There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

--Carl Jung

http://webhome.idirect.com/~lkeane/thesis.htm

a thesis on two of my favourite 20th century personalities. the paper compares and contrasts the lives and work of the "Great Beast 666" and the "Wizard of Zürich". both were sons of devout Christians who were at times into solitude, experienced "weirdness", produced "channeled" texts (The Book of the Law and Seven Sermons to the Dead), and generally advanced the cause of individualistic and (at least somewhat) scientific approaches toward spirituality. each man was a crucial modern link in the Western tradition (magic and alchemy). this paper points out the parallels between their systems (Magick and Analytical Psychology) in the light of how each can be seen as a Western continuation of the function of "shamanizing".

This thesis is a comparison of the works of two seemingly dichotomous individuals. The first work, Magick/Liber Aba, is by Western Esotericist (Occultist) Aleister Crowley [1875-1947]. Magick/Liber Aba sets out the major thrust of this prolific author's theories concerning Magick as a process towards spiritual attainment. The second work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, presents psychologist C.G. Jung's [1875-1961] interpretation of the alchemical tradition as a method toward individuation. These two men were individuals who were dissatisfied with the predominantly monophasic world-view of "Western" culture. Both Crowley and Jung can be seen as pioneers who attempted to foster a polyphasic world-view in which various states of consciousness such as dreams, fantasies, visions, and drug-induced experiences were not only valid but essential for the completion of the Great Work and the acquisition of ever deepening and widening gnosis in the quest to become fully human.

The "Cycle of Meaning" demonstrates how a symbol functions within a given world-view. At the top of the cycle we see the cosmology of the people or culture in question. That cosmology or ontological assumption is reflected in the culture's mythopoeia. The interpretation of the mythopoeia (such as art and ritual) is reinforced by a "shaman". That reenforcement influences the direct experience of the individual. The direct experience is then again interpreted by the shamanic agency. This interpretation then functions to reinforce the endemic cosmology. What results is a closed cycle which is perpetuated by the culture's shaman.

Not only was Jung writing from within the larger context of "Western" culture, he was also in a sense creating his own Cycle of Meaning. If a patient is being treated through the methods of Analytical Psychology then he or she can be as adopting that world-view. The analyst, as shaman,then reinforces the world-view and interprets any direct experience had by the patient, which in turn reconfirms the Analytical cosmology. In the case of Crowley and Jung we see that they both attempted to break the dominant Cycle (for Crowley it was the Western Esoteric Tradition and for Jung it was Freudian psychoanalysis) thereby creating their own Cycle of Meaning in which they themselves became the primary "initiator".

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Crowley and Jung is that they demonstrated that the human condition is far more complicated and deeper than we generally suspect. Both men encouraged every person to delve deeply into their depths and examine, at length and with courage, what rose from those depths. Each man also insisted that the true goal of human development was to become fully human, to transcend the limitations imposed by collective consciousness and its constrictive epistemologies toward a union with inner powers universal in their embrace. By attempting to become more human in this sense we begin to break down the boundaries which prevent us from gaining more insight, more gnosis not only about ourselves as individuals, but our relation to others and the universe at large.

http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/lectures/Technopagans%20at%20the%20End%20of%20History/

an audio transcription of an entire weekend workshop at Esalen lead by Terrence McKenna and VR pioneer Mark Pesce. these two really smart guys tackle a wide range of material related to the arcane aspects of technology in our post-modern era. some choice exerpts transcribed:

In ages where the imagination is empowered, magic rules the world. In ages where the imagination has somehow given way to positivism, empiricism, reductionism or some other form of so-called realism, magic withers on the vine. The realization that code is magical invocation is really a powerful one. Language in the hands of science becomes descriptive and discursive. Language in the hands of a magician creates...and we haven't seen languages like that for several centuries in the west. But when you write code and implement it, this is magical language. When your utterance is iterated in the machine, something happens. Once it is debugged, it is a magical invocation that works. And the world is becoming progressively more and more ruled by invocation.
~Language has some kind of symbiotic relationship to meat and silicon.
~Where the anxiety arises is in people trying to explain to themselves what is happening. The world is now so complex very few people "understand" it. But in whatever area you don’t understand it you generate mythology which explains it to you. So most of us, as the culture becomes more complex, our participation in it becomes more magical, more animistic, more provisional, more mythic. This is both a good and a bad thing. It leads to cults...which I think is a bad thing; in other words, people accept explanations for reality, the only argument for which, is that they are explanations for reality. Their persuasive force otherwise is zilch.
~Modernity was thoroughly existential. In other words, reductionist science tells you you’re the product of a cosmic accident; meaning is conferred; you’re lucky to be here; nature has no interest in your fate; nature indeed has no purpose at all. My own intellectual journey both experientially with psychedelics and through mathematical analysis of history, etc. leads to the conclusion that this existential point of view is able to maintain itself only by ignoring the evolutionary thrust toward complexity and novelty that occurs on every level of being.

And that in fact, if you begin to value novelty, you suddenly have a basis for a new human ethic, because human beings with their languages and their technologies represent a level of novelty never before achieved on this planet, something that builds on animal nature as a platform but goes well beyond it. So suddenly, from being a random accident, a chance-created witness to a meaningless cosmos, we become the cutting edge of the very process that the cosmos itself seems to value or seek to magnify and preserve. So what has crept back into being, for me and anybody else who accepts these overarching metaphors, is value. It’s a different kind of value than we’ve ever seen before. The last time we knew values, they were handed down from a religious hierarchy which talked directly to God and got strange messages. The new values are self-evident from an examination of nature. Anyone can inform themselves about the facts of biology and large scale complex systems, etc.

The new story is a story of recognizing our placement at this breaking wave of novel advance. Suddenly technology becomes a religious enterprise, good for something other than building consumer electronics and small appliances, and actually seen as the path toward some kind of transcendent possibility. The goal is well-formulated in spiritual ontology but the methods are a mess. They either don’t work or require lifetimes or make demands on people’s behavior that are practically inhuman. I think the new story is based on the recognition of our own centrality. We haven’t stood at the center of the cosmic stage for 700 years in our official myth. And now suddenly we’re returned there. Returned not merely as witnesses in a central position, but suddenly as actors. Because these technologies that are coming into our hands are truly promethian. Truly faustian. Truly capable of making us like unto a god. But not in the service of market capitalism and consumer fetishism; more in the service of the emotion of awe.

http://www.valis666.net/

massive linklist of Google videos on 9/11, the Necon Cabal, the Iraq occupation, fascism, terrorism, police state, conspiracy theory, eastern philosophy, RAW, Grant Morrison, Platonism, alchemy, Terrence McKenna, shaman stuff, LSD, Tim Leary, etc. strangely enough, no PKD that i can see.

Those who understood art as a means for psychic survival knew the immediate nature of art and its power of not only self-transformation, but collective-transformation. By uncovering the mandala, Carl Jung was in effect the modern world’s first shamanic healer. In a time of world war, Jung was able to articulate the utility of the ancient ideas of art as magic to the rational scientific mind. He wrote volumes on the subject of alchemy, involving the union of opposites, not only in its relation to individual psychic health but also in its relation to the psychic health of mankind. Jung noted that in both religion as well as alchemy this union was personified as a rounded, androgynous Anthropos, “the original or primordial man,” which contains the opposites of “the one and the many,” male and female, matter and spirit, good and evil. [+]