Information Equals Reality

This post is an excerpt from Rob Bryanton’s book, We Start With a Point (but what’s the point?) (Amazon), in which he gave me a chapter which we excerpted from the 100+ page “manifesto” I wrote while coming off of Clozaril (the strongest schizophrenia medication) over the course of a couple weeks. I don’t like most of the manifesto and find it embarrassing, but I think the excerpts included in this chapter hold up pretty well all things considered. Maybe the biggest thing that contradicts what I’ve written in other posts so far, such as in The PSI-PHI Matrix (PPM), is that I write (paraphrasing) that you can’t put a bigger thing inside a smaller thing. Absurd as it sounds, for the DPM, 10THDIM-DIAMAT-CMT, and MMG (see other posts), I’m claiming that everything is in everything, that the whole is contained in every part. This is strictly about 10D Psi “looping around” on every 0D point, though, not about, say, fitting the moon inside your living room. Other than that, I’d like to point out that “One Big Mind” here is definitely not the same concept as the Big Mind of Zen. Here it is quite explicitly panentheistic-panpsychic, and that in the post Email to Peter J. Carroll, I go into some more detail about the elements incorporated into the Pe₀ Sigil.

9: INFORMATION EQUALS REALITY

“…quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality.”

– Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna

“Every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence.”

Erwin Schrödinger

As we discussed in Three Becomes One, there are a number of mystical and philosophical organizational systems that divide reality into the physical, the moral, and the intellectual. As we think about the ninth dimension I believe we are in that third realm, where all possible universes and all tendencies towards one kind of reality over another are contained. In his book Programming the Universe, MIT Professor and quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd says this: “The conventional history of the universe pays great attention to energy: How much is there? Where is it? What is it doing? By contrast, in the story of the universe told in this book, the primary actor in the physical history of the universe is information. Ultimately, information and energy play complementary roles in the universe: Energy makes physical systems do things. Information tells them what to do.”

Information equals reality. Write that down somewhere and think about it every morning. The only thing that’s real is what you’re observing, everything else is just clouds of information, waves and turbulence within a multiverse of possible outcomes. Is there a way to use these ideas to improve our lives? People arrive at the same conclusion intuitively: if information equals reality, then knowledge is power. My internet buddy John Daniels-Riveros has some fascinating insights into the many historical/political/metaphysical connections to these kinds of ideas, about where our reality comes from and what we might be able to do with that knowledge, so I’m handing the rest of the chapter over to him. Take it away John!

John on Science

Choose to believe anything contained herein or not. Truly. We all have to make philosophical choices about the burdens of evidentiary or logical proof we require in order to get out of bed in the morning (without, for example, experiencing crippling paranoia that we will fall through the floor to the center of the Earth) or walk out the front door (without the fear of hurtling into outer space). I settle for a skeptical agnosticism rooted in the modern scientific approach of rational, falsifiable empiricism, but I hold a huge respect for the “sciences” or belief systems of older and alternative philosophies and ways of viewing the world. I appreciate the stability and factuality of the mundane material world, but I hold suspicions and superstitions about the mystical and the magical qualities of the ultimate reality. (“Mysticism” refers in general to spiritual wisdom, and “Magic” refers to spiritual power(s). Here I use “magic-mysticism” to mean both combined.)

I’ll admit it, even if it makes me a bad communist: I engage in a significant amount of magical thinking ‒ even though it is tempered with a more positivist outlook as well. These views can be complementary, if contradictory. I think as humans we have to accept that we consciously or unconsciously, and ultimately extremely frequently, hold contradictory stances and attitudes in tension within our own minds. This isn’t to even begin implicating the nature of contrasting collective ideological contradiction.

Furthermore, we have to accept that there are limits both on our perception and processing of the objective material world (or “ultimate reality”). We input a small sampling of a narrow range of sensory data collected from the comparatively infinite spectrum of energy moving around us, through us, in us, and as us ‒ at all times. This is the invisible right in front of our own eyes. Additionally, most of everything that will ever happen, even right behind our own heads, will remain beyond the scope of even that perception.

If that weren’t enough, our brains are finite and often caught up in more important business than verifying reality ‒ like keeping the heart beating, or generating the hallucination we experience as our awareness of self and the environment.

Our brains can be conceived of as small computers (or perhaps “small minds”) inside of a vastly, cosmically larger one. We cannot fit the whole world inside a smaller piece of it. We fare slightly better chances of wrapping our heads around the planet and civilization and its thinking and movement, but ultimately we struggle enough with understanding what is going on within our own heads, let alone others.

As per Chuang Tzu, the whole world is hidden inside of the whole world ‒ we are like the fisherman who lost his boat after hiding it inside of a river valley. Chuang Tzu also says not to deny what is beyond the world, but that we shouldn’t talk about it. Sorry ‒ in this chapter, we are going to talk a little bit about what is beyond the world of direct experience.

For these reasons, some ideas I am presenting here are scientific, and some are less so. I hope none of the ideas presented will be perceived as anti-science, because I love and respect the scientific tradition (though I admit science, like any human endeavor, could stand to be improved somewhat).

Science itself must ultimately be defined very specifically. Science is first and foremost a dialectical discourse, across all of history and around the whole planet. Science is the cutting edge of human history. Modern science stems from philosophy, or the study of knowledge and the nature of knowledge. Specifically, science stems from natural philosophy, the study of nature and knowledge about nature. More recently the philosophy of science itself has been defined in terms of empirical falsifiability and experimental design. Science privileges measurement and the validation and repeated verification of testable predictions first, and logical proof second.

If testable predictions are first and logical proof is second, then imagination may be a third but vital component of science. Imagination certainly is vital to philosophy and human mental life as a whole. Here, what we are doing is imagining. We are imagining as a way of placing and orienting ourselves both in our day to day lives and the timeless cosmos.

