by on

For those of you who don’t know Peter Kingsley it seems his message is fairly straightforward. Humankind has become cut adrift from its sacred source with devastating psychic isolation, nihilism, madness and general doom as its consequence.

Fleshed out a bit more it’s that the presocratic philosophers should never have been conceived as primitive proto-thinkers paving the way for Socrates et al. Rather they need to be reconceived as incredibly powerful shaman-priest type figures who received their wisdom from ecstatic type interactions with the other world.

This makes sense (though I can readily confess to my inability to judge his scholarship adequately), not least because it fits perfectly with the speculative work that I was previously doing with Emanuel Magno. In this we came to conceive of the allness as the reticulum of a-spatiotemporal light fibres. This was the nagual, the other world that Castaneda spoke of. It is the one boundless one of pure immanence.

Accepting the possibility of accessing the reticulum through practice grants the Laruellian one its correctness -radical immanence- yet also makes it not simply non-philosophically true but also practically so. The ontological war (philosophical decision) exists at the level of pneuminous accretions, where no philosophy can deliver any decisive win. All philosophers are simply agents for the ideas, striving for the cracks in the enemies theoretical stronghold.

Beyond the chatter of the accretions, down below the vector field is the reticulum, the umbratic. To accept this kind of mysticism is stop thinking of this as an epistemological limit for this is only true from an ordinary level of reality. In acceptance there is the understanding of the insane rhizomatic underpinning of all things: the folds are the synchronicities and the rest of the strange phenomena. Materiality conceived as a solid spatio-temporality is literally false. The reticulum is not a philosophical idea but an actuality only accessible through rigorous practice. The synchronicities etc are merely foothills.

Kingsley says that there was a time when those who are trained in accessing the reticulum were trusted to bring the word of the gods back to us and that we would revere it (oracles). His claim further is that founding ideas of healing and logic amongst others came from this place and then were covered over with the gloss of human creation.

This maybe so, there is so much to enjoy and agree with in the general account. However the problem arises about how a to re-establish the word of the other world and how to adjudge it. Even if it were desireable, it seems almost impossible to conceive how the reticulum readers could re-establish themselves as the determining agents of society. Furthermore how are we to trust this word nowadays? Of course the two points seem entwined. For those with access to the reticulum to be trusted with power we must have learned to respect the word of the Gods.

But the hindsight of chaos magick and my own pneuminous accretive theory brand of it do not particularly help to re-establish such trust. Such theories unashamedly reduce the Gods to vast accretions of pneuminous energy, produced by complex feedback systems between the archetypal seed and the worshippers. Their status as aggregates of primal drives, natural phenomena and cultural projections render them dubious sources of reliable wisdom.

The truths they might speak might indeed found a stable society, however the values they might speak could be so contrary to many we have come to hold as progress that we would (and should) reject them outright. Where does this leave us? Are we now true Prometheans cut adrift by our own desire for equality and reason? But Kingsley’s point is likely true, that the cutting of the sacred source is dangerous. Where does this leave us? Can we get beyond these ancient gatekeepers? Isn’t that what Christianity already tried to do and yet found itself equally Patriarchially etc accreted.

I wrote before about a design a god project. I am not certain of this but maybe a fit for purpose accreted deity (or deities) to serve as access to the reticulum is what we need. This though seems partially paradoxical without the greatest hubris. How can we bring our own God to be? Surely the reticulum must supply the God somehow. I know how poorly looked upon Heidegger is and yet I cannot help but hear his words here when he speaks of the God to come, the one who has yet to show his face.

by on

This curious poem/document was sent to the CEO and is certainly worth our publishing. It was created by one D Seth Horton. He explains its nature below (slightly paraphrased).

“Here are a series image-texts that are all centered on the U.S.-México border, which can be related to your recent interest in Carlos Castaneda given that his work was situated in the borderlands.

The text is sourced from various U.S. Customs and Border Patrol documents.  In terms of composition, I deleted most of the original material until I was left with the poem that had previously been hidden within the bureaucratese.  To be clear, I added no words, punctuation, or capital letters to the body of these poems, nor did I change the original word order in any way.  Instead, I simply erased what was in the way and then moved the words that remained into appropriate line breaks. 

