http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=magazine

one of the most important grimoires of the modern age is about to see the light of day. i for one am extremely interested in perusing the record of Dr. Jung's mystical freak-out.

What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/03/study-just-thin.html

just goes to show that there can be power in certain glyphs and their related spirits.

Forget actually buying a Mac to unleash your creativity. A new study from researchers at Duke University and the University of Waterloo found that merely thinking about Apple can make you more creative -- at least with bricks.

After researchers flashed the company's logo in front of test subjects for an imperceptible 30 milliseconds, they discovered that people actually started behaving in ways associated with Apple's brand image, thinking differently, and apparently, more creatively.

During their study, researchers used both the Apple and IBM logos to see how people would react to the brands subconsciously. In the end, they concluded that brands resonated in pretty much that same way except in two specific areas: creativity and competence (IBM's strong suit). When asked to describe as many uses for a brick as they could, the Apple subjects averaged 30 percent more brick ideas than their IBM counterparts, according to researchers. An independent set of reviewers also deemed these ideas to be more creative.

IBM-primed subjects, one the other hand, all had strikingly similar answers. While one of the Duke professors involved in the study hesitates to directly link creativity to the use of Apple products, he does conclude that powerful brands can and do affect people's unconscious behavior.

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.enemies.com/

an illustrated guide to Gnostic theology mixed in with a heavy dose of pantheism, shamanism, antinomianism and general anarchy.

Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge and absorbed some of Eve's divine force. The surge of living, intelligent energy in his nervous system triggered a spontaneous kundalini arousal, opening a direct channel between his reproductive organs and his brain and blowing his third eye open.

Suddenly able to see into non-ordinary reality, Adam could now perceive the archons for what they truly were - loathsome alien parasites dedicated to fear and oppression:

"You are the Tree of Knowledge, which is in Paradise, from which the first man ate and which opened his mind, so that he became enamored of his co-likeness, and condemned other alien likenesses, and loathed them."

The veil lifted from their minds, Adam and Eve were restored to sanity and could now voice their perceptions with humor and imagination:

"They assert... that Christ was the one called by our Scriptures the serpent, and they assure us that they have been given insight into this in order to open the eyes of knowledge and to distinguish between Good and Evil... God, who issued the Law through Moses, and who spoke through the Hebrew prophets, was not the true God but one of the Rulers of Darkness..."

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/06/07/why-the-bible-is-magic

so the part below is pretty fun, but there're some other neat ideas in here. one being that the "new age" style of "visualization" as magic (al la The Secret) is ineffectual and overintellectualized, while the arts of music, dance, drawing, storytelling, etc. prove much more effectual. another being that the gospel involves potent archetypical material which can be accessed through such methods. another being that the gnostic cosmologies and other heresies can provide such material for open-source style experimentation. it also ties in with the idea of us playing roles in our everyday lives as the "musical of the ordinary." and so on.

The point of the Bible, or at least of the Gospels in particular (as I have not tried out the rest as thoroughly): is that they are supposed to be acted out. They are a piece of dramatic writing. It’s like Shakespeare. Yeah you can sit and read it quietly to yourself and that’s cool. But it’s SUPPOSED to be put up on stage and acted out with costumes and the whole nine yards. With the Bible though I think YOU are supposed to be the actors.

I don’t just think it, I actually know it. Because I have had extremely dramatic changes in my life occur from taking this exact course. I tried grasping all this stuff intellectually for years and that laid a strong foundation, sure. But it never blasted me off the planet into arms of a warm and deeply Loving God who was welcoming me home while we both wept in the presence of Grace and Eternity. I mean, that and all the drugs of course.

You’ll know you’ve done enough drugs when everything in the world to you can or does become beautiful. You’ll know you’ve done more than enough when that stops happening. That means you’re supposed to stop for a while and integrate it. Let your mind and your heart and your senses adjust to that much Love and that much Beauty poring in on you at all times. Then you can go back for more later if you feel like it.

http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?p=1815

comic creator Alan Moore gives an interview on the relationship between art and magic, among other things. i concur with the ideas in this passage 100% [via].

