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by Steven Craig Hickman
Hyperstition itself is a complex of ideas surrounding time-sorcery, numograms, mythology, and unbelief.
“His ideas are drawings, or even diagrams.”
—Gilles Deleuze speaking of his friend Felix Guattari
There’s only really been one question, to be honest, that has guided everything I’ve been interested in for the last twenty years, which is: the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.
—Nick Land, “The Teleological Identity of Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence”
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In an interview Deleuze revealed “”Between Felix with his diagrams and me with my articulated concepts, we wanted to work together”.1 What drew Deleuze to seek out this non-conceptual form of thought? What is a diagram? Are these oppositional terms, or complimentary? We know that Deleuze’s hatred of both Plato and Hegel is well known. His investment in Spinoza and Nietzsche is also deciding. This antagonistic relationship with dualisms, with the negative, lack, and the dialectic in both Deleuze and Guattari, while presenting in their respective singularities a more pragmatist appeal to non-dialectical forms of thought is also well known. Many philosophers discount Guattari’s addition to this relationship and their work in the four extant publications of Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and What is Philosophy? Why?
A great deal of it comes down to the post-Lacanian philosophies of such thinkers as Badiou (Deleuze: The Clamor of Being) and Zizek (Organs without Bodies: Gilles Deleuze) who best typify this anathematization of Guattari. As Louis Burchell in her preface to Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being remarks, that what “Badiou names the “superficial doxa of an anarcho-desiring Deleuzianism,” making of Deleuze the champion of desire, free flux, and anarchic experimentation, is the first of the false images he sets out to shatter”, referring to Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, and will “bear the full brunt of Badiou’s scathing dismissal of the gross inadequacy of such a representation”.2 Yet, one must ask: Is this an accurate portrayal of Guattari’s stance? One might answer by asking: Who cares? Why all the fuss? Obviously there is this need in academic philosophy to protect the integrity of one’s representations of other philosophers that one is either for or against, and of qualifying and anathematizing all Johnny-come-lately infiltration as bunk to be discarded and delegitimized. Zizek in his book would remark that the true philosophical heritage of Deleuze lies in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense rather than in “the books Deleuze and Guattari cowrote, and one can only regret that the Anglo-Saxon reception of Deleuze (and, also, the politicial impact of Deleuze) is predominantly that of a “guattarized” Deleuze”.3
Of course both Badiou and Zizek are firm dialecticians, affirmers of Lacan and Hegel, both defending the negative and negation, lack and dialectical materialism and their own interactions with the Platonic inheritance. So that with Guattari and Deleuze’s Anti-Platonic stance, and their combined affirmation not of lack but of a transcendental unconscious that is both productive and creative one can see their consternation in the face of such thinking.
I want belabor this line of critique, I’ll leave that to the philosophers among you. What is more interesting for me is Deleuze’s fascination with Guattari’s diagrammatic thinking as a complemetarian approach with conceptuality rather than as its opposition or antagonism. It is well known that for Guattari the thrust of his attack on Lacan is the notion of Lack. Guattari would begin by attacking the whole reductionist enterprise of Lacan and his notions that the unconscious is “structured like a language”. For Guattari with his investment in schizophrenia and his patients he’d learned to reroute our universal pretentions into the singular truth of the fractured and rhizomatic psyches of these broken individuals. Doing this he would begin to elaborate what he’d term metamodeling, mapping, and diagrams.
