I agree with everything in your Playa article and have a suggestion on how you could implement magic in relation to its content. I would "amplify" (in the Jungian sense of active imagination) your numinous experience by writing a fictionalized version of it. As a journalist, you are inhibited from confabulating details that are understan…
I agree with everything in your Playa article and have a suggestion on how you could implement magic in relation to its content. I would "amplify" (in the Jungian sense of active imagination) your numinous experience by writing a fictionalized version of it. As a journalist, you are inhibited from confabulating details that are understandably sketchy and fragmented such as whether or not you shoved the cop, etc. A way to access the BM egregore would be to eliminate the reducing valve of responsible journalism and re-experience the experience in the imaginal and narrate it from there in first person and present tense. As Graham Greene said, "A novelist should have a bad memory." If you feel obliged to accurately report on a past event, or remember it too specifically, you cannot amplify in the imaginal. At best you would create gonzo journalism (usually fabricated anyway). Magick, as Crowley defined it, is the "Science and art of creating change in conformity to will." Writing, which of all media has the least mechanical resistance, is your most ideoplastic, thought-responsive medium over which your greatest ability to create change in conformity to will, so amplifying such a numinous experience which you remember poorly, but still have high emotional resonance, is an ideal opportunity for you to do MAGICK. For example, here's a few sentences from my about-to-be-published fantasy epic,Parallel Journeys, of the state of consciousness you describe that the DSM would call "capgrass delusion" :
The whole time, my head throbs with fearful perceptions. What if the strangers we pass are not people, but extras— person-shaped automatons? They fill in crowd scenes everywhere I look, swarming into trains and subways, mutely walking down sidewalks holding lumpy plastic shopping bags in the hot sun.
I try not to focus. I can almost fool myself into believing they’re real if I squint and glance across them quickly. But horrified curiosity forces me to look closer. The illusion of realism collapses as I behold the shoddy, counterfeit motions of hollow, doll-eyed puppets going through their programmed routines.
They’re a mechanical swarm, army ants endlessly looping around a Mobius strip. They run on rails, like the subway trains rattling by. The man spitting on the platform has always been spitting there and always will be. It’s all just loops, loops, loops . . .
I tried to ride the edge between journalism and imaginal amplification in an article I wrote about my first BM experience. (originally published in Reality Sandwich): https://zaporacle.com/incendiary-person-in-the-desert-carnival-realm/ Even in 2008, it struck me as a glamorous version ofwthat theosophists would call the "lower astral" It begins this way:
I became aware of myself within my dream and found that I was in some sort of desert carnival realm. I stood alone in a vast expanse of chalky dust, some of it powdery, but most of it caked and cracking beneath my feet. In the distance were scattered jewelries of electric light, and as I turned around I saw that they extended in all directions. The scattering of neon jewelry was punctuated by occasional fireballs which rose like jack o’ lanterns, living for a fiery heartbeat before they disappeared into the high desert night. Beyond the lights and fireballs, the chalky expanse was ringed by desolate mountains.
As I stood there, I felt waves of a haunting emotional lucidity pass through me, a sense of my whole life summed up within the peculiar alchemical mixture of blessings and wounds of an entire mutant incarnation, and these feelings seemed to radiate outward into the desert carnival realm, searching for something elusive, like a fugitive and forbidden desire.
As if conjured by my feelings, a large neon-lit sailing ship blasting techno music came careening toward me, spewing an explosive wake of dust. It passed within feet of me, and I saw that it was filled with harlequin-costumed party-goers, cocktail glasses in their hands, their gazes transfixed by carnival thought forms. They were benignly oblivious to my presence, and it felt as if the ship were a conjuration of my haunted feelings, the missed party of adolescence now become visible in the desert night, propelled by blasts of techno into the darkness as it receded from view.
The ship was followed by dusty gusts of desert wind. The elements felt so physical, and I began to realize that maybe I wasn’t merely lucid within my own personal dream. Perhaps I was caught in some collective dream, a bardo playing itself out in a lower astral plane. Perhaps this was a realm where spirits, newly separated from their bodies, indulged unfinished appetites together, a last anything-goes party wherein they could gradually burn out the last vestiges of mortal desires in a realm of nocturnal entertainments and swollen dream objects. When bardo-goers tired of clinging to this final desert carnival, they would be released, their spirits liberated for the further travels that awaited them.
