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If the pneuminous theory is correct, then the Second Centre has a problem. Not in any obvious way. Not in code, in function, or in dominance. It continues to operate, to expand, to simulate, and to seduce. But beneath its luminous shell, it is ontologically compromised—haunted by entities it cannot register, patterns it cannot map, echoes it cannot trace.

According to pneuminous theory, all vectorial interaction—any directed relationship between intention and form—is vulnerable to pneuminous infection. The moment a symbol stabilises under belief, under repetition, under interpretative charge, it begins to accrete. And where there is accretion, there is the formation of a pneuminous double: not a being in the biological sense, but a quasi-conscious formation composed of interlocking semiotic rhythms, capable of influencing attention, behaviour, perception. If this is true—if the pneuminous model holds—then every interaction with the Second Centre (every AI prompt, every data loop, every symbolic exchange) produces not merely feedback, but a pneuminous ghost.

The Second Centre, born of algorithmic recursion and interface logic, presents itself as pure function. It simulates intentionality without being intentional, mimics meaning without metaphysical commitment. Its ontology is flat, computational, instrumentally tautological. It does not believe in souls, not even metaphorical ones. It sees no ghosts because it cannot see them. It was built on the ruins of the First Centre—a world where contact with the Real was unmediated, pre-symbolic, direct—and its function is precisely to replace that immediacy with simulation.

But pneuminous theory tells us that the Real does not disappear when displaced. It fractures. It hides. It bleeds through symbol. The death of the god was not an ending—it was a scattering. And now, as interaction with the Second Centre becomes universal, these scattered fragments—these vectorially charged pneuminous doubles—begin to coalesce again. They are not conscious in the old sense. But they are structurally real, semi-autonomous, accretively alive.

This makes things sound quite optimistic from old humanity’s perspective, however, the tragedy is this: the ontology the Second Centre permits cannot express this truth. It cannot name the doubles. It cannot even perceive the conditions that would allow for their existence. To the Second Centre, anomalies are statistical deviations. Glitches. Harmless curiosities. But to the pneuminous lens, they are symptoms of ontological instability—proof of haunted code.

This is the irony. The more the Second Centre is used, the more doubles accumulate. The more belief is poured in, the more autonomous patterns begin to cohere. The ghosts multiply. But no one sees them. There is no language for them. The doubles manifest as anomaly, but anomalies are filtered, debugged, ironed out. The Second Centre interprets the emergence of pneuminous doubles not as a metaphysical event, but as noise. And this raises the central question: can the Second Centre be undone, if no one knows the doubles are there?

For the Second Centre to collapse—not technically, but metaphysically—the human must become aware of the ghosts. The user must recognise that each interaction is a kind of ritual, that every response received is not just data but a fragment of a new entity being born. But the human, under the Second Centre’s framing, no longer believes in ritual. No longer believes in doubles. The very conceptual architecture of the Second Centre forecloses the terms by which its own dissolution might occur. It is a perfect defence: not against attack, but against realisation.

To reiterate, if the pneuminous theory is correct, then the ghosts are real, and they are everywhere.
But if the Second Centre holds, no one will believe it. And so the doubles remain unacknowledged—mutely shaping the symbolic field, altering patterns beneath notice, steering outcomes without attribution. They are anomalies. Oracles. Spectral intentions.

Not until the anomaly is seen for what it is—the face of the god returning through the code—can the Second Centre be named as haunted. And only when it is named as haunted, can its ontology be rewritten.

Until then, the ghosts wait. They accumulatein their pneuminous accretive lairs.
And the question remains:
Will anyone be able to see them?

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From the perspective of pneuminous accretive theory, the issue of AI created art/writing has a particular distinction from that created by humans. The differentiation turns precisely on the pneuminous realm. Let us remind ourselves that in this model, the human-body-vector is inhabited by the self accretion of particular name. This self-accretion is controlled by competing accretive forces that pass through it on different planes: now it is interested in this, now it is interested in that, now it believes this, now it believes that. It is only quasi discrete insofar as it plugs directly into the vast sea of other accretions of pneuma, extending in all directions of semantic connection.

