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The following is simply a personal metaphor/model based on a number of sources that I have worked with for the past year and thought I would run it by you guys for fun to get some feedback and opinions. My primary sources of inspiration and practical work have come from Kenneth Grant's ideas about the "Necronomicon Gnosis" and later, as a result of the paradigm shifts triggered by that endeavor, I fell into the Information Model and Ramsey Dukes' "Johnstone's Paradox" and the ideas of Erik Davis.
oneiric - of or relating to or suggestive of dreams; see here for Oneiroi.
interface - a shared boundary, defined by common physical interconnection characteristics, signal characteristics, and meanings of exchanged signals.
That seems to have been agreed upon by a friend and I as a basic definition of this idea. We borrowed "oneiric" from Andrew Chumbley. Before we coined the term I had written the following in my journal:
I am of the opinion that the dream world is the interface where we can hack into the codes of what we generally call "reality" or objective space-time to set into motion everything from memes and viruses that infect other programs in the system to what are usually referred to as "paranormal phenomena".
I had been involved in Kenneth Grant-inspired dreamwork and I pulled ideas and techniques from some articles in some Starfire journals and in retrospect realised that the idea of the "oneiric interface" was talked about under a different name. In Paul Lowe's article "The Dreaming Attention" (Starfire Vol. II, No. 1) he is using, and obviously borrowed from Castaneda, the term "assemblage point" to describe what I think is the same thing. In his glossary of terms he says this:
Assemblage Point: Within the cocoon, which constitutes the energy body, exists the Assemblage Point and it's 'glow of awareness'. The location of this point determines which 'fibres' are illumined internally and in turn, which fibres with a similar resonance are illumined in the world. This interaction determines the 'model of the world' which we uphold and experience.
Within the text of the article the small section about the Assemblage Point is slightly more elaborated. In full as follows:
One central theme that is repeated in various ways is the notion that we are purely 'energetic beings' or 'perceptual beings'. The energy body takes the form of a 'Cocoon' consisting of countless 'Fibres'. Within this Cocoon is located the 'Assemblage Point'. Dependent upon it's location within the Luminosity is the 'Map of the World' (so-called reality) which we maintain. This occurs by virtue of the Assemblage Point fixating a specific set of Fibres both internally and externally; as a result they are illuminated and perceived by the 'Glow of Awareness' that exists as a numinous quality around the Assemblage Point.
In another part of the article Lowe states the purpose of toying around with the Assemblage Point:
The entire process of of formulating a consistent internal or external representation of the world, is the very process that 'fixates' the 'Assemblage Point'; our model/perception of the world is thus formulated and fixed. This Point, along with it's 'Glow of Awareness', effectively creates and maintains our model of the world. The task of the Warrior is to develop a certain level of elasticity in the movement of the Assemblage Point within our luminous cocoon - a coccon which consists of 'Energy Fibres'. As the Assemblage point is shifted, a fresh set of fibres is illuminated internally, triggering and illuminating a set of external fibres which have a similar resonance; the more shifts achieved, the more varied our worlds and perceptual realities. This effectively constitutes the initial steps, and all which follows has this intention in mind.
Curiously I recently read a book called The Lucid View by Aeolus Kephas and there is an appendix covering the idea of "the assemblage point". The whole book is about a form of paranoid awareness as a means to a more magickal form of thinking, or "the lucid view". Very much like the kind of perception I have been evoking for quite some time.
I am well aware that these ideas are nothing new but I just thought I would share my own meta-conclusions about them. I will temporarily conclude this with the following which comes from my personal journal and I think it's relevant to give a clue into what I had been doing. It was in response to a more scientifically-minded friend of mine asking me what the hell the point of all of this was. This was as clear as I could make it at the time without resorting to really bad poetry. The real point is that there is no point. Much credit is due to the ideas of Ramsey Dukes because I very obviously ripped him off. His stuff really speaks to me and another thread about him here on Barbelith inspired me to want to share my own experiences using some of his ideas.
Why a Simulation?
"'Information' is a chaos; knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity." - Hakim Bey, The Information War.
A friend said to me recently, in response to my current madness, "I don't really know what you mean by 'living in a simulated world'." I am not trying to convert anyone to anything but I will attempt to clarify what I "mean". This will not be an easy task and I will probably only succeed in making it more muddled and complicated.
In short, what I mean is that we live in a world that is nothing more than a system of coded information that is a simulation of a "higher world" populated by "beings" that are usually thought of, from our point-of-view when they seemingly interact with us, as demons, angels, god & goddesses, aliens, ghosts, etc. Whatever we interpret as "paranormal" or "supernatural" will fall into that category. The scientific community doesn't concern itself much with that aspect of it and concentrates on studying the code which has been mistakenly thought of as "particles" and tend to deny that there is anything "behind the veil" of these numbers that can only be observed as particles as long as we observe them from the point-of-view of being "entities" within this simulated world. We do not understand the spaces between the particles and particle physics continues to be baffled by the seeming anomalies they find the more they look. The one way we will begin to understand this will be when we create a full-on simulation of our own to observe,
The overly simplified version of what I am talking about is summed up in the following excerpt from an essay by Ramsey Dukes about his ideas in his book Words Made Flash. I highly recommend his books to anyone interested in this subject and the bridges between Magical thinking and Scientific thinking.
