Future historians of Western esotericism will likely see the time elapsed between the founding of the Theosophical Society on September 8th, 1875 and the upcoming "Timewave Zero" point of December 21, 2012 as a single 137-year span of mass initiation and flaky wierdness, a period of Western thought that may be regarded as a Renaissance, Enlightenment or Dark Age depending on what follows it. We are currently living through a climax point of that mass initiation and flaky weirdness. While magic has never totally gone away, in the preceding century it has slowly returned to high visibility within culture, in a wholly new form all gussied up for the Third Millennium - the revelation of the living universe and the divinity of all.
The climax that we are currently experiencing, as facilitated and presaged by the rise of global communications technology, is the transition from a culture informed by magic into a wholly magical culture, and it has been planned and orchestrated from the beginning. Generation Hex, as much as the term applies to the young magicians of the world, are the terminal initiates of this period, and those whose general task it will be to actualize the transition.
New magicians and new shamans are born every day nowadays. That so many new people are embracing this kind of high insanity may well be a hopeful sign that there's still a bit of sense left in the world after all.
Every culture has its hidden tradition, its dark place in the hills outside of town where you go in case you see through the Game of Civilization. Despite its outward gross materialism, this culture has traditionally had many. There are always little tears in and tunnels under the fence built up around "the way things really are" if you look closely enough, and it is an innately human drive to go exploring outside of those walls. Though few may accept the challenge, the call will come through in any way it can find.
In the 1990s, when many people were first socialized into and awakened to the magical world, that call seemed ubiquitous in popular culture to an extent that it hadn't been since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The occult and uniquely initiatory landscape of that time has now become largely clichéd - gray aliens, chaos magic, raves, Ecstasy, new media and "information wars."
The Internet itself is a kind of mass indoctrination into nonlinear structure and co-explored ethereal realms - manifested in the nineties' aura of millennial dread and expectation as not only a network of computers but also a new metaphor for human endeavor. We were transitioning into an information age, and the ideas of connectivity, of convergence, of speed and data transfer became guiding ideas for not only business but also for the human experience itself. The boundless, anarchic, "revenge of the nerds" optimism of those who spearheaded this revolution - which in its initial stages was a massive empowerment of the fringe and rejected elements of society, from "geek" to "guru" - precipitated a Gnostic fervor that not only would the information age bring humanity together in a nonhierarchical, nonlinear, loved-up whole but that it might, in fact, herald a completely new stage in the growth of the human organism.
The corporatization of the Internet wasn't far behind, and it is important to note how the Internet quickly became not only strip-malled but also how quickly strip malls took on the hypertext approach of the Internet. Logos forming links around the globe, beckoning the citizenry of the world to partake of purchasing experiences interchangeable from one country to the next. Connectivity as the new face of globalization, that qlipphotic, distorted and perverse reflection of world convergence and unity, and its manservant, monoculture, collaborating in the dissolution of the nation state and its replacement with a locked-down, perfectly mechanized, imagination-free global "culture," a planetary Vision of Sorrow.
More than a decade and one dot-com crash on, the hopeful idea that the "information revolution" would spark a jump in human consciousness seems not totally disproven; it has, at least, provided a mutation in the organization of capital. However it ended up, it should be noted that the atmosphere surrounding the emergence of communications technology has been a wholly mystic one - as the species is, yet again, forced to deal with the significance of the fire it continues to steal from heaven.
Similarly, the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent End of History hypothesis created a playing field in which history was no longer a dialectic between competing superpowers but a static millennial anguish in which the "last humans" could only contemplate their own entropy - or, as was shortly revealed, rediscover their roots in pure Crusade barbarism.
The Western youth who grew up and came into consciousness after the fall of the Berlin Wall, often (aptly as well as tackily) referred to as Millennials, occupy an apocalyptic liminal space which is largely characterized by the absence of meaning and the subsequent fetishization of nihilism - not out of a sense of rebellion, as even rebellion itself has long since become solely an expression of the marketplace - but simply because there is nothing else to fetishize.
American youth, in particular, have grown up in a cultural landscape dominated first by the suicidal self-loathing we recognized in Kurt Cobain's Ritalin gaze, the retreat into infantilism and willful ignorance personified by the bubble-gum teen acts of the late 1990s and, after September 11, a new dark age of youth culture so reactionary, McCarthyist and utterly devoid of meaning or humanity that its faceless and barren "stars" are no longer distinguishable from the corporate concerns that support them. The Abyss is our congenital state.
The Twentieth Centrury was a period of mankind learning how to destroy the planet and then struggling with the ramifications of what that meant. Now we are left with globalization, corporate media hegemony, a world without secrets, in which all information is known, in which every man and woman is a star on reality television or on their blog, in which every sex act is immediately digitized and placed on the Internet, in which every main street in the world sports the same coffee shop and the same fast food restaurant selling the same processed swill and the same bookstore hawking the same information. And in those bookstores, and on the Internet, and in the cinemas, are the keys to the secrets of the universe, made available everywhere by your friendly neighborhood monoculture constantly in need of new and interesting things to sell, and those keys are just waiting to be put to use. We have become so desensitized and jaded by information overload that our only choices are willful ignorance and self-chosen stupor, or to embrace the mystery itself.
As Zorn Zuckermann once remarked, "the Twentieth Century [was] so much a time of everything losing its magic, that the only thing left is magic itself."
Since the 1960s we have seen the shockwaves of the occult revival and the chaos magic revolution (which sought to dispose of the high theatricality of occultism and get magic back to its most functional aspects) and, much more importantly, the mass publication and availability of the practical secrets of magic and the growth of the Internet, both of which have effectively created a landscape where learning magic and connecting up with like-minded people aren't a problem anymore. The question is no longer Is there such a thing as magic, and where can I find out about it?, the question is What do we do with magic?
And the answer is, how far can you see?
How far can you reach?
Magic is a deceptive word, and also the most appropriate one possible.
Magic can be seen as an alternative way of knowing, as well as an alternative way of doing and being, and when these alternate ways are followed in one's life one becomes immediately capable of spewing reams of paper in an effort to describe "just what magic is," trying one's best to keep to safe and rational concepts and never quite hitting the mark, The amount of dreck available in the New Age section of your local chain megabookstore should more than attest to this face (the sheer tackiness of most of this material acts as a smokescreen for the atomic energy source hidden within).
There are magic moments, the magic of creativity, a magic look in the eyes, events that occur "as if by magic," and these are all accurate descriptors of the magic - that is, the sheer wonderment - of life itself. This incredible feeling of the mystery of life itself. The feeling that anything is possible, that we don't have to do things the way they've always been done, that the universe is indeed intelligent and is indeed guiding and aiding us in our coming to consciousness if we so care to listen (Pronoia). There is also the magic that is a set of practices and an evolutionary path, a discipline and journey that takes one directly to the heart of that sheer wonderment. The art and science of mystery. And at the center of that art and science are the methods of using sex, trance, inspiration and language to wake the individual and the world itself from its sleep of millennia, its addiction to hollow symbols and self-destruction.
Everything else has been stripped away. It now falls to this generation to make the evolutionary jump.
That is, to use magic and become magic.
To awaken the world to its potential.
Here's Tom with the weather.
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order 
Golden Teacher Liquid Culture For Sale, Isolated Cubensis Liquid Culture For Sale
AlteredAgain 
Booby 
Edit 
Reply 
and do'nt think a new thread is warranted. No comment on the matter, please carry on as is.
1 2 all )
Bridgeburner
AlteredAgain
deCypher
soulcircus
RonaldFuckingPaul
Telepylus
LosAngelesGraff
Moonshoe