As usual, you are tapped into the magma erupting from the collective unconscious. Though some might view egregores as an obscure, esoteric topic it actually looms larger than what Sam Harris calls "The Great Orange Goblin." Though a cheeseburger-induced coronary could take out that particular personified egregore at any moment, another will take its place. Similarly, in the Weimar Republic, Jung warned that a "blonde beast" was emerging from the Aryan unconscious. He noted that his educated German patients were all dreaming of Wotan, a Germanic god of war and mayhem. From my perspective, collective psychosis is rabid on both the right and the left, and before climate change could have a chance to take us out, an egregore could end the human experiment with the speed of a Russian thermonuclear hypersonic missile. As Jung said, “There is no hydrogen bomb in nature, that is all man’s doing. We are the great danger. Psyche is the great danger.” Notice that even our collective carbon footprint is a psychological artifact. Money is a magical artifact that exists because we believe it's real. War, everything we do to the environment, etc. these are all manifestations of psyche. Those who don't learn about egregores are doomed to be ruled by them. Following up on my last suggestion, there are broadly speaking, two ways of fighting dark egregores. On the extroverted, chemical, or causal plane, there is activism, writing scholarly exposes of their manifestations, etc. This is important work for sure, but notice it doesn't fight them on the plane on which they exist, an alchemical plane that has access to acausal means such as synchronicity and the imaginal plane that manifests into our supposedly "physical" domain. Another way to fight them is to supplant bad egregores with life-affirming ones on the imaginal plane. The I Ching says we often "sharpen the fangs of evil" by fighting it directly. As Nietzche said, "Be careful that in fighting monsters you don't become one." For example, Trump has been called a "brain-eating disease." The more we think about him, even critically, the more psychic energy we gave to his egregore which swells like an orange mushroom cloud, or a 1950's B movie monster that absorbs fire and electricity and other physical means used to take it out and becomes more gigantic. The I Ching advises that sometimes the best way to fight evil is to "make energetic progress toward the good." We need visions of possible futures lighting up in the collective imagination, life-affirming egregores blossoming in our terrifying spiritual wasteland.
Oh, and one example of an egregore is the potent anti-rationality of Qannon. It's motto, "Where we go one, we go all," is a concise operational definition of a herd, of a collective psychosis, of egregore-possessed mass man, a rude beast slouching toward the Capitol to be born. I wrote about that here: https://zaporacle.com/trumps-detwittering/
As a therapeutic exercise, rewriting it in fiction form could be an imaginative way of coming to terms with the traumatic event. But actually I was looking forward to this post and wanted to hear more FACTS from the story/memory. It sounds like a painful experience and I can relate. I'm more interested in how truth is stranger than fiction and memory blurs the line anyway. I enjoy a good critical reading of BM including the psychedelic extremes of fear and loathing. I had my own experience with the law after a Decompression in SF that led me to a night in jail and getting beaten by police. I don't tend to interpret it through an Egregore lense, though I was not on gobs of LSD. It did end up a very traumatic event in which i didn't know whether I would have my job back for a whole year as I was charged with possession, (got stopped for a U turn with no car in sight, i was searching for my wallet in a bag which was enough for a cop to tear me out of a car and slam me on the road with 6 combat body armored robot like men: I may have been lightly intoxicated from earlier in the day but I did end up passing the drunk driving test) I was eventually cleared, though its lasting effects can be seen in the damage it did to my children from the depression and anxiety of the parents. A year of anguish I desperately wish I could redo, but it's done--and must accept and see that I eventually did overcome it and get my job back. I still don't like writing about it, but it was a big life change I can see connected to the hedonism of BM, but I interpret it more as my own dualistic lifestyle coming to a crisis and as a collision with the militaristic drug war. It was 2015 just as the orange menace was beginning to rear his ugly head. I go to BM with my wife for the last 20 years or so namely as an escape from the stress of our normal default jobs in our privileged American dystopia (really hard to fit everything i was thinking into that sentence). I'll spare the details but it's worth considering that getting brutalized and put in jail by cops is not necessary and could be handled by trained professionals to minimize harm. And you shouldn't have been taken to jail either. I can see why we disassociate the pain of experiences by forming a wild theory around them: I for one see correlation astrologically as I have interpreted through that lens for more than 3 decades, but at the risk of seeming ignorant, the Egregore actual entities in thought forms correlating with events can sound a little more like blame, rather than synchronicity (such as astrology reveals). But I think I'm beginning to understand the concept a little more...Good luck on seminar & Thanks for the story Daniel! K