The human experience of the truth depends on beliefs in partly or wholly imagined approximations of objective phenomena. All phenomena are features discerned by mental discrimination from the field or “ground” of the ultimate reality. We experience facts and phenomena as discrete and individual, but this is a relative truth. In the ultimate sense, discrete facts and phenomena are all continuous with each other.

Anyway, modern science can’t answer every important question. In another sense, there are numerous sciences. Karl Popper, the philosopher of science responsible for the primacy of empirical falsifiability in the scientific dialectic, believed as much, and I do too.

Whatever ties together different balances of experience, reasoning, and belief can somewhat reasonably be said to be a science. Certainly, these different sciences vary in their level of universal applicability and validity. I have to concede that “official” or mainstream science is the best at what it does, but maintain that alternative and traditional belief systems have value, especially when it comes to speculating about the gaps in mainstream science (which as we have seen, probably constitutes most of ultimate reality). From here on out, we can refer to “official” or “mainstream” science, simply as “science”, and refer to mysticism and magic as “magic-mysticism”.

Now, an adequate philosophy of everything (our imagined worldview, or model of reality) should at least attempt to address the invisible right in front of our own eyes as well as the invisible right behind our own heads. An adequate philosophy should also be careful to address the invisible inside our own heads. Our perceptions, experiences, and reasoning are governed by rules and laws which remain invisible to us, like the proverbial fish unconscious of the water it lives its whole life in and takes for granted.

Science, philosophy, and belief therefore grasp both at the visible and the invisible. But it is foolish to use proof of the visible to argue against the existence of the invisible, even as Chuang Tzu chastises us against arguing for proof of the invisible.

Finally, being a discursive philosophical dialectic, science fundamentally operates in the realm of the ideal superstructure of consciousness, communications, and belief which rests on (and mutually conditions) all basic human activity (social consumption, production, and reproduction). In other words, science is fundamentally cultural. (Culture can be summed up as communication, imitation, and innovation.) This being the case, science under capitalism is ideologically and practically capitalist.

Science must be saved from the myopic and cruel selfishness, exploitation, and oppression which characterize the historical world-class system and its ideology. Science must be saved from the backwards and destructive tendencies of the system, and turned around and used to save the very humanity and ecosystem the system relies on to exist in the first place. Science must not be used to facilitate and enable the oppression and exploitation of the masses and nature. Science itself, the communities of scientists and institutions constituting the human basis of its philosophical discourse, must stand up and join the fight for universal emancipation from tyranny.

John on Magical Thinking

Science describes the least of things. The least of what something is. Religion, magic ‒ bows to the endless in everything, the mystery.

‒ A Dark Song (2016)

I’d like to try to draw a quick analogy that abuses coincidental similar language between math and, well, life in general. In calculus, a “moment” is a coordinate used to determine the center of balance of the area between two curves (or any at-least two-dimensional region or shape). Generally, in life we use the present “moment” to determine our respective personal center of balance from within all the cosmos and eternity.

We are all at our own “center of everything.”

So we have to make choices into how we imagine our place in reality, how we “navigate and negotiate the causes and conditions of choice and chance.”

In The Laws of Magic: an excerpt from Authentic Thaumaturgy by Isaac Bonewits, the author provides a list of the laws of magic, that is, magical thinking. He writes “Those of you who prefer to remain skeptical as to the reality of psychic phenomena and the systems of magic developed to control them will at least find these Laws an interesting and detailed guide to what psychologists and anthropologists so patronizingly refer to as ‘magical thinking.’”

Magical Thinking employs the arbitrary meta-belief in the parapsychological, ideally to induce desired practical effects in the psychological and material domains, in a derived version of Pascal’s Wager. “Arbitrary belief” is Chaos Magic’s general principle that belief itself be used as a tool to practical ends. Blaise Pascal’s original Wager was that non-belief in an existing God will lead to Hell, whereas belief in a non-existing God incurs no penalty, therefore it’s better to believe.

But what is Magic, and Magical Thinking, anyway?

Here we will be relying on terminology and theory explained by eminent Chaoist Peter J. Carroll in such books as Liber Null  Psychonaut and Liber Kaos. Modern magic (namely Chaos Magic) can be practically defined as the use of the will, perception, imagination, concentration, and visualization, as well as the operations of analysis and synthesis, acting through belief and the subconscious, to cause desired effects and outcomes in material reality. Yet, even accepting that the improbable will never happen, magical thinking is … well, maybe we should just call “magical thinking”, “thinking”.

After all, spirituality and mysticism are a feature of almost all persons’ beliefs and values throughout all of time and recorded history and it appears this will continue to be the case for a long time, perhaps as long as humans will be around to comprehend or miscomprehend reality through our imperfect perception and imaginations of reality. Let’s not be defeatist or fatalistic, either, though: I think this is a good thing that there is a spiritual dimension to our worldview and life visions.

I’m sure we are all more or less familiar with the risks and pitfalls of the mystical and magical worldviews. I’ll recount some of my own experiences with madness and magusitis below. Still, there are numerous possible benefits of magical thinking. Ideas and motivation are two that are important to me.

So far we have been treating arbitrary belief in the unverifiable as useful and strategic. To circle back around, though, perhaps the claims and assumptions are valid that truth and reality really are magical.

At the very least, that we exist at all and so on is a miracle we might as well attribute the magical descriptor to. The origin of the universe and its instant by instant reproduction across time, and our own coincidental and improbable evolution and consciousness ‒ this shit is fucking magical.

Still, I operate under the assumption that it is better to kick that rock (or at least pick it up with your hands) than to try to move it with telekinesis. Peter J. Carroll, the aforementioned Chaoist and author of the key Chaos Magic texts, suggests magic will tend to fail unless all mundane measures are taken to maximize the chance of your desired effect or outcome occurring by non-magical means. This makes intuitive sense, but also suggests that a lot of time might be wasted in the altered states and abstraction of magical ritual and practices when we could be lifting weights, sitting in meditation, or reading. It may be the case that fooling around with actual direct magic is more suited to the possible invisible magical beings native to those levels or modes of consciousness and existence.