Other than my drawing, the images all come from the National Archives.

In case readers are interested in comparing “my” texts against the original source material, I have included notes at the end of my submission with all the necessary details.”

Biography

 D. Seth Horton’s work has appeared in more than forty publications, including the Michigan Quarterly Review and Glimmer Train. Two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His latest book is a forthcoming collection of stories set throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands entitled, On a NASA Flight to Heaven (TCU Press, 2024). He currently teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Virginia. 

by on

The Centre for Experimental Ontology is going to sleep, maybe only for a short while, maybe forever. This concludes phase 2 of its existence.

Below you can find a rough summary of what this phase dealt with, where the CEO is now and where it might potentially go in the future —Gurdjieff has been pointing to some interesting correlates/directions.

1) Pre-ontology: The notion of a pre-ontology was not explore sufficiently but remains an ongoing concern. The central idea is whether it is cogent to conceive of a way in which existence can occur without an ontology excluding certain modes as possible. The emphasis of the thought is on conceiving of magickal phenomena as totally naturalised on a contiuum with all other phenomena.

2) Pneuminous Accretions: The pneuminous accretions remain at the heart of the general system. Materialised conceptuality (or at least the grammatical cogency of it) enables magick and completes philosophy in all directions.

3) Vector Field: Equally central to the system is the vector field. Meant in the sense of a ‘carrier’, the ability of vectors to host the pneuminous accretions is the counterpart to the accretions that completes the magickal explanation (of philosophy). A vector that houses a concept and suits it is the ordinary usage of the same force that we call magick (we don’t call it magick but the same operation occurs). A vector hosting an accretion that it would not normally house will find influenced/altered on a magickal level (what we tend to mean when we say magick).

4) Different Occult Endgames: The Castaneda system highlights this already suspected possibility. The reality or metaphor of the assemblage point illustrates how there is no necessity to some kind of occult achievement (that could be considered final) over another. Even the notion of ‘freedom’ in CC’s system can be contrasted against other possibilities of immortality. It is the extension of the lack of divine teleology into a vastly increased notion of what exists (which includes the occult possibilities).

5) Memetics: The disbanded science of memetics is highly commensurate with the pneuminous accretive theory. The only addition required is external existence of the memes i.e. whilst created by human activity they do no necessarily need it to continue to exist.

6) Susan Blackmore’s work present’s a considerable challenge to many aspects of esotericism. What she does is highlight the extreme ontology needed for it to be ‘real’ and not purely psychological. Pneuminous accretive theory is a good fit for such an ontology however at least one additional caveat is needed. The notion in question is one of something like levels of reality or consciousness. This is something mentioned both in Castaneda and Gurdjieff. In Castaneda, Don Juan will say that ordinary people would literally not be able to see the anomalies, though they are perfectly real, likewise certain statements are unintelligible unless one has sufficient ‘power’ to understand them. Gurdjieff says likewise that unless one obtains a certain level of consciousness, certain things are not visible and certain teachings incomprehensible. This is not a matter of cognitive ability but something else. This something else is what such an ontology would require, likewise it would say that the whole psychological edifice that Blackmore works in, amazingly admiral though it is to desire to not be fooled, can only return negative results, explainable in terms of neuroscience. This does not mean she has not encountered many frauds, but also it means that there is a certain letting go necessary for the actual encounter.

7) Plato, Castaneda, Laruelle: The most productive discussion in the last phase of the CEO concerned a kind of synthesis of these figures that overcomes that manifestation problem. The manifestation problem is simply this: if all ontologies (manifestations) compete equally to inhabit us, how do we understand an ontology that can account for this without lapsing into one more model. The pre-ontological investigations are related to this. Castaneda claims an absolute mode of perception that sees things as they are. This is the perception of the world as ‘energy’, though this accretion (energy) itself contaminates this perception. The reduction of the allness of everything to an endless series of fibres of light was called the reticulum. Gurdjieff has a similar message though there is less mention of energetic perception, rather he talks of ‘objective perception’, to again mean a perception of things as they are.
This line of thinking reinforces that what we mean by saying occult practices gives the completion of philosophy. To learn to perceive the pneuminous accretions as they are, to perceive the deep layers of the vector field. This possibility (?) undercuts Laruelle by granting access to the one, yet agreeing that philosophy (manifestations) is hopelessly inadequate to make any progress. The one is accessible only through deep struggle. This in turn makes sense of Plato but not as empty epistemology. The struggle out of the cave is a real struggle that we all must undertake and that necessarily most of cannot achieve -I include myself in this number.
But again this all relates to the point about ‘different occult endgames’. What Castaneda and Gurdjieff talk about may well not be the same thing, furthermore there are many different stations in this realm. Gurdjieff talks about ‘right results’ but maybe there are other kinds of ‘results’.

