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For those of you who don’t know Peter Kingsley it seems his message is fairly straightforward. Humankind has become cut adrift from its sacred source with devastating psychic isolation, nihilism, madness and general doom as its consequence.

Fleshed out a bit more it’s that the presocratic philosophers should never have been conceived as primitive proto-thinkers paving the way for Socrates et al. Rather they need to be reconceived as incredibly powerful shaman-priest type figures who received their wisdom from ecstatic type interactions with the other world.

This makes sense (though I can readily confess to my inability to judge his scholarship adequately), not least because it fits perfectly with the speculative work that I was previously doing with Emanuel Magno. In this we came to conceive of the allness as the reticulum of a-spatiotemporal light fibres. This was the nagual, the other world that Castaneda spoke of. It is the one boundless one of pure immanence.

Accepting the possibility of accessing the reticulum through practice grants the Laruellian one its correctness -radical immanence- yet also makes it not simply non-philosophically true but also practically so. The ontological war (philosophical decision) exists at the level of pneuminous accretions, where no philosophy can deliver any decisive win. All philosophers are simply agents for the ideas, striving for the cracks in the enemies theoretical stronghold.

Beyond the chatter of the accretions, down below the vector field is the reticulum, the umbratic. To accept this kind of mysticism is stop thinking of this as an epistemological limit for this is only true from an ordinary level of reality. In acceptance there is the understanding of the insane rhizomatic underpinning of all things: the folds are the synchronicities and the rest of the strange phenomena. Materiality conceived as a solid spatio-temporality is literally false. The reticulum is not a philosophical idea but an actuality only accessible through rigorous practice. The synchronicities etc are merely foothills.

Kingsley says that there was a time when those who are trained in accessing the reticulum were trusted to bring the word of the gods back to us and that we would revere it (oracles). His claim further is that founding ideas of healing and logic amongst others came from this place and then were covered over with the gloss of human creation.

This maybe so, there is so much to enjoy and agree with in the general account. However the problem arises about how a to re-establish the word of the other world and how to adjudge it. Even if it were desireable, it seems almost impossible to conceive how the reticulum readers could re-establish themselves as the determining agents of society. Furthermore how are we to trust this word nowadays? Of course the two points seem entwined. For those with access to the reticulum to be trusted with power we must have learned to respect the word of the Gods.

But the hindsight of chaos magick and my own pneuminous accretive theory brand of it do not particularly help to re-establish such trust. Such theories unashamedly reduce the Gods to vast accretions of pneuminous energy, produced by complex feedback systems between the archetypal seed and the worshippers. Their status as aggregates of primal drives, natural phenomena and cultural projections render them dubious sources of reliable wisdom.

The truths they might speak might indeed found a stable society, however the values they might speak could be so contrary to many we have come to hold as progress that we would (and should) reject them outright. Where does this leave us? Are we now true Prometheans cut adrift by our own desire for equality and reason? But Kingsley’s point is likely true, that the cutting of the sacred source is dangerous. Where does this leave us? Can we get beyond these ancient gatekeepers? Isn’t that what Christianity already tried to do and yet found itself equally Patriarchially etc accreted.

I wrote before about a design a god project. I am not certain of this but maybe a fit for purpose accreted deity (or deities) to serve as access to the reticulum is what we need. This though seems partially paradoxical without the greatest hubris. How can we bring our own God to be? Surely the reticulum must supply the God somehow. I know how poorly looked upon Heidegger is and yet I cannot help but hear his words here when he speaks of the God to come, the one who has yet to show his face.

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This curious poem/document was sent to the CEO and is certainly worth our publishing. It was created by one D Seth Horton. He explains its nature below (slightly paraphrased).

“Here are a series image-texts that are all centered on the U.S.-México border, which can be related to your recent interest in Carlos Castaneda given that his work was situated in the borderlands.

The text is sourced from various U.S. Customs and Border Patrol documents.  In terms of composition, I deleted most of the original material until I was left with the poem that had previously been hidden within the bureaucratese.  To be clear, I added no words, punctuation, or capital letters to the body of these poems, nor did I change the original word order in any way.  Instead, I simply erased what was in the way and then moved the words that remained into appropriate line breaks. 

Other than my drawing, the images all come from the National Archives.

