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

Yes, I mean we’re nearly full circle here aren’t we. As of course this kind of god egregore kabbalah thing is one of the aspects that sparks the whole pneuma business. Just one question concerning your usage of the umbratic. A controversial term I know sometimes. I’m not entirely sure if I disagree or not as I’m not sure of your usage here. In a previous discussion it was translated into the CC world as the unknowable. This stems from how I’ve always taken it to be, even if not an actuality, a phenomenological actuality, the idea of being outside of pneuma or the vector field even.

“The umbratic may be understood as any given region of the vector field that achieved a degree of freedom qualitatively different from the other regions. Like a spike so big it achieved escape from the field and became its own smaller vector field.”

Maybe I misunderstand but this almost seems to place the umbratic within the encounterable which purely on a definitional level would not be possible. However I can see there is some kind of revision here given that the reticulum plays a kind of access to the in itself tunnelling into the vector field is heading towards the umbratic. I almost feel this as if it would ultimately end up with the reticulum and whilst I cannot see energy and this is all speculative I cannot feel like the problem of the umbratic exists in the reticulum. It not have the same kind of relation of ‘what is the status of being behind my head, behind a closed door’? that can prompt umbratic type ideas in this reality.

But yes I totally see a lot of what you say there may be some minor terminological harmonies to make so in what I say I don’t mean ‘this is the real usage of the term’. I only say it so you know what I’ve meant so we can see if we’re talking in the same way.

The vector field is the total possible kind of space (but not only space since it covers the a-spatial and the temporal) that facilitates our ability to use words and thus stick pneuma as accretions to regions. A region of the vector field could be a small as a speck of dust, or as vast as the universe, it has a concept applied to it (in both cases its incoherent because its a use concept). So there is always a kind of dual process, usage which is minimally accretive and then what we could call object formation, the full blown accretion or fluid archetype, what appears in your mind when you think of an x. Does this all tally with your vector region?

What I feel from your writing is a sense that the blank perception attempt -trying to not see the objects- is insufficient, it only reveals more accretive layers and the second attention is to really get into that blank perception space which takes energy and silence at least to do it sober. I can make most surfaces or repetitive patterns warp and flow if I stare at them. This is a second attention like process. But it’s so surface like that it’s largely pointless.

Another thing is :do you mean something other than pneuma by pneuminosity? As in, can I say that pneuma is produced in a sense by humans e.g.? I would have said previously in a speculative way that pneuma was already there and that humans accrete it spectacularly. If I think of it as the reticulum I would say we make fibres which attach to other fibres. This then makes it sound more like the production of pneuma from the reticular perspective. The whatever the fuck the stones and things are in the reticulum only shows up as fibres (the unaccreted vector field seen in the reticulum), but when they are ‘stones” we’ve attached fibres to these other fibrous regions, which makes accretions more like knots.

I’ve been reading a pop science book on fungi, it’s a good book on that current wave of interest in the mycorrhizal web that underpins pretty much all life. And of course (and I think you’ve hinted elsewhere at fungal interest) very very reticular, which only metaphorically of course makes me wonder about concept infestation of vector regions. I’m thinking of the concept as a spore (the usage) which grows into the object as fruiting body which replicates. I know I know Burroughs has done this largely with the virus thing.

It also reminds me about  how Seranoga was supposed to have written many of his poems. It’s really quite a fungal method. He took someone else’s poem and then inserted his idea. He changed it from the inside retaining different degrees of structural similarity until he was happy with it. Some people say Seranoga was supposed to have met DJ or had contact with those sorcerers, but probably you know that.

On another point, you don’t mean that IOBs are purely accreted (by synthetic) do you? This is an interesting one generally which the epistemological status of the earlier version accretive theory would generally agree with -it was all accretions. However the recent tendency towards accepting external ‘real’ powers suggest to me that whilst yes IOB is of course an accretion like anything with a name.

They are also beings that can we say exist in pure pneuma rather than having even a sense of physicality. In vector field language we cannot apply the concept physicality to them in the ordinary sense but they are not just things we have stuck together unlike the Gods which I would probably agree. This being said there will be many nature spirits that may well be human formed accretions. Thus both exist, it’s hard to say where it stops really isn’t it? An egregore can presumably make an egregore if its consciousness is sophisticated enough to do so.

On dreaming, the view I held before was that like images in the mind dreams are unbound pneuma, this kind of raises the question as to what vector field will be in dreams (if one had enough control). From the descriptions it seems that dreams can be ’empty’ this is also something one can feel to be true as well. Even lucid dreams can be empty but the possibility of connection exists i.e. through this pure pneuminous land into the weird places. This is in principle easier than access from ‘reality’ but of course developing dreaming control is tricky

Re your ethics comment, I just wrote this yesterday ‘This infinite play of reticules reminds us also of Deleuze’s hero: Spinoza. Remember Spinoza talks of there being infinite attributes to substance. The reticulum instantiates this claim in a practical way. Space-time is just one experience of the reticulum. Sorcery is the interaction with the other attributes of the reticulum. ‘

Also I remember now the better relevance of the mycorrhizal thing. Remember originally how beyond Ballard/Sellars I was saying you could interpret the modern communication network not simply as our nervous system writ large but rather that the nervous system is this worlds way to try to instantiate the reticulum. So the mycorrhizal network would be more of the same but possibly a better example.