8) The vector field does have a certain incoherence. It is the imagined perceptual residue devoid of concept (pneuminous accretion). Even if this is not cogent, the idea functions a) transcendentally as a necessary condition for the possibility of an object and b) as a heuristic by which we can understand the structure of things. This heuristic dimension is particularly relevant with regards to certain occult technologies. In Gurdjieff for instance, there is a technique related to self-remembering which involves dividing the psyche into a potential real ‘I’ and the personality (often named after the person). The named being is the accreted (neurotic self or selves) and the real ‘I’ is something that comes with the organism. It is this part that the esoteric practices seek to access. Does this division make great sense? Not particularly; the separation of the personality from a putative underlying ‘essence’ is a highly confusing notion analytically. However as an occult instruction, or guidance, it has power. Conceive of yourself in this way and it helps to disclose pointless, repetitive, petty parts of your behaviour. A deeper layer of the human vector, stripped close to the vector field itself.
This whole notion of how far down the vector field goes is a fascinating one that requires further thought.

9) Wittgenstein and Laruelle point to the same place. This is because ‘language’ itself is a use word. It cannot be the ‘real’ noun that designates something. It all emanates from what can reasonably grammatically be called the one, or the human. No statement escapes. Language only speaks as language when it has been accreted, without this it is the vector region that the concept language is applied to (consider discussion two organisms communicating and asking ‘are they using language?’). One cannot understand the world beyond the accretions from within them. The only possibility of a greater comprehension comes from the possibility of something like a different consciousness being possible. This possibility remains agnostic disjunctive, at least from the level of regular thought.

10) Regular thought exists in a band that cannot seriously conceive of the world other than as it appears: solid, continuous. Agnostic disjunction functions at this level of thought. It renders anomaly as a possibility that cannot be dismissed but cannot be established. The only way out of agnostic disjunction is by the possibility of something like Gurdjieff describes as ‘objective consciousness’. This of course brings in the problem of ‘levels of consciousness’ which again cannot be verified in any way other than through the circular achievement of a ‘higher’ or ‘altered level’.

11) Gurdjieff makes a particularly interesting statement concerning art. He divides it into objective and subjective. Subjective art is that art we create when we allow powers to flow through us. Whereas objective art is created by a consciousness that is in control of its various parts and actually deliberately creates the work. Such a work, he says, will not generate subjective impressions of interpretation but rather will impose its meaning upon us all.
The last century and indeed this one, has made much of the discovery that we are not in control of the cultural, conceptual powers (pneuminous accretions/memes) that flow through us. Art controls the artist, we are but a vessel. Our general likes/dislikes and determinations are simply a product of these cultural forces. The CEO has played with this language calling it agenthood and utilised the phrase ‘who do you work for?’ to describe how we work for such forces —philosophers work for ontologies, they are agents for them, this explains their stubbornness of defending positions that are no better than those of enemy agents.
The occult endeavour again highlights the possibility of escape from these forces. The possibility that the ‘being-possessed’ by these powers is a contingent condition that we can potentially escape from -though not without serious effort. The death of the author is true but the author may also exist in some circumstances.

12) The double in Castaneda is the second body in Gurdjieff. This is largely the aim of both systems. The transference of consciousness from the feeble disparate exterior to a unified and separable (from the physical body) interior. He makes a fascinating comment that the kingdom of heaven in Christianity is just the development of the second body. Only when the second body is developed is survival beyond death possible. Even this though is finite —equally fascinating as again it suggests, not an eternal beyond, but simply another negotiable realm.