In case readers are interested in comparing “my” texts against the original source material, I have included notes at the end of my submission with all the necessary details.”

Biography

 D. Seth Horton’s work has appeared in more than forty publications, including the Michigan Quarterly Review and Glimmer Train. Two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His latest book is a forthcoming collection of stories set throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands entitled, On a NASA Flight to Heaven (TCU Press, 2024). He currently teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Virginia. 

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It is well known now that that the paranormality of zones of dereliction functions by means of the so called vacuum effect. This eponymous vacuum is something of a misnomer though the point is well taken. A given vector region may be conceptually (pneuminously) imbued with the multi-story car-park accretion. The community continually reinforce this accretion by their pneuminous interactions with it. However when lack of finance and minor structural damage render the car-park closed, the accretion begins to crumble.

The rapid decay of pneuminous accretions creates a vacuum like effect. The previous perpetual reinforcement of these structures has suddenly stopped. They do persist but are immediately weakened and it is this fairly rapid collapse that attracts certain other powers to fill the gap. It is not properly understood why these forces are attracted to decaying pneuminous regions though the clue may be in exactly such a notion.

There is some speculation that the accretions themselves, as they decay, release their latent energy which in turn is attractive to various of the beings that inhabit the pure pneuminous realms. In this way it might analogous to how bacteria and fungi are attracted to decaying matter, or possibly like carrion feeders are attracted to dead creatures. The scale cannot be currently determined.

Whatever the attraction, research has revealed that sudden lack of attention to objects gives the same depleted pneuminous effect which attracts certain forces. Interestingly it also confirms that whilst the accretion initially decays rapidly, at least 50% of it is forms a deep structure which is extremely difficult to remove from the vector region to which it is attached. This remaining amount breaks down extremely slowly over time. Whether the beings that attracted come only for the rapid release or for the slower breakdown (or even if different types come for different breakdowns) is not understood.

The aforementioned paranormality of these regions then is generally understood to be a product of the beings that come to inhabit the absence left by the accretion decay/withdrawal. Human experienced interactions may be accidental or may be intentional attempts by the beings to feed on the pneuminous structure of the unfortunate human or to simply warn them off from interfering with their activity. Humans of course do not usually come into contact with such beings as much of their world is under constant pneuminous reinforcement which prevents such entities from manifesting (in any significant manner).

There may be other factors involved though. General energetics have long since held that places that have ‘good’ energy are often extremely harmonious in appearance. A beautiful woodland glade of dappled light and humming life is said to have good energy and the fact we find it so beautiful is a reflection of this general energetic state. Given the nature of pneuma, this must entail (for any creature that has some sense of beauty) a kind of positive feedback loop. For example, the system (glade) is extremely positive to the encountering organism, that is, it is in itself already positive in a sense. The aesthetic appreciation of the organism for the system then accretes these kinds of positive pneuminous structures onto the system (beauty etc.). This pneuminous accretion only serves to enhance the region to more beautiful/positive level. This effect may be only slight but we know it to be real and it might be more than slight.

Zones are not known for bringing about perceptions of beauty, often being considered ugly eyesores by many inhabitants of the town/city/region where the zone is. However the growing appreciation of zonal regions as having their own aesthetic qualities worthy of attention could, theoretically, undermine some of this negative attitude towards them. This attitude change, disrupts the insufficient dichotomy of good energy/bad energy. Stagnancy and dereliction have certainly been thought of as forces inimical to humans, however the re-perception of zones as being imbued with a certain wonder places a spanner in the works of a ‘place with bad energy’.

To be clear we illustrate here only a theoretical possibility, however it is still worth discussing. If the feedback mechanism between accretion and the underlying nature of the vector region is significant (i.e. if the beauty etc accretions are making the place more positive to any significant degree) then the perception of the zonal regions as interesting, awesome even beautiful themselves, will significantly alter their sometimes hostile nature.

This speculation then involves that the beings that are attracted to the zones are not simply there to feast upon the decaying pneuma, but are also there by virtue of the negative accretive qualities that are accreted to the regions. An alteration (admittedly one would need nearly everyone to adopt this attitude) in the accretions that form on zonal regions would then potentially significantly alter the energy of the place itself.

