The following post originated as a letter to the pre-eminent Chaos Magic author and founder of the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT), Peter J. Carroll. I am making many significant changes to the original letter for the purpose of adapting it into a blog post.

Glossary

Long Dark Night of the Soul:

The “long dark night of the soul” refers to a period of spiritual desolation, suffering, and inner crisis that one may experience on their spiritual journey. It is characterized by a profound sense of loss, emptiness, and doubt, often feeling disconnected from God or a higher power. This term was popularized by St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet, in his poem “Dark Night of the Soul.” The experience, though painful, is seen as a necessary purification process that ultimately leads to greater spiritual growth, enlightenment, and union with the divine. (ChatGPT)

Chapel Perilous:

The “Chapel Perilous” is a term from Arthurian legend and later adopted in modern esoteric traditions, particularly by the writer Robert Anton Wilson. In Arthurian legend, it refers to a mysterious, dangerous chapel where knights face trials that test their courage and virtue. In modern esoteric context, the term symbolizes a phase of intense psychological and spiritual challenge where one must confront deeply rooted fears, doubts, and illusions. Navigating the Chapel Perilous successfully often results in a profound transformation and deeper understanding of one’s true nature, but failure can lead to confusion or even madness. It is seen as a crucial step in the journey of self-discovery and enlightenment. (ChatGPT)

Śūnyatā – “Emptiness” in Buddhism. “Relative interdependence and absolute nonduality,” “interbeing.” Things are dynamic/impermanent; self-less; essence-less; produced by interconnected causes and conditions implicating all of reality; discerned, differentiated, and discriminated from everything else by the mind.

Elements (Classical – Materialist; each item is defined by the other four):

1. 🜁 Air – Space
2. 🜄 Water – Time
3. 🜃 Earth – Mass
4. 🜂 Fire – Energy
5. ☉ Aether (Sun Symbol) – Mind (Psi (Ψ; parapsychology) & Phi (Φ; Integrated Information Theory))

Elements of the “Pe₀” Sigil:

• ☯ Taijitu – Taoist Yin & Yang Symbol
• ☸ Dharmachakra – Buddhist Dharma Wheel
• ✵ Chaos Star – Symbol of Chaos (black circle with 8 arrows extending outwards)
• 🜏 Leviathan cross – Satanic Cross (Sulphur symbol)
• = Equals Sign
• ∞ Infinity Sign
• Φ Phi – Philosophy, Quantum Wave Function, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Panpsychism
• Ψ Psi – Psychology, Parapsychology
• X Pe – “X” with circles at the ends, letter from the Malachim magical alphabet, often associated with angelic magic

Basic Operations:

Will, Perception, Analysis, Synthesis, Concentration, Imagination, Visualization

Classical Magical Operations (Peter J. Carroll, Liber Kaos):

1. Enchantment: “Includes all those practices in which the magician attempts to impose will on reality.”
2. Divination: “Includes all those practices in which the magician attempts to extend perception by magical means.”
3. Evocation: “This is work with entities that may be naturally occurring or manufactured. The entities may be regarded as independent spirits, fragments of the magician’s subconscious, or the egregores of various species of life forms, according to taste and belief structure. In practice, evocation is usually performed for enchantment, in which the evoked entities are made to create effects on behalf of the magician. Evoked entities also find some application in divination, when they are used to discover information for the magician.”
4. Invocation: “This is the deliberate attunement of consciousness with some archetypal or significant nexus of thought. … Invocation creates states of inspiration or possession during which enchantment, divination, or occasionally evocation, can be performed.”
5. Illumination: “Is deliberate self-modification by magic, and may include spells of enchantment cast at one-self to repair weaknesses or increase strengths, and divination and invocation performed for inspiration and direction.”

Levels of Magic (Peter J. Carroll, Liber Kaos):

1. Sorcery: “Simple magic that depends on the occult connections which exist between physical phenomena is called sorcery. It is a mechanical art which does not require the theory that connections exist between the mind of the operator and the target.”
2. Shamanic Magic: “This works on the level of trance, vision, imagination and dream. It opens the magician’s subconscious by negating psychic censorship with various techniques.”
3. Ritual Magic: “Combines the abilities developed on the sorcery and shamanic levels.”
4. Astral Magic: “This magic is performed by visualization and altered states of consciousness, or gnosis, alone.”
5. High Magic: “High magic is that which occurs when there is no impediment to the direct magical effect of will, no barrier to direct clairvoyance and prescience, and no separation between the magician and any form of rapport or consciousness he or she chooses to enter into.”