Metamodeling is “a discipline of reading other systems of modeling, not as a general model, but as an instrument for deciphering modeling systems in various domains, or in other words, as a meta-model” (GR 133/PIP72; CS 27). As Janell Watson comments:
The term “model” here harbors negative undertones, suggesting the schematic reductionism which for Guattari characterizes both structuralism and the capitalist axiomatic. Metamodeling is offered as a more complex and enabling alternative to prevailing social and psychic models… Guattari understood the term “model” – which in French can also mean “pattern” – in roughly two ways. In its normative sense, the model is a learned pattern of behavior inherited from family, institutions, and political regimes, and which in the end functions as a prescriptive norm imposed by a dominant social order. In its descriptive sense, and in keeping with the social sciences, a model is a means of mapping processes and configurations. (GDT: 8)
Mapping in Guattari’s parlance, “metamodeling” is closely related to “mapping,” as evidenced in the above-cited paragraph which includes the word “cartographies.” He in fact characterizes schizoanalysis not only as metamodeling, but also as map-making, a process of building “a map of the unconsci0U5- with its strata, lines of de territorialization, and black holes.” As Watson explains Guattari’s emphasis on cartography (as for example in the title Cartographies schizoanalytiques) can be placed within a larger poststructuralist vogue of mapping which presupposes “the unremitting deconstruction of representational thinking” and therefore “excludes a metaphysical definition of mapping in the classical mimetic sense.” Recognizing this rejection of representation and mimesis is crucial to understanding how Guattari defines modeling, mapping, and the diagram. (GDT: 10)
Diagram. As Watson comments Guattari’s “metamodeling and mapping, his diagram produces and creates, bringing new entities into existence and thereby serving an ontological function”. This means that the diagram also shares the quality of operating outside of the realm of representation and must be similarly understood as a dynamic force rather than as a static image. However, while I think that metamodeling and cartography can be used almost interchangeably within Guattari’s lexicon, the notion of the diagram comes from a different line of thought. The diagram is, for Guattari, a component in a general semiotics, and plays a crucial role in his thinking about science and technology in relation to contemporary subjectivity. (GDT: 11)
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What struck me odd is this notion of “bringing new entities into existence” out of the transcendental unconscious. The notion here closely aligns with Ccru’s notion of hyperstition which as Delphi Carstens reminds us functions similarly to magical sigils or engineering diagrams. Carstens goes on to explicate that hyperstitions are ideas that, once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Whether couched as religious mystery teaching, or as secular credo, hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations. The very real socio-economic makeover of western (and increasingly global) society by the hyperstitions of Judeo-Christianity and free-market capitalism are good examples of hyperstitional feedback cycles. As Nick Land explains: “capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force”(email interview). (see Delphi Carstens Hyperstition: pdf format)
As Maggie Robert’s in an interview with Nick Land once asked him to define hyperstition in the context of apocalypse. Land’s answer would be revealing:
What is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages – a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.
Hyperstition itself is a complex of ideas surrounding time-sorcery, numograms, mythology, and unbelief.
Numograms act as a rigorous systematic unfolding of the Decimal Labyrinth and all its implexes (Zones, Currents, Gates, Lemurs, Pandemonium Matrix, Book of Paths …) and echoes (Atlantean Cross, Decadology …. The methodical excavation of the occult abstract cartography intrinsic to decimal numeracy (and thus globally ‘oecumenic’) constitutes the first great task of hyperstition.
The Mythos underlying the complex is a comprehensive attribution of all signal (discoveries, theories, problems and approaches) to artificial agencies, allegiances, cultures and continentities. The proliferation of ‘carriers’ (“Who says this?”) – multiplying perspectives and narrative fragments – produces a coherent but inherently disintegrated hyperstitional mythos while effecting a positive destruction of identity, authority and credibility. And, finally, the notion of Unbelief brings a pragmatic skepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking and all its forms of imposed unity (religious dogma, political ideology, scientific law, common sense …). Each vortical sub-cycle of hyperstitional production announces itself through a communion with ‘the Thing’ coinciding with a “mystical consummation of uncertainty” or “attainment of positive unbelief.” (see: Cold-me.)
In a more formalized definition of hyperstition Land would tell Roberts,
Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality.
Abrahamic Monotheism is also highly potent as a hyperstitional engine. By treating Jerusalem as a holy city with a special world-historic destiny, for example, it has ensured the cultural and political investment that makes this assertion into a truth. Hyperstition is thus able, under ‘favorable’ circumstances whose exact nature requires further investigation, to transmute lies into truths. Hyperstition can thus be understood, on the side of the subject, as a nonlinear complication of epistemology, based upon the sensitivity of the object to its postulation (although this is quite distinct from the subjectivistic or postmodern stance that dissolves the independent reality of the object into cognitive or semiotic structures). The hyperstitional object is no mere figment of ‘social constuction’, but it is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it. (ibid.)