13) The Moon in Gurdjieff devours our awareness, we only can stop this by the development of ‘objective consciousness’. This is very similar to the ‘Eagle’

14) All adornments (job,clothes, language, hair styles etc) are a semiotic system that displays ones alignment to various powers. Some are imposed, some are chosen. Liberation from these powers leaves a vacuum we must somehow fill with a curious control. If we simply remove them, more accretions will take their place. This aids flexibility but not control itself.

15) Magnetic centres are what we develop and activate when we trigger synchonicity. Our fascination with this at the wrong level easily burns the centre out. We can reactivate it, but our modern consciousness means making contact through the centre is almost impossible. We have no choice but to attempte solitary activity and experiment.

16) Gurdjieff suggests that the mystery schools were/are not complete in their questionings. He indicates they continued to conduct experiments on subjects concerning consciousness. Some products of these are fakirs that one may encounter performing incredible feats. He suggests such people are sometimes simply failed experiments of mystery schools. This suggests a very scientific attitude (that one would not get past an ethics committee) towards their relation to consciousness. Ouspensky mentions an anecdote in which a sheep was brought to full consciousness. When he asks ‘What did they do with it?’ Gurdjieff replies ‘They ate it.’

17) Prevous CEO terminology called the human vector the ‘regional processor’. The ‘neurotic’ or ‘self accretion’ plugged into this to make the NARP.

18) The Hyperqabalah remains and ongoing concern. It is the development of a diagrammatic system in which each path of the previous tree of life is transformed into a sephiroth (node) or the levelled up system. It is a partial product of accident. In the process of forming sigils for each regular tree of life path they were as scribed numbers 1-22 as single symbols. This meant that if this was a new based system, it was necessarily base 23, i.e. the equivalent of 10 could only be achieved after the 22 single sigils. The cultural accretive weight of 23 makes this seem highly appropriate. Much work has been done on this but the nature of the paths between the nodes still needs establishing.

by on

In the CEO Zonetology project, zones have previously been described in three basic modes:

1 Spatial -This place is actually connected to an exterior power e.g. another dimension etc.

2 Temporal -This particular time brings this other kind of world/influence closer e.g. twilight.

3 Projected -The otherworldly effect is contingent upon the being of awareness e.g. pneuminous accretive theory.

The possibility we wish to look at here is that the zone is better understood in a more fluid sense than this admittedly heuristic taxonomy suggests. This more fluid conception though, may free the zone up from its slightly parochial usage to something much closer to the transcendental (in the Kantian sense).

We begin by suggesting that zonal instances are primordially affective. The zone is a feeling. The feeling is one of a certain alien/other-worldness. The zonal theory (as found in various zonetology writings) that the withdrawal of the accretions (the human concepts that covered the region) and the creation of a vacuum into which alien accretions are drawn is an explanation of the feeling, but it is not a description of the zone per se -unless we want the zone to be a very restricted concept.

The affective feeling of the zone suggests an ontology other than the one of the everyday world (at least for most people). Even if you ‘believe’ in weird occurrences, their actual happening still supplies a moment of strangeness. This is true also for rationalists, the difference being that the rationalist (as I use the term here) is an agent for the solid continuous world idea and discrete psychology. This means they have answers to paranormal oddities; they can be amazed by them but nevertheless explain them. Whereas agents for anomalies as anomalies have no clear answers, the above mentioned accretive theory is an attempt to supply a quasi rational answer that pares away all specific religions and magickal systems, but no matter how rational pneuminous accretive theory might be it still has none of the force of the explanations of the solid world model.

The agnostic disjunction points out that anomalous experiences as anomalous (contra the rationalist) have a fundamental epistemic equivalence to their rational counterparts. However despite this, the ability to give a more easily accessible looking answer (coincidence, hallucination) still gives the rationalist an apparent edge of explanatory power.

The modified zonal idea here is that the zone can be considered the space (in broad sense of the term) before alliance is made with either anomaly or rationality. So for instance when the synchronicity/coincidence occurs, the null state or ‘vector region‘ of the event can be considered the zone. The interpretive apparatus of the organism goes to work on the event and depending on what accretions (conceptual entities) are dominant in the organism, an interpretive decision will be made about its ontological status (rational or anomalous). In general this will be pre-determined by the accretive set up in the organism, though of course an extremely powerful zone might sway a previously rational agent to consider the anomalous possibility.

