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Recent considerations have moved my theorising away from outright human contingent paranormality –conceptuality as active substance– to a possibility that includes human accretive forces as only one element in the sea of what we call anomalous phenomena. Currently being played with is a ‘reticular ontology’, that is, a conception of everything as and endless series of lines or fibres. This is appropriated from reported occult conceptions of reality in this wise (e.g. the web of wyrd, Castaneda) in conjunction with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a line of flight.

Perception of the reticulum is supposed to be the closest one can have to seeing existence as it is in itself (note we do not say this is the case, we merely engage with the concept). It is also sometimes called ‘seeing energy’.

Now a feature of the reticulum is that once perceived, the separation of the perceiving being from the externality is considerably challenged. The lines can be clearly seen to extend straight from the being into the ‘outside’. There is a kind of boundary in so far as the being of awareness is a kind of node, yet the connectivity to the whole is immediately present. Furthermore the lines cannot be considered purely to exist in the regular spatial coordinates available to us; the lines bypass temporality as we know it and dimensionality.

A reticular ontology is essentially panpsychic insofar as all the lines are formed of awareness in a sense. Access to the reticulum is access to greater awareness -all psychic type events can be considered momentary reticular access. The reticulum as a whole is entirely self-aware. This is a postulate.

The formation of nodes (beings like ourselves) has an interesting consequence from this perspective. The more nodes develop there own internal awareness the more they believe they are capable of grasping what is going on. Unfortunately for the nodes, the more the awareness becomes centralised in the node, the less it actually accesses the reticulum. This then is the formula of the inverse increase in awareness in relation to the development of the node:

The greater awareness in the node, the less awareness of connectivity to the reticulum.

This means almost the opposite of Hegel’s PoS is true. The development of conscious is a retrograde step, worse still is self-consciousness, increasing narrowment of reticular awareness continues to occur until the crowning glory of this occurs -the state.

This tragedy also seems to entail a strong kind of unpleasant Kantianism. The more developed we become in investigating things with our own developed tools (maths, science) the less access we actually will have to the thing in itself. Of course Kant bars access to the thing in itself anyway, however the reticular as possible perception not only places the thing in itself partially within reach, it also means human rational attempts to fathom it necessarily get further from it. Consequentially all ‘lower species’ as we think of them have an increased reticular access, with this increasing further as one ends up in the inorganic.

Please don’t misunderstand. This is not an anti-scientific stance. Even if the node/reticular concept is accurate we generally do not live perceiving the reticulum and science has been of tremendous value to us. This occurrence of delving further and further away from perceptual access to something like the in-itself cannot necessarily be seen as worse than reticular access. Our investigations in this relatively solid seeming reality function well so the withdrawal from the reticular possibility can also be seen as highly epistemically satisfying.

This leads us to a second point about such an ontology. When we say that perceiving the reticulum is the actual connection to the ‘outside’, we consider it as a totally time/space transcendent perspective in which anything can be known (though equally there must be caution here, accounts like Monroe’s would suggest that even reticular access has many layers to it). It is minimally a totally superior epistemic state to regular human capacity. So it is easy to consider regular human perception as subtractive in its relation to reality. Even without the reticulum and simply with regard to our scientific understanding there is much we cannot see/hear/detect etc. We subtract from reality and our perception of the world is what we get.

Two points complicate this picture. The reticular ontology is totally compatible with human formed conceptual accretions which we literally layer over the regions of the outside. In the reticulum these are perceivable as emanating lines to nodes (accretions are different kinds of nodes) whereas from regular perception we often confuse concept and object.

This means we not only subtract, but that we add. We add pneuma to the externality and it stays there in the reticulum. However this actual state of confusion of regular perception -in which the connecting lines are not visible is also different from reticular perception, which for all its superior access is subtractive of the human state of perception. So our reality is additive and subtractive

Secondly then, this is why we couch reticular access as only the closest thing to seeing things as they are, for whilst it does show the accretions stuck to the vectors, it does not and cannot show the actual confusion of the nodally perceived reality state itself.

