Tuck Detchon Writes

In this post I’m going to argue that synchronicity (acausality) proves telepathy, parapsychology (parapsychological or paranormal phenomena), magick, and the Cosmic Mind. I’ll also explain my extension of the Classical Magickal Operations of Chaos Magick into the Advanced Magical Operations (or the highly-illuminated, or enlightened, “Mystical Operations”), claim that synchronicity is a miracle (I mean, well, everything is a miracle if you think about it enough), and consolidate the outline of my Evolutionary Parapsychology model into Competitive and Social Evolutionary Parapsychology.

The Parapsychology Proof (PPP)

While this realization is new to me, it may actually trace back to the origins of the idea of synchronicity/acausality and its terminology as it comes to us from Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Here is one of those situations where my not having done much of the necessary reading is a limitation — but at least I should be able to describe it in a specific and hopefully new way that is useful.

Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences. The following proof assumes that they are real, yet while many people around the world believe in synchronicities, they remain a kind of “Unverified Personal Gnosis (UPG),” untestable, unprovable, and anecdotal. I for one experience them all the time, sometimes very “strong” or specific ones, and sometimes more or less frequently.

They are characterized by the coming together of internal, embodied, and external events, often involving symbols and language (which is interesting in its own right). Three examples from this past summer when I was experiencing a lot of synchronicities every day, especially while taking neighborhood walks: 

1. I was listening to Van Halen’s self-titled album and the song “Ice Cream Man” started just as an ice cream truck drove by and stopped just ahead of me.
2. I was walking with my Mom, me on the left and her on the right, and she was not wearing her glasses nor was she looking in the direction of a scrap of plastic packaging or tape on the ground to my right when she said “and now it,” and the scrap also said those words.
3. I was walking immediately past the entrance of the neighborhood pool when an Aesop Rock lyric said the specific name of the pool.

To be honest there is usually a “you had to be there” type of feeling surrounding synchronicities in general, even strong ones — and on top of that these together don’t paint the full picture of the frequency or even strength or specificity of some of the synchronicities I experience.

Many people log/journal synchronicities for just this reason but also to increase their occurrence and the likelihood of noticing them, in theory because synchronicity journaling (and journaling any other magickal result) works like a dream journal in that it subdues the action of the “Psychic Censor,” the psychological/parapsychological aspect of reality responsible for ignorance and amnesia of our innate cosmic omniscience in general but more specifically things like dreams, psychedelic trips, synchronicities and other magickal results, and peak mystical experiences.

In any case my goal here isn’t to convince you of synchronicities or UPGs. As I said, for the sake of the following argument, we are assuming synchronicities are real.

Well then, what do synchronicities mean? Meaning from one synchronicity to another may be significant, like an omen or a sign speaking directly to some kind of anxiety or a topic one is thinking about a lot; or, it may be relatively arbitrary, seeming almost like a wink and a smile from the Universe where it simply seems to say, “I’m here, you’re not alone, there is someone who ‘knows how many hairs you have on your head.’” I refer to this entity (or if there are more than one, entities) as the “Synchronistic Agent(s).”

Acausality is “overdetermined” by causality: an event or circumstance is overdetermined if there is a redundant array of two or more causes for a given effect or outcome. Whenever a synchronicity occurs, and if we are using a materialist mode of analysis, if we look closely our interpreted meaning did not cause anything. Events occurred in a sequence from one to the next without needing to be explained by the intervention of any hidden variable. Action, reaction, and interaction.

Yet, acausality implies a kind of hidden causality. If reality turns out to be deterministic, synchronicities imply a kind of plan going back to the beginning of time. If reality is not deterministic, synchronicities imply the active modification and orchestration of circumstances in a way that masks, hides, or “launders” the involvement of the Synchronistic Agent: acausality overdetermined by causality.

But for our purposes here, and this is the realization that is new for me, synchronicities by their nature stand as a proof of telepathy, parapsychology, and magick:

• Synchronicities demonstrate that the Universe knows, responds to, modifies, and/or controls mental states and coordinates them with other internal (mental), embodied (the condition, sensations, or movement of your body), or external (environmental) events.
• This coordination is often very fine-tuned, down to the instantaneous moment (though sometimes less granular, instead occurring within the span of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc.).
• This demonstrates that the entire Universe knows, responds to, modifies, and/or controls the relationships between an individual mind and the Universe as a whole, mediating mental contents and physical events.
• If the Universe can mediate one mind and the whole Universe in this way, it follows that it also “links” two or more minds in this way, or, if it actively modifies individual mental contents and events within one mind, it can modify mental contents and events within two or more minds. This is the proof of telepathy (or at least a plausible mechanism for its functioning).
• If the Universe links minds and the Universe, and knows, responds to, modifies, controls, and/or coordinates internal, embodied, and external events, then synchronicities additionally prove that magickal operations and parapsychology occur and can yield results (or they prove a mechanism for these).