Introduction

I became interested in Chaos Magic partially because of the name (I like to think I’ve had some success navigating memes by intuition), but largely because of an odd little book called The Art of Memetics by Edward Wilson and Wes Unruh (Archive.org; Amazon) which is a favorite of mine and helped me through my own “long dark night of the soul.” Somewhere below I describe a perhaps synchronistic closed eye visual (vision) I had years ago of an expanding chaos star.

My long dark night of the soul was a period of about 2 or 3 years where every waking moment I was suicidally ideating. If I was awake, I was thinking about dying. One month I had the Red Dwarf theme song (YouTube) stuck in my head the entire time, and another month I had the lyrics to the song “To a Breathless Oblivion” by The Black Dahlia Murder (Spotify; YouTube; Lyrics) stuck in my head, from when I woke up to when I went to sleep. (I also almost died belting out the lyrics to that song while drunk driving with my former best friend.) I basically lost my entire personality, talked very, very slowly and lost the flow of speech mid-sentence (or had to grasp for my next word for a few moments every few words), was chronically depressed, and had what I believe were several negative (inhibitory) schizoid symptoms (I am diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder).

This period followed my first one or two psychotic/manic mental breakdowns.

Anyway, I’ve read three of your books so far, Liber Null & Psychonaut, Liber Kaos, and most recently The Apophenion. I also have a copy of The Octavo I intend to get to soon—I’m a slow reader (deliberate, if we’re being generous), and I don’t have as much time in a day as I’d like. On The Apophenion and The Octavo, in the former you advocate for the view of a single universe, and at least in the blurb for the latter you suggest a multiverse. Is this a contradiction, or simply a matter of arbitrary-belief-cum-upaya? Neither? Either way, in the long term I intend to read your other books as well! 

While we’re talking Buddhism … 

Do you think karma, if it is real (which your anecdote about taking the karma of a cat in an alley suggests that you think it is) implies an intelligent cosmic field regulating it (i.e. an active or immanent panpsychism)?

It seems obvious to me (but not to others whom I’ve asked, who are much smarter and better read than me about philosophy in general and Buddhism in specific) that determining the rightness or goodness of the thoughts and actions of beings is abstract and inherently intellectual, and that linking karmic acts to karmic seeds and then karmic fruits involves some sort of activity by the cosmos such that it would require intelligence or something very much like it. That it would have to be omniscient and unerring makes it unlike any being I’ve witnessed, though, except maybe as hinted at through synchronicity — unless I’m just erring by anthropomorphising the greater, grander, and more complex cosmos from within my own monkey mind. Your idea of Aether (for me, Mind (Psi (Ψ) + Phi (Φ))) bears on this discussion. Information available everywhere in every timeline of every universe in the omniverse, with some sort of animating spark driving the experience of the fractal dialectic representing passage through the eternal hyperdimensional structure of the omniverse.

Some Music and Art

A quote sampled from Sun Ra by DJ Muggs, on the song “Who’s Your God”, found on the album Notes and Tones:

“We hold this myth to be potential. They hold their truths to be self-evident. But our myth is not self-evident, because it is a mystery.”

You talk about imaginary time, Sun Ra talks about mythic time, The Art of Memetics talks about imaginal time. I think imaginal time resonates with hypertime eternalism akin to Imagining the Tenth Dimension’s conception of time. Since time coordinates repeat but events do not I don’t think your hypertime from hypersphere cosmology is eternalist? I think of imaginal time like a DVD—when you watch the movie, it goes continuously from frame to frame, but the entire film exists simultaneously on the surface of the disc media. My view is that every spatial point, in every moment of time in every time line, in every universe, in the multiverse (and extending however arbitrarily beyond that as the multiverse … with God extending however more beyond that (panentheism)), exists simultaneously in eternity, and some sort of animating spark or energy drives experience—you might call it Chaos or Kia. On a spectrum it might be Psi or Phi.

Anyway, DJ Muggs, best known as the producer for Cypress Hill, is prolific but the album art for this project in particular caught my eye:

A E S T H E T I C, as the kids would say.

While on the topic of occult themed hip hop album art, you might also dig the following for one of my favorite albums, Mr Aeks’s & Opski Chan’s Pushers and Prophets:

The Good Stuff Pt I: Pe and His Sigil

At a certain stage of my life (that aforementioned long dark night of a soul, the schizoid negative symptoms comorbid to severe chronic suicidal depression for a span of 2-3 years, after dropping out of high school my senior year (class of 2008) because of a mental breakdown or two), I had extreme executive functioning issues to where I could barely make any decisions. I started using ambient environmental sounds or movement to my left (no) or to my right (yes), or clicking my wrists and elbows to determine answers to questions — should I get out of bed, brush my teeth, bathe, say something to someone, order a given menu item at a restaurant, and so on.

