Tuck Detchon Writes

“Furthermore, there is something deeply human that what we call occult practices have given expression to. I would call this a desire for ecstasis, for having an unmediated experience with the divine. Magic and religion were once inseparable, but even when these practices were outlawed, people continued to find ways to have their own personal agency in regards to their spiritual lives. But I think we would prefer to do this in the context of community, as had once been done. This drive will always find a way to manifest, and rock and roll provided a most potent vehicle to reignite the echo of the earliest forms of worship; theater, dance, performance, shouting, drumming, and even intoxication and the shadow of madness, of being possessed by the gods.” (Peter Bebergal interviewed by Richard Metzger, Dangerous Minds, “Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll”)

For me, magick is realizing you are a thought and a being, a thought-being, within the Cosmic Mind, and everyone and everything else is also a thought-being.

I like to think that when we dream, and there’s other people in our dream, that we can go down two paths when determining beingness in terms of theory of mind: other beings within the dream are real and have their own minds, versus dream being solipsism. 

I’d argue that we can’t usually predict what the other people in our dreams will do, yet we can interact and talk with them, they appear autonomous, and expressive, and sometimes they seem surprised and shocked (for example when you are semi-lucid in a dream and excitedly tell everyone, “we’re dreaming right now!”). We don’t have access to their inner world, such that it is. While we have retreated into our own brains, so to speak, in a way that is more extreme than our day to day life (where even our experience of the external world, other entities, beings, and persons and therefore the question of their “other minds” is actually an internal experience, simply because our sensory-perceptual link with the external world “ends” inside our brains where it is rendered, muxed, processed and ultimately experienced … but I digress), it still seems like dream people are relatively individual subpersonalities.

This discussion concerns the concept of a “multimind”, or the stance that there are subpersonalities in the brain. Split brain experiments support this view. So do certain hallucinations, namely hallucinations of others’ voices. (As I understand it the multimind view contradicts the “Integrated Information Theory (IIT)” thesis of some flavors of materialist panpsychism, though, yet I wonder if these two views can be reconciled.)

There are “neural correlates” for our “self” (the combined experiential and narrative self we identify with both when we are awake as well as in dreams, at least usually), and there must also be “neural correlates” for dream people (and any other mental and therefore dream event or element).

Well if it’s something that is being experienced, and it has a neural correlate, a lot of us would call that “a thought.” We could differentiate thought from experience, but here we’ll use the term generally, similarly to how we used the term “beme” in the post B.U.T.T.S. DLC, thus thought = experience, including sensory-perception, emotion, cognition, and even physical movements of the body. So, there is a physical system supporting or identical with this thought-experience. And it seems like the thought-experience-correlate itself is an experiencER: a thought-experience-correlate-being. We are experiencing ourselves as ourselves; we are the experience of experiencing ourselves.

The materialist panpsychists argue that consciousness is the “intrinsic nature of matter.” Matter IS consciousness, there is no distinction. Structural, informational, or even computational integration of matter in particular ways generates emergent “beingness” or experience greater than the sum of the quantity of primitive consciousness inherent to all smallest possible units of matter (matter = mass, energy, space, time, information, consciousness).

Accepting things this far, we may then take any other physical object, element, system, structure, process, network, or phenomenon etc. as basically analogous to a “correlate”, like a world-correlate for a thought or a being. This world resembles a dream (given that dreams resemble the world), and we resemble dreams’ inhabitants. And the rocks and the trees and the moon and the stars, and so on, number among our community.

We are approaching a picture that looks basically like neo-animist multimind materialist panpsychism.

At this point I would specifically invoke the pared down, generic, chaos magick paradigm, where you have a fundamental basis of “belief” as the root which establishes “kia” or the soul, which differentiates dualistically into “will and perception.” From “belief, will, and perception,” you get all the other basic operations including “concentration, imagination, visualization, analysis, and synthesis.” At that point we’re really cooking.

The world-dream of the Cosmic Mind is this constant interaction of elements. It’s like a fractal, Rubik’s Cube, cellular automaton where the values, operations, variables, equations, and functions describing the geometry all “talk” to each other and exchange information locally, globally, temporally, instantaneously, and eternally.

From the post “Email to Peter J. Carroll”: “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).”

In brief: in dreams, dream people appear autonomous; dream people and all experiences have “neural correlates”; each neural correlate is a “multimind” subpersonality; materialist panpsychism proposes consciousness (experience) is the intrinsic nature of all matter: matter = consciousness; each physical element is its own “correlate”; as above, so below: dreams within the brain resemble the world outside the brain, and vice versa; all possible elements are numberless beings; all beings interact at numberless levels, including hidden (occult) levels and the levels of meaning.

Thus, magick has two main procedures: (1) Open yourself up to the Cosmic Mind, send out messages, pay attention, receive messages, and interpret them, and (2) Establish rapport/relationships with all of the other thought-beings, spirits, or minds out there — and in here, with us, and inside of us, making us up, passing through us, in us, and as us, and we as them.

But, for the most part: try to notice other thought-beings and remember them, even if they appear and disappear like octarine lightning flashing in a dream. “Find the others,” (Timothy Leary), make contact, and then, together, do as ye wilt.

Edit 2025-06-29: I just watched this thanks to someone on magickschool.net sharing it there, I enjoyed it a lot, and it’s really exciting to me. It appears to echo my own thoughts (or vice versa) in the above post, so I’ll embed it here with links to the YouTube page and transcript in the caption. (It is roughly two hours long.):