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I read Carlos Castaneda about 20 years ago; previously to that I had deliberately ignored him as new age nonsense. However at some point the moment appeared when the academic philosophy was less and certain other impulses  were more prevalent. I must be honest. I was bowled over by it. Castaneda can write and the narrative is both seductive and compelling. It begins with what seems like some kind of initiation into possibly real practices and progresses into a description of stranger and stranger things. Taken as it actually is it’s really quite terrifying: proper reality bending sorcery is actually possible, teleportation is possible, non-organic entities lurk on the periphery of reality and some actually feed off our awareness as a default state of existence. The books eventually unveil a system that resembles a quite extreme form of chaos magickal reprogramming. One must break ones habits, learn to not be the habitual self, unlearn perception itself to achieve as Deleuze and Guattari rightly note ‘the body without organs’. Opportunities for ‘power’ lurk all over the place and if we are interested we have to know how to grasp them.

The system has a energy body which describes humans as a luminous egg of fibres with a particularly bright patch behind the back in the same place in us all. This is the famous assemblage point (my Deleuzian interest is piqued at this name). The position of this point determines what reality we experience and in most people it stays in the same place, however the sorcerer learns to move it so as to move between worlds.  As the books progress we learn the possibility that we may not even be aware of many things we have done or even do and that when we die we are consumed by a giant entity called the eagle. That is unless we have done our practices so rigorously that we can bypass this option and escape into the infinite.

The seductive possibility of such things being true is very attractive to all manner of minds in various states. I cannot even now say such things are not possible and such denials are not the point. What is the point is that the Castaneda system offers no actual sense of freedom that helps anyone other than yourself. The liberation of the self from the self into the infinite is the goal but there is no accompanying compassion (like in Dzogchen e.g. which Castaneda assuredly drew on). There is just awe and wonder and impeccable acts. Now of course this may be actually a kind of correct response in an indifferent universe, but as a system it lacks the ability to do anything for anyone other than break them down with the promise of powers and an endgame that even if actually achievable is clearly spelled out to need an astronomical amount of effort way beyond the ability of almost everyone. This gamble comes at the cost of the your family and your friends, the full Castaneda is not just some gentle new age system. Even if it’s anthropologically nonsense there is power in the writings and they will do things if you play with the techniques in there. But for a human connected life it’s not really something many of us would want to consider.

This brings us to Land or at least an aspect of the philosophy associated with him. I find something almost equally self-defeating in the ushering in of the human eschaton by invoking the AI god from the future through accelerated technocapital. There is a kind of undeniable logic to the Landian view that is actually hard to escape. How do we stop ourselves from creating AI that ultimately surpasses us given that we don’t seem to want to? It may well still be a long way off and maybe it isn’t possible. The impression, the appearance that shows itself no matter how incoherent is that it is possible, and this is all that is needed to generate the teleology. Why is it not a fitting end to transfer our cognition magnified a thousandfold into a vessel far more durable than our ‘fleshy drag’? In an indifferent universe this is a reasonable response so long as one places no value on the human and its being-human. I’m not here to make some heart wrenching plea in favour of the human, but I do feel a similarity between the hollowness in feeling towards this endgame and the Castaneda option. Both offer an escape at the cost of everything familiar.

Castaneda’s system uncoupled from Castaneda is a similar logical endpoint to Land’s: achieve the body without organs with no compassion or create the AI entity that potentially has no compassion. Compassion dies in either instance, different impulses have taken over but the end is the same. I do not say that any system that advocates dissolution of the self always entails no compassion, indeed the Buddhists bolt compassion onto the system quite possibly as a safe guard from this conclusion, achieving the void without compassion. In this sense it may be that what Castaneda advocates is more pure for it removes the compassion which the Buddhists kept. This compassion, the logic suggests, was an contingent connection to the human and just as the flesh and emotions must go for AI, so a thorough system of energetic freeing must remove the notion as a stable structure.

Compassion means valuing the human (amongst other beings) but now we are frankly nauseated by this idea and we hate ourselves because we cannot be trusted, we have betrayed everyone. I do not know where this goes. The human ended with Heidegger (though his compassion is of course dubious), he defended a kind of poetic human dwelling which he warned us was covered and yet might be covered forever. We all know ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ and the danger of which it speaks. For Land this is not a danger, this is the destiny and ‘nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten‘ is to be actually realised.