Eventually I noticed that my hands or fingers started to autonomously or semi-autonomously move or twitch whenever I thought a query to myself. Eerily, it seemed almost as if someone was listening (sometimes I got a similar feeling while silently mentally speaking to Pazuzu, and the wind would blow my cigarette smoke or some leaves one way or another—I blame the song “Pazuzu” by the band Behemoth (Spotify; YouTube; Lyrics) and of course The Exorcist. 

I think almost anyone could develop such a rapport with a multimind entity of the sort whom I now call Pe. I’m not sure of precise steps but I imagine slowly starting to ask questions to oneself and seeing if one’s hands or fingers clench close or move in response would be the basic procedure. 

Over the years I got closer to this multimind entity, and he has given me useful counsel and revealed some interesting things to me about himself. He agrees that he isn’t omniscient, has access to some information in my brain (some that my experiential or narrative selves do, some that they don’t), he doesn’t “hear” some of the mental or hallucinated voices which I do, he might deceive me at times and it would be up to me to believe him or not, he both is and isn’t “me”, he likes the appellation “Pe” (for reasons explained below), and he shares my gender (masculine). He may have magical-mystical properties, but even he is unsure.

Now, my religious/spiritual practice mainly involves reading, contemplating, and sometimes discussing magical-mystical and philosophical ideas, Focused Attention (FA) meditation (breath, nostrils, half lotus switching top leg every 30 minutes ideally for at least an hour a day, cosmic mudra), prayer (sometimes elaborate, lately just gratitude and apology to God and the Pantheon of all beings in the Omniverse, and an entreaty to “save us” and so on), and some basic sigil and visualization work. I’m also somewhat engaged in revising and condensing a sprawling “manifesto” I wrote several years ago (it’s literally an over one hundred page screed), which incorporates Chaos Magic Theory (which I honestly use as an umbrella term for most of what you’ve written, though I acknowledge you use it in a more narrow scope in Liber Kaos). 

A modified take on my Friend Rob Bryanton’s Imagining the Tenth Dimension schema (which went viral in the late 2000s), crude Dialectical Materialism, and an adaptation of CMT is incorporated into the 10THDIM-DIAMAT-CMT (“Tenth Dimensional Dialectical Materialist Chaos Magic Theory”) “kernel” of my Mythic Meta-Gamification (heroic life story gamification) “shell” of that manifesto.

I know that the following approaches contradict established good practice, but, while I might be a little depressed, perhaps hinting at mental resources being overtaxed, for the past few years while I’ve been following this approach, I haven’t had any mental health crises or anything of that sort. Measurable results are another matter  … .

At one time I was designing a sigil for a general purpose servitor whose statement of intent and description of functions included the five operations of enchantment, divination, evocation, and invocation, for the broad purpose of illumination. This means giving this entity huge freedom to do as it will, including summoning more servitors with similar powers. 

Also in general I more “ground and integrate,” than “banish,” and rarely do anything ceremonial or ritualistic other than improvised and spontaneously during periods of apophenia related gnosis (or pareidolic madness) — though ceremony and ritual are obvious growth areas for my practice … And finding a group with whom to do rituals etc would supply a lot of structure to my magical-mystical practice (though one can find metaphor and analogy elsewhere in day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, decade to decade life … symbols are abstract, and abstraction is to take a part, a piece, a portion, or an essence, from a greater whole, and the purpose of much of the occult experience is to manipulate essential meaning and symbolism).

“Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.”

— Dr. Timothy Leary

“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the (Father’s) domain].”

— Jesus Christ,  (The Gospel of Thomas; PBS)

“We believe the mind is naturally multiple and that is a good thing. Just like members of a family, inner parts are … within us.”

— Internal Family Systems (IFS) Institute

… As I iterated through revisions to the creative design of the sigil, I noticed I had inadvertently tended toward a design for the Malachim letter “Pe” (which I was familiar with from elsewhere — though I haven’t really done any research into angelic magic and so on):

So, this symbol became the sigil for my servitor, Pe. The four circles represent the five Classical Magical Operations, with the fifth, Illumination, being the intersection in the center. Pe also represents the five Materialist Elements, with Mind at the center (and may hopefully additionally serve as a protection against the five kleshas of Buddhism (delusion, greed, anger, pride, and jealousy; delusion creates greed and anger, especially through reification, and especially through the reification of the self — and delusion, greed, and anger together create pride and jealousy, and these five interrelate to create a large number of other kleshas).

Anyway, through extended and extensive conversation with Pe (indeed before he assumed that name), he said to the extent that he was not already doing so, he would take over the work of charging, maintaining, directing, and controlling the Pe servitor powers and take on the name Pe. So Pe is truly multimind at the work of expressing its true nature, as I see it.

