stone vibrate at a rate dependant on its temperature. If they ceased to vibrate, its temperature would drop to absolute zero and it would shrink towards zero size. The electrons within the atoms that make up the molecules of the stone have very high orbital velocities, of the order of hundreds of miles or kilometres per hour, and they also undergo a complicated sort of spin as they orbit. In the nuclei of the atoms of the stone very complicated processes involving even higher energies proceed ceaselessly. The stone also interacts with the whole universe gravitationally, fractionally bending space and time around itself and responding to the spacetime curvature of bigger objects like planets and stars.

  So all in all, a stone consists of many processes. If you push it, it pushes back with its inertia, if you try to poke it, its electrons move to repel the ones in your finger.

  We cannot really ask what a stone 'is', we can only ask what it does, or what it resembles, or how we feel about it.

  We have no reason to suppose that it consists of anything other than the totality of what it does.

  However our meagre unaided sensory capabilities encourage our simpler brain programs to conceptualise a stone as having some sort of static state of 'being' because we cannot directly perceive, or easily conceive of, most of the doing going on. This misconception of 'being' leads to the erection of entirely fallacious philosophies and assumptions. These have serious practical consequences, and they have killed millions of people. (Wait a few pages to find out how).

  Popular science authors seem to delight in revealing that the atoms, which make up the world and us and the stars, consist almost entirely of empty space. They often use the analogy that an atom magnified to the size of a concert hall would have a nucleus the size of a pea in the orchestra pit, with pinhead sized electrons orbiting at the distance of the rear stalls.

  This rather depends on what you mean by 'empty space'. It seems unlikely that any such thing as empty space actually exists. Although electrons sometimes behave as dimensionless points, when they orbit the nuclei of atoms they behave like diffuse clouds spread right round their orbital paths. A stone also exhibits a certain amount of gravity, and gravity consists of a curvature in space and time. We do not normally notice the spacetime curvature of stones, but really big ones, stones the size of moons or planets, do exhibit an unmistakable curvature which causes smaller objects to fall towards them or to stick to their surfaces. This curvature extends as far as the universe extends, so in one sense, any object stretches right across the universe. The apparent limiting surface of an object arises in our perception only because of short-range electrostatic forces between electrons and because of interactions between electrons and light. Creatures that perceived only gravity would experience any object as a phenomenon that extended from its centre with gradually diminishing intensity to the limits of the universe.

  The short range 'forces' inside an atom probably also consist of a special sort of spacetime curvature, and so in a sense they completely fill it up. In other words spacetime has a structure which arises from the presence of matter within it, or conversely the curvature of spacetime appears to us as the presence of matter.

  The idea of subatomic particles having some kind if definite size makes little sense anyway. They have measurable wavelengths which can determine the size of hole they can go through, but wavelength tends to decrease as the mass of quantum particles or their energy or speed increases. Electrons in atoms can absorb or emit photons (light quanta) which appear to us as vastly 'larger' in some sense, than the electrons themselves.

  Our unaided senses tend to encourage us to model space and time as Privative phenomena, (which merely consist of the absence of events). Death for example does not exist in a positive sense, it consists merely of the absence of life activ
ity, and similarly Darkness consists merely of the absence of light quanta activity.

  However we can no longer regard space as merely the absence of stuff, and time as merely an interval between events. Spacetime has a structure defined by the presence of matter and energy, large concentrations of matter distort spacetime by bending it, and travel at very high speeds measurably deforms it.

  Thus if we want to think clearly about the universe in which we find ourselves, we should no longer regard space and time as some sort of passive stage on which objects have their 'being' and execute various actions under the influence of energy.

  On close inspection, the whole 'thingness' of objects that we conceptualise on the macroscopic (human size) scale just evaporates. No phenomenon exhibits 'being'. All phenomena consist of ongoing processes; they consist of various doings.

  About two and a half thousand years ago, the early Buddhist philosophers recognised the impermanence and the illusory nature, and hence the 'emptiness' of all phenomena except change itself. From the observation that most phenomena change if you observe them for long enough, they proceeded by induction to the idea that they all do.

  Less patient western thinkers simply assumed 'being' and then eventually, after frantic researches lasting centuries, to find out what 'things' actually 'are', they found that every phenomenon they examined underwent change. The universe itself changes with time. Stars explode or collapse eventually; worlds accrete from dust and gas and cannot persist forever.