The Mad-Hatter Returns…

Something in this immensity turns and meshes its  gears with a regularity so precise as to be disquieting; and exactly for whom-or against whom-this mechanism deploys its flaming wheelworks, we do not know. -Jaques LeCarriere

Think High Non-Sense: Magickal Sigils, Diagrams, Energic engrams: calling cards for an inexistent daemonic intelligence, a Demiurgically inclined algorithm produced out of thermospasmic time vectors: hyperstitional devices to enact the bridge between telepathic relays in the universal crapper, slowly floating downward into the lost sink hole of a nameless Abyss… Adult Games of sex and eroticism to awaken dispositions toward optimal peak experience… a number of radical zen koans to disperse the neural feedback filters filtering out reality from the Real… deprogramming agents from the nanobiotech future productive of mutations rereleasing brain traumas from their caged exile… Deideolgizing the political spectrum with immersive renaturalization techniques… Invasive psychotechiques for breakthrough therapies, planned strategies to circumvent the Reality Studio… Biofilmic screen overlays to suture the curvature of thought, instilling limits, circumspection, skeptical artifacts capturing escaping rhizomes, wild paths into the unknown… Deontological motivational therapy lessons on how to negotiate the fantastic regions of the hypermind, conjectural strategy sessions on tripwiring the collective repetition syndromes of ancient songlines into the forgotten zones… Pyromaniac cheering sessions for the pessimistically disposed ingrates who refuse the laughter of  paranoid benefactors… fires aglow in the deepest in-between exposing the dark light of a fraying virtual matrix… Ultimately (and, if you take me seriously, a new psychobabble gummy suit for your private psycho ward! Mind-straps included, no additional expense!!!) think Naturalized TELEPATHY!!! (Of course, the black sorcerors of neoliberalism -neonazis? or neosocialist? (is there much difference?) – are thinking telepathy, too, only by way of command and control nanotech implants: thought replacement techniques, drones from the hinterlands of decisioning matrices calibrating the social enclaves for endless work, utilitarian pacification centers for the faulty malcontents) – Distributed intelligence either natural or artificial… but which? Either way the end game for the liberal subject, the individual as singular agent, anarchic monads from the Leibnizian crime units – their days are numbered: either natural collective telepathic citizens, or zombie machines and meat factories run by advanced AGI algorithms under regimes of jouissance (pleasure/pain). Only a Diagnostician from the Nieztschean Fortrean Times knows for sure… cost analysis reckons slipstream effects into current display units… projected outcomes: ultima zero in nth degrees of insanity.

-S.C. Hickman – Tales of Future Madness: Menippean Disclosures of the Fifth Kind

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Notes on a Future Crime – Fantastic Forays into Alternate Immortality (Memory) Systems:

Soul sparks, once envisioned, led on to the more imaginative notion that any one of us could be the recipient of sparks from more than one other soul. Indeed, each of us could become a veritable anthology of soul sparks… -Kaddish of Adam Kadmon

All the ancient memory systems were based on allegorical and symbolic layering, of imaginal spaces elaborated with pun based compression, the hooks of weird gargoyle or mythic duplication of monstrous and mimetic icons where memory is the daemonic engine of a vast engine of spiraling icons, graphemes, and sigils: a living Tarot or Rota Wheel of Memory that can be spun round and round in the mind gathering information and processing it into the various labyrinthine libraries of the Cathedral of the Mind. (Comes down to the simplicity of an early data-processing system of computing word/image based of algorithmic programs for easy retrieval and indexing.)

Giordano Bruno was one of the first to bring various ancient systems together, combining Heremticism, Raymond Lull’s mystical techniques and praxis, and the Memory-Magickal systems of the Scholastics into a unified human memory system for knowledge learning, and the invention from the limits of reason new forms of knowledge. Because he couched it in the lore of daemonic agencies of Hermetic/Gnostic Neoplatonic systems they burned him at the stake… no, actually he pissed off a client who was too stupid to learn his system so turned him into the Inquisition (lying out of his ass against him!). So goes the intellectual tribe…

One need only read and study James Joyce’s trilogy to gain the same base understanding of how to build a do-it-yourself memory system… in three easy steps, and a long life’s work… or one can enter the Beckettian kenoma, strip the excess verbiage of culture to the nil, discover the blanks between things, and listen to the silences in the Void to discover an apposite and opposing form of nonknowledge… call it the askesis of knowledge, the depletion of human learning, the opening to the emptiness in things… where all knowledge is still waiting in the noumenon, unknown and unbidden.

Wittgenstein ended in silence, Heidegger in poetry… everyone else turned away into language or math and forgot their humanity. Now begins the nonhuman turn wherein both language and math vanish into cosmic horrorism… in the place of the inhuman or posthuman.