That is, even reticular access itself is subtractive.

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An excerpt from Memory Alchemycal

By: Sean Duffield


“Anabeila” She heard it ring in her ears. It wasn’t angry or even loud, but Notum Raysolas voice had a coercive effect. Anabeila could sense the set pegs of her mechanical music box heart being adjusted and arranged so that her cadence would again match the other children’s in the class. Her meditations would find accord with the other children’s. Her eyes would close and the conservatory’s natural fabrics, flush with microbes basking in the greenhouse sunlight would melt away into the fascinations of the spirit realm. 

“Anabeila…” the voice was in her ear. It tumbled waves of green grass liturgy around the soft cartilage of her herbaceous scapha, passing the juvenile concha and entering her ear canal still wet with birth; they would say, even if several years ago. 

The lush voice of a natural Notum scrubbed the inner workings of her mind and washed the leaves green. She removed fig seeds from the crooks of her branches. Stripped the knots from the bark, tilled the soil round’ hungry roots and left a canopy of light above the naked sensations of her ego’s tree.

“Anabeila.” The forest of synchronicity was dusted in summer daylight dimensions that refracted equally through the missing corners of every tree tops green spectrum. “Anabeila.” 

“Yes Notum Raysolas.”

She was tall and lean in front of Anabeila now. Notum’s pupils were constellations that read for signs. Her iris, the planets of Cratum and all its intelligent design. Her face, the universe in singular sum. Her hand reaching out, touched Anabeila’s heart, attempting to quell the distractions she so often, naturally, succumbed.

“Anabeila you must focus with the class.”

“I am focused, Notum.”

“You should be working in your forest. Laying ash from memory and sowing the seeds of your apple trees.”

“Yes, Notum Raysolas.”

“I know the conservatory insects are distracting to you but… 

The tell tale legs of a meelywag began kneading the soft innards of Anabeila’s clavicle skin. She opened her eyes and looked over. The small creature’s great blue pupils shored up and made safe the deep well of its ocular beauty. Anabeila threatened to lower herself to the bottom and collect the nectar from the meelywag’s well. It almost smiled, then cocked its quadruple mandibles, turned a sectionalised body of metallic feathers and flushed its wings out right. Jumped from the cliff-side of Anabeilas focus and floated into the conservatory’s vast open skies, heading for the windows that it truly could not be imprisoned by.

Anabeila again found herself sunk into the art that was the conservatory’s delightful reprise. A place not unlike the one she crafted in her mind. In place of deciduous trees however, were what was referred to as ‘chitin trees’. Tall woody structures with Amber tinted transparent leaves that stretched out like man-made wings on a single network of black nutrient thickening lung bronchioles. They filtered light through to the fauna beneath them, but stole all the blue from the spectrum and left the forest floor in a dark orange sheen. 

“Anabeila!”

Again focus was stolen and replaced with placated desire.

“Yes, Notum. Sorry.”

“Anabeila, you have much work to do here. An enlightened cannot just be strong of body and soul. She must be strong of mind.” 

“I work on my forest Notum. All the time.”

Skepticism washed the painted canvas of stars from Notum Raysolas’ face. A master’s emotions were usually only shown here. For the sake of communicating without language. To be what they meant and Notum always meant what she was.

“Anabeila.” She said with remorse pooling in pores and concern washing the skin of lions away. 

Notum placed her hands on Anabeila’s shoulders. Twisted her sternum, gentle suggestions of heart, and positioned her to look in the opposing direction. Away from Notum. Peering into the true shadow of Anabeila’s mind. 

Away from the tree under which they stood, passed the dividing lines of desire and intention. The river laid. Fast and grey. Full of serpents and yellow eyes and jaded riddles or devious games. It struck a path of violence between the island on which Anabeila and the Notum were standing and the true face of the forest of ash in which Anabeila should have been working was layered in the banks beyond its other side. 

