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Each one of these posts is an anecdote/commentary of synchronicity, kindly sent into the centre.

Send yours to ceo47@outlook.com

NEXUS -Ryan Madej

There are no coincidences in the world of synchronicity, only the path of personal revelation and insight if one is willing to follow its thread. Even the timing of this essay is a synchronicity in itself, as I begin work on my next book that deals in large part with my own deep experiences with synchro-mystical happenings For two years—from roughly 2006 through 2007—I experienced what I’ve come to call The Nexus (1). A daily storm of synchronicities so strong that there were several points that I began to question my own sanity and why this was happening to me. At the same time, I’ve never been a stranger to unusual occurrences. Several times in my youth I was privy to the presence of what could be called ‘apparitions’ or ‘ghosts’. On top of that, a myriad of other psychic or for lack of a better term, supernatural, occurrences began to shape my personality. Philosophy, science, and mysticism blending together lead of course to my interests in the esoteric arts and the symbolic nature of reality and the world of synchronicity itself. Jung defined synchronicity as ‘meaningful coincidences’, which in this Age of the Algorithm has become clouded due to our footprint on social media and the ever increasing stealing of our data where we ‘see’ coincidences happen more and more bubbling out of the electronic aether; true synchronicity bubbles out of the quantum foam itself. A legitimate synchro-mystic event reaches deeper into one’s psyche, where the symbol, event, person, number has an acausal connection and offers a ‘meaningful’ insight into one’s interpretation of reality.

An example I can offer from my own experience during the Nexus was about cranes. I’ve always had a penchant for birds, and cranes with their grace and beauty are one of my favourites. During an intense day of synchronicities I was walking through the downtown library and into the basement level which had a connection to the train I was going to catch. As I walked through the annex I saw dozens of paper cranes suspended from string that were done by school children for a project. Seeing the cranes took my memory to one of my favourite movies of all time, Blade Runner where the character Officer Gaff makes origami art and in one instance makes a paper crane. Fast forward to the evening of same day where I was planning to watch for the first time John Woo’s classic action movie, Hardboiled. About halfway through the film, there is a scene on a houseboat where Tony Leung’s character lives and one can only guess what was suspended from the ceiling in mass quantity: paper cranes. So what does this all mean in the greater scheme of one’s own existence? As an esotericist, I find it helpful to trace the symbolism of synchronicity in order to garner insight. In Celtic lore, the crane is viewed as a symbol of secret knowledge(2), or spiritual guidance, whereas in Asian cultures it holds high esteem as a creature of wisdom and peace. As Jung said in his long essay on synchroncity (in reference to one of his patients),‘this experience punctured the desired hold in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance’(3). In many ways, I feel that intense experiences of synchronicity is a sign of the mystical path, as sages, saints and shamans alike throughout history have been privy to these events along their path. What Jung is asking of us in our confrontation with synchronicity is to open up our intuitive minds rather than the rational, for the simple reason that these meaningful coincidences don’t appear from what is considered ‘rational’. It’s perhaps no coincidence then that Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize winning physicist helped Jung in developing this theory along the lines of science.

Rationalism and intuition are two parts of the same whole; our feelings and hunches tell us that strange happenings are afoot behind the fabric of existence, while our rational, logical minds will reveal the evidence to us through signs and symbols. Perhaps then its our duty as humans to follow the thread that synchronicity has laid out for us, for this path leads into the realms of the Unknown.

1 First discussed briefly in my book, The Marble Corridor (2020), and will subsequently be expanded upon in my next book, Triads (Anima).

2 During the writing of this piece, I was privy to a strange Inception like dream where I was told to find a ring in the Ninth Realm, which after some diligent research directed me to the World Tree of Norse mythology and the underworld beneath its roots.

3 Jung, Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle, Collected Works Volume 8, paragraph 982

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Owing to a dearth of synchronicity anecdotes being submitted, I am rethinking this particular issue. The invitation to submit strange coincidental tales is very much open, however for now, all I am going to do is collate and post on the site (so be prepared for that to happen if you submit).

Theoretical considerations on the matter are perfectly welcome as are relevant artistic endeavours.

If I reach a point where there is enough material I can reconsider and collate, however for now this is all I can do with this project.