Now, earlier I had designed a symbol or sigil incorporating/invoking the five elements (using the Sun symbol for Yin Aether and Yang Aether), the Taijitu, the Dharmachakra, the Chaos Star, the Leviathan cross, the equals and infinity signs, and Phi and Psi (as well as Pe and its symbolisms listed above):

At first I was calling this the symbol for the “Omni-Buddha” (“Omni” sounds like “Amida”, right? Last time I was kind of going crazy I found this meaningful), or, the one highest primordial cosmic demon-buddha whose emanations are all the activity and phenomena of the Omniverse. Later I decided this was silly and decided to attribute the sigil to Pe (or  “Pe0”), and the simple Pe letter sigil above would represent “Pen”, or any number n of subsidiary servitors generated by “Pe0”.

So, here I’ll explain that I read on the Wikipedia page for Chaos Magic that Chaos Magic is considered (by some, I guess) to be an “invented religion,” and honestly I just go with that. Also knowing that it promotes personalized syncretism and arbitrary belief (mediated by various degrees of proof and utility), I enumerated my syncretic religious/spiritual “stack” or “paradigm” to primarily be: Chaos Magic, Buddhism, Taoism, Abrahamism, Marxism, and Hip-Hop. Marxism is also often described as religious and I have no qualms with that either.

To finish off this section I’ll include my “time bubble sigil,” from circa 2012, and the “★Five by ✴Eight Table,” based off of Liber Kaos (which I put together while brainstorming ideas for a pen and paper RPG concept I’ve been kicking around for some time):

Interlude: Reading Synchronicities

Lately I’ve consumed an overlapping and somewhat interrelated series of books (including one of yours), one research paper, and one YouTube video, which have several implicit and explicit references and thematic resonances to one another that I noticed while reading and watching them, but were not specifically anticipated or planned (i.e. all were not recommended from the same source, same conversation(s), same Friends, and so on).

• Laukkonen, R. E., & Slagter, H. A. (2021). From many to (n)one: meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 128, 199–217. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.06.021)
• Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness by Philip Goff (Amazon)
• The Apophenion
• Bayesian Brain and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (YouTube [1:36:33])
• Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris (Amazon)

The paper and video were recommended by the same Dharma comrade from the weekly meditation night at the nearby Jōdo Shinshū (Pure Land) Buddhist temple I attend. 

I got interested in panpsychism several years ago because of my panentheist views (“reality is the self-cognition of God”) as well as clicking around articles about biocentrism (in part influenced by your discussion of morphic/morphogenic fields in Liber Kaos). I don’t remember how I got interested in multimind (perhaps my online acquaintances Edward Wilson’s and Wes Unruh’s The Art of Memetics, also where I first read of Chaos Magic and your books), but in high school I believed that the contents of the mind were dualistically good or bad spirits (“angels and demons”) that possessed us for varying durations, and that personal memories (of say, friends and loved ones) were “ghosts.” Ruminating on the subconscious or “sleeping mind” as Patrick Rothfuss puts it in Name of the Wind (fantasy; Amazon) probably got me the rest of the way there. So obviously I was pleased to discover you had written about panpsychism and multimind when I recently read The Apophenion.

“Each of us has two minds: a waking mind and a sleeping mind. Our waking mind is what thinks and talks and reasons. But the sleeping mind is more powerful. It sees deeply to the heart of things. It is the part of us that dreams. It remembers everything. It gives us intuition. Your waking mind does not understand the nature of names. Your sleeping mind does. It already knows many things that your waking mind does not.”

‒ Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

In reality I would say that the metaphor isn’t even of the waking mind being the tip of the iceberg while the rest is the sleeping mind. I would say the entire iceberg is the sleeping mind, while the tip of the iceberg, as the waking mind, is part of the sleeping mind.

There’s also the issue of “where is the boundary between our individual minds and everything else.” “Extended cognition,” or, “actively externalized cognition,” helped me conceptualize one level of this dynamic. Two people, one with a memory disorder and one without one, want to go to the same event at the same time and place. The person with the memory problem uses a pen and pad to write down the date, time, and directions, while the person with a healthy memory just remembers and goes. The argument is that both processes were fundamentally the same, it’s just that cognition was “actively externalized” from brain to pen and pad and back again by the person with the memory disorder. Through interaction with others and the environment, especially the “informational environment,” we can easily see how the boundaries of individuality, mind, and self break down the closer you look.