In other posts I’ve used the term “Panpsychic Multimind Panentheism (PMP),” but I’ve made a new discovery here as well which changes things. Panpsychism is the view that every smallest possible element of reality has at least primordial, fundamental, or basic consciousness, and that the interactions of these elements into larger systems creates deeper levels of consciousness as an emergent property of matter. Here’s the new part for me: if Panpsychism is a sort of bottom-up arrangement, Cosmopsychism is a top down, holistic, monistic view that reality as a whole at its topmost level is conscious and that its more basic constituent elements or systems derive consciousness from the whole. I like both, so I’ve changed PMP to PCMP, or, Panpsychic-Cosmopsychic Multimind Panentheism.

Even before the term PMP I used DMP for “Dialectical Materialist Panpsychism,” a mashup of “Dialectical Materialism” and “Materialist Panpsychism.” A deeper exploration will have to occur in the future on a separate post, but for now it will suffice to say I believe in a sort of Materialist Idealism (rigorous philosophers, and God, forgive me).

In the context of the above discussion about synchronicities and acausality, and PCMP, there is another point of the proof:

• If the Universe instantaneously knows, responds to, modifies, controls, and/or coordinates internal, embodied, and external events, then this proves that mind and matter are one, i.e. the Universe is a mind and all of its constituent elements are minds.

This supports Peter J. Carroll’s case for “Ether” (or “Aether,” the spelling I prefer) in his Liber Kaos. To quickly recap his ideas (which I also discuss repeatedly on other posts) surrounding Aether and the Material Elements: He first identifies four “Materialist Elements,” (not the Chemical Elements) which are each defined “tautologically” by the rest and correspond to the Classical Elements as follows:

• Mass → Earth
• Energy → Fire
• Space → Air
• Time → Water

Interestingly he preserves Aether from the Classical Elements and defines it separately as a an additional fifth Materialist Element, so I move it back to its original Classical position, split it into Yin Aether and Yang Aether, and correspond Yin Aether to Psi (Ψ, Mind) and Yang Aether to Phi (Φ, Information). 

In his model, Aether is Morphic and Akashic information instantaneously linking any event or system to the whole Universe within a single moment. “Morphic” refers to the idea that there is a cosmic field within which “negentropic” or orderly forms evolve randomly but once they have done so it is easier for the Universe to replicate them (which goes part of the way to explain why, in magickal practice, this gives Visualization special power to influence Reality). “Akashic” refers to the idea that there is a cosmic field which is a kind of virtual database of all possible knowledge about all events and systems. 

Carroll elaborates on “spherical time” and “hypersphere cosmology” in The Apophenion, but I choose to view Psi/Phi as morphically and akashically accessible anywhere in the ten “key dimensions” of Rob Bryanton’s Imagining the Tenth Dimension model (“key” because I allow for virtually infinite dimensions including for curvature, very large or very small dimensions, etc., and additionally I “loop” the 10D point around on all 0D points within itself; I think Bryanton more recently has explored the concept of infinite dimensions himself). Bryanton’s model, like Carroll’s, also uses “hypersphere packing,” but instead of three key dimensions of space and three key dimensions of time in Carroll’s model, Bryanton adds three more key dimensions of multiverse forming the topmost hypersphere treated as a single point in the tenth dimension.

This is all to say: “Everything is everything,” and everything is intimately interconnected, interrelated, and interacting with everything else. “Everything fits together.”

For one thing, I view the self-conscious, what we typically experience on a day-to-day basis, as actually being a subcomponent of the subconscious. We have a self-hood chauvinism that privileges the part over the whole, and this creeps into popular psychological models of magick, but first of all in The Apophenion Carroll describes two kinds of “multimind” properties, one diachronic (over time) and dynamic, one synchronic (in a given instant) and structured. Basically, our consciousness and personality changes over time — we and our minds are different from moment to moment, so the “I” from a few seconds ago cannot be said to be identical with the “me” right now. And within a given moment, there is a structure of subpersonalities constituting the mind, all interacting and interfering with each other, from which our self awareness emerges. These subpersonalities might roughly equate to different networks, subnetworks, and patterns of neurons and interneuronal connections within the brain, and their properties and activity.

The diachronic and synchronic multimind properties of consciousness are not separate, either, and generate additional complexity.