But really, I suspect fairly strongly that important features of the way reality operates are best described as truly magical, and magical thinking or the Chaos Magic worldview can help us grapple with that productively. I feel that we for certain need to keep open minds about all of this shit.

Does magic work? That’s hard to test. I often wonder if God (or the lesser to God, material world creating Demiurge) implemented magic in such a way that it launders its activity from falsifiable proofs and verification generally. Psi (which I have borrowed from parapsychology to mean the general conscious principle of the universe and life), is similarly difficult to pin down, explain fully, philosophically prove, or even define. To me, magic seems sufficiently reasonable conceptually, and on top of that I’ve had innumerable magical and quasi-magical experiences. Unfortunately, these “results” are impossible to prove and sound exactly like bullshit ‒ even to oneself. It is usually difficult to differentiate delusion and hallucination caused by mania or psychosis from an “authentic” peak mystical experience or magical result. We have to be open to the idea that this is so because madness is real and magic-mysticism is not. This shouldn’t stop us from exploring the idea, though.

If nature is the work of God, or Their material scripture, Psi or relatively totalizing cosmic consciousness must be a trade secret with built-in failsafe mechanisms meant to nerf our ability to prematurely experience or know too much from “within the simulation”. Possible quantum features of consciousness represent one such hurdle. It is certainly the case that dreams (often regarded as touching the spiritual realm or aspects of reality) synchronicities, and peak experiences and psychedelic trips, all appear to be efficiently regulated by the “psychic censor”.

Consciousness audits, edits, and censors itself, it seems. It might be biologically painful to know too much, but it also seems that we are usually locked out from the awesome and trippy transcendent awarenesses which people frequently take drugs to try to access. Perhaps the truth is dangerous, or maybe there are other good reasons for the tendency of consciousness to restrict and compartmentalize itself. Hell, maybe there aren’t good reasons for the psychic censor doing what it does. However circumstantial and speculative the psychic censor’s reasons or “motives”, our awareness is restricted, or perception is limited, our consciousness is compartmentalized, and in many ways we are almost totally ignorant and forgetful. In one way or another, I think the basic principle that cosmic consciousness is regulated by the psychic censor is fact.

We evolved to have experiences that are restricted in space, time, and universe, at the very least. The psychic censor also especially casts its spells of ignorance and forgetfulness on things like synchronicities, dreams, psychedelic trips, and near-death experiences.

It is elegant to identify the psychic censor with God, or the Demiurge. Combining “panpsychism” (discussed below) with “psychic censor” yields “pansychic-censor”.

Forgetfulness characterizes much of the strange and weird experiences most people have, and the normal and mundane ones, too, but some people have paranormal experiences that they will never forget. Some folks have had encounters with “Others”: ghosts, spirits, celestials, aliens, gods, God, demons, angels, or telepathic communications or visions, and so on.

At any rate, magical thinking and superstition, of course, can be disastrous if implemented and adopted incorrectly. Danger, delusion, illusions, obsessions, mental disorders, mania, psychosis. Even without resorting to strict mundane or scientific materialism, within the framework of magical thinking itself, you have the phenomenon of Magusitis:

There are dangers inherent in the development of the sleight of mind technique for enchantment and divination. It is easy to become obsessed with what might or might not lurk just below the threshold of consciousness waiting to be triggered by a stray analogical thought. Thus a feeling of omnipotence can begin to develop, particularly if the magician starts to misinterpret divination as enchantment and comes to feel that everything going on around oneself is the result of subconscious desires. The final madness begins when one starts interpreting even the disasters which befall as expressions of what one must really have wanted.

‒ Peter J. Carroll, Liber Kaos

Magusitis is magical hubris and mystical obsession. Usually, it will ruin your life, and sometimes it will “brick” you. I’ve bricked myself a couple of times.

John on “One Big Mind”

In this section, we discuss panpsychism through the lens of a sort of organic, conscious “computational universe” (to borrow the turn of phrase from Seth Lloyd, whom Rob quoted in this section’s introduction), and simulism. We also look at what it might practically mean for us in our day to day, goal-oriented lives.

All phenomena in the cosmos, according to the panpsychic model, exhibit at least basic consciousness. All phenomena “feel” something greater than nothing. We typically view non-life as “dead matter”. Panpsychism suggests that so-called dead matter is really just “asleep”. This is because when “dead matter” is “integrated” in certain patterns or structures, the information constituting those patterns generates what we usually think of as consciousness — and this consciousness does not come from nowhere. It must be inherent to the very so-called “dead matter” in which, before, we could find no consciousness.

Panpsychism evokes the Zen Buddhist phraseology that reality is “One Big Mind”. If the cosmos is both computational and conscious, maybe it’s a big computer-mind. This resonates with “Simulism”, or Simulation Theory, which is the hypothesis that our universe is simulated in cosmic computers (computers which must pack more computational power than our simulated universe itself).

Combining panpsychism with simulism yields a scenario similar to humanity’s own videogames — except we are the game, playing itself, as conscious information.

Well, alright, but how do we play?

That question spontaneously generates an infinite cascade of subsequent philosophical and practical questions with as many possible solutions as actions we can take within (and as) the universe. Here we borrow some terminology from various fields in an attempt to craft some basic answers. If life in the panpsychic-simulated universe can be thought of as an imaginary heroic adventure (revolving around accomplishing goals), think of these ideas as your starting spells.

Our conscious-information management operates at the levels of internal cognition (roughly brain-based, self-aware thinking), “embodied cognition” (thinking involving the rest of the body), and “extended cognition” (thinking which is actively externalized into the environment), embedded within (and as) the informational environment. Let’s explain some of this stuff.