The truth of her forest was obvious. Passed the rage of the river was a towering horizon of red waves and putrid fruits, acorns and den mother cries. It was a wooded anomaly of oak trees tied under strangler fig piano lines, whose great flowers stretched tendril roots down through bark and into sulphur rich earth full of rabbit pelts and skinned skink spines. They pulled nutrient from every crevice and fed every line until swollen with molestation crimes. The vitamins and carbon rose beyond the suffocating tree limbs, powering the huge soot laden fig tree flowers that hung in the sky, imperious ravens, eyes like owls. Mice in the field. Anabeila and the Notum prey to the rotating stigmas of thousands of predatorial blossom sties.

“This is what we must conquer, Anabeila. Not small islands of pleasure, but huge territories of fear.”

Anabeila looked at herself. Somewhere inside the second self, right now. She could feel the island beneath them quiver. It was shaking. Fear was all powerful. It was encompassing.

“Child, I am here. Do not be afraid.”

But it began as Anabeila looked into the maw of a fig flower where wasp stings putrefy. She felt them without looking, and she had looked on them with true eyes.

The flowers shook. Their scried stems pulsed. Their ovaries opened, anthers pulled apart. The angular focus of petals stretched back to the forest and the forward facing leaned directly into Anabeila’s sights. The receptacle appeared, a mouth in its bloom. A set of sawed teeth, mucous lined and stained with rotting rabbit feet, smiled. They all smiled. They all turned their smiles to the two on the island on the other side of a river shrinking. Violent, but shrinking. The forest getting closer. The wind picking up powerful pace.

“Anabeila! You must overpower it. Stand above it. It is YOU. Do not let it empower that which you’ve hidden, it must be brought to light! Not embiggened!”

It made nonsense of her senses. Anabeila began to slip further. Her eyes spiraling into the shoreline of demons. Her heart disappearing. The monster within freeing itself and using her thin scarred arms as levers. 

The sky turned a crude dark oil spill dripping hydrocarbons and tannins from the roof of an acidic lake. Upside down into the ephemeral timescape of the halfway empyrean nested with bodies of Abbadon above the forest of smiling snakes. The sour rain from the locust filled sky drenched the ground with sulphur and fed the soil with wine.

“Anabeila!” Her voice was growing softer. Leaving her ears. “Ana! Truth is the ego of the beast… Conquer it a—” her voice disappeared into the din of demons.

The storm turned its soil to a churning of tentacles like cardboard waves righting stage left, held in the hands of imps and spectres. The ground splashed amongst itself, spears and sceptres. Tarot card pulp turned the soil fuel line rider and all the tendril roots grew seven times larger. 

The flowers rose even higher, the trees beneath them shrinking into old towers overpowered by time and vines and raising volume waters. The bloom smiles grew wider, teeth larger, throats emptier, stronger, muscles inducing sky semen down harder. Great casts of shadows, sails billowing with dark jolly roger. Monster minds, and blowing bombs. 

“Anabeila!” Her voice was quiet and it was scared. It was very far away… evanescent.

The forest continued and grew into a giant, its legs rising from the backs of turtles lodged in hands of logs of reptile riots. The beast rose from the deep, mouth opened, behemoth ready to reap. Its hands now pointed towards the stars, it grasps the great WYRM! The cycle of God! And it pulls! It pulls God’s mouth down onto —

Shock. All white.

Notum’s hands were a description of pale and hot. She had clapped them together once and entirety disappeared from thought. The forest shrank and dissolved. The island washed out beneath her, and Anabeila was drowning for a moment. Coughed of raging waters and Notums palms.

She opened her eyes, still coughing. In the conservatory. The entire classroom of silent unwatching children were all focused on the back, where Notum Raysolas stood, holding Anabeila in her arms. She turned them both away from innocent but curious eyes and placed her chin into Anabeila’s shoulder, joining physical self to physical mind. “Don’t fret child.” Spoke Notum while tears welled in their eyes. “Egos are the beast of the mind. Terrors to be tamed and brought in line. We will conquer them. All in good time.”