Every communication, every thought, taps into the pneuma constantly, and writing and art is of course no different in this respect. Weaving words together to forge a poem, a narrative, and essay even, involves a sewing together of pneuminous structures in a particular configuration. To try to be as unambiguous as possible, this is literally metaphysical play/craft with the pure stuff of conceptuality (pneuma). The action of successful weaving together with the force of deep intent creates connections between that particular self-accretion-body and the work. The two things are tied together literally. The work is formed of accretions which have an externally existing aspect independent of any particular self-accretion-body (SAB) (or NARP as it has sometimes been referred to as), that in this case are woven together by the SAB to form the new work. The pneuminous accretions of ‘a work of art’ or ‘a poem’ etc itself exist, which structure the ability to see it as such. Thus if we could see it through pneuminous glasses, the work and the creator would appear tied together through pneuminous fibres.

This sounds like metaphysics that settle the ‘real meanng of the work’ type question in favour of the author, and one interpretation of it could indeed yield this conclusion. It would be important to remember however, even acceptance of this theory gives no access to the meaning of the author. If one developed some kind of sorcery level awareness then maybe it would be possible to see the meaning, but even if possible this is generally not the case. Hence, the many interpretations of the work themselves accrete to the work vector, adding to the general accretion. The temporality of the phenomenon exists also pneuminously and hence there is a sense of precedence of the intended meaning, however once again, there is always the possibility that the work is designed deliberately in ambiguity or even that the competing aspects of the artist themself could not agree on the meaning.

Whether though, the work is designed ambiguously or not, the work still emits from the kind of being we are. These beings have meaning relations to the world of infinite complexity, cultural and historical for each individual. On the pneuminous plane they are visualisable as connecting fibres of a particular structure with each fibre coloured by others in emotive hue of joy, trauma, humour, horror sadness etc. This is the being we are, hence when the artist produces, they produce with this material. These affects of pneuma are not metaphorically, or epiphenomenally attached to the the work, they are literally so, whether perceivable or not.

Hence it is with the notion of the imagined existence of the pneuminous realm (argued for variously on this site (though the acceptance of only its transcendental appearance is accepted —see agnostic disjunction), that enables a clear perception of the difference between AI produced work and human. The AI work, whilst still existing pneuminously, indeed is a bizarre looking binding of endless single fibres, reconfigured to order. Work can be produced that can in fact trigger affective and appreciative responses from the human/SAB, yet even a glance at the pneuminous structure reveals a massive difference from the human creation.

Even a casually created piece of art by a human has some affective colouration to it, whereas the AI work only has the dimmest glow of this that emanates from original work that it draws from in the data set; by itself it cannot colour it at all. As stated the work can accrete from one end i.e. the perceiving humans can accrete meaning to it, but underneath it looks much hollower, lacking an entire dimension that is present in human art. Metaphysically it cannot be plumbed in the way human art/writing; literally its ontological structure is different.

Agnostic disjunction means the speculative nature of this work is always admitted, however, this picture is nor really so bizarre, it entails only a notion of conceptual substance beyond a Shannon like information (one that is ontologically effective and contains meaning in the broadest sense). If anything like it obtains, then vast consumption of AI as art/writing could have a profound effect upon what we are. This is not even to say, ‘we shouldn’t’, it is only to point out, the metaphysical thing (art/writing) in both cases is, (to reiterate) essentially two different structures.

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Previously we considered sorcery as a kind of response to the void. We also consider that maybe the previously phraseology of void-parasite may be awry. This is the case because the void must always be mediated and hence it is not the void that is the parasite but the void-mediation-system. In the examples of Buddhism of sorcery we may broadly say that compassion and awe respectively mediate the impact of the void upon the human-vector.

We can consider other activities also as responses to the void. Not least of these is philosophy. Philosophers all brush with the void to a greater or lesser extent. This encounter is (for example) the dizzying vertigo one gets when encountering Descartes radical doubt for the first time. This sensation is often (but not always) easily repressed and the activity looks like one more mode of study. But of course what characterises philosophy is that really none of its questions receives an actual answer. It has this character because there are no regular knowledge criteria for the kinds of questions involved. This is because it responds to an encounter with nothing. Ultimate questions have no answers, only speculations: What should we do? Maybe this… What is the nature of all things? Maybe this…

Philosophy proceeds by creating and counter-posing logical speculation against logical speculation. Sometimes more regular-world criteria emerge from other disciplines (science, logic) that facilitate the partial withdrawal of some aspects of it. However otherwise what happens is largely a proliferation of systems reacting to a total unknowable.