I agree with everything in your Playa article and have a suggestion on how you could implement magic in relation to its content. I would "amplify" (in the Jungian sense of active imagination) your numinous experience by writing a fictionalized version of it. As a journalist, you are inhibited from confabulating details that are understandably sketchy and fragmented such as whether or not you shoved the cop, etc. A way to access the BM egregore would be to eliminate the reducing valve of responsible journalism and re-experience the experience in the imaginal and narrate it from there in first person and present tense. As Graham Greene said, "A novelist should have a bad memory." If you feel obliged to accurately report on a past event, or remember it too specifically, you cannot amplify in the imaginal. At best you would create gonzo journalism (usually fabricated anyway). Magick, as Crowley defined it, is the "Science and art of creating change in conformity to will." Writing, which of all media has the least mechanical resistance, is your most ideoplastic, thought-responsive medium over which your greatest ability to create change in conformity to will, so amplifying such a numinous experience which you remember poorly, but still have high emotional resonance, is an ideal opportunity for you to do MAGICK. For example, here's a few sentences from my about-to-be-published fantasy epic,Parallel Journeys, of the state of consciousness you describe that the DSM would call "capgrass delusion" :
The whole time, my head throbs with fearful perceptions. What if the strangers we pass are not people, but extras— person-shaped automatons? They fill in crowd scenes everywhere I look, swarming into trains and subways, mutely walking down sidewalks holding lumpy plastic shopping bags in the hot sun.
I try not to focus. I can almost fool myself into believing they’re real if I squint and glance across them quickly. But horrified curiosity forces me to look closer. The illusion of realism collapses as I behold the shoddy, counterfeit motions of hollow, doll-eyed puppets going through their programmed routines.
They’re a mechanical swarm, army ants endlessly looping around a Mobius strip. They run on rails, like the subway trains rattling by. The man spitting on the platform has always been spitting there and always will be. It’s all just loops, loops, loops . . .
I tried to ride the edge between journalism and imaginal amplification in an article I wrote about my first BM experience. (originally published in Reality Sandwich): https://zaporacle.com/incendiary-person-in-the-desert-carnival-realm/ Even in 2008, it struck me as a glamorous version ofwthat theosophists would call the "lower astral" It begins this way:
I became aware of myself within my dream and found that I was in some sort of desert carnival realm. I stood alone in a vast expanse of chalky dust, some of it powdery, but most of it caked and cracking beneath my feet. In the distance were scattered jewelries of electric light, and as I turned around I saw that they extended in all directions. The scattering of neon jewelry was punctuated by occasional fireballs which rose like jack o’ lanterns, living for a fiery heartbeat before they disappeared into the high desert night. Beyond the lights and fireballs, the chalky expanse was ringed by desolate mountains.
As I stood there, I felt waves of a haunting emotional lucidity pass through me, a sense of my whole life summed up within the peculiar alchemical mixture of blessings and wounds of an entire mutant incarnation, and these feelings seemed to radiate outward into the desert carnival realm, searching for something elusive, like a fugitive and forbidden desire.
As if conjured by my feelings, a large neon-lit sailing ship blasting techno music came careening toward me, spewing an explosive wake of dust. It passed within feet of me, and I saw that it was filled with harlequin-costumed party-goers, cocktail glasses in their hands, their gazes transfixed by carnival thought forms. They were benignly oblivious to my presence, and it felt as if the ship were a conjuration of my haunted feelings, the missed party of adolescence now become visible in the desert night, propelled by blasts of techno into the darkness as it receded from view.
The ship was followed by dusty gusts of desert wind. The elements felt so physical, and I began to realize that maybe I wasn’t merely lucid within my own personal dream. Perhaps I was caught in some collective dream, a bardo playing itself out in a lower astral plane. Perhaps this was a realm where spirits, newly separated from their bodies, indulged unfinished appetites together, a last anything-goes party wherein they could gradually burn out the last vestiges of mortal desires in a realm of nocturnal entertainments and swollen dream objects. When bardo-goers tired of clinging to this final desert carnival, they would be released, their spirits liberated for the further travels that awaited them.
Wonderful thoughts, Mr Zap!
Good to hear from you. I resonate with the “Lower astral” / playa link… will write more later.