From the Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (US Department of Defense, 2005): The “informational environment” is, “The aggregate of individuals, organizations, or systems that collect, process, or disseminate information; also included is the information itself.” Control and manipulation of the informational environment, and thus the information people use in their decision making and reasoning, is cited as the third, more powerful tool besides the carrot of incentive (reward) and the stick of disincentive (punishment) when it comes to controlling individual or social behavior. Basically, though, the entire material cosmos constitutes one big information environment, by the same reasoning that describes it as One Big Mind.

Extended (or “actively externalized”) cognition is best explained by the following parable (paraphrased from the original found in the paper The Extended Mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, 2000):

Two persons, one with a memory disorder and one with a healthy memory, want to go to the same event at the same time and place. The person with the healthy memory just remembers the time and directions, and goes. The person with the memory disorder has to use a pen and pad to write down a reminder, and directions. They both make it to the event at the right time and place. The outcome is the same, but the extended cognitive hypothesis is that the process is also the same overall cognitive operation, just that the person with the memory disorder incorporates the external environment, in the form of the pen and pad, into the cognitive process.

In the medium range between the external universe and the internal mind roughly identifiable with the brain, is “embodied cognition”, where we think with our physical bodies.

In this way we think with objects, with the environment, and with others, and so on. Here is an obvious and direct way our mind “dimensionally bleeds through” so to speak with our adjacent and surrounding phenomena and eventually the entire cosmos. The panpsychic hypothesis that consciousness permeates all matter looks a little bit stronger in this light.

So what we are doing as conscious-computational beings is managing the informational environments inside our skulls, bodies, and the whole rest of the outside world.

One basic strategy, inspired of course by the Pansychic-Censor, is the following “workflow”: Compartmentalization → Consilience Effects.

“Compartmentalization” is the principle of breaking things up into manageable chunks, including processing experiences and emotions. This latter meaning originates as a term describing the subconscious coping mechanism in response to trauma and stress. “Consilience effects” are when “separate” streams of development (in organization, thinking, or other activity) converge or “come together” as one.

A broad example of this dynamic is in the sciences, where upstream (many years ago) biology and mathematics diverged into specialized fields (compartmentalization), but more recently they have begun to tend to converge when a theoretical mathematical construct or principle is applied to a biological system (consilience). In day to day life, we might compartmentalize “cleaning the house” into rooms and tasks, where a consilient effect is that once one part of the house becomes more organized, cleaning the entire house will self-catalyze because a clean room can be used as a staging or storage area for other rooms, and supplies will become easier to find and so on. Can you think of some other examples of this pattern?

From here, we use belief (and perhaps magical thinking specifically) to intervene in our own “OODA Loop” (… Observe → Orient → Decide → Act →…) cycles and avoid analysis paralysis through intervening in our super-, pre-, and sub-conscious informational environment management at the mental, embodied, and external levels.

Note that all these phenomena are really continuous and innately integrated. We are still, at this stage, choosing to “imagine” our reality in very specific and intentional ways.

We apply operant conditioning (reward and punishment), imagination-management (control of the informational environment at the level of facts and belief), and compartmentalization and consilience over our own OODA cycles, to ourselves. We are our own worst enemies, and to quote the Dhammapada (translated by Acharya Buddharakkhita, 1996):

“Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle, yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself. … Self-conquest is far better than the conquest of others. Not even a god, an angel, Mara or Brahma can turn into defeat the victory of a person who is self-subdued and ever restrained in conduct.”

John on Magusitis and Madness

I have had my most intense Magic-Mystical results (and/or madness) with the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project and, later, Theistic Satanism. Note again how ambiguous the line often is between magical results and madness. At its core, this dynamic is fueled by the fact that sometimes, some of us (or in reality, many of us) have experiences which cannot be explained by science, other than madness, yet which are so tangible and real to us (as well as challenging and novel) that we have great difficulty entirely discrediting or forgetting them.

This might boil down to ignorant stubbornness: clearly wild madness, encompassing delusion, and convincing hallucination caused by, say, excessive surplus dopamine in the brain explains everything away. But instinctively, and sometimes when a suspiciously or brazenly coincidental detail arises in memory, we find ourselves doubting our doubt, skeptical of our skepticism.

Continuing from this point of reasoning, between madness and “results”, how much of both can be attributed to a given experience or memory? 0% result, 100% madness? 50-50? 100% result? What happens when we break down such events into different features or categories, since a given event is constituted by physical, interpersonal, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral sub-events and so on? Maybe eventually we are confronted with choosing to imagine reality itself as either miraculous, or insane.

It’s easy to discredit anything un-scientific, as much as it is comforting to clutch desperately at absurd and bizarre delusions which contradict the scientific worldview. But we’ve taken a look at science, belief, experience, imagination, etc, as well as speculated about the possibility of panpsychism, the psychic censor, God, etc. I think we can all agree that definitive answers are excruciatingly difficult to come by, especially as we cast more scrutiny at the assumptions we take for granted.

For now, a handful of short stories about “results” (or madness):

First, shortly before dropping out of high school because of crippling psychosis followed by years of debilitating depression, I encountered Imagining the Tenth Dimension. At the time I was smoking weed in the neighborhood with some friends, when I closed my eyes and, vividly, in my mind’s eye, saw what years later I would learn is a “chaos star” or “sigil of chaos”. It is a black circle with eight arrows radiating out from its center. I saw this chaos star expanding in my mind’s eye. When I mentioned this to my brother, he said, “dude, you have to check this out,” and showed me the 10THDIM video for the first time, which uses an animation similar to what I had seen.

I got obsessed. I worked myself up into what I later would learn in Chaos Magic is called a gnostic trance (or, in psychology, mania), during which time I convincingly experienced that I lived (or maybe just dreamt I lived in exact detail) the same day twice in a row. At one point, I was sitting at my computer desk, looking out my window, as the same cars and buses drove by, or pulled up and parked, their occupants disembarking, moments later jumping back in the car and driving off again, driving back up moments later, parking the car, jumping out, going inside, coming back out, driving off, returning, etc, all in the span of minutes or seconds.