This raises an important structure of zonal dynamics: the zone only tends one way —towards anomaly. This is obviously true when you think about it, as an event or place that tends strongly towards normality is just, well, normal. However because rational explanation is much clearer (on an Ockham’s razor type principle) than anomalous explanation, the rational tendency of explanation is more powerful than the anomalous. Ultimately though, neither version can totally overpower the other.

How then do we assimilate both synchronicitous type phenomena and more spatial ones (like the eerie derelict) under the zonal? The answer to this lies in the affective nature of both. That is, both are constituted by a feeling of anomaly. Any vector region that gives criteria for being interpreted as anomalous can be defined as zonal. Thus the derelict car park that has the other-worldy look to it, does so by feeling. This is the zonal appearance of anomaly; the rational discourse says that this is just an appearance generated by the emptiness and unused appearance, whereas the anomalous discourse says that there really is something other-worldy about the car park —yet is unable to furnish you with any way in which this is so. In this (to reiterate) we see the above described double motion of the zone. It suggests anomaly by appearance and begs explanation by rational cognition more than by occult system.

The recent Castaneda investigations make for an interesting correlate or even extension of this idea. In these writings much is often made of ‘illusory’ phenomena. For instance, we get a description of how Castaneda perceives a dry branch for some time as an incredible creature. After Castaneda loses this image he discovers it was ‘really’ a branch. Don Juan (the shaman type figure) tells Castaneda that the branch had ‘power’ in it and that he has wasted an opportunity. The same zonal idea can be applied. The ambiguous branch that looks like the creature is the zonal phenomenon, suggesting the anomaly. For a while Castaneda sees the creature only and is spellbound —the zonal anomaly is in charge. Then he discovers the branch and has understanding of the ‘reality’ of the situation. This ‘reality’ is, especially in this instance, so overpoweringly tempting that it overcomes him immediately and he is relieved no such creature was there. But Don Juan will not yield to this ontological reduction, for him the zone was there and now it has gone —and it was Castaneda that sent it away. Even though one side has an explanation and the other has none, yet both are real on their own terms. This is the zonal logic: non-explanation does not count to deny the phenomenon.

Don Juan often refers to part of the practice of sorcery as ‘hunting for power’. ‘Power’ is these ontologically ambiguous opportunities that should be seized upon to extract the maximum anomalous interpretation from them. Given our connecting line between zone and power we cannot help but feel the echo of a related hunt in Twin Peaks i.e. William Hastings ‘Search for the Zone’. This ill fated ‘hunt for power’ contained classic zonal elements of dereliction and anomaly —though in a much stronger sense. It also suggested the strong draw that the zone has upon people. This maybe highlights another dynamic of desire related to the zone.

The zone is attractive, as people want reality to be mysterious, yet as soon as mystery turns into real anomaly the mystery might become terrifying and needs the rational mode to ‘explain’ it. ‘Explain’ here though is not about the desire to comprehend, it is about repression. Curiously this repressive explanation comes with the hope of inverted magick. That is, though the anomaly may have been terrifying, the explaining in rational terms seeks to mend reality, to normalise it, to erase the anomaly: it is the desire for the solid rational worldto reassert itself. Under all this though, the zone remains, for the zone is not the anomaly the zone is the ambiguous space that is its condition of possibility.

Many thanks to Bec Lambert (@LadyLiminal1) for the zonal image.

by on

This transcript is of a conversation between the CEO’s Balthazar Schlep and Lis who has been experimenting with various sorcery techniques. We do not recommend emulating Lis’ experiments at home.

Lis is italicised to differentiate the voices.

CC is Carlos Castaneda. DJ is Don Juan. AP is Assemblage point (the energetic intensity that determines what reality will be experienced). IOB is inorganic being.