With all this in mind (heh), what do I mean when I say “the self-conscious is a subcomponent of the subconscious”? You may be familiar with the image of an iceberg, with a vast body underneath the water representing the subconscious, and with the tip of the iceberg which protrudes above the water representing the self-conscious. I like this metaphor but criticize its usual interpretation: It usually is interpreted as suggesting that the subconscious is merely larger, more vast, and more complex than the self-awareness, or at best that the self-conscious is “supported” by this vast subconscious machinery or ecosystem. I would go a step further and point out that the tip of the iceberg is obviously just a chunk of the whole iceberg which happens to have the unique property of sticking above the water — and properly speaking, the entire iceberg is really what we should be calling the subconscious, including its tip.

Instead of this:

We have this:

And therefore even the most deliberative, contemplated, planned, and reasoned thoughts and decisions we make are fundamentally and completely automatic, intuitive, and instinctive. The brain science bears this out. (The neuronal correlates or brain cell networks responsible for a given decision fire a moment before we have the conscious experience of having made a decision). Split-brain experiments also prove the multimind thesis (where the bundle of nerve fibers connecting the two halves of the brain is severed and so is the personality and its decisionmaking and rationalization of its — their — decisions).

This raises some challenging questions about free will, as if chaos/order, randomness/determinism, and self/nonself weren’t challenging enough. If there is a self and a free-will, they depend on each other and emerge from complex and dynamic relationships and processes which implicate all of reality.

This self/subconscious situation is also a useful metaphor for psychology and parapsychology (by which I mean, psychological and parapsychological phenomena and properties etc. generally, not strictly “the respective fields of scientific study thereof”). Sure, we’re skeptical about the self and reality and everything, we’re all friends here, but let’s assume in this instance that we believe in parapsychology. Well, usually the idea is that parapsychology is something that occurs when the individual psyche transmits information “out there” into the universe from a separated and isolated place “in here”, and the universe transmits something back; as if the psyche and the universe were discrete, and as if the psyche and the universe were exchanging messages in bottles, pinging each other over an internet modem and waiting for a response.

If everything is instantaneously interconnected as we speculated above, and if everything is everything, and everything is within everything, then this traditional view falls short in light of the total instant integration of Reality.

But there is a much more direct and simple observation we can make here: The parapsychological refers to the Universe, which is itself a mind, and the psychological refers to the individual mind (such that it is) as a kind of cosmic multimind. This means that the Universe contains and includes the individual mind and its brain, much the same way that the subconscious individual mind contains and includes the self-conscious individual mind:

The Advanced Magickal Operations

I’ve also developed an extension of Carroll’s model of the Basic (Psychological) Operations and the Classical Magickal (Parapsychological) Operations. In Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos, he lays these out, and passes along the traditional wisdom:

“For this reason one should, where possible, ‘Enchant Long and Divine Short.’ Enchantments cast well in advance have a greater chance to modify sequences of probability in one’s favor, while divinations will give better results if performed for the near rather than the far future whose manifestation is more subject to indeterminate chaotic occurrences.” (Peter J. Carroll, Liber Kaos, pg. 25, emphasis mine)

Basically, borrowing Bryanton’s 10THDIM perspective, there is a given finite or infinite (but mind that there are hierarchies of infinity) quantity of matter defining the Universe in any given instantaneous moment or “frame” of time. Add one more frame and you’ve doubled that information, and you are astronomically far from the amount of matter defining a single second of the Universe’s arrangement and activity. This dynamic supports giving enchantments longer time to cook (and speaks to the difficulty of achieving results in larger and complex versus smaller and simpler physical systems), while it inhibits gaining information over greater and greater distances in space, time, or multiverse.

Later, Carroll defines the Classical Magickal Operations as follows:

Classical Magical Operations (from Liber Kaos by Peter J. Carroll, pgs. 157-158):

• Enchantment: “Includes all those practices in which the magician attempts to impose will on reality.”
• Divination: “Includes all those practices in which the magician attempts to extend perception by magical means.”
• 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.”
• 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.”
• 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.”

And he continues:

“Thus, all magical operations are based on the use of will, perception and imagination, which is to say that they are all species of enchantment or divination.” (Peter J. Carroll, Liber Kaos, pgs. 158-159)

In PSI-PHI SCHEMA DLC I make some modifications, adjusting and massaging the model and correspondences to taste, where the key Basic Operations (probably infinitely many) begin like this:

Here Psi (Ψ) amounts the superlative, primordial potential of the cosmic mind as it is structured and delimited into the particular and specific informational contents of Phi (Φ). As I write in Patch Notes 02 – PPM, which revises some points of The PSI-PHI Matrix (PPM):

So the PPM looks like this:

Where:

1. Psi Observation is superlative [omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent] and absolute.
2. Psi Censorship delimits it.
3. Phi Observation is the result.
4. Phi Censorship is the difference or ratio between Psi Observation and Phi Observation

In PSI-PHI SCHEMA DLC I also make the following correspondences (since writing that I’ve added a weak correspondence for each of the five senses):

#. Classical Magickal Operation = “One of the Five Poisons” (Basic Operation(s)) [Sense].