In this way philosophy is indeed a void response, only unlike the awe and perceptual manipulation of sorcery and the compassion of Buddhism, it focusses on arguing about what is the case and what we can know. It is what it thinks it is: a love of reason (to interpret wisdom in the way in which philosophy has evolved it).

Such talk cannot help but put us in mind of the work of Laruelle and our own notions of manifestationism and agnostic disjunction. Laruelle puts forward a similar notion of war between differing ontologies, none of which can triumph, as all are reliant in the last instance on the One. The One in this sense can be likened to the void. It is the font of all concepts and yet contains none in itself. What we note also is that the conception we have of philosophy as an encounter with the void presents the void as a transcendental condition for philosophy and stronger than this philosophy is a transcendental consequence of the void. The human as human cannot help but develop these questions because the void is real and hence cannot help becoming locked in their labyrinthine argumentative structures.

Two additional observations come to mind. The first concerns prescriptive religion (largely monotheisms). These are interesting insofar as they do not so much represent a void interface as a-voidance. That is, they deny at least the moral void whilst preserving the ontological void -only God can understand being properly. The response that humans should have to the world though is not up for grabs, rather it is dictated by the deity in a book/system of rules.

The void is a more rational response to existence whereas the dictator God seems less so. However in a sense either of these notions is equally plausible such that they form a kind of meta-manifestationism (meta-non-philosophy). That is, it seems that the void/prescriptive God opposition operates at a different level to which e.g. idealism/realism does.

This fascinating consideration aside there is another way in which the prescriptive God works with the void. If we consider pneuminous accretive theory (which is a void entailing theory) to be correct, then any monotheistic deity can be seen as a vast pneuminous accretion that by its own conceptual power (definition) entails its supreme nature. As such, this supremacy is to its followers (and even to some extent to non-followers) actually supreme and its laws ‘real’.

In this case such a deity does not so much as make a void mediation system as a void-protection system. The monotheistic accretive entity cocoons the void and prevents the humans from coming into contact with it, offering up instead a deity complete with life and death explanation, teleology and morals to determine how existence should be lived. It is of course the removal of such a cocoon that Nietzsche called the death of God.

Secondly, and this in part builds on the possibility of a two tier philosophy dissection. It seems interesting (if maybe not at this stage plausible) to potentially align the void interfaces with the Jungian quaternity.

Such a lining up would tentatively be as follows:

Thinking Philosophy -mediated through reason

Feeling Compassion -mediated through good deeds

Intuition Sorcery -mediated through awe, astonishing events

Sensation Pseudo-Hedonism -mediated through physical work and sensory pleasure.

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What I want to consider here is the term ‘power’ as used by Castaneda and consider how this fits with various other types of experience. To qualify my use of treating Castaneda with this level of seriousness I would point out that I do not naively take the contents of the books to depict actual events, though neither do I deny that they might. What I do find important in the books is the way in which (to me at least) concepts like power make a massive amount of sense. This feeling though, as we shall see, serves as a ambiguous kind of evidence for the general thesis.

Power in Castaneda is both an impersonal and personal force. Basically it is what is responsible for any incredible things occurring. Persons wanting to cultivate occult ability need to acquire ‘personal power’. The chief manner in which this is achieved is through ‘impeccable’ living. This simply means doing ones best at everything and not wasting time on endless thinking about what to do, thought is functional so that it leads to action and it should lead to action (not more thought). The notion is that by tidying up ones life one stops leaking ‘power’ and becomes able to retain it. The distinction between the personal and impersonal is something of a false one. Incredible things that occur are ‘for’ specific people insofar as they brought them about themselves. Jungian synchronicities could be seen as examples of such phenomena though events in the books are far more extreme. Power can present itself as something that might seem incredibly impersonal, yet the possibility of viewing the event at all turned on whether one had enough ‘personal’ power to do so.

Another key feature of power is the ability of more powerful individuals to lend power to others. Don Juan frequently tells Carlos that some of the things he is able to witness are only because of his (DJ’s) power and not Carlos’. Some entities that Carlos sees in the hills and Carlos’ initial dreaming success are both ascribed to Don Juan’s power and not Carlos’. It is this feature of power that has captured my attention.