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Night considered as a power in itself has structural similarities to one of the forms of zones listed in these writings. The zone referred to is the spatial-temporal zone:

“Spatio temporal zonal manifestation appears only at a specific place and time. The entrance
to the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks was exactly such a phenomena. Magick is of course littered
by instructions to do certain things at not only certain times but also at certain places. In this
notion lies the spatio-temporal zone.”

What we mean then is that night functions as a temporal zone -where zone means region more prone to anomalous interference from trajectories not usually experienced (alien, crypto-zoological, ghosts, non-human spirits etc).

Night’s ability to act in this zonal capacity is interesting insofar as it may suggest either something in common or something different to other kinds of temporal zone e.g. astronomical/astrological particulars.

The standard explanation for the zonality of night concerns its ability to restrict human perception. Human accretive reality fields restrain the chaotic outside in a literal fashion. Light is an intricate part of this system. Perpetual feedback systems of solid realities as accretions fed back onto the vectoral (hosting) outside help to maintain the appearance of a near perfectly solid reality. Transcendental repression of small anomalies easily covers over tiny cracks.

Darkness alters this. As light withdraws, even though conceptual and other senses continue to work with the outside to maintain physicality at near similar levels to in daylight, there is necessarily an increase in the lack of stability. Fear of the dark can exacerbate this, both by increasing instability in the system and being attractive to entities that normally are outside of the reach of solid physicality. The instability generated by various anxieties and actual ontological looseness results in an increase in regular reality being breached by the anomalous.

These two processes themselves are also exacerbated by the night-time accretion itself. That is, the historical interconnected threads of the night in the pneuma (conceptual substance) make a vast accretive structure that itself autonomously alters the vector (the time region that the ‘night’ as accretion inhabits). No matter how much rationality may be imposed upon the vector in the modern day, this solidifying pneuma will only be partially successful in altering the mythic powers of the night as accretion.

In zonetology zones have been attributed with generating a kind of vacuum by the withdrawal human conceptual structures (dereliction). This conceptual vacuum has been assumed to be attractive to forces that can create anomaly -the speculative causal ‘reason’. Zones share with the night the accretive overlay effect which can multiply the anomalous potential of a zone.

In this sense though the zone-as-night has more similarity with the spatial zone than with some spatial-temporal zones. Our inevitable experience with this phenomenon on a daily basis bears some resemblance to a spatial zone that we might walk past every day. Twilight also fits this kind of description though twilight itself has a different accretive structure.

However spatial-temporal zones as they are otherwise defined can be shown to be different. Spatial-Temporal zones that are defined by particular configurations (astronomical/astrological) do not have the easy repeating nature of either the night or twilight. If it is augured that to be on a particular hill on a particular day may have some particular other worldly property, (if we accept this) we may infer two possibilities for its truth. i) is that a particular set of actual forces are in play in what we experience as ‘that time and place’ that will yield some kind of anomalous effect. ii) is that, having been given the coordinates for the ‘event’ we accretively project anomalousness onto this vector region and as such we facilitate its occurrence. We might note that if i) is true (so long as we know about the event then so is ii) (the accretion will necessarily be formed) whereas ii) might be true and i) was not.

Of course other forces might be in play on particular nights, however this is besides the point in relation to our zonal delineation. The zonal (anomalous) power of night has two faces, one human accreted ‘the night accretion’ and the other quasi intrinsic to our relation to it -the withdrawal of human visual perception. The power of the temporal zone however potentially comes from a particular intersection of hidden forces that create the zone or solely the application of the accretion to the spatial/temporal vector.

