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Adam Curtis is well known for espousing the notion that modern society (especially the West) has no notion of where it is heading, or even of how it could be heading somewhere or even what it would mean for it to head anywhere. Western societies cannot imagine anything other than more of the same — more capitalism, maybe slightly stranger capitalism, with AI augmentations, but still weirdly the same. As Nietzsche understood, this doesn’t actually satisfy the the spiritual(a new word is probably needed but it will have to do) nature of the human. Christianity — brutal as it was — offered structure and purpose. Without that scaffolding, we are adrift. Individually, we seem to bear the existence of staring into the void and keep going. Collectively, it tears us apart.

Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism: the pervasive sense that “there is no alternative.” Capitalism presents itself not as one system among others, but as the only imaginable frame. We may dislike aspects of it, even hate it, but we can’t picture a coherent beyond. The future, if we dare to imagine it at all, looks like a more intensified version of the present — just stranger, faster, weirder. Jean Baudrillard gestured in a similar direction: culture untethered from any ground, spinning in loops of simulation, losing orientation.

The problem, though, is even worse. Pneuminous theory, or chaos magick (they are similar projects), doesn’t rescue us from this malaise. It extends the nihilism. It shows that not only rational structures, but even magickal, symbolic, and esoteric frameworks are contingent accretions — pneuma infecting vectors, conscious doubles arising by intention. The abyss doesn’t shrink when one embraces occultism; it expands. There is no final ground, only shifting layers of contingency.

Which leaves us with a somewhat grim recognition: powerful people who manufacture myths and control structures are, in a sense, right to do so. Without myth, societies collapse into conspiracy, nostalgia, or despair. The real question is: can there be an ethical control myth — one that binds without domination, one that acknowledges the possibility of paranormaityl without relegating it to fringe counterculture or totalising it into religion?

Maybe this is where a new myth must be conceived — the Myth of Ur. Ur not as an ancient city, but as a beginning, a foundation that knows itself as contingent. It would say: we are something like multidimensional pneuminous beings, layered, accreted, entangled in vectors of meaning and possibility. We cannot (at least in regular consciousness, know if paranormality actually obtains, but we cannot deny the possibility either. We live inside the disjunction, thus rather than being opposing agents we should dwellers on the threshold so to speak.

Furthermore, the possibility of the actuality is what we should bet on. Even in recognising the agnostic disjunction, we should act as if the fluid-paranormality were real, as it is this side that makes reality truly interconnected hand invokes our responsibility. Like Pascal’s wager: live as if God exists, because it is the safer bet. Our wager is ontological: live as if we are pneuminous beings. Not because it is proven, but because this orientation does the least violence to the complexity of our condition.

These kinds of rules could be examples that might be part of such an ethical ontology:

  • Live as if the world is layered and multidimensional in the most literal sense.
  • Direct power toward preserving openness, not closing it down.
  • Treat technology and capital as the contingent manifestations of the second centre they are: new accretions, not ultimate horizons or grounds.
  • Play seriously with meaning: enact, invent, but never deny fragility.
  • Care for others as beings whose pneuma you inevitably entangle.

This horizon entails the understanding of the accretions as process in a more active sense. This is the wager, the new Myth of Ur: a transparent myth that everyone knows is made (contingently accreted), but which we agree to live inside because it is better than the void. Not salvation, not certainty, but a collective as if — a horizon we can orient toward, even knowing it may be provisional. It doesn’t solve things in the way we might think of a solution, because thinking in that way cannot give an answer. However the acceptance of the radical nature of reality coupled with a deeper understanding of its impermanence may be part of our ability to overcome the place we have become stuck.

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So far we have broadly delineated several void responses and void cocoons. The void responses are: philosophy, sorcery/chaos magick, compassion-love (Buddhism as paradigm example), something akin to hedonism and aestheticism. A void cocoon is any system that generates guidance for life, general teleology and cosmology from a putatively trustworthy supra-human source.

Questions remain as to how humans withstand the force of the void given that not all human-vectors are thoroughly taken over by any of the above installations or protective systems. Certainly combinations of these kinds of defences are enlisted to supply protection, however such patchwork approaches entail that there are gaps. These gaps necessitate another kind of response to the void. This response is the literal covering over of the issue with only a second nothing to put in its place. As such this is the negation of the nothing by an active lethic activity. There is something ironic in this given that the void is a kind of discovery of the cognitive mind. A variety language game escapes the inappropriateness of which can never confirmed or denied (why are we here? what should we do? what can we know?).

The negating of the nothing, here called a transcendental repression takes place to protect the individual from its overpowering effects and maintains a kind of ‘everyday reality’ bearable to most persons. We believe the transcendental repression has an equal number of faces to the impossible problems of philosophy.

Solipsism as a phantasy is a sceptical possibility that many people discover. This possibility is repressed in favour of the appearance of coherent others, yet the possibility remains. Solipsism is one way in which the nothing appears. It entails that there is literally nothing other than one self. Solipsism itself, owing to its extreme incoherence is not too hard to repress.

However related to solipsism is the Kantian issue. This entails that reality in human awareness (and the ability to process it), whilst coherent, is not necessarily identical to reality outside of human awareness (and the ability to process it). This problem in turn is deeply related to the manifestation of any occult phenomenon. This is the case as the non-identity of reality in and outside of human awareness facilitates the possibility of magickal alterations (synchronicity). This possibility opens the space for the radical outside which might contain all manner of potentially strange implications for the in-awareness.

More importantly then than the repression of solipsism is the repression of the sphere of immanent awareness as a potential source of actual certainty -insofar as reality is made more manageable in this immanent arena. The repression of the appearance of the non-identity of in-awareness and outside-awareness is crucial for the well-being of the human, as non-identity thesis presents an annihilation of the regular world -a nothingness. Whether considered as subtractive or additive, the effect of the non-identity is the same -a kind of annihilation.

This kind of thinking demonstrates adequately the connection of darkness and the occult entities. Darkness here is literally the paradoxical perception of the limit of awareness, as such it is literally ontologically the nothing. As source of various entities the darkness is not darkness because they come out at nice but rather because the non-identity thesis comes into force in this region of the space (a dark room) or time (night).

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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).