In his essay Base Materialism and Gnosticism Georges Bataille will align such thinking with the ancient spiritual systems: “In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not be simply the absence of light, but the monstrous archontes revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action). This sense that underlying the noumenal realms of our ‘medial negelect’ (or what the brain excludes) is a realm of energetic forms and entities awaiting to be conjured into existence out of the virtual matrix as pure possibility.
In his theory of the Subject Kant will as Land suggests “domesticate” the noumenon defining it as an “object”, and, as well, he domesticates “zero-intensity” – conceiving it as pure consciousness. (p. 116) What Bataille will do is radically fuse this subject/object at what he terms the “place of communication”. Land will comment on this base materialism: “In this shift from the transcendental idealist treatment of zero to that of base materialism there is a difference of seismic consequence” (p. 116).
Speaking of man’s propensity for illusion Land will offer the wisdom of Nietzsche whose anecdote is the pure light of nihil – or absolute Zero:
It is the devaluation of the highest values, the convulsion at the zenith of nihilism, that aborts the human race. Having polarized the high and low in extension, humanity finds itself destituted of its idols – which have purified themselves into overt inexistence – and is thereby plunged vertiginously into its abjected values; animality, pathology, sensuality, and materiality. At the end of human civilization there is thus a regression driven by zero, a violent spasm of relapse whose motor is the cavity of an extinct telos; the death of God. Zero religion. (p. 148)
Land’s merger of capitalism and artificial intelligence is such a hyperstition. As Park Macdougal who in an otherwise critical essay on accelerationism, Left and Right tells us:
For Landian Accelerationism, capitalism is a machinic, ‘techonomic’ (technological-economic) explosion, whose self-reinforcing, self-excitatory mechanism is best modelled as a runaway cybernetic feedback loop (it should be said that if you’re a cyberneticist, everything is best modelled as a feedback loop). This just means that the immanent dynamics of capital push necessarily towards the ever-greater expansion of capital – Marx’s M-C-M’ circuit is cybernetic runaway par excellence – and immanent within that expansion is a necessary co-dependence of technological and economic advance, including ever-increasing powers of abstraction and computation. As ‘capital’ expands in both space and time (imperialism, futures’ markets), the market, understood in its Misesian sense as catallactic, itself becomes a sort of distributed computer for the calculation of prices, spontaneously generating collective intelligence far in excess of what humans are consciously capable of mastering. Thus, the market an sich is a form of ‘artificial superintelligence’ long before the computer is even invented. This is, in part, what Land means by the “teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.”
One would need to return to Giordano Bruno: De Vinculis for such a epistemological turn in thought as Land’s. It has also been noted that at Oxford University, Giordano Bruno’s brief, obscure but very profound work, De vinculis in genere, is considered a cornerstone of modern political thought – on the par with Machiavelli’s Prince. In fact, many Anglo Saxon and Middle European historians and intellectuals consider De vinculis in genere modernity’s most intelligent and insightful political work. The London School of Economics uses it as a core text because of its usefulness in understanding behaviour patterns in contemporary social life. As the late Ioan P. Culianu in his Eros and Magic in the Renaissance tells us,
All mankind has heard of Machiavelli’s The Prince, and many politicians have hastened to emulate his example. But only today can we appreciate how much De vinculis outstrips The Prince in depth, in timeliness, and in importance—today, when no head of state of the Western world would any longer dream of acting like the Prince but would use, on the other hand, methods of persuasion and manipulation as subtle as those the brain trusts are able to place at his or her disposal. In order to understand and show to advantage the timeliness of De vinculis, we ought to know about the activities of those trusts, those ministries of propaganda; we should be able to glance at the manuals of schools of espionage, from which we may glean something of what happens outside the corridors of those organizations whose ideal goal is to guarantee order and the common welfare, where it exists.5
For Culianu Bruno’s notions or centered on desire as the root and engine for gaining and maintaining power, and is a “magical” operation (in the true sense of the word) because while the end is the same (having control of the situation) what changes is the means (persuasion). Just like a lover casts a magic net around the object subject of his love with gestures, words, services and gifts, so “society’s magician” casts the net of his fantastic vision over the world to capture his “prey” by means of his consent. In Machiavelli’s republican vision, the citizen is, at the most, a complacent subject, in Bruno’s the citizen is a lover to be conquered and tied. Bruno calls this chain of operations “vincolare” (to win) and his procedures are given the generic name for ties, that is “vincula”.