1. Enchantment = “Anger” (Will) [Touch].
2. Divination = “Greed” (Perception) [Hearing].
3. Evocation = “Pride” (Analysis & Concentration) [Smell].
4. Invocation = “Envy” (Synthesis & Imagination) [Taste].
5. Illumination= “Delusion” (Belief, Mindfulness, & Visualization) [Sight].

Well, long story short, I’ve also recently finished corresponding the Advanced Magickal Operations (or maybe “Mystical Operations”) as follows:

Whereas for the Classical Operations Carroll recommends we “Enchant Long and Divine Short,” with the Advanced Operations, for Miracles one can “Enchant Short (Miracle) and Divine Long (Prophecy).” This may necessarily come up against the limits of the laws of physics where first of all Miracle and Prophecy blend Enchantment and Divination and second of all the resulting “results” are symbolic and metaphorical — a Prophecy becomes “Biblical” and loaded with abstract imagery, and a Miracle conserves its potency and efficiency by operating at the level of language and symbolism …

Because Synchronicities, as a type of result, are Miracles.

And this tracks because these Advanced Operations are the “highly illuminated” or “enlightened” versions of the Classical Operations. Remember that Illumination is self-directed magick for the purposes of self-modification and self-improvement.

One additional thing this suggests to me is that mystics with dedicated meditation, prayer, and other broadly “yogic” or devotional practices can and probably should spend their time studying and practicing magick (and, well, Radical Proletarian Theory and Praxis). After all, in the Sōtō Zen school for example, meditation practice follows two main stages: the lower stage, Zazen (Focused Attention meditation on the breath at the chakra in the belly); and the higher stage, Shikantaza: “just sitting,” or, “silent illumination.”

In OpenCult’s Mythic Meta-Gamification (MMG) model, special emphasis is placed on the Marxist DIAMAT (Dialectical Materialist) law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa. Here, we can conceive of quantitative illumination transforming through the qualitative rupture of Kensho or Satori — the enlightenment experience.

If Magick subdues the Psychic Censor, Mysticism subdues the Self — so, considering that Mysticism and Magick are two sides of the same coin, we likewise see that the Censor and the Self are two sides of the same coin. In fact, per the The PSI-PHI Matrix (PPM) and PSI-PHI SCHEMA DLC, individuality and the Self are created from the Cosmic Mind by Censorship. It follows that the Advanced Operations are more “selfless” than the Classical Operations.

And if, as Carroll says, Evocation, Invocation, and Illumination are kinds of Enchantment and Divination; then Possession, Summoning, and Enlightenment may be said to be kinds of Miracle and Prophecy.

All of this said, another point of departure from Carroll’s original model is that I simplify Evocation/Invocation to where I associate Evocation primarily with servitors, internal, smaller, simpler, and local intelligences; whereas I associate Invocation primarily with egregores, external, larger, more complex, and nonlocal intelligences. 

Furthermore, I define a godform as the integration of at least one servitor and at leaste one egregore across the self/other or internal/external boundary, where servitor, egregore, and godform are the three main categories of thoughtform. This I think explains why I correspond Evocation with Possession and Invocation with Summoning the way I do. I’m quite literally saying you are being Possessed by a being inside your mind, or you are Summoning a being to appear into the world in this way.

It’s a bit more messy than that in practice. For one, the properties internal/external, lesser/greater, simpler/more complex, and local/nonlocal might be mixed and matched for a given being.

Note on Evolutionary Parapsychology

In the final section of The Identity of Magick and Labor, I explained the simple model I call Evolutionary Parapsychology. Physics, biology, psychology, and history being as complex as they are, my model is a bit too simplistic but illustrates the idea well, I think. I will try to streamline it further here to make it even simpler:

Evolutionary Parapsychology works at two main levels:

1. Competitive Evolutionary Parapsychology: Predator and prey stealing and protecting their mental contents from each other.
2. Social Evolutionary Parapsychology: In-groups and out-groups, and friends and foes, broadcasting positive and useful perceptions, emotions and cognitions (to promote cooperation, mutual benefit, deception, and exploitation) while inhibiting negative perceptions, emotions, and cognitions (to avoid conflict); while also trying to steal “the truth” from each other.

Finally, notice that there is a dynamic between broadcasting, stealing, or protecting “the truth” on one hand, and broadcasting or planting “lies” on the other.