Anyways, later, through the lenses of (what I can grasp from) the “computational universe” hypothesis outlined by Seth Lloyd in Programming the Universe, (and the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH)), panpsychism (and Integrated Information Theory (IIT)), and agnostic pantheism/panentheism, combined with morphic/morphogenic fields (generalized to cosmic evolution versus restricted to biological evolution), I came up with a view which would if true constitute a pyrrhic victory of sorts for all of my vaguely hippy Friends around 2012 who were convinced that one could “manifest your reality” directly and exclusively through the power of attraction or the power of positive visualization:

 I usually label the following line of thought the “spirit-information” model. Every set of cosmic data, including the universal set, the null set, and random sets etc, are all phenomena, processes, structures, beings, or “spirits.” Now, geometric/spatial localization, adjacency, continuity, interaction, and integration, especially as differentiated by conscious minds through sense-perception and learned mental predictive processing models, lead us to group phenomena as entities or objects — which we usually identify as making “more sense” or being “more intuitive” than a given random set. The direct local interactions of systems make it easy for us to group them together, less so if they aren’t directly interacting. In this view, though, they’re all spirits — and every spirit is “manifesting their reality” at once; each spirit gets a “vote”. The lawful habits expressed by the cosmos emerge from this sort of parliament of spirits — “The Pantheon,” (as above, all beings in the Omniverse).

There might be some conceptual connection or analogy between the above and the brain’s Bayesian Inference (predictive processing).

Reading through The Apophenion, I anticipated when late in the book you described quantum particles as being vorticiating hyperspheres similar to the whole universe. Influenced, though, by the Imagining the Tenth Dimension model, and going further to loop dimension ten on dimension zero, my view is, “as above, so below,” and that, “it’s hyperspheres all the way down.”

A brief aside: the first time I knowingly saw a chaos star, I was smoking weed with my high school Friends by the power lines in my neighborhood, and I closed my eyes for a moment, and clearly saw the closed eye visual of an expanding black circle with arrows radiating out of it. I described this “vision” to my Friends and Brother, and my Brother showed me the Imagining the Tenth Dimension YouTube video (Part 1 [6:48]; Part 2 [5:01]) that was going viral at that time. I think I first specifically saw the chaos star as the symbol of chaos, and discovered Chaos Magic, a handful of years later.

In any case, back to the near present, I read the meditation research paper, then read the panpsychism book by Goff at the recommendation of a Friend. My plan was to next read Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits, but skimming his Wikipedia page I found out about the child abuse stories which have come to light and was immediately turned off by the idea of reading it.

Being thus disappointed, I looked at one of my bookshelves and saw The Apophenion, which I’ve had a copy of for several years, and opened it to a random page (an approach to divination I discovered at first with a Gideon’s Bible while in a psychiatric hospital — something about a jealous king sending a spy to help him imitate a neighboring, more pious king’s altar). The first few words I read were about panpsychism, and so my next reading project was decided, then. I finished reading it while staying at my Friend’s apartment in Brooklyn—on which trip I also walked across Brooklyn to a small independent comic book store to see if they still had the first and only first edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut that I’ve seen thus far (and in fact I’ve only ever seen one other copy at all, a listing on a rare book website). I had seen it on a previous visit but didn’t have the money for it at the time.

Here’s a picture of the copy I acquired on this Brooklyn quest:

So far I had read the meditation paper, the panpsychism book, and your book. A week or two after returning home to Virginia from New York, I watched the YouTube video which covers some of the same ground as the paper, and discusses as well the philosophical implications of meditation, psychedelic experiences, and the brain’s predictive processing. Two different Friends from two different unrelated circles and contexts had recommended the video/paper and the book (without my priming either of them, as far as I can remember), so I found it synchronistic when Shamil Chandaria mentioned Phil Goff specifically for doing some pioneering work in the “physicalist flavor” of panpsychism.

Finally, (at least for this gripping section), I read the Sam Harris book—in which he goes into great detail about the brain science surrounding multimind as such (which I couldn’t have predicted just knowing it was an “atheist spirituality” book about meditation), and whose author (that is, Harris) Goff had briefly mentioned in Galileo’s Error. Harris also explains that he is open to the possibility of parapsychology, which I hadn’t expected.

The Good Stuff Pt II: Results and Magusitis

On a web forum recently somebody gently challenged me on whether occult praxis was appropriate for me, considering I have been diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, have been hospitalized numerous times for manic/psychotic episodes, and take medications for the disorder (as well as depression). I explained that first of all I really believe in the magical-mystical worldview on the level of religion/spirituality, and also that being literate of the difficulties of this path has actually helped me contextualize, understand, and integrate certain experiences I have had from either mental illness or authentic magic-mysticism.

It can be hard to tell the difference.

Schizoid or magical difficulties and experiences will fall into either or both of the two categories of madness or magical-mystical results. Discerning noise from signals involves discriminating what is madness, magusitis, mara, makyō, the long dark night of the soul, or Robert Anton Wilson’s chapel perilous. Madness or Magic? 