Politics is not the Machiavellian science of command and power but the art to understand how to manipulate the mind of people and individuals. Bruno deals with the problem from the manipulator’s point of view. He is the theoretician par excellence of modern politics. Centuries later, it will be up to Sigmund Freud (in his famous work on mass psychology and analysis of the ego, 1921) to study the same psychological phenomena and the relation between power from the point of view of individuals (and not politicians) the masses and the individual. While Machiavelli’s Prince is the ancestor of the adventurer-politician, Bruno’s magician is the prototype for the impersonal systems of mass media, self-censorship, global manipulation and brain trusts that fascinate and control the masses of western democracies. The magician’s capacity to control citizens is in direct proportion to his knowledge of them and his ability to tap into what they desire the most. And this applies both to groups of citizens taken as a whole and to each individual citizen. All of humanity filters through the love-Eros funnel, which is deemed stronger than the will. (It is in this sense that Bruno is Nietzsche and nihilism’s strongest adversary because the love-Eros principle is a universal one that ties everything in the universe to everything in the universe and thus to its creator to whom everything is tied.
The desire for power of Nietzsche’s man finds fulfilment in the abyss into which he sinks due to a lack of support or ulterior goals. Bruno’s erotic man, however, is not lubricious or satanic. He can love wealth, sex, and power in its many forms, both erotically and voluptuously, but these dimensions, which – ultimately – are only marginal ones do not extinguish his drive. According to Bruno, everything leads back to eros as the vital essence of the universe.
As Coulianu suggests Machiavelli’s Prince is the forebear of the political adventurer, a type that is disappearing. On the other hand, the magician of De vinculis is the prototype of the impersonal systems of mass media, indirect censorship, global manipulation, and the brain trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses. He is not, doubtless, the type followed by Soviet propaganda, for he by no means lacks subtlety. On the contrary, Bruno’s magician is altogether aware that, to gain the following of the masses, like the loyalty of an individual, it is necessary to take account of all the complexity of the subjects’ expectations, to create the total illusion of giving unicuique suum. That is why Bruno’s manipulation demands perfect knowledge of the subject and his wishes, without which there can be no ״bond,” no vinculum. That is why Bruno himself also asserts that it is an extremely difficult maneuver, only to be accomplished by the use of intelligence, perspicacity, and intuition equal to the task. The complexity of the task is not diminished, for the illusion must be perfect to satisfy the many expectations it proposes to fulfill. The greater the manipulator’s knowledge of those he must ״enchain, ״ the greater is his chance of success, since he will know how to choose the right means of creating the vinculum. (EMR: 90-91)
We see that the goal of Bruno’s erotic magic is to enable a manipulator to control both individuals and crowds. Its fundamental presupposition is that a big tool for manipulation exists—Eros in the most general sense of the word: that which we love, from physical pleasure to things probably unsuspected, in passing, by wealth, power, etc. Everything is defined in relation to Eros, since aversion and hatred merely represent the negative side of the same universal attraction:
All affections and bonds of the will are reduced to two, namely aversion and desire, or hatred and love. Yet hatred itself is reduced to love, whence it follows that the will’s only bond is Eros. It has been proved that all other mental states are absolutely, fundamentally, and originally nothing other than love itself. For instance, envy is love of someone for oneself, tolerating neither superiority nor equality in the other person; the same thing applies to emulation. Indignation is love of virtue . . . ; modesty and fear [verecundia, timor] are none other than love of decency and of that which one fears. We can say the same of the other mental states. Hatred, therefore, is none other than love of the opposite kind, of the bad; likewise, anger is only a kind of love. As regards all those who are dedicated to philosophy or magic, it is fully apparent that the highest bond, the most important and the most general [vinculum summum, praecipium et generalissimum], belongs to Eros: and that is why the Platonists called love the Great Demon, daemon magnus.6
My belaboring of Bruno as an exemplar of hyperstitional awareness comes to a fore in his notion of Sigils and Mimetics, of bringing non-existent entities into existence.