We are (culturally) extremely familiar with the positive energy of harmonious places and negative energy of unpleasant ones. Even, the beautiful place that houses poison is a comprehended trope. However the zonal energy transmuted through the positive gaze is not a common idea. Even currently interested people still are fascinated largely because of the negativity, because the places are creepy and strange; this make the re-perception only partial. The alchemical transformation of such a proper reperceiving might bring about a rarely encountered form of energy. Similarly the beings attracted to zones would be of a different order. Owing to the speculative nature of the enquiry, possible functions of such an energy are not yet even guessable, however research in zonetology is always progressing.

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There are only two modes of activity. One takes place within the strata of concepts/culture and the other other also partially does so but strains beyond it and possibly achieves this. Most activity in general takes place in the regular home of what I called above the ‘strata of concepts/culture’. I don’t mean anything esoteric by this, but I do mean something very broad. Whether a scientist, a writer, a carpenter, a gardener or a cleaner, your activities, your aims fall within this realm. Indeed just in your day-to-day existence, all of your quasi-conscious and conscious (though I am always wary of using this word since reading Gurdjieff) activities fall under this mode. The mode is purely directed within the accretions. It works with them. It may try to work out new, hitherto unidentified vector regions (science) or it may work with existing accretive structures, absorbing them, mildly mutating them as we do in our interactions.

Even many of those who believe they work closer to the edge, work purely within the accretive structures. Indeed many people interested in esoteric/occult matters only work within the accretive layers without attempting to escape them. Here probably is the only point of this writing. Nothing you engage in, in any occult quasi-activity (like numerology) escapes the accretive layers or does anything significant to alter your relation to them. You might obtain results. Results are a different kind of phenomenon. Results enable the practitioner to question the state of reality by means of the question ‘what ontology is compatible with my results not being reducible to a solid-world materialist/psychologist type explanation?’ Results are an invitation not a real result.

In this way results are openings, but they are in many ways only accidental openings. They may encourage more playing with systems. This may trigger more results either synchronisitic or intentional. It is real but it means nothing. All such activity is still within the accretive realm. The only activities that are otherwise are the practical attempts to move beyond it. These are the thought stopping, personality disabling, pattern breaking practices you read about in all the literature on this matter.

Phenomenology comes so close to some of these. Phenomenology unearths the vector field, the transcendental backdrop into which the accretions embed themselves, but then it returns to the accretive world to show how it is constituted. The second activity seeks the vector field unrelentingly. The vector field is the wellspring of sorcery. No one can say how long it goes down before disappearing into umbratic depths.

Poetry, art and music are interesting cases. Poetry rearranges the accretive field to present disclosures of a certain depth. This is a kind of result which might hook someone into seeking the vector field. Art in representational mode is simply the skillful display of the visual accretive field. However its other faces (more abstract forms) can facilitate something like an encouragement to perceive the vector field. Music, without words, can effect something similar, can give an insight into a heuristc pure[r] perception.

All of these experiences though, without motivation, are accidental results which are rapidly overtaken by the establishment of the accretive field.

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The Centre for Experimental Ontology is going to sleep, maybe only for a short while, maybe forever. This concludes phase 2 of its existence.

Below you can find a rough summary of what this phase dealt with, where the CEO is now and where it might potentially go in the future —Gurdjieff has been pointing to some interesting correlates/directions.

1) Pre-ontology: The notion of a pre-ontology was not explore sufficiently but remains an ongoing concern. The central idea is whether it is cogent to conceive of a way in which existence can occur without an ontology excluding certain modes as possible. The emphasis of the thought is on conceiving of magickal phenomena as totally naturalised on a contiuum with all other phenomena.

2) Pneuminous Accretions: The pneuminous accretions remain at the heart of the general system. Materialised conceptuality (or at least the grammatical cogency of it) enables magick and completes philosophy in all directions.

3) Vector Field: Equally central to the system is the vector field. Meant in the sense of a ‘carrier’, the ability of vectors to host the pneuminous accretions is the counterpart to the accretions that completes the magickal explanation (of philosophy). A vector that houses a concept and suits it is the ordinary usage of the same force that we call magick (we don’t call it magick but the same operation occurs). A vector hosting an accretion that it would not normally house will find influenced/altered on a magickal level (what we tend to mean when we say magick).

