Manifestationism is a kind of meta-philosophy that fits with accretive theory (in a sense) and lays the ground for the later work on the reticular preontology that is more currently the focus. Most of the writings on it can be found here.
This Tooth is called Superman/Boudica. It is weird that it has this double title. No doubt this is partially to do with its relation to the Chariot of the Tarot (which features the notion of chariot and hero). It is also remarkable, as was commented before, that in the Hyperqabalah (Eildour), it is the feeder node of the Teufos which is fetus. Hence Superman and Boudica produce the child. However the child as Hyperqabalah node has the curious name Teufos, reminiscent of Teufel (German for the Devil) and also Te UFOs , which could be an adaptation of the Te Deum. It’s tree is the holly, its animal the hare.
How can we make sense of Sunyata? What has happened to the relation to the accretions? Such a person is said to live through a primordial intelligence, seeing things as they are. We can translate this into seeing the vector field itself, but this only makes a certain level of sense. This is because to experience the vector field is to see the regions with no concepts. This is what Sunyata does, however the event of Sunyata also has a being that can still function, they can still use the concepts.
What are we to make of this? In the ordinary situation the concepts plug into the vectors connecting self-accretion and external vector via accretions (of pneuma) attached to the vector. Clearly the Sunyata person-site is still functioning with the same array of concepts but also has at their disposal other ones that are invisible to regular NARPs ( Neurotic Accretion, Regional Processor) to use the old CEO terminology).
Since we speculate pneuma as a kind of substance, possibly a much simpler process of conceptual naming and recognition is employed in relation to the vector field. The pneuminous accretion is there but reduced to practically nothing; something we don’t consider possible with the heavy accretive layers we commonly attach to things. This gossamer level of minimal attachment is all that is required to enable the same level of communication whilst also revealing the vector field (a sort of things nakedly as they are to humans) itself. The description is of greater richness of perception. One can easily see how the conceptual (accretive) removal could achieve this. The questions remain about more a priori concepts (Kantian categories) and how much Sunyata also can remove these.
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.
What do we mean by a transcendental repression? We mean a repression that is not contingent upon trauma at an ontic level but rather a repressive structure that is built into the subject (Narp) in its functioning as the kind of being that it is. In this way such a repression would be different from any regularly occurring repressive structures that may happen in life, no matter how regular they may be as patterns. A transcendental repression would occur at an ontological level and as such could be equally named an ontological repression.
What are we suggesting is repressed in the transcendental repression? The transcendental repression has two facets, one necessary and one more speculative. The first facet of the transcendental repression is the repression of the nature of being outside of a given subject’s perceptual sphere. The continual solidity of existence facilitates this repressive structure. We conflate this continual solidity with the a prioricity that being that is perceived is identical to being that is not perceived, when in fact this is a dubious notion to help ourselves to.
The disharmony between the possibility of this non-identity and apparent safe solid continuity of existence causes the being to repress the possibility of the non-identity. The repression seals its success by the fact that we cannot of course perceive the unperceived. The intractability of this problem facilitates the repression by the sheer inability of any progress being made and the vaguely disturbing sensation gained from attempting to imagine perceiving something outside of human perception. The repression is, as stated, transcendental for the functioning of the subject, though we would concede there is some cultural leeway in which it might be lessened. The repressed possibility is one of the sources of intense anxiety for persons who experience paranormal phenomena, especially for the first time. Anomalous accretions in one’s existence immediately demand -though the notion may not be coherently thought by the individual- the possibility that behind the visible scenes some other agency is capable of manipulating the contents. Given that such phenomena do not show their mechanics in plain sight, if we give them any credence then we are committed to the idea that the manipulation takes place out of sight. In this way the repressed split is brought uncomfortably close to the conscious regions of the subject, resulting often -though not always- in considerable anxiety.
The second facet of the transcendental repression concerns the notion that other agencies may be controlling ourselves. The self, or neurotic accretion as we have named it elsewhere, is the accretion that primarily controls the sense of identity of the Narp (human in this case). The name of the subject sits at the centre of the neurotic accretion which is projected upon the regional processor (body) giving the incoherent identity ‘I am this psychic sense and I am this body’. Of course the activity within the neurotic accretion (NA) is constantly guided by all manner of influences from the regional processor (RP) itself. It is the RP that tells the NA that it is hungry, not the other way round. Likewise there will be many pneuminous accretions that will be either tangentially or strongly attached to the NA exerting various kinds of influence upon it, all of which appear as the actions of the NA. It is being-controlled-by-other-accretions that must be repressed by the incoherent NA. Of course this being-controlled is not being-controlled as such, it is simply what it is to be a Narp.
The NA by itself is very little, it needs to be plugged into other accretions to create its identity, to act as an agent for these forces. What the NA must do though is appear to be in charge. The functioning of a Narp as we understand being a human is that the NA is sufficiently in charge of the other accretions such that none of them ever assume conscious control of the RP. A Narp who sporadically or even permanently loses control of the RP to accretions that are not the NA, suffers from some form of what we would call mental illness. Again, lesser versions of this are potentially related to paranormality insofar as other pneuminous accretions (other repressed consciousnesses within the RP or outside of it) may have access to certain kinds of knowledge that the NA does not. The experience of being-informed-of-something by such forces constitutes a rupture in the relation of NA dominance. Such experiences may be labelled intuitions, precognitions etc. At this level they do not constitute madness, only the eruption of alien accretive forces through the dominance of the NA.