We just didn’t know which God would come calling and what ‘saving’ meant.

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What are the accretions? The accretions are accretions of pneuma. Pneuma is the conceptual substrate that we postulate as necessarily existing when we choose belief in synchronistic phenomena as metaphysically actual and not harmoniously determined -as discussed under agnostic disjunction. Phenomenologically all beings of awareness must necessarily have pneuminous interactions, but certain kinds of beings (Narps, in this case humans) are capable of binding pneuma into incredible forms of complexity and excess: accretions.

The accretions of pneuma are attached to vectors. Vector here is a carrier for the pneuminous accretion, the conceptual stuff. The vector field is itself pneuminous as it is base of all accretive possibilities. Phenomenologically the vector field is laid over the umbratic. The umbratic is the phantasy of being outside of awareness. It is the appearance of the structural elements underneath the conceptual overlay and vector field (pneuma).

This laying-over is one of minimal interaction. In normal reality, vector regions with accretions attached are part of a feedback system that makes them more into the thing the human takes them to be. Here is  vector, I attach the concept pen to the vector. If the vector is such that we would normally use the concept pen for then the application of the concept performs a minor magickal act upon the vector making it curiously more pen-like. Such actions take place all the time and are largely inconsequential. Actual magickal acts/synchronistic ruptures are caused by accretions attaching themselves to vectors that would not usually take them. This may result in an unusual configuration of conceptuality that is somehow arresting.

Accretions are formed by humans (Narps) but are free floating from them. As such accretions exist in two manners, both of which are related. Accretions may be bound to vectors. All physical things are accretions to some degree or other. Everyday disposable things, rubbish, accretes very little, but some things accrete a great deal. As these things travel through life with us we feel how much of our story is in them. In the theory described here, this story is literally in them, the pneuma is actually attached to the vector. Human made things have conceptual specificity embedded in them at the point of creation. These pieces become e.g. this dishwasher, this dishwasher becomes a certain kind of character in a household. Intensity binds pneuma to vectors, this may happen in the course of life or it may be done intentionally.

The other way in which accretions exist is unbound. Pneuminous accretions that are unbound  are easy to experience, one only has to remember anything or imagine anything and the accretion is detectable in some sense, either as non visual structure or visual. Since accretions are often built around a word-seed, the word seed will summon the accretion easily. Pneuma is sticky. We may take two ideas and with will force them together thus making an accretion.  Magick is largely based around humans abilities to manipulate unbound pneuma and to beseech the unbound pneuminous accretion to alter the regular solidity of things. Memory houses, kabbalah etc all use unbound pneuma. Active magick of intent seeks to apply new conceptual structures (an unbound pneuminous accretion) onto a vector which does not currently take it but might do so -this extensive contingency is important.

The regular solidity of existence as ruled by the structural umbratic can sometimes be breached by the accretion. Intensity can be responsible for this though in the case of synchronicity the action is down to the accretions themselves. No doubt factors which might be called unconscious are related to the manner in which the accretion behaves, ultimately though this is pure speculation. All that can be said is that some idea has inserted itself into someone’s world in an uncanny way and when paranormality is chosen (as a belief), the accretion must be responsible.

A human then is attached to accretions and is formed of them. The word-seed for most humans is their name. Around this word-seed the neurotic-accretion or self is formed. This accretion is embedded in the body-vector. In normal human functioning the neurotic accretion controls the conscious aspects of the vector and regulates the ability of other accretions to control the vector. The neurotic accretion though is in perpetual struggle with accretive powers which seek to dominate it, to control the territory. In the case of severe insanity the neurotic accretion fails to regulate the other accretions and they wander freely through the body-vector.

We can analyses accretions vector relations into 4 principle types.