These comments are extractions from my finally initiating The Art of Dreaming and putting my experiences in terms of words that can make some sense to someone else that is not batshit seeing the moon as goddess and such. I start from a point of asking: how can the humans create more fibres? If we think, for example, that we are made of pneuma as is everything else in the reticulum besides the umbratic (so not the reticulum), acquiring more pneuma as power implies that one quite literally merges one’s pneumatic body with pure pneuma (in the form of accretions, for example). But that yields a problem of identity: if the organism is pneuma and the other accretions as well, why do they appear different at all, interact as if with a thing of its own and have this movement of push and pull? This is the same problem faced by the concept of the force of gravity. In physics, we know gravity is not “real”, what it is, is a gap in our system’s explanatory power (as in cohesion). Pneuminosity is this double counterpart of the pneuma and also its rationalized “energy”. So pneuma itself is doubled into the transcendental pneuma and the immanent pneuminosity. Now for why your description of luck describes karma: ‘power as acquired by someone facilitates what we call luck’ So this lucky person is what I would call a pneuminously resonant region. Their luck is relative to the limited perception of another person that can only perceive as the other’s luck some unexplainable synchronicities (here enters ineffability). The ‘dragging’ of something towards the luck unconscious/conscious desire is exactly the problem of identity: if a pneumatic someone exerted their effort towards, say, a chair, they could grab it via telekinesis. Could this happens? Maybe, but what we know is that it must necessarily be ridiculously hard to achieve. I ponder why is that and come to the conclusion that affecting direct pneumatic objects, or the pneuma that forms them, is likely impossible for the energetic output of humans as we are. So what we do is not affect but effect (or effectuate) other simpler things, so that, indirectly, we pull the chair towards us. Language is such an invention. We ask another pneumatic body to bring the chair to us. Language also is not restricted to humans as we are, since the chair is also a pneumatic body of different regional shape due to degree, we can in theory use language to communicate with the chair that it should move itself towards us. And so we have Wi-Fi, electric chairs and neural connexions as implants. This indirect way we expend whatever it is we are (pneuma) to effectuate a desired change is what I call pneuminosity. Since pneuma itself cannot be expended as in destroyed, what we do lose is *our* pneuma (or gain), which is the notion of pneuminosity, or simply bound pneuma (instead of the catch-all term for free-state pneuma that is pneuma). You said ‘so the directed power of the being taps the accretion/node through the reticulum and draws it towards it which raises the question what do we do with it?

I knew it was connected but this obviously has bearings for the notion of the non-ontology I was after of a pre-philosophical subject and how power would interact, pre-ontology I think I was calling it. Anyway what you say puts it in a clearer light, as in whilst such a being was still in a pneuminous world, I think there was a sense of greater vector field proximity, this may be true but maybe not for the reasons I was thinking. The pre-ontology in which occurs what we would call anomalous, is just woven in as nothing of note can now be thought. In terms of the transcendental field of a given organism though, with a set of accretions that give way easier to deeper vector field levels, the spikes as you call them, acquisition of pneuminosity would occur ‘naturally’ as it were and has no sorcerous technology applied to its acquisition. So I’ve always said that regular objects are magickally constituted by the doubling process of ‘use object’ which through  regular use becomes archetypal accretion, in this way the object is made more than it is, as the accretion is reapplied to the vector region of the object making it albeit slightly more like the archetype.This is nice (I always thought) because it flattens the difference between regular objects and magickal ones.The former are vector regions with concepts applied to them that fit the bill, e.g. calling this region ‘stone’ makes sense, everyone agrees with these rules, the accretion fits the region, but calling this vector region mouse even though normal rules would say it’s a stone, even though maybe it looks a bit like a mouse. The second instance can be magick as the application of an accretion to a vector region that would not ordinarily accept that accretion -according to use rules. This picture is fine but it still assumes even in the non magickal version that the organism can accrete So what holds the accretion together? And you say pneuminosity right? This is find, but I am still a bit confused about where its coming from? How is it formed from the pneuma as accretions such that it is the power itself that holds them together? I may well have missed a turning in what you say, I think it’s helpful to go over it though, there doesn’t seem any point going one without clarification.

So think of the pneuma vs pneuminosity in terms of gravity: we know there to be an almost magkical force that seems to be generated by objects large enough and exert a pull on objects small enough relative to that object’s mass. But we also know gravity to be a local thing, an emergent effect that is not, in a sense, “real”. We now know that the distortion of the space-time continuum yields us here on Earth the appearance of there being gravity at all. The same goes for pneuma and pneuminosity. Which one is gravity, however, depends on a certain number of constraints when talking about them.