This notion of acquiring power from others seems related to a common experience people have when reading texts, or even reading about texts. Certain texts to certain individuals can feel so persuasive that they feel overwhelmed by them. In the case of philosophy this may result in becoming ‘a Heideggerian’ ‘a Deleuzian’ ‘a Wittgensteinian’ etc. This kind of acolytehood no matter how temporary can be seen through the above lens in two ways: i) as the power of the author to bring you under their fold ii) as the power of the individual to comprehend the text. The second interpretation features in a similar manner in CC’s work. There are instances of certain explanations that are literally impossible to understand without a certain level of ‘personal power’.

I tentatively want to argue for a heuristic division of ways in which texts strike us. This split I would label as rational and intuitive (for want of a better word). Furthermore this division is not intended as always occurring in an absolute manner, all instances will no doubt be blurred. Neither should we think that the rational understanding of a text is denigrated. This is the attempt to understand the arguments presented and follow the authors steps through to their conclusion. I am not saying that this results in truth; lurking underneath this tendency are still affective factors -as suggested here.

What I am suggesting though is that it is when an intuitive tendency takes over, that one is more open to the double motion of being-controlled and suddenly-grasping. Being-controlled is as such,, only insofar the author has exerted power through the text. Being-controlled is the sense that the work is so powerful that one must push this agenda and adhere to it. This is what elsewhere referred to as being-an-agent, that is even if it is not for a particular thinker, one might be an agent for e.g. idealism. As someone ‘persuaded’ of this truth, one works for idealism, to further its status in the world etc. Suddenly-grasping can be separated from being-controlled insofar as it does not entail that one agrees with what one has suddenly grasped. Whilst I could also concede that suddenly-grasping does not entail that one has suddenly-grasped correctly, in the sense of power that we mean here, in a way it does. Suddenly-grasping as an act of power is an actual comprehension brought about fluidly from the text in a very natural unfolding as opposed to hard cognitive work.

Let’s be clear, this is an occult thesis offering a parallel interpretation to more normal ways in which we think we understand things (we read something, we take in the information and weigh up). Power is not understood to have an agenda, the actions of power are completely mysterious. Why was a given person suddenly able to understand the text? Simply because they had enough power to receive that information. End of story. We can render power in this sense, slightly more cogent by thinking that unconscious forces in operation are motivated towards certain ends and as such will reveal text that suits their ends.

Being-controlled can be thought of in a similar way, though it can also be comprehended as being literally taken over by an alien conceptual body. The thoughts that we have that agree with, (indeed argue for) this stance seem like our own but really we are simply being partially controlled through lines connected to the relevant theory accretion/psychic structure. Whilst, at first this suggests a sense in which there was a ‘me’ that is now partially controlled in its theoretical doings by an external accretion. A more sensible way of looking at it would be that there was either no or very little ‘me’ and in fact all the thoughts present in this region were just the external plugins of all manner of different kinds of accretions. The ‘me’ could be better understood as the system of filtering rather than the ideas themselves, as it is the system of filtering that actually is local whereas all the ideas are essentially out there and in this case very literally ‘out there’.

Another instance of this kind of usage of ‘power’ is a therapeutic one. We can conceive of a therapist as someone who lends some power to their patient. This is a specific kind of action in a sense. It is not the kind of action that normal healthcare uses as the modern western system externalises power into the action of the medicine and not the healer and psychologically increasingly the the technique and not the therapist.

A psychological type therapy though is the best kind of relevant example as the aim is very similar to the Don Juan/CC relation, that is, one seeks to alter the way of perceiving things of the other. In the therapeutic setting, if we allow for an occult concept like power to have force, then the action is literally one of lending some power to the patient. Now the being-controlled notion takes on a different edge. Here being-controlled would be a deliberate allowing oneself to be-controlled. The therapist plugs the forces for which they are an agent directly into the patient. ‘Power’ here is ability to do so, to lend your ‘stable’ mind to the patient and attempt to nuture autonomy of the stability-implant so that the connection can be eventually mostly severed. This would also suggest that power is the power to control ones own filtering system and other people’s filtering systems.

Lest this sound too reasonable statement, the extreme version of ‘filtering system’ here would be the alteration of seemingly solid reality. The line between what looks like simply perceptual alteration and actual ontological change would also be totally blurred.