Below are tracings on the shore…

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-Sigmund Freud. Freud – Complete Works:

Telepathy has no relation to the essential nature of dreams; it cannot deepen in any way what we already understand of them through analysis. On the other hand, psycho-analysis may do something to advance the study of telepathy, in so far as, by the help of its interpretations, many of the puzzling characteristics of telepathic phenomena may be rendered more intelligible to us; or other, still doubtful, phenomena may for the first time definitely be ascertained to be of a telepathic nature.    There remains one element of the apparently intimate connection between telepathy and dreams which is not affected by any of these considerations: namely, the incontestable fact that sleep creates favourable conditions for telepathy. Sleep is not, it is true, indispensable to the occurrence of telepathic processes – whether they originate in messages or in unconscious activity.

-William S. Burroughs,  Letters 1945-59:

My own tendency is the opposite of identification with “non-supersensual reality.” My personal experiments and experiences have convinced me that telepathy and precognition are solid demonstrable facts; facts that can be verified by anyone who will perform certain definite experiments. These facts point to the possibility of consciousness without a body or life after death, and before birth. Telepathy is independent of space-time. I do not see that these are facts of no importance or “concern to the living.” Why is it “useless and deceptive to look further”? What are you afraid of? Why all this insistence on confining your attention to “non-supersensual reality,” to “palpable objects”? Why this care to avoid any experience that goes beyond arbitrary boundaries (and boundaries set by others)? Mysticism is just a word. I am concerned with facts on all levels of experience.

—Philip K. Dick,  The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick:

This is the notion that paranormal powers and mystical experiences are expressions of the emerging buds or limbs of an evolving human supernature. Although this idea was endlessly explored in the pulp fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, found some of its most sophisticated mystical expressions in the human potential movement, and later found a wide popular audience in the counterculture with its “mutant” hippies and pop-cultural “X-Men,” it is much older than all of these. Indeed, the idea’s deepest roots lie in elite academic British culture, and more especially in the London Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882), with figures like the Cambridge classicist Frederic Myers, who saw psychical abilities like telepathy (a word that he coined) as “supernormal” expressions of our “extraterrene evolution.” Further back still, Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of evolutionary theory with Darwin, asserted that there was a second spiritual line of evolution organized and directed by a higher power working toward its own ends. In short, the mytheme of Mutation goes back a century and a half to the very origins of evolutionary biology itself.

 -H. P. Lovecraft and the Black Magickal Tradition: The Master of Horror’s Influence on Modern Occultism (John L. Steadman):

In “The Shadow Out of Time,” there is a simultaneous type of possession that spans centuries. Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor of economics at Miskatonic University, experiences a form of amnesia beginning in 1908 and lasting six years; he has no memory of his former self and his whole personality changes, causing him to lose his wife and his career. After Peaslee returns to his normal consciousness in 1913, he begins to have recurrent dreams of his life as a member of an alien race, the “Great Race” that ruled the earth in Triassic times. The Great Race resemble immense, rugose cones that are ten feet or so in height, with their heads and other organs attached to foot-thick distensible limbs that spread out from their apexes. The Great Race move by expanding and contracting a viscous layer of membrane attached to their bases; they communicate by telepathy and by the clicking or scraping of claws attached to the ends of their limbs. These beings live in great cities, and they have developed the ability to travel through time and space mentally, exchanging their personalities with the personalities of other beings in other ages and on other planets. The visiting personalities are invited by the Great Race to provide records of their own civilizations, which they transcribe into books that are housed in metal cases and then filed away in city libraries and archives. Peaslee realizes that his dreams are actually memories of what he experienced during his bout of amnesia, and he suspects that he has, indeed, been forced to exchange personalities with one of the members of the Great Race. Peaslee puts together an archaeological dig in a place near Pilbarra, West Australia, where some blocks of stone were discovered that are reminiscent of the stones used for the buildings in the cities of the Great Race. One night, Peaslee wanders away from the rest of the crew and discovers an entrance to the buried remains of one of the cities. At these remains, he discovers one of the metal cases and the writings that he has, in his own hand, transcribed for the Great Race. Thus, Peaslee has empirical evidence that he had, in fact, exchanged personalities with one of the members of the Great Race, but unfortunately, he loses this evidence as he escapes from the buried city.

