There are only two modes of activity. One takes place within the strata of concepts/culture and the other other also partially does so but strains beyond it and possibly achieves this. Most activity in general takes place in the regular home of what I called above the ‘strata of concepts/culture’. I don’t mean anything esoteric by this, but I do mean something very broad. Whether a scientist, a writer, a carpenter, a gardener or a cleaner, your activities, your aims fall within this realm. Indeed just in your day-to-day existence, all of your quasi-conscious and conscious (though I am always wary of using this word since reading Gurdjieff) activities fall under this mode. The mode is purely directed within the accretions. It works with them. It may try to work out new, hitherto unidentified vector regions (science) or it may work with existing accretive structures, absorbing them, mildly mutating them as we do in our interactions.

Even many of those who believe they work closer to the edge, work purely within the accretive structures. Indeed many people interested in esoteric/occult matters only work within the accretive layers without attempting to escape them. Here probably is the only point of this writing. Nothing you engage in, in any occult quasi-activity (like numerology) escapes the accretive layers or does anything significant to alter your relation to them. You might obtain results. Results are a different kind of phenomenon. Results enable the practitioner to question the state of reality by means of the question ‘what ontology is compatible with my results not being reducible to a solid-world materialist/psychologist type explanation?’ Results are an invitation not a real result.

In this way results are openings, but they are in many ways only accidental openings. They may encourage more playing with systems. This may trigger more results either synchronisitic or intentional. It is real but it means nothing. All such activity is still within the accretive realm. The only activities that are otherwise are the practical attempts to move beyond it. These are the thought stopping, personality disabling, pattern breaking practices you read about in all the literature on this matter.

Phenomenology comes so close to some of these. Phenomenology unearths the vector field, the transcendental backdrop into which the accretions embed themselves, but then it returns to the accretive world to show how it is constituted. The second activity seeks the vector field unrelentingly. The vector field is the wellspring of sorcery. No one can say how long it goes down before disappearing into umbratic depths.

Poetry, art and music are interesting cases. Poetry rearranges the accretive field to present disclosures of a certain depth. This is a kind of result which might hook someone into seeking the vector field. Art in representational mode is simply the skillful display of the visual accretive field. However its other faces (more abstract forms) can facilitate something like an encouragement to perceive the vector field. Music, without words, can effect something similar, can give an insight into a heuristc pure[r] perception.

All of these experiences though, without motivation, are accidental results which are rapidly overtaken by the establishment of the accretive field.