In his In the Heroic Furors, mnemonics are at the disposal of Eros. The method is already outlined in the second part of the third dialogue of the Spaccio, where Bruno gives a literal translation of the famous passage in the hermetic Asclepius concerning Egyptian statues, ״full of life, full of intelligence and spirit, capable of many important functions. Those statues foresee the future, cause infirmities, and produce the remedies, joy and sorrow, according to the merits [of each], in human affectivity or body. (EMR: 65) As Coulianu will comment this time, the material used by Bruno is made up of phantasmic emblems (Sigils) whose prestige also derives from the hermetic statues. Are not those spiritual constructions, in the final analysis, forms used by magic itself? (EMR: 65) We know that the term sigil derives from the Latin sigillum, meaning “seal”, though it may also be related to the Hebrew סגולה (segula meaning “word, action, or item of spiritual effect, talisman”). The current use of the term is derived from Renaissance magic, which was in turn inspired by the magical traditions of antiquity. There’s a sense of sigils as gateways, or diagrams that do not represent these entities, but are these entities under the numogrammatic function of dynamism. Vibrating time-waves, or sorcery of a temporal vector that was as humans are barely able to think much less perceive, these sigils unseal the gateways of darkness releasing energetic systems of impersonal forces into our realm. Magick is non other than quantum physics calling into existence the subatomic forces of the thermospasm.
In medieval ceremonial magic, the term sigil was commonly used to refer to occult signs which represented various angels and demons which the magician might summon. The magical training books called grimoires often listed pages of such sigils. A particularly well-known list is in The Lesser Key of Solomon, in which the sigils of the 72 princes of the hierarchy of hell are given for the magician’s use. Such sigils were considered to be the equivalent of the true name of the spirit and thus granted the magician a measure of control over the beings.
A common method of creating the sigils of certain spirits was to use kameas (magic squares) — the names of the spirits were converted to numbers, which were then located on the magic square. The locations were then connected by lines, forming an abstract figure. A diagram. (see: wiki – Sigil)
My circuitous look back into the hermetic past and its influence upon the Western occult traditions and even its incorporation by way of shadowings in the works and lives of modern philosophers, scholars, politicians, economics, psychoanalytical and schizoanalytical, and – even, critical works is a labyrinth I will leave to others to pursue. And, yet, it exists. What I do want to emphasize is the slow erasure and deletion of its Platonic heritage, the slow and methodical exclusion of the two-world metaphysics and dualisms of that world view which is readily seen in Bruno and his immediate followers. This antagonistic relation to the Christian-Platonic heritage is readily seen within Deleuze and Guattari, Land, and others. And, yet, under it all is this persistence of magical forms reiterated under new diagrammatic thinking even in is more secular unbelief. One might say that the new hyperstitional praxis is the enactment of magical practices stripped to the bone from its mystification in religious and occult ritual. Rather it shows us the underlying temporal engine that drives this erotic and desiring machine at the heart of matter.
As Coulianu will explain it in Bruno’s Sigillus sigillorum, he had already explained the deep reason for ut pictura poesis, the equivalence between painting and poetry. Zeuxis is the painter of internal images in the memory, who excels in phantastica virtus, imaginative power. In turn, the poet possesses powers of thought out of the ordinary whose source is also spiritual. “It follows that philosophers are also painters and poets, poets are painters and philosophers, and painters are philosophers and poets.” Indeed, since intellect is phantasmic by nature, the philosopher must be able to manage phantasms, to be a great painter of the spirit. Did not Aristotle say that “to comprehend means to observe phantasms?” (EMR: 65-66)
This sense of bringing into existence entities (phantasms) out of the virtual into the possible is at the core of the Deleuzeguattarian project. This sense of making real what is hidden from view, etc. A sense that our actual world, the one our brain has fashioned over eons of use for its own goals of survival and reproduction of the organism is not all there is. That instead of a two-world view there is only one world, and yet our brain through processes of ‘medial neglect’ (R. Scott Bakker) leaves out much more of reality than it includes. That all our phenomenological and vision based, not to say descriptive sciences and humanities are constructed out of a minuscule knowledge of this greater sphere of information.