In other words, the sequencing of events in time was going haywire, but in a continuous and smooth way suggesting things being held together by some rational higher order. I wasn’t just experiencing decontextualized flashes of events, moments jumping from one to the next. As stated, it’s hard to tell which, “real” or “imagined”, these experiences were, though the obvious answer is the latter. Years later, it is still hard to shake the feeling of significance and importance to these peak spiritual, or peak psychotic, events. I soon contracted Magusitis when my obsession and gnosis went wrong. “Nobody can understand, they ruined it, I ruined it, the magic is gone.” (And from a later perspective which holds up today: “I wasn’t ready.”)

For years my family would get scared whenever I even mentioned Imagining the Tenth Dimension. That was one feature of a very dark period. (Especially because the project is so positive and creative.)

A few years later, driven by the intense emotionality and aesthetics of the demonic imagery and aesthetics of death metal, I became similarly obsessed with Theistic Satanism. I was convinced I was the anti-Christ, but that if I followed the teachings of Jesus, the real Christ, and God and so on, that I could save the world from cabals of black magic practicing witches who ruled from the shadows in consort with pedophile fascists who have for decades, centuries, or millennia infiltrated and perverted all levels of society, around the world but particularly in the West, and were intent on destroying the world and killing everyone. One time I was convinced all commercial and municipal food and water were poisoned, on the eve of the great slaughter.

At one point I was in Kmart with my Dad. The store was relatively empty, and I had lagged behind looking at something, and I was looking for my Dad through the aisles, trying to catch up with him. As I passed by an aisle, I saw a short, dark-haired woman pushing a cart, with her young child walking next to her. All of a sudden, as I passed the aisle, she stood rigid, her eyes shot wide open with terror, and she blurted out “SATANAS EST DEUS!”. Her son immediately reached up his hand to cover her mouth and shouted, “No mom! Don’t say it!”. I had to ask my Dad and Google the Latin to make sure that it was correct and meant what I thought it did. “Satan is God”.

Holy shit.

Even more terrifying was in 2012. I had been descending into Theistic Satanic paranoia and obsession over justice and retribution against hypocrites. I was in and out of the hospital for a few months, using a “fractal time bubble sigil” (a fractal taijitu inside of a chaos star inside of an unmarked clock face) for “fractal Baktun magic”. You may recall that a Baktun is a unit of time in the Mayan Long Count Calendar, and the 12th Baktun ended in 2012. At one point I heard voices in my head saying “he’s doing this number of Baktuns per minute,” with “this number” constantly changing. I thought my ex-girlfriend was killed by the Illuminati and replaced with a robot. I tried to burn my copy of Imagining the Tenth Dimension in the grill but relented before the cover got too badly singed. Suffice to say, I was losing my shit.

One night, I was laying in bed, my ex-girlfriend asleep next to me, and unable to sleep myself. All of a sudden the sky outside started glowing magenta through the closed shades. I began to hear the ghastly howling of the wind, as if we weren’t in suburban northern Virginia, but in the middle of a sand storm in the desert. This lasted for what seemed like hours, the whole time I “just knew” that the world was being disintegrated outside of the bubble of my room, and that we would survive and the world would be reconstructed, through accelerated passage of time through all of identical history, and returned to normal, as long as I didn’t open the blinds. Just when I couldn’t take it anymore, the magenta glow and shrieking winds stopped, the night ended, the calm blue light of morning crept in through the edges of the window, and I heard birds chirping outside. I fell asleep.

A few weeks or months go by, and after hospital stays characterized by all sorts of distortions of time going forward and backward and jumping, and slowing down and speeding up, being convinced the world was ending every night, etc, I was laying in bed next to my ex-girlfriend, pretty securely psychotic, and having taken an Ativan to try to get some sleep and respite from my intense anxiety, paranoia, and racing thoughts.

Her laptop was closed and on the top of a short bookshelf by the foot of the bed. It had a green LED light, which shone across the ceiling. Gradually, I got a strange frightening sensation, like Hell or witches were reaching out to me. Very Halloween, but in the middle of Summer. In the frame of the electric green light splayed across my ceiling, all of a sudden apparated the silhouetted shadows of rows and rows, an army, of shambling zombies, lurching forward at an angle, and all in the same direction. In unison, they simultaneously chanted in a ghastly, howling, ghost-zombie wail, “WE ALWAYS KNEW YOU WERE THE FALSE MESSIAH!”

I was scared shitless. I didn’t know what to do. I shut my eyes and saw various closed eye visuals, fractals and shapes and patterns, as well as Jesus wearing a thorned (as in thorns, not horns) helmet (not a crown). Then this regal, majestic, rich voice, like Jesus, God, or some messenger angel from a Charlton Heston movie about the Bible, burst into my head, and proclaimed: “Nonadherence is not a transgression!” I took it as a sign: do the right thing, don’t transgress against God’s law, and nonadherence against bullshit dogmas, religions, and unjust and unreasonable laws doesn’t indict you to damnation in hell or punishment by God.

That was intense, but then moments later still I heard the smooth, practiced voice of a radio DJ (again, this is all happening as tangible auditory and visual hallucinations while laying in bed), who just says, “You are now tuning in, to Galaaactic, Radioooo.” Following were a few brief snippets of the most awesome and abstract experimental Jazz I’ve ever heard. It tuned in and out for a few seconds and then was gone.