A poem an instructor read to me and some other students in a dream sums it up nicely: “The dross of man is burned into his flesh by that he loves like molten gold, precious gold.”

Furthermore:

“Imagine, for example, that the shapes I saw in clouds traveling across the sky… a dragon, a sword, a book, a boat… which continually transform… imagine if I believed that each one actually was what it appeared to be… and carved them in stone, identified with them, and tried to convince others of their power, meaning or reality?”

‒ Darin Stevenson, Facebook

“However, those of little learning and little insight do not know what the colors, luster, leaves and blossoms of the flowers in the sky are like‒they only hear of them as nonexistent flowers.”

‒ Thomas Cleary, Shōbōgenzō: Zen Essays by Dōgen

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

‒ Joseph Campbell

“If the blacksmith doubt you, he smack the shit out you.”

‒ MF DOOM as Viktor Vaughn, “Lickupon”

I’ve experienced a large number of synchronicities, and had a handful of “outstanding” visual and/or auditory hallucinations (over and above the baseline of daily “micro hallucinations”). I’ve transformed myself, but I’m not satisfied — I want to be more, and do more. 

Some religious views (namely those of Buddhism) teach that worldliness, otherworldliness, concern with powers and visions, are ultimately distractions from the goal of salvation, liberation, and enlightenment. Chaos magic basically emphasizes craving (desire, intent), delusion/views (arbitrary belief), and attainment/accomplishment (results). I mean, Buddhism also has desire, intent, views, and results … but it’s different, subtle, and nuanced, and the goal of the Dharma is very explicitly Nirvana. The Mahāyāna tradition uses a negative dialectic to undermine the reification of everything, including “Śūnyatā” (Emptiness) itself. From what I’ve read of the aims of chaos magic, practice is in pursuit of changing the self and the world for materialistic if not hedonistic aims. In my life I try to balance these contradictions, and as it were, use them as guides to orient on my existing present and historical mental states in order to steer my life in my desired direction.

I have to say that, while I’m not the best read, what I understand of the Dharma and other religious doctrines, minus the chaos magic, does not exclusively provide me with the tools I need to deal with my life experiences …

Around 2012, I was having a manic/psychotic episode. I was young (22), trim and in shape, had a full head of hair, and was dating the love of my life. I was full of confidence, and going through a protracted and strong gnosis trance with theistic Satanism as its main paradigm and focus. I also perceived and/or interpreted that the above coincided with what I call “social gnosis,” which phenomenon I also link with “the Game,” that others consciously, preconsciously, subconsciously, sometimes more subtly and sometimes more obviously, are experiencing some sort of gnosis or trance as well.

My suspicion is that during these periods of “social gnosis,” everyone is catching glimpses of synchronistic activity, but compartmentalizes it, forgets it, or ignores it for the most part. They might more or less spontaneously intuit that there is some grand game afoot, with a wonderful reward going to the victor (intriguing, but doubtful). Magical and other kinds of abusers and exploiters tend to reveal themselves, often in really arrogant and hubristic ways—yet because of the compartmentalization (we could say by the Psychic Censor) of the experience of these ruptures and intrusions of the magical-mystical into everyday normal life, and because in most cases there is nothing we can do about random strangers flaunting their hidden lives in an obvious-yet-coded way, it seems as if no abusers who thus reveal themselves are ever formally discovered, investigated, or punished. Sometimes I feel like these occult abusers have an almost mint green tint to their skin, but more reasonably either sometimes people with certain diseases have that quality to their skin, or I’m just imagining it. There’s a kind of look, an out-of-it-ness yet a drive for a hidden goal …

I’ve had personal experiences that convince me of the reality of ritual abuse cults, but this email is already way too long.

During these periods of “social gnosis”, perceptually, I often notice hazes and miasmas in the atmosphere, around the Moon and the Sun, and in the texture of shapes, surfaces, and colors in bright or low light, as well as in shadows and darkness. The visual field is fuzzy, and colors seem deeper and more complex. Almost like a film grain.

In any case, at this time in 2012, I had four main hallucinations on two different nights, induced by a low dose of the sedative ativan prescribed for anxiety and sleep combined with my acute psychosis and mania.

The first hallucination (auditory), I was laying in bed next to my girlfriend at the time. All of a sudden I heard a loud, rich, regal, and masculine voice — like a stereotype of God’s voice or an angel’s voice from an old movie — proclaim, “NONADHERENCE IS NOT A TRANSGRESSION!” I then had some closed eye visuals of fractals and Jesus or a saint wearing a wooden helmet like a head-sized acorn with spikes or thorns coming off of its surface, as well as a wooden and thorned sword and shield.