4) Different Occult Endgames: The Castaneda system highlights this already suspected possibility. The reality or metaphor of the assemblage point illustrates how there is no necessity to some kind of occult achievement (that could be considered final) over another. Even the notion of ‘freedom’ in CC’s system can be contrasted against other possibilities of immortality. It is the extension of the lack of divine teleology into a vastly increased notion of what exists (which includes the occult possibilities).

5) Memetics: The disbanded science of memetics is highly commensurate with the pneuminous accretive theory. The only addition required is external existence of the memes i.e. whilst created by human activity they do no necessarily need it to continue to exist.

6) Susan Blackmore’s work present’s a considerable challenge to many aspects of esotericism. What she does is highlight the extreme ontology needed for it to be ‘real’ and not purely psychological. Pneuminous accretive theory is a good fit for such an ontology however at least one additional caveat is needed. The notion in question is one of something like levels of reality or consciousness. This is something mentioned both in Castaneda and Gurdjieff. In Castaneda, Don Juan will say that ordinary people would literally not be able to see the anomalies, though they are perfectly real, likewise certain statements are unintelligible unless one has sufficient ‘power’ to understand them. Gurdjieff says likewise that unless one obtains a certain level of consciousness, certain things are not visible and certain teachings incomprehensible. This is not a matter of cognitive ability but something else. This something else is what such an ontology would require, likewise it would say that the whole psychological edifice that Blackmore works in, amazingly admiral though it is to desire to not be fooled, can only return negative results, explainable in terms of neuroscience. This does not mean she has not encountered many frauds, but also it means that there is a certain letting go necessary for the actual encounter.

7) Plato, Castaneda, Laruelle: The most productive discussion in the last phase of the CEO concerned a kind of synthesis of these figures that overcomes that manifestation problem. The manifestation problem is simply this: if all ontologies (manifestations) compete equally to inhabit us, how do we understand an ontology that can account for this without lapsing into one more model. The pre-ontological investigations are related to this. Castaneda claims an absolute mode of perception that sees things as they are. This is the perception of the world as ‘energy’, though this accretion (energy) itself contaminates this perception. The reduction of the allness of everything to an endless series of fibres of light was called the reticulum. Gurdjieff has a similar message though there is less mention of energetic perception, rather he talks of ‘objective perception’, to again mean a perception of things as they are.
This line of thinking reinforces that what we mean by saying occult practices gives the completion of philosophy. To learn to perceive the pneuminous accretions as they are, to perceive the deep layers of the vector field. This possibility (?) undercuts Laruelle by granting access to the one, yet agreeing that philosophy (manifestations) is hopelessly inadequate to make any progress. The one is accessible only through deep struggle. This in turn makes sense of Plato but not as empty epistemology. The struggle out of the cave is a real struggle that we all must undertake and that necessarily most of cannot achieve -I include myself in this number.
But again this all relates to the point about ‘different occult endgames’. What Castaneda and Gurdjieff talk about may well not be the same thing, furthermore there are many different stations in this realm. Gurdjieff talks about ‘right results’ but maybe there are other kinds of ‘results’.

8) The vector field does have a certain incoherence. It is the imagined perceptual residue devoid of concept (pneuminous accretion). Even if this is not cogent, the idea functions a) transcendentally as a necessary condition for the possibility of an object and b) as a heuristic by which we can understand the structure of things. This heuristic dimension is particularly relevant with regards to certain occult technologies. In Gurdjieff for instance, there is a technique related to self-remembering which involves dividing the psyche into a potential real ‘I’ and the personality (often named after the person). The named being is the accreted (neurotic self or selves) and the real ‘I’ is something that comes with the organism. It is this part that the esoteric practices seek to access. Does this division make great sense? Not particularly; the separation of the personality from a putative underlying ‘essence’ is a highly confusing notion analytically. However as an occult instruction, or guidance, it has power. Conceive of yourself in this way and it helps to disclose pointless, repetitive, petty parts of your behaviour. A deeper layer of the human vector, stripped close to the vector field itself.
This whole notion of how far down the vector field goes is a fascinating one that requires further thought.