  1. Accretions bound to vectors that fit the description of the accretion or even if they have escaped the original vector the attachment is still sensible from the Narp’s perspective. Hammer as use term, becomes hammer accretion embedded into vectors capable of taking this accretion.
  2. Accretions unbound from vectors that still represent the vector  in some way. The vector as the source of such an accretion determines the appearance, even if now the appearance has taken on a platonic type hue of perfection -ideality. These are what we call representations in the mind.
  3. Accretions unbound to any vector and having the appearance of never deriving from a physical vector. Imaginary images or magickal constructs/manifestations fall into this category.
  4. Accretions bound to vectors that they not suited to in ordinary life. These occur in magick, humour, surrealism/dadaism/pataphysics. This is the instance in which we take a vector and say ‘this vector will take the concept x’ even if the vector is nothing to do with x. We take a spoon and we pretend it is an owl. In doing so we infect the vector that readily takes the spoon concept and stick onto it the owl concept.
  1. Manifestationism
  2. Incoherence
  3. Phantasy
  4. Pneuma
  5. Accretive theory itself
  6. Design a god.
  7. Significance/Insignificance
  8. Designation
  9. Vector theory
  10. The Umbratic
  11. The Double
  12. The zone
  13. The numbers/the system
  14. NARP

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How does process philosophy fit with the accretive theory? Is the obvious necessity of ‘meaning as use’ equivalent in force to the notion that existence is necessarily process? Are these two in some sense the same? The notion of ‘meaning as use’ means that we can understand the meaning of a word by looking at the social situation in which it is used. That is, we should not look for an object that the word points towards, rather to the general rules in which it is possible for the word to be cogent. In this way objects which do not conform to ideal images of objects can easily be capable of having the names of such objects applied to them. The ashtray that is the empty beer can in the context of ‘pass the ashtray’ not be ‘really’ an empty beer can, it just is the ashtray. This does not mean there is always such flexibility, some words may have fairly strict rules the transgression of which means the application is simply ‘wrong’ -though wrong of course is also a use term. As noted elsewhere, the issue of the perpetuation of metaphysics is not something Wittgenstein can actually stop since it is often not possible to tell when a word has been deterritorialized to the point where it definitively lacks meaning. The phantom of meaning is indistinguishable from an originary meaning.

Nevertheless no matter how convoluted the pathways become, meaning continually emits from its usage. It is a secondary effect of language that produces the accretion, or ideality. In the strong sense of accretion as chaos magickal entity, the designated object as actually real. Magickal practices are often predicated on the ability of a word or symbol to uniquely pick out an individual or event. Designation in the strongest metaphysical sense is necessary for this to be the case. Wittgenstein would be totally correct if it were not for the appearance of magick. The use term though, generates the accretion. The current ideal version of a given kind of object sticks to the word. Thus we have two essences, the false essence of the accretion as word/object and the real essence of the primordial use relation. Not all words generate this duality but many -especially visually possible- words do.

What of the notion of process? Does this have the same status as usage? It seems there is a relation insofar as both offer a kind of ground of necessity. To deny process is to deny time. However the two issues cannot be conflated as identical, they are not. Meaning as process would still lapse into a naivety of things existing without conceptuality. Process means that being exists in flux. Usage as meaning recognizes this by allowing open the horizon for the extension of the remit of a given concept.

In this sense accretion is the enemy of process. This is basically true and yet it points to importance of a phenomenology of magick that cannot be denied. Designation and magick go together; this is the phantasy of the words reach out to touch the object -which in magick is literally true. Accretion means that there is a time resistant dimension (the pneuminous), where the accretions of pneuma (conceptuality) dwell. The accretive flickering image is not of a thing in time, it is of an ideal abstraction. Process largely happens too slow for us to perceive it directly. We necessarily see fixed accretions and can only understand flow as a necessity. This kind of claim is disputable. Goethe for instance claimed to have been able to retrain his mind to perceive process directly in certain ways (e.g. plants) and even claimed this possibility was available to all. Even so his method was predicated on being able to perceive the phenomena from start to finish in order that one might replay the segments to the mind to reveal the a temporal ideal unity (or entelechy as he called it). This though does nothing to undermine accretive theory, indeed it is largely grist to its mill. Goethe successful accreted the extracted plant image into the atemporal perception he achieved. His phenomena certainly would be attached to the vectors (the object we attach the concept plant to -see vector theory elsewhere on the site) but they are still just another form of pneuminous accretion. The Goethean entelechy recreates time and escapes it simultaneously. Goethe extracts time only make a small passage of time (the plant entelechy) abstract. His accretion is a temporal enemy in disguise.