Submissions should go to ceo47@outlook.com

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There is a sense in which philosophy, even in its contemporary academic forms, remains a kind of base-level occult practice; it just doesn’t recognise itself as one. This doesn’t mean that metaphysics is disguised Hermeticism or any such claim. The connection in a way is more fundamental.

To see it we just have to take the understanding it gives of a kind of contingency of various relations. Whether we have a sense of this contingency seemingly from ourselves or we are struck with it from our study doesn’t really make any difference. Either way it is one of the things philosophy does to us.

It makes us consider whether a relation is necessary, whether the world is necessarily as it seems, what it means that it seems one way, what an object is, what it means to consider something an object at all, what it means for us to consider things as having value and so on and so on.

Before philosophy (in a given person) there is a much more naive relation to the world. Things are what they are, time is time, a person is a person, morality has a kind of obvious sense to it, causation is incoherently clear, language adequately conveys the world. The conceptual nature of these phenomena are obscured to us, they appear simply as reality.

To study some philosophy meaningfully challenges many of these and forces us to recognise the various problems entailed by them. This cognitive effort of endless and territorial conflict we call philosophy. However whilst a lot of it is performed under a kind of hegemonic materialism (even its idealist strands largely wish to maintain the strict rationality of materialism), from an esoteric perspective even this (in itself somewhat pointless) activity supplies the foundation for deeper understanding.

People often wonder what philosophy does? Well what it actually does is loosen our relations to the accretions embedded in us that hold us firmly to the world. This is certainly a form of esoteric practice, it just is never addressed that way. But surely to be doing esoteric practics you have to be doing magick or meditiation or something? These things certainly count but actually without philosophical reflection of the vast conceptual contingency of things one can end up in a reified world naive occultism (new age movement).

Of course since philosophy has been co-opted by rationality, all the amazing senses of wonder and mental vertigo are just interesting cognitive experiences, as opposed to the loosenings of the other aspects of the organism that they sort of actually are (and when they are dismissed in this way they do not develop). A certain freedom is achieved, but it is largely a cognitive freedom. Existentialism could be said to achieve a superior freedom, however it is a kind of unhinged freedom that will still not be properly realised, because the organism remains under too much accretive control.

In the language of curvature caused by the accretions recently employed we may say that philsophy enables us to see how we are curved but does not, at least only a tiny bit, allow us curve pneuminous field ourselves. To do this we must move beyond this purely cognitive activity and begin to do something more practical with it.

What is probably weirder is that whilst enlightenment thought massively eroded the relation between the two, the connection of esotericism and philosophy is historically strong. Good evidence suggests Plato had an esoteric teaching that was not written down and even if he does represent only a rational philosophy, it is one based on earlier teachings that were previously certainly mystery school teachings. The world of forms was the other world of gods and spirits. This was a place to receive wisdom from, to be healed from (as Iamblichus tells us) and not simply to contemplate.

Another, more recent example is Jakob Böhme. Often treated as a mystic rather than a philosopher, yet his speculative account of God, contradiction, emergence and manifestation becomes enormously important for later German philosophy. Hegel explicitly recognised Böhme as a profound precursor, seeing in him an intuition of the dynamic movement through which determinations emerge through opposition and reconciliation. The Hegelian dialectic is a direct descendent of Böhme’s spiritual alchemy; a practice that requires understanding to enable the work that will liberate us through Christ (and Sophia).

So this linkage of deeper loosening with conceptual understanding as the base is not new; what is maybe a bit sad is the cognitive loophole trap that modern philosophy has found itself in (become); now ironically too rational to allow for the possibility of a different knowledge, from which it ultimately came.

Meditation, ritual, contemplation, magical practice, dream work, ascetic disciplines and deliberate symbolic practices attempt to carry the destabilisation beyond the level of the the conceptual destabilisation that philsosophy performs and into perception, attention, behaviour and identity.

Philosophy asks: could the world be otherwise? Esotericism asks: what happens to the operator (and maybe the world) when they actually try to experience the world as otherwise? From the standpoint of accretive ontology, both are forms of liberation. However the sustained form of the latter takes the former to places it cannot go (though arguably as mentioned above, the latter cannot go there with any depty without the former).

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The consequence of the pneuminous theory is that to intend reality as divine or magickal (no matter how incoherent such concepts might be) minimally makes them so.