Magic is a language but perhaps a better analogy is to say: Each religion is a language, and magic is linguistics. In the sense that, if you are a linguist, there’s no such thing as a “false language.” It’s not like, “Oh yeah French is real, but Russian is not a real language.” So if you’re a magician, you have to accept ALL of those religions as being…they’re all true languages! So, you get a different array of concepts, a different worldview in each of the religions. To some degree I take the quantum position that ALL of them are right, in a sense. In order to see truth, you have to consider a lot of different possible positions and hold them all to be true in some mysterious way. Magic, in this sense, is moving between those different positions, studying them, seeing what information there is to be gleaned from each of them, seeing how they connect up. How, for example, a story in the New Testament of the Bible seems to connect up with an ancient Egyptian legend from the Parari Anu. And how this in turn relates to one of the Tarot cards. Which gives it a certain position on the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. And you follow through these chains of ideas. You do that long enough, you start to get a different set of synaptic connections in your brain, different pathways. And you start to see things in a different way. You start to put things together differently.

Faith is for sissies who daren’t go and look for themselves. That’s my basic position. Magic is based upon gnosis. Direct knowledge. It’s a kind of “I’m from Missouri. Show me” approach, if you like. I think that gnosis it’s probably the original form of spirituality in mankind. If you look back at the old Gnostic religions that proceeded Christianity, what they depended on was direct knowledge of the Mysteries, or the ideas being talked about. If you look at the early Christians, the people that were allegedly around Jesus, then you can’t get much gnostic than St. Thomas. He has to stick his hand in the wound before he was convinced! Or you’ve got the Essenes, with John the Baptist – they were certainly gnostics. Back then, everybody formed their own relationship to the godhead, which was seen as being inside them, as much as anything.

This is true of the old shamanic religions, that were the forebears of all kind of spiritual and religious thinking. The shaman didn’t so much act as a middleman between people and the gods; he showed them how to get there. He told them how to make their own journeys into the Underworld. I get the impression that the shaman in an ancient tribe would have had the same sort of position as a plumber or an electrician. A plumber is a guy who just knows about plumbing and doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty when he’s unblocking your S-bend or whatever. A shaman is a guy who knows about traveling to the spirit world and doesn’t mind vomiting because he’s taking poisonous drugs, or getting the horrors of going to hell. It’s a community thing.

The later idea of magic, which probably sprung up when people started burning witches and magicians, when it became dangerous to be a magician. Which would probably have been around the ooo, what, the 3rd century, 4th century? When Christian mobs started putting Gnostics and hermetic scholars to death, Around that time there were Christian mobs that were putting to death hermetic scholars like Hypatea. We mention her in the first issue of Promethea. She was real. She was, I think, skinned alive by Christians. And so at that point, this is where you start to get the thing of secrecy and magic, which carries on from that point up to the present day. “If you’re a magician, don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell them and don’t tell them any of the visions you’ve had or give them any of the information that you struggled so long to accrue. Keep it to yourself." And that seems very elitist to me. I’d rather disseminate any information I’m getting by one of the means that are open to me. And I’m lucky in that I have several quite excellent means to disseminate information that are open to me. Comic books, CDs, things like that.

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. [+]

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2007/02/11/a_beautiful_mind/

i've loved this guys stuff since i first saw it. (via technoccult).

Combining neatly outlined, comic book-style images and words made of vinyl stick-on letters, Laffoley's paintings are essentially large, absorbingly complicated diagrams explicating a mind-boggling profusion of philosophical, scientific, artistic, and religious ideas. Time travel, astrology, lucid dreaming, black holes, and mathematical theories of four, five, and more dimensions are just a few of the topics addressed.

Some resemble Eastern mandalas, others look like posters for a bizarre New Age religion. Typically they are made on 6-by-6-foot square canvases and feature a wildly eclectic array of symbols and images, from ancient hieroglyphs and Gothic cathedrals to infernal demons and flying saucers. Often they include wordy charts displaying stages of spiritual progress, calling to mind the Jewish Kabbalah, which Laffoley has studied extensively, and Tantric Buddhism.

i knew i would be waiting for the UPS man after work today, so i brought a project. (i'm glad i did as it took him till an hour after close to get here). last week i rediscovered the collage tarot deck i'd done a couple years ago. i was pleased, excited as i had thought it pretty much gone. so i scanned it.

it's modeled after the traditional 21 trumps of the major arcana, but with some personal twists thrown in. it was created mostly from Rolling Stone magazines i salvaged from the recycling center...so there are some familiar faces. to me, they get the archetypical job done (hell, i don't even know who some of them are). in any case, ( here they are. )