-The Greeks and the Irrational (E.R. Dodds):

We know at any rate that Pythagoras founded a kind of religious order, a community of men and women whose rule of life was determined by the expectation of lives to come. Possibly there were precedents of a sort even for that: we may remember the Thracian Zalmoxis in Herodotus, who assembled “the best of the citizens” and announced to them, not that the human soul is immortal, but that they and their descendants were going to live for ever— they were apparently chosen persons, a sort of spiritual élite. Epimenides before him had heard of the northern belief that the “soul” or “guardian spirit” of a former shaman may enter into a living shaman to reinforce his power and knowledge. That they taught the most famous of so-called “Orphic” doctrines, the transmigration of souls… but it may, I think, be inferred without undue rashness from the conception of the body as a prison where the soul is punished for its past sins.  Even with this addition, the sum total is not extensive. And it gives me no sure basis for distinguishing an “Orphic” from a “Pythagorean” psychology; for Pythagoreans too are said to have avoided meat, practised catharsis, and viewed the body as a prison,  and Pythagoras himself, as we have seen, had experienced transmigration.

-Algis Uzdavinys,  The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads:

In Pythagoreanism and Platonism, the mortal body became a simple appearance, and the main task of this “Egyptianized” philosophy was purification and separation of the soul, recollection (anamnesis), and emancipation of one’s soul in this life as it will be after death. According to Pythagorean and Orphic belief, the psyche is a spiritual being fallen from a higher noetic realm into the cycle of birth and death. The soul must thus eventually return to its original state through the exercise of virtue, contemplation, spiritual hermeneutics, philosophical askesis, and hieratic rites.

-Asclepius, The Hermetic Tracts:

Hermes next describes the basic principles of the cosmos which are three in number: God, spirit, and matter. Each of these is unproduced and eternal, and corresponds to a different aspect of the various living creatures: God to intellect, spirit to soul, and matter to sensible form. Since the highest of these living creatures—endowed with intellect alone—are the superior gods, a brief digression is inserted on their hierarchical arrangement, one in which a group of five intelligible gods or “rulers of substance” (ousiarchai)—Zeus, Phos, Pantomorphos, Heimarmene, Deuteros—presides over a group of five sensible ones—the heaven, the sun, the thirty­six decans, the seven spheres, the air. For Hermes, the primal God is bisexual in the sense that he produces all things without the cooperation of a second principle. Human beings have only one sex, although they can participate in a divinely ordained mystery by copulation.

-Gnostic Mythmaking in Sethianism in Light of Ophite evidence Nag Hammadi (Johannes van Oort & Einar Thomassen):

Celsus mentions that the ruler of the “archontic angels,” the Jewish God (apparently Ialdabaoth), was considered an accursed god, since he cursed the serpent for bringing knowledge to humankind (6.27–28). Origen also hints at the role of the serpent as the bringer of knowledge (6.28). his agrees with Irenaeus’ report according to which the serpent’s advice was good (Adv. haer. 1.30.7).

-Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism:

[T]he Kabbalists were—like “all mystics,” according to Gershom Scholem—symbolists. Elsewhere he declares that the Kabbalists were “the main symbolists of rabbinic Judaism. For Kabbalah, Judaism in all its aspects was a system of mystical symbols reflecting the mystery of God and the universe, and the Kabbalists’ aim was to discover and invent keys to the understanding of this symbolism.” Scholem expresses himself in these quotes as a historian of a specific type of literature reflecting “mysteries” dormant at the core of reality… The basis of such an understanding of the affinity between symbols and the symbolized is, ultimately, not only the work of the post-Kantian German thinkers, but also and primarily the negative theology of Neoplatonism, which in addition to Gnosticism were conceived as the formative components of a peculiar blend of theosophy that was embraced by most of the Kabbalists. In fact, Scholem and Tishby regarded the encounter between Neoplatonic negative theology and Gnostic pleroma that contributed the positive aspects of Kabbalistic theology as the very birth of the most dominant aspect of Kabbalah— its theosophy.

-Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennia:

Gershom Scholem points out that Sunni, or normative Islam, the Catholic Church, and the rabbis and Jewish philosophers all had rejected transmigration, but it had survived among Christian Gnostics, Shi’ite Islam, and at last in the Kabbalah, and in their Provençal contemporaries, the Cathars or Manichaeans, against whom the French king and Church sent a crusade of extermination. …. Gilgul,  in its very sound, expresses its original meaning, a “rolling over” of souls according to the Kabbalah. The earliest Kabbalists were fairly explicit in distinguishing rolled-over, or “old,” souls from new ones, but Scholem notes  a deliberate toning-down of  gilgul  in the classical or Spanish Kabbalists of the thirteenth century. Evidently, in the days of the sage Nachmanides the doctrine went underground, and became a secret knowledge or Gnosis proper. … Soul sparks, once envisioned, led on to the more imaginative notion that any one of us could be the recipient of sparks from more than one other soul. Indeed, each of us could become a veritable anthology of soul sparks, themselves of three kinds:  nephesh, ru’ah, neshamah.  Since we have all fallen away from Adam Kadmon, the primal man-god, the function of transmigration is to mend us, and so mend the original Adam.