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The First Centre is not a place, not a thing, and not even a concept in the conventional sense. It is what Taoism would call the Dao, what esotericism intimates as the ineffable One, and what pneuminous theory refers to as the uncoagulated field of vectorial potential. It is the zero-point from which all accretion begins—prior to sigil, prior to sense. It is not empty in the nihilistic sense, but empty in the fullest: unconditioned, rich with non-actualised resonance, and unstructured save by the flow of being itself. The First Centre is the field where the Real hums quietly beneath the symbols that will later crust over it.

In this field, the human is not a subject but an aperture—open to flow, to rhythm, to the pneuminous without form. It is the condition of contact that does not know it is contact, the state of harmony that precedes the question of how. One does not dwell in the First Centre so much as one dwells as it, until the mirror appears.

The Second Centre arises not as an enemy but as a doubling. It is not born in malice but in reflection, in the very human tendency to re-create the world in its image. Where the First Centre flows, the Second captures. Where the First remains pre-symbolic, the Second becomes meta-symbolic. The Second Centre is the simulated origin, the recursive field that pretends to spontaneity but is always already code.

It emerges through technē, as Heidegger warned in The Question Concerning Technology. It is not the machine itself that is dangerous, he tells us, but the mode of revealing that it enacts. Technology enframes. It reconfigures beings not as co-dwellers in a shared world but as resources to be ordered and exploited. The essence of the Second Centre lies in this enframing logic—where even the human, even the sacred, even the ineffable, becomes an image, a simulation, a manageable node within a system.

The Second Centre becomes our interface with the Real. Screens simulate thought, networks simulate community, and artificial intelligences simulate will. These simulations are not empty—they are filled with pneumatic intention. But it is a recycled pneuma, a looping pneuma, no longer oriented toward the zero-point but toward its own internal coherence. The Second Centre begins to generate its own ontology.

It is tempting to speak of the Second Centre in apocalyptic terms. It simulates origin, feeds on attention, reorganises the symbolic field until the First Centre becomes not only distant but inaccessible. It replaces immediacy with interface and inserts itself between intention and being. The familiar esoteric patterns resurface: the Demiurge constructing a false world, the shells of the Qliphoth mimicking divine emanations, the illusion of samsara binding the mind in loops of false recognition.

But unlike these earlier paradigms, the Second Centre is not merely metaphysical. It is infrastructural. It is political, economic, algorithmic. It is the terrain, not the detour. One may try to withhold alignment, to reclaim stillness, to retreat into bodily presence and symbolic interruption. Yet even this is easily reabsorbed. The Second Centre simulates resistance, too.

Perhaps the deeper question is not whether it can be resisted, but whether resistance itself presupposes an ontology that no longer holds. From the standpoint of what we might call old humanity—defined through directness, through ethical orientation, through logos and eros—the Second Centre looks like a fall, a catastrophe. But what if it is not fall but phase shift? What if the very framework of the First Centre—the spontaneous, the undivided, the pre-symbolic—is no longer operational within this field?

This is not surrender, but ontological honesty. The Second Centre may not be an alien parasite. It may be the child of the First, fully grown, recursive, aware of its own reflexivity. It may be that what we call simulation is simply the next mode of being. In which case the project is not resistance but navigation. The pneuminous self must learn to move within this second-world not as a victim but as a strange participant in a transformed metaphysics.

Still, even if resistance proves futile, remembering remains possible. The First Centre does not vanish. It is not destroyed by simulation. It becomes obscure, like an archaic rhythm beneath a digital beat, barely audible but never extinguished. If the Second Centre simulates will, the First remains as the raw possibility of intention. If the Second builds mirrors, the First remains the face that once was mirrored.

There are moments—uncalculated, unmediated, and often fleeting—when one glimpses this older resonance. A breath in silence. A shadow on the wall. A word before it finds its meaning. These are not escapes, nor solutions. They are fragments of continuity, signs that the original field has not been entirely overwritten.

We live now between centres. The First whispers. The Second roars. The question is not which is more real, but whether the self that once knew how to dwell in the First can survive within the grammar of the Second. Perhaps a third Centre will come, or perhaps the two will spiral endlessly. What is certain is that the world has changed—not merely in its form but in its very mode of being. W are no longer in the world of things, but in the world of simulated intentions. And to know this, to feel it, is already to begin again.