Much later in the hospital again, another patient told me “You’ll go to Hell but you won’t burn.” I hope I don’t go to Hell, if it exists, but if I do I’ll probably be glad if I don’t burn. Jesus is alleged to have passed briefly through Hell ‒ this point was something that I obsessed over. I imagined that Jesus left some of his holy flesh and blood in hell, a cross-dimensional smuggling operation between worlds. His magical flesh and blood regenerated and multiplied, feeding the bloodthirsty vampiric demons of hell. Jesus did this out of compassion, and out of a pact to reduce human suffering and save all beings, including those souls magically trapped or reborn in hell.

During all of this, I had what I would call results. Innumerable synchronicities and insights. I had visions and experiences. For example, one time, without looking, I automatically stepped out of the way of a panel van that otherwise would have run into me. A couple of times, I automatically turned towards the origin of a sound just before the sound itself was made.

But nothing tangible stuck. Just the vaguest hint, a vision, a dream, a coincidence, and the perception that others were experiencing the same, just on the edge of awareness. The extreme visions and experiences would inevitably fade, their intense emotional high with them, giving way to an underlying mundane materiality that was not so easy to violate.

I think there is a whole spiritual world that is the same as this one, a level of reality which we cannot consciously access or experience. I think God is great and forgiving, and wants us to do the right thing and save the world. Perhaps there are no magical powers we can attain. Certainly, the most I ever undoubtedly gained was creativity and charisma, as well as energy and drive. But if everyone could evoke creativity and charisma, and energy and drive, through Magic-Mystical means, for the purposes of enlightened proletarian revolution, then maybe we really can save the world.

It must be said, though, that while miracles and magical powers (or “siddhis”) have long been reported in the world’s spiritual and religious traditions, that having a pure and true heart, and its cultivation thereof, are vastly more important and valuable, personally and communally. Anyway, someone might be able under very rare circumstances and conditions be able to move a pebble with their mind, but we all can already do so, too, by the embodied psychokinesis of our hands and fingers. Someone with powers will let it go to their heads and act selfishly, but together as one, and with faith in ourselves, each other, and the ultimate material reality, we can proverbially and literally “move mountains”.

John on Special Numbers

 Know the ledge to where your heart is

Or fall off into the internal hell that’s uncharted

…

The whole world is sick, sick, sick

Trapped up in six, six, six

‒ RZA – Sunshower

This will be a brief note on two aspects of my personal, syncretic, arbitrary belief system as it pertains to numerology. The numbers concerned are the infamous “mark of the beast” 666, and the number 10.

First, “666”. At the root of this number’s meaning is the Demiurge, the creator of the material cosmos who is coterminous with the cosmos thereby created. The Demiurge is the entity of form/incarnation, sense/perception, thinking/knowledge, and karma/sin, and is simultaneously self-created and other-created by the both transcendent and immanent Summus/Unus Deus (the One/Highest God) who transcends dualistic existence and nonexistence. The Demiurge has aspects spanning the six types of realms of Buddhist Samsara (or, cyclical existence divided into Hells, Ghosts, Animals, Humans, Demigods, and Heavens):

1. The Demiurge is the Heavenly aspect
2. Lucifer is the Demigod aspect
3. The Antichrist is the Human aspect
4. The Baphomet is the Animal aspect
5. The Unholy Ghost is the Ghost aspect
6. Satan is the Hellish aspect

We beings are each coterminous with the entire cosmos, yet smaller and larger, simpler and more complex, more chaotic and more orderly exist as and within one another like hyperdimensional nested Venn-Matryoshka dolls. Thus, in relative terms, some phenomena are more “us”, and some are less “us”. Some phenomena are more, or less, identical, related, or connected. We are the whole, and we are each at our own centers.

The Demiurge refers to the meta-being coterminous with the largest and most dimensionally complex and orderly scale, the scale of the panpsychic Heavens. At the human level, merely our thoughts incarnate the Demiurge and create our experience of the world. In some respects, we humans are all Antichrists. Original sin within the Christian tradition from whence the number “666” originates, de facto illustrates this point satisfactorily enough for our syncretic arbitrary-belief purposes. Yet we can strive to progress from lower to higher states, and through virtue, meditation, and wisdom, we have a chance to transcend Samsara completely.

This model implies that it would feel better to be a “transbeman” (a being which has transcended biological, exobiological, or mechanical limitations, for example through Substrate Independent Mind (SIM) uploading of consciousness to an advanced computer) plugged into a “Matrioshka brain” (a computational stellar engine, that is, a structure engineered at the scale of a star to harvest energy and use it for computation), than it would feel to be a sentient quantum particle. This is because the “Matrioshka-SIM” being is closer to the Heavenly state (larger, more complex, more orderly) than the Hellish state (smaller, simpler, more chaotic). A human is more likely to attain enlightenment than a stone, a plant, or some other animal. Yet in an ultimate sense, we are all One.

Maybe the mystical hypothesis of reincarnation is literally true and the Demiurge, the highest angel or will of the Absolute (God) which transcends Samsara, was cast like a spell to create this dream we experience through the trance of consciousness, Cosmic Psi energy-information coursing backwards and forwards through time and all the space-like dimensions.

Hence we are all in Hell, cast down from Heaven, and our soul is the One Mind of the Demiurge being reincarnated and compartmentalized (by the Pansychic-Censor) endlessly back and forth across the spacetimes of all realms. Universal reconciliation is the transcendence of the at turns abysmal at turns delightful existence of conscious beingness, the unity and merger with the Godhead: “We will be who we will be.”

That’s the first “six”, the six realms of Samsara. The second and third “sixes” also come from traditional Indian philosophy: the six senses (or “Ayatanas”), and the six proofs or means of knowledge (or “Pramanas”).

