So who lives in your head? Under what sea of imagination and concern? Before we talked about chaos theory and philosophy, today we are talking about chaos magick and a meta-paradigm of practice.

Who’s on first? You are under a spell, and you are always on first, never on second, and will never experience home base.

I am sad.

With the public consensus, consensual reality, the core question of chaos magick practice is, “Why do you experience the reality that you experience? Why is life the way it is for you? Is it forced to be that way? By who or what?”

The answers that naturally arise to those questions are very important. For most people, the common view is that life just is the way it is. Some external rule or force sustains a reality that they are forced to conform to. Life makes you the way that you are. In my experience, just about everyone believes this consciously or subconsciously. Is that unfair to say?

Murphy’s law? That would be an extension of the belief, yes.

I think everyone seems to believe that. What makes you believe it? Where does the believing occur and how and why does that ever change? If it does at all?

I think people blame God or other forces for their lives whether going well or not. It’s God’s will. Praise just being the positive side of blame. Two names, same process.

Lack of self reflection.

It’s why I don’t like being praised for things. I consider praise to be prompting in a positive light, otherwise it’s confining.

What are the alternatives to the common belief in an objective reality that forces us to conform?

Free will? Do we have a publicly understood notion of free will? Is your will free if you have values that form absolute constraints on it’s behaviour?

People think they choose when it’s really conditioned response.

Why do we believe anything at all?

If you create your own values and don’t just get them from someone else. Values are constraining. You weight one aspect of experience higher than another. You seek one outcome over another. Values are inherently limiting.

You can choose to cross the street anytime you want, but the little hand tells me to conform.

We believe things to allow us to habituate? That is one path belief takes, yes. Habituation is ritual.

A game without limitations soon becomes boring. That’s very true, but where would games be if we lack an understanding of how they are created? What if no one knew how to create a game? What would our society be like?

Hard to play. Ultimately, impossible to play.

I’ve recently realized that when we do something over and over, we improve upon it slightly over time, and eventually, our habit becomes “the way it should be done.”

Every time you recall anything, a skill, a bit of information, any experience at all, even a perception, it gets subtly modified, associated with other things in the network of our own consciousness. Everything you can think or do or feel or perceive has the fingerprint of your own nature on it, your own constitutional tendencies, prejudices or predilections. Nothing in your entire mind is or can remain objective. It is neurologically impossible. This process is the basis of belief whether we consciously guide it or not.

Subjectivity is belief, and you believe everything. People swear they don’t believe everything they read or hear, but this is self delusion. You just stamp an attitude on everything you experience, and everything you have rejected forms just as coherent a body of beliefs as everything you accept. So how do you think we could gain deliberate conscious access to this process that automatically occurs anyway?

The brain doesn’t actually have the ability to disbelieve. Skepticism, as it’s popularly expressed, tends to be intellectual masturbation, rubbing up against other peoples beliefs in an aggressive way because it stimulates a sense of superiority. It serves no other purpose.

My atheist friend was doing that to me today. I asked if he believed in anything at all and he got all insulted. Did it leave you feeling dirty?

Yeah, a little dirty. He called me a humanist and I like that term. I think you get a bit of both things there. Yes. You might as well have some faith in humanity. I don’t disapprove of humanism in essence. It just tends to be a bit vague and directionless so far.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~