One imagines in a more modern context that the magician as a figure who brings into existence occult entities through the use of diagrams (Sigils) is only allowing what is already there in the hidden/virtual/noumenal realms that our brain has due to its own limitations and sex and survival needs neglected and filtered out, excluded from view. For Land the modern hyperstitionlist is “equipoised between fiction and technology, and it is this tension that puts the intensity into both, although the intensity of fiction owes everything to its potential (to catalyse hyperstitional ‘becomings’) rather than its actuality (which can be mere human expressivity)” .7
For Guattari and Deleuze diagrams do not represent thought; rather, they generate thought. Diagrams abound in experimental science, he says, because it is “a sphere where signs have a direct effect on things,” involving “both material technology and a complex manipulation of sign machines” (MR 166/ RM303). (GDT: 121)
Comparing this process to modern Quantum physics Guattari would remark that the discovery of new sub-atomic particles would be a case in point. He notes these particles are often only theoretically formed, discovered through mathematics rather than through experimentation. In some instances, these particles are later detected through observation and experiments, or are produced in particle accelerators, and may not be detectable directly, but only by their effects. Their existence may be brief. “Physicists ‘invent’ particles that have not existed in ‘nature.’ Nature prior to the machine no longer exists. The machine produces a different nature, and in order to do so it defines and manipulates it with signs (diagrammatic process)” (MR 125/ RM322). This “diagrammatic process” makes use of signs, but not language, and therefore uses neither signifiers nor signification. (GDT: 13) It’s this sense of experimenting with the unknown, of calling into existence something that is not describable in terms of our known world (i.e., our language systems, descriptions, etc.). Diagrams abound in experimental science, he says, because it is “a sphere where signs have a direct effect on things,” involving “both material technology and a complex manipulation of sign machines” (MR 166/ RM303). The diagrammatic consists precisely in this conjunction between de territorialized signs and deterritorialized objects. (GDT: 12)
This alliance of ancient magick and modern science in sigil, diagram, and the machinic intelligence of matter is the earmark of an unwritten history of the occult or noumenal. What Deleuzeguattari term the de territorialized realm is the noumenal or surround of our existence that is neglected or filtered out (excluded) from our brain’s perceptual and memetic memory systems because of the evolutionary needs of the organism. And, yet, as we’ve seen ancient ritual or High Magick would use pentagrams, hexagrams, sigils, circles to bind and call forth these invisible entities to manipulate or do their bidding, much in the same way our quantum physicists will use the Hadron Collider and the algorithmic diagrams to manipulate and call for the quantum forces of the universe. Scientists will pooh-pah such a convergence or alliance, while occultists will go off on spiritual tangents. While others like my self will see that both are working in their different modes with a much wider enframing of reality that most of us are barely perceptive of much less willing to allow into our daily lives. We need to move beyond both religious-occult and secular-scientific paradigms. We are experiencing an intelligence apocalypse as we externalize the great knowledge bases of our known world. As the infosphere accelerates to the speed of light, our brains are still bound to the slow motion analytics of our ancestral matrices. We are limited in our brain power, and even as we’ve externalized most of our mimetic and recall functions to these external systems we are losing our abilities to reason and think through thought in the old parlance. We are entering what my friend R. Scott Bakker terms the semantic apocalypse or crash space. The unknown is only beginning to register upon that fractured remainder and will undoubtedly remind us of its virtual potential and possibility in the coming century. A new enframing of our thought is at hand, what shape it will take is anyone’s guess, but the worlds of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance still hold temporal clues to our future that we should heed and discover under the hood of our ignorance.
I’ve only tried to give a hint at this melding of notions. One would need a greater work to explicate the intricacies of this heritage in its underlying connections and divergences, conjunctions and disjunctive resurgence in our time.
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