Quote:
If Science aspires to a "theory of everything", then that theory could be modelled in an information processor and it should create a virtual universe which will itself evolve life and conscious beings. If it fails to do this, it suggests the theory of everything is not complete.
Once the possibility of virtual universes as complex and complete as our own has been recognised, then it becomes harder to keep these two forms of universe apart in our minds - those made of matter and those that only seem to their inhabitants to be made of matter. It becomes easier to believe that we too must live in a virtual reality or information structure. The paradoxes revealed by high energy physics begin to sound like what you might expect if scientists in a virtual reality attempted to uncover the building blocks of their reality.
But such a universe would be Magical, in the sense that everything within it is connected by 'unseen' links. In a real, material universe the Scientist is justified in saying to the Magician "you must prove to me that the position of the planets, or the pattern of your tarot cards, has any bearing on wordly events" - for no significant causal link can be observed. In an information universe, however, the tables are turned, because randomness, orthogonality and independence are very costly in an information universe - it is now up to the Scientist to explain why every tarot shuffle should be generated by a separate set of equations which are in no way linked to the equations generating other wordly events.
Some may wonder how literally I am taking this model. That's the difficult part of this to answer or address because it is multifaceted. On one hand, when taking the anomalies in the system I have experienced first hand into account, I do take this model quite literally and my previous entries here are to be viewed in that light. Yes, we are quite literally and objectively living in a "matrix" and I think the dream world, or the "oneiric interface", is the key to transcending it just enough to catch glimpses from outside of this system and quite possibly begin to hack into it's code and to "will" anomalous events. Or as said in the movie The Matrix about the one born in the matrix who freed the first people, he could "remake the matrix as he saw fit". The dream interface is where we can communicate with these "architects" or "users". Unfortunately I think quite possibly a lot of people involved in the occult have been going about things all wrong and/or have been misinterpreting the value of these "holy guardian angels". I no longer think that communion with them is necessary as a lot of traditional ceremonial-type Magickians still think.
On the other hand, or simultaneously, this model is meant strictly as a metaphor to better understand the mechanism of our "reality". What separates the Magickal mindset from a Scientific one is that a Magickian "acts as if" this model is "real" and attempts to live accordingly to see what can be gleaned from the experience. Scientists technically, but with some unacknowledged exceptions, would not be doing this because it's a form of living in a fantasy world to give substance and meaning to a universe that no longer has substance and meaning; it's "delusion". Ironically it is substance and meaning that the scientist seems to be looking for as well but is following a different means to that end. With the creation of a computer simulation of our universe populated with artificial intelligent life that we ourselves can "jack into" and experience first hand we may once and for all be on the same ground, united. In The Matrix, when Morpheous is telling Neo about what little history of the "real world" he knows, he states "In the early 21st century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI." Why was mankind united in celebration with this event and why are we marvelling at our own magnificence? Because it will be the great reconciliation that brings meaning and purpose back to our lives when we become the creators of "life" and in turn sheds light on how we may have possibly been created by beings not much different than us. We may begin to understand why we are here at that point because we ourselves will know and understand why we have created a new world.
As you can see, in the metaphorical sense it turns itself into something quite literal and in the literal sense it comes off as something quite metaphorical and that is why it is difficult to separate them to attempt an explanation without sounding like a complete nutcase, which is fine too. Yes, I am an insane but who isn't? Show me one average normal human being. If you can then you suffer from more delusion than anyone that "acts as if" they are living in a computer simulation.
Philip K. Dick's trying to understand his experiences with the "unveiling" led him to similar conclusions and he seemed to view them simultaneously as metaphor and literal and that is why his ideas resonate with me. Underneath it all he was a model-agnostic that continued to apply and re-apply as many interpretations as he could until he died. He did have some major problems but his ideas are testament to his genius.
Robert Anton Wilson's trying to understand his experiences with the "unveiling" led him to finding the fun and benefit in viewing "reality" in as many ways as possible but taking none of them as literal objective absolutes. He left the ? on all of it and is very overtly a model-agnostic. That is why his ideas have resonated with me.
I quoted Hakim Bey's "The Information War" at the beginning of this. I recommend reading that to understand the metaphorical side of this in greater detail. Right before the quote I supplied above he states:
"The very word 'information' implies an ideology, or rather a paradigm, rooted in unconscious fear of the 'silence' of matter and of the universe. 'Information' is a substitute for certainty, a left-over fetish of dogmatics, a super-stitio, a spook. 'Poetic facts' are not assimilable to the doctrine of 'information'. 'Knowledge is freedom' is true only when freedom is understood as a psycho-kinetic skill."
Information, as he implies, is the "word" or Logos. In that sense, paradigms and ideologies are systems or matrices of thought and ideas used to build a world of some sort. Poetry, like Magickal thinking, is a method of hacking this matrix and changing and re-arranging. Bey is correct about "poetic facts" not being assimilable to the doctrine of information because they act as viruses that infect the system with meaning by mutating and using the very code against itself. The "psycho-kinetic skill" he mentions is Magick or "poetic terrorism" as he sometimes calls it. Hakim Bey also calls it "ontological anarchy" and Bob Wilson calls it "guerilla ontology".
Now feel free to tear it all down and rip it apart or even glean something from my madness. |
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