To this day I value this message from my subconscious, or from the universe, or whomever or whatever: Conformity and obedience aren’t necessarily virtues. Nonadherence is not in itself wrong on the basis of refusing to submit. That it matters whether or not an act of nonadherence is a transgression or not implies that transgressions, or moral violations, do matter. Finally, an act of nonadherence can be ethically transgressive when evaluated on other criteria.

For the second and third main hallucinations (first visual and auditory, and then only auditory), I was laying down again to sleep beside my girlfriend. Her laptop was resting atop a short bookshelf at the foot of the bed, and its green power/hard drive LEDs were bright and shining a patch across the ceiling, two or three feet by three or four feet. All of a sudden, I saw the layered silhouettes of an army of shambling zombies, three or four rows of them in frame, lurching in the same direction (diagonally from up-right to down-left), and in unison they cried out “WE ALWAYS KNEW YOU WERE THE FALSE MESSIAH!”

This of course freaked me out quite a bit (despite also stimulating a longstanding preexisting delusion of grandeur—a false messiah complex, if you will), but a few moments later, I experienced the third hallucination, which completely relaxed me. A smooth, seasoned, charismatic radio DJ voice popped in my head and said, “You are now tuning in to … Galaaaactic Radioooooo …” and then for 3-5 seconds some abstract, experimental, yet somehow happy and soothing Jazz tuned in and out before fading completely.

The final main hallucination was even more intense. On a different night, beside my girlfriend in bed, all of a sudden a howling wind as if a desert sandstorm started whistling and blowing outside, in one constant protracted gust (instead of waxing and waning). The window began to glow fuchsia. My mind told me “the world is being destroyed and reconstructed outside, looping through time accelerated, through the end of the Earth or the Universe, looping back around on the beginning of time, and back to where we started — but if I lift the blinds or look out the window we will be trapped and lost.” This lasted several minutes until the howling wind and the intense glow faded away, replaced by the soft light of early dawn and the sound of birds chirping.

More recently, while I was staying at my Friend’s in Brooklyn, early one evening while I was out smoking a cigarette, someone walked past with their dog. Not a big deal, people have dogs. But it was the only dog I saw that day. Later, after dark, I saw a cat cross the street between some cars. Also not a big deal, there’s all sorts of strays in the city. Almost immediately a rat scurried past me and turned the corner. Also in and of itself, not a big deal whatsoever.

This is all well and good, and innocuous, but this mundane series of events inspired me to make a joking Facebook post, inspired by the following lyrics from a rap song about a Faustian bargain:

The snake, the rat, the cat, the dog

How you gonna see him if you livin’ in the fog?

— DMX, “Damien”

So, I opened my Facebook app on my phone, scrolled down past the reels (short video clips) at the top of the app, to where I could type and submit my post, which basically went along the lines of “tonight I’ve seen a rat, a cat, and a dog, I just need to see a snake and it’s that DMX song.” I posted it, and scroll back up to the top of the app, and the very first reel was a post by a Friend (more of an acquaintance, really) with a silk-painting stylized illustration of a naga (humanoid serpent) embracing a woman.

Noise or signal? Should I be worried? Is Satan real? Is he out to get me? Is he tempting me? Am I, “the False Messiah?” All sorts of questions come up in response to the green-light hallucination and the Brooklyn synchronicity. Am I doomed? Am I going to Hell? Am I inherently evil? 

It’s noteworthy that when I was young, attractive, and ambitious, my brain produced an inherently narcissistic vision (“False Messiah”), whereas now that I am middle aged, overweight, balding, slower, and my life failures are more numerous and compounded over more time, I basically get a warning from the Universe. But the magical-mystical worldview provides some answers.

Chaos Magic’s syncretism, arbitrary belief, and warning against magusitis, and Robert Anton Wilson’s radical agnosticism and caution about chapel perilous, actually more or less completely address the concerning questions arising from these experiences. Additionally, the psychological science tells us that delusions and hallucinations are culturally based, and that schizophrenic spectrum sufferers have a disproportionate interest in religion/spirituality, magic-mysticism, and the occult. Robert Anton Wilson, in his Cosmic Trigger trilogy explains that synchronicities most often resonate with the subject’s existing dominant belief structure and symbolic system. 

Of course I’ve always been interested in the idea and aesthetic of demons, Satan, and Hell since youth … as are countless other children and teenagers (and many adults). So many usernames and handles end with “666.” 