9) Wittgenstein and Laruelle point to the same place. This is because ‘language’ itself is a use word. It cannot be the ‘real’ noun that designates something. It all emanates from what can reasonably grammatically be called the one, or the human. No statement escapes. Language only speaks as language when it has been accreted, without this it is the vector region that the concept language is applied to (consider discussion two organisms communicating and asking ‘are they using language?’). One cannot understand the world beyond the accretions from within them. The only possibility of a greater comprehension comes from the possibility of something like a different consciousness being possible. This possibility remains agnostic disjunctive, at least from the level of regular thought.

10) Regular thought exists in a band that cannot seriously conceive of the world other than as it appears: solid, continuous. Agnostic disjunction functions at this level of thought. It renders anomaly as a possibility that cannot be dismissed but cannot be established. The only way out of agnostic disjunction is by the possibility of something like Gurdjieff describes as ‘objective consciousness’. This of course brings in the problem of ‘levels of consciousness’ which again cannot be verified in any way other than through the circular achievement of a ‘higher’ or ‘altered level’.

11) Gurdjieff makes a particularly interesting statement concerning art. He divides it into objective and subjective. Subjective art is that art we create when we allow powers to flow through us. Whereas objective art is created by a consciousness that is in control of its various parts and actually deliberately creates the work. Such a work, he says, will not generate subjective impressions of interpretation but rather will impose its meaning upon us all.
The last century and indeed this one, has made much of the discovery that we are not in control of the cultural, conceptual powers (pneuminous accretions/memes) that flow through us. Art controls the artist, we are but a vessel. Our general likes/dislikes and determinations are simply a product of these cultural forces. The CEO has played with this language calling it agenthood and utilised the phrase ‘who do you work for?’ to describe how we work for such forces —philosophers work for ontologies, they are agents for them, this explains their stubbornness of defending positions that are no better than those of enemy agents.
The occult endeavour again highlights the possibility of escape from these forces. The possibility that the ‘being-possessed’ by these powers is a contingent condition that we can potentially escape from -though not without serious effort. The death of the author is true but the author may also exist in some circumstances.

12) The double in Castaneda is the second body in Gurdjieff. This is largely the aim of both systems. The transference of consciousness from the feeble disparate exterior to a unified and separable (from the physical body) interior. He makes a fascinating comment that the kingdom of heaven in Christianity is just the development of the second body. Only when the second body is developed is survival beyond death possible. Even this though is finite —equally fascinating as again it suggests, not an eternal beyond, but simply another negotiable realm.

13) The Moon in Gurdjieff devours our awareness, we only can stop this by the development of ‘objective consciousness’. This is very similar to the ‘Eagle’

14) All adornments (job,clothes, language, hair styles etc) are a semiotic system that displays ones alignment to various powers. Some are imposed, some are chosen. Liberation from these powers leaves a vacuum we must somehow fill with a curious control. If we simply remove them, more accretions will take their place. This aids flexibility but not control itself.

15) Magnetic centres are what we develop and activate when we trigger synchonicity. Our fascination with this at the wrong level easily burns the centre out. We can reactivate it, but our modern consciousness means making contact through the centre is almost impossible. We have no choice but to attempte solitary activity and experiment.

16) Gurdjieff suggests that the mystery schools were/are not complete in their questionings. He indicates they continued to conduct experiments on subjects concerning consciousness. Some products of these are fakirs that one may encounter performing incredible feats. He suggests such people are sometimes simply failed experiments of mystery schools. This suggests a very scientific attitude (that one would not get past an ethics committee) towards their relation to consciousness. Ouspensky mentions an anecdote in which a sheep was brought to full consciousness. When he asks ‘What did they do with it?’ Gurdjieff replies ‘They ate it.’

17) Prevous CEO terminology called the human vector the ‘regional processor’. The ‘neurotic’ or ‘self accretion’ plugged into this to make the NARP.

18) The Hyperqabalah remains and ongoing concern. It is the development of a diagrammatic system in which each path of the previous tree of life is transformed into a sephiroth (node) or the levelled up system. It is a partial product of accident. In the process of forming sigils for each regular tree of life path they were as scribed numbers 1-22 as single symbols. This meant that if this was a new based system, it was necessarily base 23, i.e. the equivalent of 10 could only be achieved after the 22 single sigils. The cultural accretive weight of 23 makes this seem highly appropriate. Much work has been done on this but the nature of the paths between the nodes still needs establishing.