As usual, you are tapped into the magma erupting from the collective unconscious. Though some might view egregores as an obscure, esoteric topic it actually looms larger than what Sam Harris calls "The Great Orange Goblin." Though a cheeseburger-induced coronary could take out that particular personified egregore at any moment, another will take its place. Similarly, in the Weimar Republic, Jung warned that a "blonde beast" was emerging from the Aryan unconscious. He noted that his educated German patients were all dreaming of Wotan, a Germanic god of war and mayhem. From my perspective, collective psychosis is rabid on both the right and the left, and before climate change could have a chance to take us out, an egregore could end the human experiment with the speed of a Russian thermonuclear hypersonic missile. As Jung said, “There is no hydrogen bomb in nature, that is all man’s doing. We are the great danger. Psyche is the great danger.” Notice that even our collective carbon footprint is a psychological artifact. Money is a magical artifact that exists because we believe it's real. War, everything we do to the environment, etc. these are all manifestations of psyche. Those who don't learn about egregores are doomed to be ruled by them. Following up on my last suggestion, there are broadly speaking, two ways of fighting dark egregores. On the extroverted, chemical, or causal plane, there is activism, writing scholarly exposes of their manifestations, etc. This is important work for sure, but notice it doesn't fight them on the plane on which they exist, an alchemical plane that has access to acausal means such as synchronicity and the imaginal plane that manifests into our supposedly "physical" domain. Another way to fight them is to supplant bad egregores with life-affirming ones on the imaginal plane. The I Ching says we often "sharpen the fangs of evil" by fighting it directly. As Nietzche said, "Be careful that in fighting monsters you don't become one." For example, Trump has been called a "brain-eating disease." The more we think about him, even critically, the more psychic energy we gave to his egregore which swells like an orange mushroom cloud, or a 1950's B movie monster that absorbs fire and electricity and other physical means used to take it out and becomes more gigantic. The I Ching advises that sometimes the best way to fight evil is to "make energetic progress toward the good." We need visions of possible futures lighting up in the collective imagination, life-affirming egregores blossoming in our terrifying spiritual wasteland.
Oh, and one example of an egregore is the potent anti-rationality of Qannon. It's motto, "Where we go one, we go all," is a concise operational definition of a herd, of a collective psychosis, of egregore-possessed mass man, a rude beast slouching toward the Capitol to be born. I wrote about that here: https://zaporacle.com/trumps-detwittering/
As a therapeutic exercise, rewriting it in fiction form could be an imaginative way of coming to terms with the traumatic event. But actually I was looking forward to this post and wanted to hear more FACTS from the story/memory. It sounds like a painful experience and I can relate. I'm more interested in how truth is stranger than fiction and memory blurs the line anyway. I enjoy a good critical reading of BM including the psychedelic extremes of fear and loathing. I had my own experience with the law after a Decompression in SF that led me to a night in jail and getting beaten by police. I don't tend to interpret it through an Egregore lense, though I was not on gobs of LSD. It did end up a very traumatic event in which i didn't know whether I would have my job back for a whole year as I was charged with possession, (got stopped for a U turn with no car in sight, i was searching for my wallet in a bag which was enough for a cop to tear me out of a car and slam me on the road with 6 combat body armored robot like men: I may have been lightly intoxicated from earlier in the day but I did end up passing the drunk driving test) I was eventually cleared, though its lasting effects can be seen in the damage it did to my children from the depression and anxiety of the parents. A year of anguish I desperately wish I could redo, but it's done--and must accept and see that I eventually did overcome it and get my job back. I still don't like writing about it, but it was a big life change I can see connected to the hedonism of BM, but I interpret it more as my own dualistic lifestyle coming to a crisis and as a collision with the militaristic drug war. It was 2015 just as the orange menace was beginning to rear his ugly head. I go to BM with my wife for the last 20 years or so namely as an escape from the stress of our normal default jobs in our privileged American dystopia (really hard to fit everything i was thinking into that sentence). I'll spare the details but it's worth considering that getting brutalized and put in jail by cops is not necessary and could be handled by trained professionals to minimize harm. And you shouldn't have been taken to jail either. I can see why we disassociate the pain of experiences by forming a wild theory around them: I for one see correlation astrologically as I have interpreted through that lens for more than 3 decades, but at the risk of seeming ignorant, the Egregore actual entities in thought forms correlating with events can sound a little more like blame, rather than synchronicity (such as astrology reveals). But I think I'm beginning to understand the concept a little more...Good luck on seminar & Thanks for the story Daniel! K
Thanks for your thoughts! Sorry you had that experience. I have more to say but not right now!