(Note: This was actually written for another forum a short while ago, but I thought folks hereabouts might find it of interest)
Recently, I've been experimenting with chaos magics, and while I've had some success, I've never really felt comfortable with the whole fire & forget paradigm. It's just not my style.
I'm a programmer. I've been one for almost a decade, so it's shaped a lot of my thinking. And it occured to me, fairly recently, that a lot of what sigil-slingers do can be described in computer terms.
Got a servitor that protects you from outside attack? That's a firewall, running as a background process (or a TSR program, for you DOS types). Centering and purification rites could be filesystem checks and virus scans. And connections to other people can (and have been) treated as network links.
So I've been working on a specific visualization. I call it my "core chamber". A dark room, lit only by a shining white disc, floating in the center at about waist-height. This disc is my "head drive". By placing my "hands" on it, and triggering a specific image as a password (and no, I'm not telling you what it is  ) I can open up a terminal, allowing me to create, compile, and run various System Tools, including a filesystem checker and a firewall.
(I ran the filesystem checker a while ago. It may have been the novelty of it, but I immediately felt better. I also tried running a remote session, using a strong emotional connection with the woman I love...and it worked there, too.)
It's all a bit weird, I admit. Especially when I read that a German adept, Frater U.'.D.'., wrote the following, many years ago:
The application of the as yet evolving information model has led to the discipline I have termed Cybermagic (from "cybernetics" or the "science of control systems"). Contrary to the other models described above, Cybermagic does not rely on magical trance to achieve its effects...The desired information is then called up and transmitted quite similarly to a copy command on an MS-DOS computer. The copy command analogy holds good insofar as the information (not having mass) is not actually "lost" in the process (as energy would be) but rather is duplicated.
Oddly, this is not unlike the theories of David Herbert & Jack Sarfatti, who treat information/consciousness as the "hidden variable" of quantum physics, a concept I was first introduced to in the works of Robert Anton Wilson, who seems to use them as a starting point for what he calls "hedonic engineering". But I can't say I entirely accept his approach.
Primarily, while Wilson (and Timothy Leary) agrees that the mind can be treated like a computer, he assumes that any modification to it requires "hacking" into it's cognitive structure, often accompanied by chemical stimuli. However, in my approach, I feel that I shouldn't _have_ to break in. It's my mind...I have root access. *grin*
Any comments? |