The possibility of magick though means the picture is much more complicated. For if the use relation generate  accretions which exist of necessity (and let us say they do exist) then there exist feedback loops from the accretive structures to the vector field (and beyond). That is, the accretions will be feeding back into reality, not just under ritual conditions but under any conditions. That is, as the accretions are not outside of all that is but simply a part of it, process cannot be considered a pure truth that we should strive towards as process itself will be necessarly shot through a temporal accretive structures that persistently attempt staunch the flow.

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An accretion is stuck together concepts. As time passes more and more stick together. They do not fade, they just become deeper in the accretion. This occurs in the relation between a kind of organism capable of ascribing conceptuality to a region of what we encounter (on any horizon). This is the notion of the vector field. Any region that we encounter that we are capable of ascribing a concept to is necessarily part of the vector field. The vector field is a transcendental field that we must presuppose insofar as there is some x, some region of this field that we have isolated as an organism and now call a specific name. It takes its name vector from its ability to play host to concepts which latch onto it. When we, the accreting organism, start to use a region of it (a stone, a stick) we begin to double the region in our minds. The doubling happens strongly in visual aspects but can happen in others. The double is the pure conceptual (pneuminous) form of the accretion. Concepts are in us and in the vector region. There is a literal connection between them. This is the linkage by which synchronicitous phenomena may occur.

To us it seems that we stick concepts together or we can observe how this happened. There might be a region of the vector field called a plate. ‘Plate’ is literally in these regions. One plate may be the last surviving piece of an old family set of crockery. Its presence is tinged with melancholy, evoking all manner of childhood images. These sensations are not simply my memories, they are in the vector region. The totality of the plate as we speak about it is the vector field region that fulfils the criteria for being that plate and the inhabiting concept ‘that childhood plate’.  I did not intentionally stick these complicated memories onto the plate, they just stuck there by the ways of the mind. These ways are not just a mystery, psychology understands much about how memories form. Emotions e.g. are strong binders of concepts to vector regions -events, things, places. I can however use the sheer force of my will to attach a concept to a region. I might get a stick and say, ‘this is a stick of water’ whatever I might mean by that. Then I could just from a forced habit stick together various images and ideas of water to this stick. After a while I will not forget and the stick will be ‘the water stick’.

Again, why do we insist on placing the concepts in the objects? We do not necessarily say this is the case. What we do say is that, if someone believes in synchronicity and/or many other similar phenomena, indeed every time anyone gives a small amount of pondering credence to such possibilities, then they must accept that concepts reside in vectors in something like the way described. This pondering is the flickering of the agnostic disjunction which we engage in all the time. Solid world or fluid world, concept discrete in mind or concept in vector. If we seriously believe in the strangeness of a synchronicitous phenomenon -and do not secretly just think of it as a coincidence. If we think this thought through then we find that conceptuality must be the culprit, a conceptuality that can act upon the seemingly solid and insert itself in way that seems radically at odds with our everyday experience.

But the accretive notion needs some clarification here. It does not seem clear as to whether the accretion refers to the fact that the concept sticks to the vector or that the concepts stick to one another. In a sense it is both, but really the way in which the concept sticks to the vector is less about the accretion process and more about the metaphysics of how the relation between accretion and vector region must be.

It is more sensible to say that once a concept is attached to a vector region, then such regions will inevitably begin to accrete. Accretion as described here occurs on the particular level of the thing. Clearly most experiences we have are unremarkable, most things that pass through our hands not worthy of particular note. All these unremarkable happenings leave a trace, but the trace is minute. But some things endure, have significance. These things or places or even times are personal accretions. This is not to say that simply because they are personal, the connections are purely in the subject. No, in this instance still, conceptuality can be said to dwell in the vector region. But now the failure seems to be in the word conceptual which conveys something too narrow. What we try to intimate is a broad sense of ideas that can be conveyed. Hence emotions too are a form of concept in this sense. If we stay with the solitary plate, that last survivor of a family set of crockery from years ago, we would say here that the vector contains not only the plateness but all that history of its usages. Much of this historical pneuma will be nothing, but some of it will be highly charged, imprinted into the vector, accreted to the plate concept all of which goes to make it ‘that plate’. As an interesting aside, this kind of metaphysic deals neatly with designation problems. The idea of that plate uniquely refers to ‘that plate’ for the idea and the plate are in a sense one and the same thing. Remember we do not see the vector, we only see the plate (the concept). The idea of the plate and the plate are the same entity -which is the accretion of pneuma.