It is the former of these two points that is the crucial distinction between such zonal conceptions. Both faces of the night are contingent on different relations a particular species (humans) has with the night, one accretive and the other a feature of how its perceptual system functions. Clearly these demarcations aren’t absolute and it is hard at some level to strongly separate the withdrawal of light and its hiding of the world from the cultural-mythic accretion of ‘night’. However even treating them as two poles still renders the structure of night as differing from the spatial-temporal zone and its potential for being brought about by either simply accretive powers or actual hidden forces, utilised by humans but potentially simply occurring whether they are aware or not -and accretive powers..

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The CEO is proud to host this fascinating paper by Mina Baek on Accelerationism, Reza Negarestani’s ‘Intelligence and Spirit’ and Blaccelerationism.

Introduction

“Accelerationism comes from the Marxist idea that communism comes after capitalism, and therefore, to get to communism, we have to accelerate the logics of capitalism. Rather than resisting corporate exploitation with robust unions, maybe we should implicate ourselves in corporate takeover of the world. Rather than feeling guilty about being trashy consumers, maybe we should get out there and enjoy commodity fetishism. Accelerationism is a seductive idea. It says: it’s okay to lay down the hermeneutics of suspicion, the nagging doubt that capitalism is out to get ya, to screw you over. It’s all part of the plan. Just hang on tight, accelerate the process, and we’ll be in communist utopia in no time. Never mind the question whether Marx was right; never mind the debate that well, Marx didn’t quite mean that communism will just naturally happen to us inevitably; never minding those, nevertheless immediately one might worry: capitalism is racist. If we ought accelerate the logics of capitalism, doesn’t this entail that we ought accelerate racism? But surely one would have to be an evil racist to believe that.”

Read the paper here.

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With thanks to Emanuel Magno for the reticular word and ongoing discussions on this topic.

A reticulum is a network of fine lines. Reticular ontology describes reality in terms of these lines. The reticulum can be said to account for all relations between all phenomena both in reified object (molar) modes and relational-becoming (molecular) modes.

Reticular ontology unambiguously accepts the potential reality of all phenomena generally labelled paranormal/anomalous/spiritual. This does not mean there are not seemingly ‘strange’ phenomena explainable within an already comprehended band of reality, however it does mean that all potential realms that might account for extreme anomaly are accepted as existent.

As such common human perception only perceives the reticulum through a small lens -though is of course formed also by incredibly restricted access to the reticulum at large. The narrow region of the reticulum enables stable structures but also facilitates apparently strange alterations by their connections. The strangeness of the alterations is only only perceived as ‘strange’ by our inability to perceive the reticular flow in all its complexity.

The previously much discussed pneuma and its accretions are also reflected in the actions of the reticuli. Pneuma was put forward as a substantialised concept substance capable (under certain circumstances) of making alterations to the more generally recalcitrant ‘umbra’ that hides beneath. Pneuma now becomes an aspect of the reticulum that occurs in structures more like knots than accretions.

The fibres of the reticulum connect all things together and they are all things together -accepting that individuation is not necessarily part of the reticulum itself. Paranormality and associated phenomena are simply the actions of lines that connect across in ways we cannot perceive as cogent. To return to synchronicity, when we wonder what the connection between the dream and the event is, we can now understand that reticular lines quite literally connect the two.

Humans as reticular bundles move amongst the network (reticulum). However one must not conceive of the reticulum of consisting of simply one reality of this kind, it must be conceived as multiverse but not in a passive sense. Reticular engagement of what may seem to be relatively banal kinds can easily result in a shift to an alternate reality directly connected by a particular reticular flow. This kind of shift can be likened to a convergent tectonic plate shift, in which the plate appears to be heading one direction but then travels downwards. Factors previously understood as pneuminous accretions (conceptual entities) may be responsible for such shifts though such shifts may simply be flows in the reticulum of a movement more akin to the movement of the wind (when considered as an impersonal force).

As such existence is constantly formed of reticular band convergent slides and incursions from other differing angled flows that may form knots within a given band. A fluid experience from stability to ambiguous half-paranormal experiences (luck) through to attention grabbing anomaly is the result of the reticular interactions.