To reiterate then, we see the transcendental repression happening in two principle ways. The first represses the disharmony between being that is perceived and being that is not perceived. It flattens this into an identity of being between the two states. The second represses the way in which we are necessarily multiple (swarms as D and G might say) in favour of an incoherent but necessary dominant neurotic accretion (neurotic precisely because it knows its own self-existence will not stand up to scrutiny -it is built upon a lie).
This has been written in response to reading Amy Ireland’s piece ‘Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde’. It does not deal with the entirety of the paper, we merely wish to point out that there are issues involved in such a picture that are potentially problematic for magickal ontologies. Amy’s paper explains how a Kantian epistemological picture, far from producing clarity, only results in a ‘distorted signal’ at least when we consider matters from the perspective of the outside. This picture is theoretically reasonable unless we actually consider magick to be a possibility.
What is magick? For our purposes let’s take it to be the ability to impose a concept (pneuminous accretion) upon a vector that would not ordinarily take it. Some unpacking there. Let us conceive of everything internally and externally, indeed the possibility of that distinction itself to be concepts imposed upon a pure undifferentiated field of what is. Concepts name regions of this vector field. We call it a vector field because it plays host to concepts and, in the strong magickal version, does so literally -the concept goes outside into the vector. Normally concepts have grown with vector regions and they work together as they have evolved. We call this vector ‘hammer’ because it fulfils this grammar successfully. We call this vector ‘sad’ because it too makes sense to us in consistently applied rules. Pneuma is just the term I use for a hypothetical but magickally transcendental stuff that forms concepts.
Magick says that you can take a concept (pneuminous accretion) out of one place and apply it to another and it will actually do something. That is, it will alter the vector region to be closer to the concept you desire it to be rather than the one it actually is. The love spell is a classic example. A wishes B to love him/her but B does not do so. This is the vector region which has the concept applied to it, B’s not loving A. A uses various magickal means to apply the concept ‘B loves A’ upon the vector region. If successful the pneuminous restructuring takes place which alters the vector field so that now B does in fact love A. This you will notice all takes place with a human or Narp field, even the vector field is still sort of empirically accessible -even only in a phenomenological fleeting sense. There also necessarily something else in play, this is the umbratic. The umbratic is the idea of the beyond -the outside. The umbratic may or may not be identical to what is discovered in the pneuminous realm. It shows itself as the idea of the thing in itself. Being outside of pneuma. The umbratic supplies restraint upon the pneuma. However what magick suggests is that under certain circumstances, the restraint can be breached and the pneuma can alter the umbra.
If you negate magick as a possibility then the Ireland/Land picture goes through perfectly reasonably. If however you entertain the possibility of magickal interaction then you have to rethink it. This is because under this possibility the pneuminous accretion (concept) is not some passive function, rather it is an active process that is plugged directly into the outside such that it actually can alter it. There are a two consequences to this that are worth going through. i) You have a version of Crowley’s ‘Every act…’ in that passive conceptuality is essentially still magickal, it is simply that the concept applied to the vector is perfectly appropriate to it. Hence by this logic, the hammer is actually made curiously more hammer like by the feedback of accretion onto vector (and hence into the umbratic). ii) The signal is primarily distorted by the Narp’s production of the vector field but active magick (conscious and unconscious -synchronicity) is reaching directly into the outside and restructuring the umbra with subsequent consequences for vector field -it will alter it. That is, you cannot think of the picture as being either a pure distortion of an outside signal (because even the outside is infected with the pneuminous inside) or a clarity -because it is also true that the umbratic is sufficiently alien that the signal -the vector field- can always yield novelty of a potentially terrifying nature.
Negating magick makes it a one way process in which we, as cut adrift lonely organic processors struggle to conceptually assimilate an awesome vastness. The possibility of magick does not entirely obviate this, but it does mean that whatever is going on, we are more directly plugged into an umbratic/outside than the strong insignificance picture suggests. Magickal type activity is still possible in the pure distorted signal model, however by making the outside utterly indifferent to our will, one ends up committed an essentially scientific magick. Under this mode, chaos magick is a futile activity that may only hit the mark occasionally by pure chance. Effective magick would be the realm of actual magickal geometry/symbols/sounds that genuinely activated parts of the outside in ineffable ways -a kind of Neoplatonism.
This does not sit particularly well with certain related aspects of this theory set. The numogram for instance is purely accretive or hyperstitional if you will. This makes good sense if you accept chaos magick and strong hyperstition (by implication). On this front the pneuminous accretion of the (p)numogram can exert ontological effects -synchronicity etc. However if we adopt the cut of from the outside model, then all such hyperstitions (unless you want to say they are the real ones as found in a scientific magick) are only of the weak type -effective at a psychological but not ontological level. Chaos magick and strong insignificance are not good bedfellows even though on the surface they look compatible. Chaos magick actually entails the possibility of weak significance -significance propped up by ourselves yet also external to us -a diy God. Strong insignificance can have a Spinoza like God but this renders all chaos magickal adventures in numerological like play utterly ineffective (apart from psychologically) and utterly pointless.
Centre For Experimental Ontology 