Yes, it’s along these lines. At first I also thought that what I saw as silence was achieving this peeling off of the accretive to an interaction with the vector field, a more “pure” interaction. But then what happened is that the peeling off of an accretion is like spiking a region that reverberates the force used to peel it off. This spike and reverberation travel through the surface of a vector region and depending on the energy exerted it goes into other regions. But here’s the thing, there doesn’t seem to be a difference between affecting one region and affecting two. What seems to happen is that affecting one region enough makes it dissipate itself over other regions, and they become one expanded vector region.

This expansion in the vector region results, instead of in a purer contact with the vector field and more silence coming spontaneously, in the proliferation of whatever was in the region separate to inside the region that was spiker and merged with a bigger one.

So instead of spontaneous silence, the exercise of cultivating silence open the attention to indeed more noise

Which makes automatic, everyday existence, harder due to the level of energetic activity one has to maintain to keep the noise in check. Like a newborn learning to tune his ears

I like that Spinoza section a lot. Indeed it resonates.

I’m thinking of the pneuma as whatt seemingly was already there when we came into awareness of our own historical condition, and of pneuminosity as the “simulacra” of the pneuma. That thing which closely resembles it the most while still being “an imitation”. But an imitation refined enough that it can “work” almost like pneuma does. It’s in this sense that I’m thinking pneuminosity can be produced by humans much like bees make honey; using our own bodies like factories for this stuff. I was also thinking of the puffs as a color-spectrum of pneuminosity refinance. The white smoke being the “purer” (that I know of) of the colours.

The white fog/smoke being the stuff of dreams, it would be secure to say something along the lines of: we, pneuma, produce pneuminosity, and the side-effect of this pneuminosity is dreaming. One can use this to modulate one’s pneuminosity and better comprehend the operations of the pneuma that is without the dreamer.

The knots that you said it make accretions resemble more is what I’ve been calling nodes. Nodes are like these extremely loaded regions that seem impenetrable (no peeling off) even from the second attention

But a knot would differ from a node even linguistically, in the way a knot implies a tension between relations maintaining a structure together (it can be stressed to the point of unknotting)

While the node is more akin to the concept of a corner in interior design. It’s less a tension of relations between lines and more a structural holder in itself. Knots and nodes would differ only in degree.

I love this idea of the spore and even have a name for it: sporification

About the IOBs, by synthetic I don’t mean purely accreted. Synthetic here means the opposite of fabricated in the sense that pneuminosity is fabricated while pneuma “was there”. The synthetic is indeed a category instead of a mode, and I would say only the umbratic is properly synthetic (to take from Laruelle, it is pre-prior). The inorganic beings would benefit from being understood as synthetic beings (since, for example, a rock is inorganic but not an IOB).

Or it is perfected enough to the point where the pneuma in resonance in a given region, instead of pulling things into itself, starts to push them out. This is the possibility of making the pneumatic self less dense (or more dense) than the sum total of density the region enclosured by nodes can support.

So this happens

OK let me keep poking for greater clarity, don’t get me wrong I’m mostly there, there are just I think different angles of concepts that I’ve been using that I need to see how they work with this expansion. So with no energetic perception when I try to look at me room as not a room but undifferentiated hyle

Your recent ideas would mean doing this does not reach the vector field right?  Which phenomenologically I previously would have said. I can see how the reticulum could be the vector field itself. This makes a kind of weird mishmash of the earlier versions of the umbratic vector field thing

The vector field as reticulum would be something most organisms do not perceive ever but that as the biological and cultural formations of the organism develop directly attach to in the sense of the transcendental and as broad accretive structures that are carried by the vector field. So these broad transcendental structures would then be the thing I was previously calling the vector field.Does this tally?

About the room: I would say the room itself, as well as you, as interacting with each other due to the resonance between vector regions (consider yourself a vector region and the room another). Both regions are in the vector field. When you look at, say, the wall, you’re not “seeing” the field because what you’re seeing is a myriad of resonant accretions between the two regions. Still, the very possibility of seeing the field implies you’re always already in it.

Indeed, something most organisms will never perceive precisely because that’s what being an organism is: it’s being in a central point of resonance between regions, which make the habitus of the body work. Say, for example, the circadian rhythm of someone: it’s an organic circuitry modulated by exterior and interior relationships such as luminosity, onset of sleeping patterns, stress levels, even the noise or birds as they go to their nests and you know it’s time to go home and start to relax. This circuit of sleep, unique to each individual organism, is dictated by the nodes that make enclosures around a region.

When something deals a blow to what in CC is known as the assemblage point, it disrupts the organic circuitry . So, for example, you may gain more energy and less need of sleep (or the opposite) from recapitulating memories.

I think the ontological electricity of Twin Peaks may be a good example. So power structures accretions? This makes good sense, as you get it back if you take them apart. Back to Twin Peaks insofar as the pylon borders are intense electrical-power edges, fences which require a lot of power to go through but by this virtue are reservoirs of power themselves.

I think you basically, with some tweaks, explain the concept of karma in a rational way. Let me try to say what I think power is in that specific sense.