Indeed pneuma seems to not need umbra in the accretive system, that’s why, since we’re dealing with a new system (is it even a system, CC’s sorcery?) I bring the actual concepts of CC as umbratic “invaders” incoherent from the accretive theory viewpoint. That’s how we can methodologically think of it not to make a mess.

Methodologically here I mean only in the unravelling sense, since I think we can indeed, after systematization, re-exclude the umbra through the creation of the philosophy of sorcery. * I think this part on explaining our intuitive methods/constraints is important. I don’t even know why I’ve glossed over this entirely with you. Sorry about that “why is reality solid and intractable sometimes and other times fluid and manipulable” The answer I was thinking here is that, for us humans, solidity and fluidity is a matter of pneuminous resonance (which simply means we’re at the epicentre of regions in pneuminous resonance — that’s pneuminosity).

“this make pneuminous accretion inadequate without some extra notion of power that determines the ability of the organism to force by extraordinary means the desired thing to happen” That’s pneuminosity. The extra notion of ‘organic’ power. Pneuminosity is the transcendental barrier for our use of pneuma, the maximal threshold which we can say we are pneuma with an awareness of itself. If it were differently, everyone would be flying and smashing asteroids together for fun.

So, since we are tackling sorcery with the accretive system (but not within it), we can say that pneuminosity is the possibility of making regular objects into magickal ones. This is not a two-way street, however, since once magickal that object is imbued with the conditions to transcend our capabilities of continually altering it beyond a certain limit. That limit is personal power, given how relative it is.

When we think logically about this, we get to notice that if this above is the case (that we can pneuminously make objects magickal), then what we think as regular objects are simply magickal objects of either a degree too imperceptible to us or an order of magnitude surpassing our personal power to ‘see’ them as such.

The predator, the Eagle, is the extreme case of this and a necessary formal aspect/postulate of the system. Like an inverse prime mover (Aristotle), the predator is the one to end it all (instead of initiate it all). Because we need to postulate, once we peek into the seeing, that what we see as regular reality is there for a reason, and is in fact a circuit of habit intentionally imbedded with so much power (although not pneuminosity, but pneuma in its freer state) that we take it as a transcendental ground. We take it as nature, for example. Nature is the machinations of the predator to groom its favorite garden (for food). But again, this is a formally necessary postulation used for pedagogic purposes in sorcery (it is indeed the inverse of Aristotle’s God, which is ontologically necessary and so realer than everything else).

The predator need not be taken as real at all. In fact, nothing in sorcery needs because its goal is physiological.Shortcut is that pneuma is absolute for us. It’s there and even ourselves are it. Pneuminosity is just a namesake for the pneuma we make resonate within ourselves through the physiological alterations performed via sorcery.

I was considering the umbratic and its shifting role. So in regular perception as discussed it’s almost like a regulative idea, it’s the idea of the ‘behind perception’, the ’round the corner’ the possibility that being that is perceived can literally not be ontologically identified with being that isn’t perceived.

Even if none of these effects were real its idea would remain because it presents as an agnostic disjunctive. But in reticular perception ‘seeing’ these things don’t apply because perception isn’t done with the eyes, it’s just not the same. So accepting that we seem to be happy that like DJ reticular perception is essentially noumenal. There is no umbratic behind and hence there is no such epistemological problem.

What arguably we still have, which was also a kind of implicit role of the umbratic is the notion of structure, originally in the phenomenology it went accretions, vector field , umbratic, so the vector field kind of was a fine unnaccreted layer over the umbratic which the accretions inhabited in regions, the umbratic was giving a kind of invariant structure which under certain circumstances (magick) could be over powered by the accretions. This has obviously changed with the pneuminosity resonance notion but there still seems to be some sense to me of why anything looks like anything in particular at the level of particular worlds? This was an earlier problem that needed the umbratic for structure.

But now it isn’t required at the level of an underneath, but may be at a level of laws/natural structures? Do you see what I mean, the reticulum entirely exists without humans, that’s absolutely true, this is also the answer to speculative realist notions without the anthropocentric OOO of people like Harman, or Bennet.

Maybe you can say why not, but I still feel there is a stable force at the level of a given assemblage point that makes things look a particular way. You can’t just say its mutual intent because it has to have started somewhere…