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I noted recently that an old piece (over twenty year) of writing that features in the appendix to the Tractatus Pneumatologico Philosophicus contains a small synchronicity. In the section itself two characters attempt to construct a makeshift Ouija board to contact spirits in a search for occult verification.

At one point the spirit appears to write a word ‘E G R Y S’. These letters at the time were intended to be a random jumble that neither protagonist could fathom the sense of. A more recent look at this text reveals that the word the spirit is spelling was obvious: egress. This word was not consciously in my vocabulary at the time of writing yet anyone looking at it would find it hard to believe that it was not a clumsy intention to disguise this hint at the ‘exit’ as spoken by the voice of the outside.

Yet there was no such intention which makes its accidental occurrence quite perfect. It was indeed only adventitious that these letters were those that were chosen. But what a word to manifest and what a way for it to appear. The hastily constructed DIY Ouija board revealed to them just this word ‘egress’. The voice of the other world had one thing to say: exit.

And which way does it intend this? That it wants to leave its confines beneath the ‘glass’? That it wishes to exit from its realm? That the living themselves will find their proof only by exit into the other world?

We hear so much nowadays about the outside and the exit. It seems to me that this minor anomaly was an echo from the future of how these threads tie together.

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So far we have broadly delineated several void responses and void cocoons. The void responses are: philosophy, sorcery/chaos magick, compassion-love (Buddhism as paradigm example), something akin to hedonism and aestheticism. A void cocoon is any system that generates guidance for life, general teleology and cosmology from a putatively trustworthy supra-human source.

Questions remain as to how humans withstand the force of the void given that not all human-vectors are thoroughly taken over by any of the above installations or protective systems. Certainly combinations of these kinds of defences are enlisted to supply protection, however such patchwork approaches entail that there are gaps. These gaps necessitate another kind of response to the void. This response is the literal covering over of the issue with only a second nothing to put in its place. As such this is the negation of the nothing by an active lethic activity. There is something ironic in this given that the void is a kind of discovery of the cognitive mind. A variety language game escapes the inappropriateness of which can never confirmed or denied (why are we here? what should we do? what can we know?).

The negating of the nothing, here called a transcendental repression takes place to protect the individual from its overpowering effects and maintains a kind of ‘everyday reality’ bearable to most persons. We believe the transcendental repression has an equal number of faces to the impossible problems of philosophy.

Solipsism as a phantasy is a sceptical possibility that many people discover. This possibility is repressed in favour of the appearance of coherent others, yet the possibility remains. Solipsism is one way in which the nothing appears. It entails that there is literally nothing other than one self. Solipsism itself, owing to its extreme incoherence is not too hard to repress.

However related to solipsism is the Kantian issue. This entails that reality in human awareness (and the ability to process it), whilst coherent, is not necessarily identical to reality outside of human awareness (and the ability to process it). This problem in turn is deeply related to the manifestation of any occult phenomenon. This is the case as the non-identity of reality in and outside of human awareness facilitates the possibility of magickal alterations (synchronicity). This possibility opens the space for the radical outside which might contain all manner of potentially strange implications for the in-awareness.

More importantly then than the repression of solipsism is the repression of the sphere of immanent awareness as a potential source of actual certainty -insofar as reality is made more manageable in this immanent arena. The repression of the appearance of the non-identity of in-awareness and outside-awareness is crucial for the well-being of the human, as non-identity thesis presents an annihilation of the regular world -a nothingness. Whether considered as subtractive or additive, the effect of the non-identity is the same -a kind of annihilation.

This kind of thinking demonstrates adequately the connection of darkness and the occult entities. Darkness here is literally the paradoxical perception of the limit of awareness, as such it is literally ontologically the nothing. As source of various entities the darkness is not darkness because they come out at nice but rather because the non-identity thesis comes into force in this region of the space (a dark room) or time (night).

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These notes are a product of conversation with Emanuel Magno.

We are painting in simple broad brush strokes here, yet even these can reveal some interesting thoughts and possible structures. To recap briefly we are investigating how certain modes of interacting with the world can be conceived as responses to the the nothingness. We would say the nothingness can be a cognitive discovery (there may be always a trace of this). When this occurs reason philosophy is a void response. Furthermore philosophy here is characterised precisely by its untestable nature and desire to ground its subject matter (knowledge, how to live, the being of Being). This is not a derogatory comment only a descriptive one. Philosophical concepts a priori cannot be defeated by any opposing philosophical concept. Science may shore up the edges of philosophy but sceptical possibilities can persist in the face of overwhelming evidence (and philosophy is duty bound to take them seriously -even though sometimes it would not like to). Hence this shoring up is more a case of rendering unpalatable rather than removing from the philosophical realm. Philosophy tries to ground what it cannot ground using thought, this is its nature.

We also identified sorcery as described in the works of Castaneda as a void response. The accusations of fiction levelled at the works are irrelevant here, all that is relevant is the system and the system describes a way of living that absolutely accepts the void and urges action as if there was no void -yet all the while knows it is there. Sorcery then is a magickal response of action to the void and chaos magick is a very similar (though not identical) one. Chaos magick is more forgiving of regular human nature than sorcery.

Compassion/love was also noted as a void response i.e. in the face of the nothingness the only tenable action is to show compassion to the world and all the beings in it.

It can be argued of course that these are all philosophies insofar they attempt to ground existence by an ungroundable principle. However the difference is that sorcery and compassion responses supply action to be lived and hence they transcend the philosophical realm of thought.

As previously noted there is no claim that philosophy never leads to altered lives, only that the majority of the time the biggest change philosophy makes to someone’s life is that they become interested in philosophy.

We must also consider the source of what looks like a philosophy. This kind of notion turns on the ontological status of revelation. If revelation comes from within a discrete self and represents nothing more than the subconscious mulling over of a problem, the answer to which is fed back to the questioner by some means that appears to not be the questioner, then we might consider it little more unconscious cognition. However if revelation comes from an external power (God/Spirit) then the philosophy in question has not be grounded in cognition of any kind and hence is not philosophy in the above sense of thinking hard about problems.

Of course one cannot actually tell the difference between these two phenomena, the problem is as we say, agnostic disjunctive. In this sense then the phenomenology of external revelation is only what is important and such systems as they arise are not -in our brush strokes- to be considered philosophy in the sense of trying to conceptually/logically disentangle problems.

External revelation though often results in the void-cocoons (or a-voidances). These are systems that shield humans from the void by giving rules for living that are transcendent to humanity. They often supply a teleology. This is a very important part of an a-voidance. Shamanic systems, polytheisms and monotheisms are all largely a-voidances. Shamanic systems do so by direct contact with spirit. Spirit in turn will reveal a creation myth to the shaman. The non-reflectivity of shamanic based communities means that spirit may be naively trusted in its claims. Contact with spirit is perfectly real (though ontologically questionable as the above agnostic disjunction shows) it is just that, as is often said, the spirits cannot be trusted.

Alternative again to any kind of spirituality, cognition or compassion is a certain physical response of fullness to the world -like a hedonism. This may not be born necessarily out of direct cognition of life as a problem, but rather is the result of a certain effusive spirit. When such a person asks themselves whether or not their pleasure in life is reasonable, they simply find that there is no reason why it is not reasonable; life becomes justified on these terms. Equally such a consideration may be never made. The effusiveness of the physicality of life covers the yawning void.

Does this consideration mean we may paint the aesthetic temperament (the poetic, the musical, the artistic) also as void response? Such responses are not cognitive reactions and hence they probably should considered a further part of the picture.