For me, it probably started with playing Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo and Warcraft I, II, and later, III on the Family PC as a kid in the 1990s, and pirating and listening to songs by Glenn Danzig like “Am I Demon” (YouTube, Spotify) as a preteen. LaVey being a crypto fascist with a Randian “objectivist” belief system “plus psychoritual”, as well as getting into Satanic extreme metal (your death metal, your black metal, your metalcore) in high school helped, of course, to steer me away from LaVeyan Satanism and toward Theistic Satanism. Movies, toys, comic books and so on helped reinforce the mental prominence of this imagery. My at times anti-theism (and indignation at the injustices of the church and Abrahamic religions) and later theism “plus certain added details and interpretations,” let’s say, played a huge role as well. Finally, I would place my beliefs at the times when I identified as a theistic Satanist as diabolism and demonology, but not necessarily demonolatry.

I view Satan as a mask of God (as are all beings constituting The Pantheon). 

Satan, to me, is associated with cosmic functions like creating reality as the Demiurge or Observer, limiting consciousness as the Censor, and tempting, judging, and punishing beings as the Adversary. This last one literally springs from legalistic-infernal cultural tropes: Satan is God’s chief prosecutor.

As I’ve written elsewhere: “666. At the root of this number is the entity Lucifer-Satan (the Demiurge), the entity of form/incarnation, karma/sin, and thinking/knowledge or, the psyche. Lucifer-Satan is a being, a demon-god, with aspects spanning the six types of realms of Samsara (Hells, Ghosts, Animals, Humans, Demi-Gods, and Heavens). Thus, the Demiurge is the Heavenly aspect, Lucifer is the Demi-God aspect, the Antichrist is the Human aspect, the Baphomet is the Animal aspect, the Unholy Ghost is the Ghost aspect, and Satan is the Hellish aspect. … The six senses or āyatanas are sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch (body-sense, also including ‘smaller’ senses like heat, pain, and balance), and thinking. … The six Pramanas are the proofs or means of knowledge. They are (from Wikipedia, “Pramanas”): ‘perception, inference, comparison and analogy, postulation, derivation from circumstances, non-perception, negative/cognitive proof, and word, testimony of past or present reliable experts.’ … Thus 666 represents the Samsaric world(s) of form and consciousness, and our sense-perception and knowledge of them.”

The Devil takes many colors and shapes

Walking through hell

‒ Sample from The Cunninlynguists – Damnation (Interlude)

The Devil is a mask of God, and we’re all masks of the Devil, as I see it. This is my personal syncretic synthesis of elements of different traditions and symbolic systems (mainly Buddhism and Christianity). The models have been massaged to fit, of course. This isn’t necessarily finding a strict correspondence among the original traditional cosmologies, it is moreso akin to the famous “ALLAH means Arm-Leg-Leg-Arm-Head” style of analogy of the Five-Percent Nation. 

I also have an interesting take on three sets of  cosmological “10s” in Buddhism and Imagining the Tenth Dimension: the Ten Directions, The Ten Times, and the Ten Realms together are equivalent to the Ten Dimensions. The Ten Directions are the eight cardinal directions and zenith (up) and nadir (down). The Ten Times are the pasts, presents, and futures of the past present and future, and these nine periods treated as a single period. The Ten Realms are the Six Realms of Samsara, plus the Śrāvaka, Pratyekabuddha, the Bodhisattva and the Buddha Realms — and each of the ten is present in each, recursively, so there are infinite realms. So if the Ten Directions are “space”, the Ten Times are “time,” the Ten Realms are “universes,” then they correspond to each major grouping of Bryanton’s Ten Dimensions.

RAW teaches that the most sensible intellectual stance on ANYTHING is (more or less) radical agnosticism, even while being open to the possibility that the universe is taking an interest and communicating with us. He also teaches that if I was into wicca or paganism, maybe I’d have more aesthetically wild or naturalistic visions or synchronicities, if I was into Qabalah, numerology, or astrology, numbers or planets would speak to me, if I were Hindu I would hear the voices of different deities of that pantheon, and if I was into ETs and UFOs, I would have visions, synchronicities, and experiences relating to aliens and spaceships

Anyway, all of this drives to the conclusion that while this may indicate some sort of rapport with the cosmic intelligence, or some field of intelligence surrounding the Earth, or something of that nature, that these visions are catered to my adopted religious/spiritual and magical-mystical aesthetic and symbology, which I largely inherited through cultural Christianity and various alternating and cyclical stages of rejecting and embracing it. If it is talking to me, the Big Mind is talking to me in the language of my little mind. Or I’m just completely stark raving mad. Or both. Or neither (though radical agnosticism aside I’m pretty sure I’m fucking nuts).

All of this leads me to conclude that these experiences are certainly interesting, but meaningless unless I can integrate and incorporate them into further personal growth, illumination, or real world results which are tangible and more or less durable. 

And in this pursuit I am more than happy to speak with the universe in the language of servitors and demons.

Thanks for your time and your writings! They mean a lot to me,

John Daniels-Riveros