The six senses are of course 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. Andrew J. Nicholson, in Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (2013) (and originally accessed and quoted from the Wikipedia entry on “Pramanas” on June 7, 2019) identifies them as:

1. Perception
2. Inference
3. Comparison and analogy
4. Postulation, derivation from circumstances
5. Non-perception, negative/cognitive proof
6. Word, testimony of past or present reliable experts

Thus “666” represents all the unified phenomena, and beings, of all the realms of form and consciousness, as well as our sense-perception and knowledge of them. To conquer Satan and the forces of Hell, represented by the number 666 means conventionally or relatively to generate universal benefit through charity and piety, as well as ultimately reunifying our inner divine natures with the Absolute through the practice of virtue, meditation, and wisdom. To conquer Satan is to conquer the Self.

Thus we see that magic truly is the Satanic witchcraft of Hell, and furthermore that this witchcraft is magical thinking, that magical thinking is “just thinking”, that thinking (by panpsychism) is just being, and Hell is all the realms of form and being. We are all Satan, we are all each other, we are all the Demiurge, and we are all God. We just don’t know it yet.

Furthermore, continuing our conversation around the numbers “666” and “10”, enlightened beings are said by some Buddhist traditions to exist in four higher realms beyond the lower six realms of Samsara, in the realms of the Śrāvakas, the Pratyekabuddhas, the Bodhisattvas, and finally the Buddhas who have attained the supreme enlightenment. The six lower realms and four higher realms create ten realms in total.

Now, to address the significance of that very number, “10”.

Here we will look at a personal and general synchronicity whereby I found the number ten, which I originally associated with the Imagining the Tenth Dimension (10THDIM) project by Rob Bryanton, to coincide with a pattern of several related tenfold factors of Buddhist metaphysics and cosmology.

The central coincidence here is the Buddhist cosmological trinity of tens which are consolidated by the more recent 10THDIM model. The 10THDIM model’s ten dimensions account for all points in space, of all moments in all timelines, of all universes in the multiverse, all integrated into a single indeterminate point or information field. Space, Time, and Universes (or Realms), each has a tenfold model in Buddhism.

Space, the whole universe, is referred to as “the Ten Directions”. These are N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE, and SW, as well as Zenith and Nadir (up and down, respectively). Time is referred to as “the Ten Time Periods”, which are the pasts, presents, and futures of the past, present, and future, as well as those nine time periods treated as a single whole. “The Ten Realms” are the six realms of Samsara, as well as four additional, higher realms, constituting Holy States, discussed above. Note that each of the ten realms contains each of the ten realms, producing 100 realms, but that then this recursive interrelation generates infinite realms (as explained in a footnote in Shobogenzo: Zen Essays by Dogen by Eihei Dogen, translated by Thomas Cleary).

I know from personal correspondence with Rob Bryanton that these synchronistic resonances between Buddhist cosmology and the 10THDIM project were truly coincidental and unplanned.

There are several more noteworthy sequences of ten, important to Buddhist theory and practice, including the Ten Perfections, or Pāramitās, the Kammapatha, or the ten wholesome or unwholesome courses of action and the ten Bhūmi or “grounds of enlightenment”.

John on 1E M+ K+

Reality is mysterious. (And, as you know I would say, magical, too.)

In any case, time is an illusion whereby we “sample” eternal information, one Planck-frame at a time, the same way when we pass through space we necessarily pass through it gradually although all of space continues to exist in our absence. In reality all times and places exist at once, simultaneously ‒ they are just consciously inaccessible. This is why in Buddhism, Chaos Magic, and common sense, it is said that the present is the only period of time that exists, while the past and future do not (though a stricter Buddhist interpretation is that this reifies the present moment, and that in fact the present also does not exist independently or permanently). From the perspective we’ve been building in this chapter, all “wheres” and “whens”, every point in every direction in spacetime and all the space-like dimensions beyond spacetime, all the way up to the Tenth Dimension of Rob Bryanton’s 10THDIM model, exist all at once in eternity. We are just locked out of experiencing this information by the Pansychic-Censor.

So, can we ever extend our experience beyond our senses, to expand throughout “infinite space and time”? Can we wake up to living simultaneously in multiple lives (on multiple timelines) the same way the Buddha is said to have? Can we extend or transform our consciousness at least, or material basis in general, into the multiverse? These questions inform the mystery of what I call “Material Theurgy”, which, in short, is the communal and everlasting Hero’s Journey to extend life and expand consciousness beyond the material and mental limits of circumstance and the Pansychic-Censor. The quest to preserve life and consciousness, and wake up the sleeping cosmos. At our present stage of cosmic and historical development and evolution, our approach is roughly outlined by the abbreviation: 1E M+ K+.

1E M+ K+ is a simple formula that takes a cosmic and historical perspective based goal-oriented approach to Material Theurgy. Basically:

• 1E: One-Earth unity and sustainability, as well as reminding us that this single Earth is all we have. One Earth is a measure of sustainable production and consumption, where 1.0 Earths or less of consumption is sustainable, and consumption greater than 1.0 Earths is unsustainable.
•  M+: Advance Maslow’s Needs for all, meeting more basic needs first,     worldwide (as implied by 1E).
• K+: Advance on the Kardashev Scale as a civilization on a 1E M+ basis.

The above necessitates a worldwide scientifically planned and direct-democratically accountable economy, and the rationing of all goods and products.

We can imagine that there might be sentient, consciously hyperdimensional beings (able to perceive and make decisions directly at levels beyond three dimensions, treating time and the multiverse like space to travel through or exist throughout). Might we be part of them, maybe a dream (or a computational simulation) of theirs? (Like Chuang Tzu wondering if he had dreamt of being a butterfly, or if the butterfly was dreaming of being him.)

John on the Cosmos

The whole cosmos is “one bright jewel,” ‒ we experience relative movement through a field of information which is, at the absolute top level, totally integrated! Two potential examples of this are photons and electrons. According to the “One-Electron Universe postulate”, all electrons are identical, and they are also identical with all positrons except for the fact that positrons can be said to be going the opposite direction in time. This leads to the suspicion that all electrons and positrons are really just one single electron going back in forth in time over and over.