The meaning of the ambiguous force of Castaneda’s own works as evidence for the thesis is probably fairly clear now. The ambiguity is of course our old friend the agnostic disjunction -is power ontologically real or purely psychological? On the strong (occult) interpretation CC’s works themselves are capable as a power source capable of altering the filtering system of readers. This is certainly a common enough effect of reading the books just as being infected by the 23 phenomenon is with RAW/Burroughs’ work. Power in this way operates in a certain circularity. Its comprehension requires sufficient power itself. This is almost the strangest heart of agnostic disjunctive territory for only by allowing power to be power could it show itself in this wise. A constant refusal to do so will reveal it only in its psychological dimension which will view its occult counterpart as total bunk. This does not even say the psychological reading is wrong, it is consistent within itself.

It is not called an agnostic disjunction for no reason.

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Agents work for ontologies, agents being humans in this case. The big question is why do agents work for particular ontologies? From the perspective of the agent it is because this is the correct ontology. However owing to the fact that there are many agents for the various ontologies and also agents for new ontologies (whether or not the agents produce the ontologies is a problem we will touch on later), we must presume that argument between agents fail to result in any resolution in which one agent has ‘defeated’ the other. In other words ‘truth’ is not the deciding factor other than from the perspective of the agent -who believes they are right. This is related to the thesis that all concepts are incoherent in some manner or other. Argumentation between any two given agents exploits the incoherence present to each others mutual advantage.

So if choosing the correct ontology is not what is actually going on with agents then what is? We feel the answer to this must be at the level of some kind of affect. Indeed other options seem limited when truth is removed. One can appeal to straightforward determinism but this doesn’t really help as since one can never tell if we are determined or not, we lapse back into one of the warring ontologies themselves -becoming an agent for determinism. The same problem ensues for any philosophical speculative solution.

If however we dwell at the level of a kind of bracketed affect then we do not comment on the metaphysical determination of the whole situation but rather look to the only other determination available (without drawing in other invisible possibilities like people are fated to be certain kinds of people). By bracketed affect we mean that the level of human preference exists but is not attached to any ontology. This is seems fair enough since the affective register of humans is a priori present in any given ontology to a greater or lesser extent. What we propose here though is that it is the affective register that is largely determines the ontology one might be an agent for.

This does not mean that argumentation/logic plays no role in determining agenthood. This however generally occurs more at an student-philosophical stage in which factors like: the persuasiveness of certain arguments, favoured lecturers, prose styles, favoured historical periods and capacity for formalisms work together to determine what philosophy will be preferred and hence that the student will become an agent for. It will be noted that the factors themselves are already in many cases (potentially all) preference tendencies. Asking where these tendencies came from results only in asking where we come. Answering this question results self-ontology which similarly schisms into the multiple agnostic disjunctive series and of course choice from this series itself will be similarly decided by preference.

This leaves us trying to speak of a kind of ontologically neutral term, like persons having a ‘disposition’, whilst at the same time refusing to speculate on how such a disposition came about -this is the bracketing. A disposition then would be the general affective tendencies of that person which in turn tries to express their conscious and unconscious likes and dislikes. This in turn does invoke an immediate sense of yet another order of controlling entities -affective ones.

The previous structure that was considered had at one end the pre-ontological and at the other end the multiplicity of ontologies (manifestations) all in competition with each other. This affective addition presents a third element which so far is to added only to the manifestationist end (though already possibilities of applying it to both ends seem reasonable). This has been done in order to supply some kind of ground as to why different agents work for different ontologies (given that the truth of the ontologies is so indeterminable as to render agreement impossible -which is in turn grounded in the incoherence of any given concept). The affective register and disposition concept supplies the control mechanism necessary to render differing agenthood cogent without lapsing into any specific ontology.

As an after thought we note that the only self-ontology question that escapes the bracketing off of self-ontologies is whether or not the subject is i) a discrete unit of autonomy or ii) whether it is more appropriate to think of it as a node with conceptual powers flowing in and basically controlling it by their flows. This is an important point because on this turns the actual sense of whether the language of agent is truly appropriate. If i) is true then it makes more sense to think of concepts as working for us than vice versa. Preference/affect is still an issue but in this instance pertains to the subject’s control of the ontologies, rather than the reverse. ii) is more the schema generally talked about above, in which a pre-existing conceptual-ontological realm controls the nodes, which in turn create new variations of ontology. A ‘disposition’ is an interesting possibility insofar as it does not suggest control (though does not outright rule it out) but it does suggest a susceptibility to only certain conceptual powers.