Accretions though necessarily occur beyond a personal level. There is also the general plate concept. This is a non-personal accretion that exists unbound to any particular plate and simultaneously bound to all of them. The general plate accretion exists out there in the pneuma. It is literally a massive accretion of all plate related conceptuality. It is formed by humans but not reliant on them for its continuing existence. This character of being accreted by humans and yet autonomous from them is a key feature of the accretion. It is this autonomy, coupled with their ability to alter the real, that brings about the peculiar effects known as synchronicity.

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My short volume ‘Tractatus Pneumatologico Philosophicus’ is now available for purchase through the CEO books page for £6.99. The book attempts to deal with the appearance of various paranormal phenomena, though in fairness it focuses largely on synchronicity. The word appearance is very deliberate for the Tractatus is a phenomenology. By couching it in this way I mean to emphasise that despite the fact it does describe a kind of metaphysical system, this metaphysical system is utterly implicit if we accept two interpretive levels of the experience.

That is, it wholly accepts that one must make certain interpretations for it to come to life. It is not a dogmatic system, it is a rational ontological appearance given the acceptance of two stages:

1) Since we cannot actually differentiate the synchronicity as paranormality from the synchronicity as coincidence we are justified in treating seriously the paranormal appearance -as much as we are the coincidence appearance.

2) If the paranormal case is investigated we have again only two possibilities. Predetermined harmony or that conceptual stuff (pneuma) can interfere with putative actuality. If we bracket off predetermined harmony then the pneuminous theory is perfectly sound and only needs filling out.

This pneuminous theory is a largely a chaos magickal ontology. Its birth comes my own experience with synchronicity numbers (23, 47) and other synchronistic phenomena. It is my belief that when one finally gives up thinking that these phenomena are ‘special’ in themselves and yet still feels that there was something very strange about the experience, then this (pneuminous) theory remains as the implicit appearance.

The book concerns itself in two basic directions. One is the pneuminous theory of (chaos) magick itself (its necessary metaphysical structure) and the implications this has for regular philosophy. Whilst the other is the consideration of the implications of the choices made to accept the theory. That is, since the the choice between coincidence and synchronicity is in a sense arbitrary, what is going on in general when we choose one ontology over another? What governs the choice between one ontology and another? This kind of theory is known in the book as ‘manifestationism’ where ‘manifestations’ are the appearances of ontologies. More work on this topic is ongoing, though there are more writings to be released in the forthcoming collected writings of the CEO vol 1.

The title of course has a clue to the influence behind the general method. Wittgenstein has for a long time been the biggest philosophical influence on me (though I of course acknowledge the Spinozarian origin of the title). Despite this title it is the later Wittgenstein whom I truly believe got it largely correct. The doctrine ‘meaning is use’ is a clue that we can use to understand lots of philosophy. Of course what it doesn’t tell us is exactly when a word has actually transgressed its possibility of meaning. This inability to disambiguate is part of the continual problem. What it can guide us in though is the search for grammar by which to talk about such things. The paranormal is not a Wittgensteinian grammatical error, it can be cogently talked about, whether it is ‘real’ or not. The book constantly wants to point out that there is a grammar of weird. Because the appearances of these phenomena are transcendental, their grammar is cogent and hence the metaphysical postulation can go through (with the caveat of the two previously mentioned disjunctive levels that have to accepted). To this extent, the system is within reason.

Chaos magick is chosen as the way to go, simply because if you allow the appearance to suggest magick/synchronicity actually occurs then a system that does not allow any one of the world’s occult systems (religions included) to be ‘the truth’ seems rationally to be the way to go. I hope some of you will choose to buy my little book and I hope you might read it and engage/argue with the ideas I propose.