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(c) Ian Bell 1995,2003
Background image by MC Esher.
[ Under Construction ]
A tenet of Chaos Magick is that mental activity can influence reality by "paranormal" means. The Power of Magickal Will derives from the confidence of the magickian. The *knowing* of the magickian, achieved through a concious control of certainty, that the result will be achieved renders the desired outcome inevitable, or at least significantly more likely.
A corrolary of control of belief is the manifestation of sincerity. Minimisation of autonomic cues which would otherwise hinder the maintenance of glamours confers the edge in acts of deception. Some argue that such constitues the primary delopmental drive of intelligence.
Choas technique may be premised on concious control of certainity. The maintenance of knowledge of omnipotence is hard if not impossible to sustain when confronted with failure. One ruse adopted by NewAge and Christian paradigms is to assign infallibilty to an integrity-retaining external entity, attributing failure to an imperfect link.
Choas technique may be premised on concious control of certainity. The superior athelete, Bruce Lee writes, " Fed by previous successes and having completetly rationalised previous failure, ... feels himself a Triton among minnows."
The mental reductionist position on entities holds that they have no
"external" existance and exist solely "in the mind".
competing for the resources of the ego.
The traditional shamanic paradigm, on the other hand, holds that internally
experienced external entities are the extensions into our "dimension"
of autonomous beings, many of dubious character, that, while existing
independently of us, desire our attentiveness if not our reverence.
One can readily hypothesise alternate conciousnesses lurking in the fringes of the mind planning to overthrow the dominant conciousness. These are internal demons. The documentation on scizophreneia provides compelling evidence for the existance of semi-autonomous mental processes competing for the resources of the mind. The ego is simply the dominant demon.
A conciousness is merely a pattern of information with the capacity
for productive self adjustment. It requires a strata in which to
manifest its patterns. Any process of sufficient complexity evolving
in a sufficiently extensive strata has the potential to become a
conciousness, although Penrose argues that quantum physics may be necessary.
The ego is a conciousness that has maintained or gained a degree of
control of the resource allocation for the system in which it operates. Mental
preocesses are allocated enough computing resources to complete the job
and may also be granted partial contol of external resources (limbs,
facial expression, respiration) in order to accomplish a task.
That mental activity can produce a process capable of
analysing its own situation and formulating strategums to improove its
degree of control over its environment is undeniable, given that the ego
is precisely such.
One can readily hypothesise lurking in the
fringes of the mind p
Internal demons are semi-autonomous mental processes, alternate conciousnesses, competing for the resources of the mind. The ego is the dominant demon. It is hard to find fault with the viability of this hypothesis. Thos planning to overthrow the dominant conciousness are internal demons. The documentation on scizophreneia provides compelling evidence for their existance.
Mental demons maintain their existance even when we are not aware of them.
They can think without our being aware of their thoughts. In this sense, they exist apart from us.
Most demons are of low intelligence, having lacked realworld feedback during their development.
Some have the capacity to observe the actions of the ego, however, and
the sophistication to plan strategies for ascension.
Experience suggests that demonic conciousnesses seldom attempt a
fully fledged coup. The responsibility for and ability to
maintan the survival of the organism is a massively demanding
undertaking that many demons may lack the resources to accomplish in the long
term. Furthermore, the ego is generally well entrenched against usurption.
Accordingly, demons often operate by stealth, convincing the ego of the
desirability of lending them increasing ammounts of control. Progressive
delusion is an example of this, To achieve credability, some demons will
construct a line of pater precisely designed to appeal to the demon's
perception of the assesment criteria used by the ego. If an individual
has been raised in a particular religious tradition, for example, demons
will appear as figures from within the tradition.
Demons operate from a position of severe disadvantage in that they usually,
but by no means always, have little of genuine benefit to offer.
Consequently demons will usually promise more than they deliver. A demon
may have greater access to a desirable mental resource such as an
artistoc talent but the correct responce to this situation is to bypass
the demon and seize the talent. Demons may offer feelings of power or
confidence, often as corollaries to the mindset offered by the
demon, but these are usually illusory.
A more sopisticated demonic tactic is the immediate provision of
access to resources whose value is implied by their purported
content. Blueprints for a technologically advanced item (in reality
merely a complex pattern of obstruce symbols) is a favourite for egos
interested in technology, for example. Maps to hidden wealth (material
or spiritual). Information purportedly ripe for future analysis.
The "many voices" model of conciousness holds that the ego is
continually taking a sort of "weighted majority vote" from the
computations of many, often mutually contradicting , processes. Viewed
as the evolutionary selection agent acting on a lattice of competing
thought generators, the ego becomes (from the point of view of a mental
subroutine vieing for resources) 'that which must be convinced'
The only serious argument leveled against the reductionist position in defence of the shamanic position is that of asserted experiential. The experience of demonic physical presence is sometimes extraordinarily convincing. However, this is not surprising since the demon is manifesting within the strata which retains the internal model of external reality without incurring the limitation of having to produce results consistent with or derived from reality. At the battlefront of conciousness, senstaions of fundamantal certainty can be falsely triggered as easily as paranoia or rapture.
Psychaedelics tend to subvert, divert, and disable the ego's selection and evaluation criteria. Thoughts that would normally be dismissed or relegated to the fringes of conciousness are given credence, sometimes resulting in increasingly implausible strings of reasoning often being accepted as critically important and profound in content. Demons can and do take full advantage of this.
The relegation of control by trance dancers to that which is experienced as possession by a third party cannot convincingly be explained as mere delegation to the cerebellum of routine or learnt behavioural sequences. Though such autonomous mechanisms undoubtedly exist [ In martial art training specific reactions are engrained by repetition to the point where they do not need to be conciously envoked when their trigger condition arises ] The sensation of possession is of wholy different type. With reflex actions, the concious mind is not forewarned of the action and can only observe the consequences. In posession, actions are telegraphed to the ego significantly prior to their execution, even if the ego is effectively powerless to prevent them. Addiction can be considered a demon in this regard.
Their degree of manifestation relates to the nature of our perecptions. The religious paradigms hold that there are external entities which cannot reveal their existance for fear of revealing the existance of the Good as a corollary to the reality of their own manifestation. For an evil force to recognisably manifest itself in reality would confirm the existance of alternate realities. Such a revelation would provoke investigation into these realities, which is precisely that which Evil might seek to prevent. In some traditions, Evil is seen as seeking to limit our "spiritual" awareness as much as possible.
[ Under Construction ]
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(c) Ian Bell 1995,2003
Background image by MC Esher.