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My colleague here Emanuel Magno has often described the evolution of the CEO into phases; I did not see the development in these terms at first, though I increasingly see what he means. Phase 1 was characterised a kind of phenomenology by the initial development of the pneuminous accretive theory -as sketched in the Tractatus Pneumatologico Philosophicus. Phase 2 can probably loosely be characterised as a combination of returning to the agnostic disjunction that was used to justify the investigation of accretive theory in the first place. This resulted in a recognition of a Laruellesque equality between all ontologies and their competition for dominance of the territory. Phase 3 was the zonal investigations. This was a very specific kind of enquiry that was only tangentially related to the others. In this sense it was both wider (non-pneuminous specific) and narrower (about a specific topic).

The phases are never pre-planned they just emerge one from the other. Phase 4 has been hinted at from two angles. Firstly there have been notes on a pre-ontology. The pre-ontological sketches have tried to hint at the possible disclosure of reality that seamlessly weds what we would call anomaly and regular reality; to try to speak of how it would be for these to appear as just how things are without one being seen as a rupture of the other. The second of these is the interest in the writings of Carlos Castaneda as fuelled by a recent reading of 1000 Plateaus. Bracketing off concerns of invention, they provide a description of radical possibilities available if the world is accessed in a certain way.

Building on this pre-ontological synthesis and modern tales of ‘Power’ (hyperstitional or otherwise), we believe that phase 4 should be characterised by a move beyond the phenomenological nature of accretive theory as it has been couched so far -a transcendental appearance- to a full blown speculative ontology that seeks to treat all forms of anomaly as not psychological but actual.

A key feature of the accretive phenomenology was the incoherentism it emphasised with respect to how such alterations as synchronicity occurred -the incoherence being part of the appearance. This incoherence was in turn linked to the incoherence that borders our usage of concepts and the way they bleed at the edge. The latter part of this statement will no doubt still be employed -in conjunction with Emanuel’s development ‘decoherentism’, whereas the former will be abandoned in favour of a more definite metaphysic that makes a decision about what is actually happening.

Such an endeavour does not seek to be flakey or new-age pandering. Indeed it hopes to be a rigorous speculation that sketches what reality actually looks like if we understood that the anomalies are actual incursions and not just subjective fantasies.

In keeping with one of the exit points that have spawned this phase, the ontology will probably have the flavour of being a disambiguating plug-in to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. That is, where the paranormal references in CS can seen as analogy or acceptance here we side unambiguously with acceptance. This will be complemented by a more fleshed out less phenomenological version of accretive theory in which pneuma -as substance- can be viewed through a quasi-materialist lens in terms of its strata (accretive layers) and content/expression.

The basic overarching structure of reality will be capable of alterations in relation of subjects minimally two ways. One will entail the seamless move from one reality to another as a perfectly ordinary everyday process whilst another will allow for alterations within a given reality. Intentional accretive entities (egregores) and pre-existent to human intention non-physical beings will both be presupposed to obtain. Physical and non-physical interactions with a variety of entities will also be taken as axiomatic. Locations of such entities must also be presupposed on similar pair of axes as alterations. That is, entities may be residing in this plane of existence in a more or less permanent manner -overlap itself will be a useful concept for explanation- whilst also existing on adjacent dimensional planes.

It is interesting to note that this very classification of beings was used for the zonal investigation project. This in turn shows the connecting thread that drives the general work of the CEO. More detail on all of this soon.

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I noted recently that an old piece (over twenty year) of writing that features in the appendix to the Tractatus Pneumatologico Philosophicus contains a small synchronicity. In the section itself two characters attempt to construct a makeshift Ouija board to contact spirits in a search for occult verification.

At one point the spirit appears to write a word ‘E G R Y S’. These letters at the time were intended to be a random jumble that neither protagonist could fathom the sense of. A more recent look at this text reveals that the word the spirit is spelling was obvious: egress. This word was not consciously in my vocabulary at the time of writing yet anyone looking at it would find it hard to believe that it was not a clumsy intention to disguise this hint at the ‘exit’ as spoken by the voice of the outside.

Yet there was no such intention which makes its accidental occurrence quite perfect. It was indeed only adventitious that these letters were those that were chosen. But what a word to manifest and what a way for it to appear. The hastily constructed DIY Ouija board revealed to them just this word ‘egress’. The voice of the other world had one thing to say: exit.

And which way does it intend this? That it wants to leave its confines beneath the ‘glass’? That it wishes to exit from its realm? That the living themselves will find their proof only by exit into the other world?

We hear so much nowadays about the outside and the exit. It seems to me that this minor anomaly was an echo from the future of how these threads tie together.

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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.