This correlates interestingly with the cosmology insofar as the logos was the state transformation of the ur-pneuma -it really is conceptual god all the way down (or up). Remember, the regular word pneuminous circuit involves the feedback of accretion on to vector which pulls the vector towards the accretion (though the accretion itself was initially formed from the vector).

Hence applying the accretion of divinity to it is a more appropriate concept than materiality. Materiality is an accretion violent to the actual nature of the divine (pneuminous) vector. The more respectful divine or magickal interpretations preserve its actual ontology more successfully.

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We cannot speak of in the beginning because this all entails there is no beginning. This abground is beyond all sense of existence, it is the ur-information; the formless pneuma. But there is impossible movement within the primordial pneuma. Straying further into speculation, though still within the reasonable confines of the pneuminous picture, we can expand further on the existence of everything through this lens. This pneuminous wind generates somehow in this non space (like a state space?) recursive structures (vortices? strange attractors?). These structures are vast cosmological concepts; this is the logos.

The transformations within the ur-pneuma as primordial logos are what instantiate what we experience as the physical cosmos (and potentially much more that we are not aware of). Difference accumulates upon difference. Persistent structures condition subsequent movement, which reinforces the structures that produced them. Accretions deepen, interact, combine and perhaps generate vast self-sustaining centres of pneuminous organisation. These unimaginably vast a-spatial, a-temporal accretions essentially think the thing that allows us to experience things as space, time, forces in physics, different atoms.

The question of gods and spirits has a two fold answer here. One cause of these beings could be patterns within the ur-pneuma that can hover move fluidly between it and the thought-into-being-materiality. Having gained some autonomy from the ur-pneuma these beings could also potentially contribute to thinking more solid aspects of being into reality (or stranger unimaginable ones). Possibly there could be yet smaller and smaller pure pneuminous beings capable of moving between various strata of the accreted pneuma -faerie descriptions commonly render them as made of fine matter.

The second would be the formation of such beings themselves essentially formed by limited beings like ourselves. Such beings attribute agency to phenomenon, deify/spiritually animate it and then behave towards it as if it were so. This very action accretes the pneuma of agency to the phenomenon which ulimately would create an autonomous pneuminous egregore. Clearly it is very difficult (impossible) to tell which of these any given entity is and it may be that all such beings are a compound of the two phenomenon. This does however raise a picture of the cosmos as potentially littered on the various finer strata of pneuma, with various beings, exhibiting differing levels of what we call agency and consciousness.

As mentioned previously, this does alter the nature of the umbratic somewhat. Rather than a speculative beyond it now is definitively made of pneuma; it is the cosmic thoughts; ancient, ancient accretions, which to us looks like solid ‘matter’.

The living operators (ourselves and other limited beings) that have evolved out of this situation are strange insofar as they have developed a particular recursive capacity. The operator (NARP) perceives the ancient accretion as a vector (blank object) as a concept which it then projects back onto it. The ancient accretion of course can resist any kind of alteration as its thought/pneuminous sustenance is so much greater the feeble operator. Yet there is a tiny push upon it; the limited being still has some pneuminous power. This is the divine capacity of the Operator.

The cultivation of this push is what we call magick. Magick cannot push hard against the ancient thought, it must form intensities that can create what we can call curvatures. This brings about a similar kind of picture to relativity. The whole picture can be thought of in this way to some extent. The accretions of the logos create the ground, the further accretions curve the shape by there pneuminous intensity. Here we refrain from mass for two reasons: 1) the analogy is just that, not an equivalance 2) it makes less sense to say the quantity of the pneuma than its intensity, and the mass metaphor creates a notion of quantity.

Pneuminous intensity curves a given strata to a greater or lesser degree. Normal concept application is largely a fit to the existing ancient accretion/vector; magick is an attempt to make an curvature in the strata for a certain purpose, to draw certain phenomena into that space.

The curvature model can be seen to be general operation in reality. Art objects, buildings, objects of power, certain people etc have formed pneuminous intensity, as such they curve the pneuminous space around them. This can be experienced and described psychologically/scientifically but its phenomenological primordiality is pneuminous.

Similarly the accreted or pre-existing gods curve the pneuminous space, but they too are limited by the ancient accretive structures that are part of the even more ancient logos. Hence we live inside countless overlapping accretive geometries while continuously contributing tiny distortions of our own.