From a photon’s perspective, due to the identity of the speed of light and the speed of time with the universal physical constant c, no time elapses between the photon’s emission and absorption. A photon, from its own perspective, travels however far across the whole universe instantaneously. As a consequence, from its own perspective, the entire universe takes the form of a single, integrated point.

In the 10THDIM model, the entire multiverse is integrated into a single indeterminate point.

Panpsychism suggests that the whole cosmos is conscious, One Big Mind. Within a certain arbitrary belief paradigm (which I call the “10THDIM-DIAMAT-CMT”, or “10th-Dimensional Dialectical Materialist Chaos Magic Theory”), all phenomena at all scales and complexity are unified at the 10th-dimensional level, and emit consciousness, “Ether”, or “Psi-information”, which is theoretically available anywhere (and anywhen) else in the multiverse. This is a magical-thinking take on the basic premise of panpsychism, which is the hypothesis that, as the CBC summarizes (in the blurb for the CBC Radio episode “Panpsychism and the Nature of Consciousness” from September 13, 2018): “maybe consciousness, like space and time, mass and energy, is just a basic characteristic of the universe. Maybe it’s a fundamental property of matter.”

In Chaos Magic terms (again relying on the model outlined by “the Chaoist Pope” Peter J. Carroll, whose model I have slightly modified), Psi is one of the five main material elements of reality, each corresponding to the classical magical elements (also noting that by material elements we are speaking more generally than the very specific periodic table of chemical elements which lists the atomic forms of matter):

1. Air – Space
2. Water – Time
3. Earth – Mass
4. Fire – Energy
5. Ether – Psi

“Matter” here means the information constituting reality, not just “mass” as it is commonly meant. Therefore Space, Time, Mass, Energy, and Psi (or consciousness) are the key “elements” or properties that define Matter.

To clarify something, I am using “cosmos” to refer to the idea of “the multiverse” (as Carl Sagan put it, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be,”). The “ultimate material reality” might transcend or escape our own universe the same way the past and present transcend or escape our presently lived moment. Still, the same way only our measurements and inferences can guide our notion of the essence of the material, only the presently available universe available to our measurement and inference can guide our thinking. Further, as discussed earlier, we are a small part of the cosmic and universal mind, and consequently all our thinking is rendered on the hardware and logic of the particular universe we exist as, and within.

From Hegel’s dialectical method we get the idea that nothingness and the infinite are indistinguishable. The 10THDIM model agrees: the 10th-dimensional field (a single indeterminate, infinite void-point with no other points of reference) is “not very interesting.” It contains all possible potentials of the multiverse, time, and space. We can imagine this point is “a zero” which is “full” with all the dialectically contradicting positive and negative values for ten perpendicular or orthogonal axes, canceling each other out. From our vantage point in the lower dimensions, we asymmetrically sample this information, and experience change and motion. Yet at the eternal level, beyond time, at the tenth-dimensional level, there is no activity, there is no change. Relative dialectical chaos (“change”) is a quality of the lower realms we reside in.

As narrated by Rod Serling in the introduction to the classic show, The Twilight Zone (1959–1964): “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”

We can observe that in both the 10THDIM model and CMT’s “shadow time” model, we can be said to exist and live in the weird “twilight zone” of the fifth dimension. In the 10THDIM model, the fifth dimension represents the plane of branching timelines we experience as movement in one direction along a single vector of conscious experience. In this model, this is a key component of the argument for free will. This makes sense because in Chaos Magic, Chaos or Kia is the experience of absolute free will ‒ but, free to do what? What range of options are we choosing from? They all eternally exist independent of our experience of them, the same way that in Dialectical Materialism, or DIAMAT, the absolute “material” exists independently of the relative “ideal” conscious reflection of it.

Free will is a belief that should empower us. We can choose to influence the world-states our conscious centers pass through and reside in, selecting from the eternal 10-dimensional option menu.

I believe knowledge of the truth and the historical and cosmic imaginary perspectives can empower us to shape our own lives, and history. After all, as Rob Bryanton says in Imagining the Tenth Dimension, “[I]f all we are talking about is a constant throwing of the dice with no interactivity, no qualitative decision making, no desire for things to be ‘this way instead of that way’, then the entire construct we are examining here has no point whatsoever.” The more informed and wise the masses are, the better. I think through knowledge and struggle, we can transcend our worst problems. I think there is a point to existing, a point to existence. I choose to believe that.

The essence of this worldview is that to best exercise free will, we have to imagine (or, as an advanced magical method, visualize during a strong trance) alternative moments, timelines, or worlds, and figure out what we have to do to get to them or make them real, to “get there from here” ‒ and then make it happen. We choose to believe that the cosmos exists and that we exist not for no mere reason, but for some real reason, and the historical and cosmic perspectives will guide our thought and action. This might seem pointless, merely imagining and realizing material configurations of cosmic information, applying selection patterns on what is ultimately ten-dimensional “noise”.

But the basic belief that truth can be approximately known is at bottom a choice of belief, and similarly we must choose to believe that our individual and communal (and cosmic) lives are not pointless.

John’s Syncretic Sigil

I like thinking of new ways to constructively combine ideas. One product of that impulse is the following “Syncretic Sigil”. It is made up of a few components, including the Taijitu (Yin and Yang), Chaos Star, Dharmachakra, Cross/Leviathan’s Cross (noting especially the equals sign and the infinity symbol), and the traditional symbols for the five classical elements (or, as above, the five materialist elements, with Psi for Ether, here depicted with the customary Sol/Sun symbol). When I look at this sigil I can’t help but get at least a few minor brainstorms of fresh perspective or insight (or at least creative speculations) about mysticism and the nature of reality and our conscious existence within it.

To reiterate the Magical Thinking section above: In general, the present moment is each of our respective personal centers of balance from within all the cosmos and eternity. We are all at our own “center of everything” ‒ but we are also all in this world together. This is it.