The Revival of Microcosm and Macrocosm

Each person's biochemistry is as unique as their fingerprint. The interaction of the components of a complex system - hypothalamus and pituitary in the brain and adrenal near the kidneys - controls our reactions to stress and regulates many body processes (digestion, immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality and energy storage and expenditure). Much of how we react to the world - inner bodily comfort, sense of wellness, emotional state, lust and desire and our Will insofar as our Will is also the energy we can apply to a purpose - is managed by a system that links our complex mind (brain) with our body, both of which are only intermittently under our conscious control.

Is this a system that we should try to command through our reason - a rather futile intent on our part since our reason can influence but perhaps not command very much - or should we try to understand it, live with it as it is in general terms and manage it in the best interests both of mind and of body regardless of our conscious wilfulness? If mind and body are not in close accord, surely this system will, indeed must, break down through psychosomatic symptoms or even lead to total bodily or mental breakdown.

Although organic collapse of either body or mind is more than possible regardless of the other, most people most of the time are not well in body or mind because of a failure to bring the non-conscious Will of the body into alignment with the desires and instincts of the mind. To place on top of this the reasoning Will (a functional tool for the acquisition of resources and shaping of things) is almost certainly to over-burden it. We have a balance required here between disease (the collapse of the body) and psychosis (the collapse of the mind), both of which will have effects on the other. It is the inward turning of Reason on to the Body-Mind (not the same process by any means as the application of Reason, the tool, to the Body-Mind, of scientific medicine) that is most likely to disrupt that balance.

Standing between the two, Body and Mind, on the one side is psychosomatic illness - all those petty pains and illnesses that come at times of stress - and, on the other side, neurotic illnesses where the mind works but not very effectively. The calibration of our mind and body is thus a life's work and there can only ever be very personal adaptations of our general human condition. There are no external rules only the guidance of science, probability and possibility. Chance and necessity.

For example, a 'normal' circadian cortisol cycle (early morning rise to a peak in under an hour, then a fall, then a rise in late afternoon for a fall that reaches a trough in the middle of the night) might be disrupted and abnormally flattened by the demands of the social - the demand that one work at peak performance, for example, for eight hours at a stretch. The question is whether we are to try to 'normalise' an imposed new abnormal pattern through the exercise of Will – in other words, adapt to chronic fatigue by willing ourselves into not what we want or need but what the social wants or needs as 'rational' (for itself or others). This question of intervention or adaptation is a political question - a microcosmic version of the macroscosmic questions of intervention and adaptation in (say) international relations. And the microcosm and macrocosm find themselves in the same relation, that of the natural body to the unnaturalness of the social to that of the natural organically developed historical community to the demands of the Liberal (or any) Absolute.

This is where 'Will' is at the heart of things. With each apparent malfunction of 'normality', the person or the community can choose to seek help or find the inner resources to restore functionality or it can embrace the malfunction and propose to become adapted to the 'abnormality'. The 'abnormality' may soon become normal to the person or to the society despite the underlying damage to both mind and body, the psychosomatics and neuroses of statecraft as much as of the single human being . A genetic or minority 'abnormality' might be dysfunctional under conditions of 'normality' but be highly functional under abnormal social conditions. Evolution teaches us that the abnormal may, over a considerable period of time, become 'normal', leaving the previously normal as now abnormal.

We should not be dismissive of the potentiality of the abnormal but the evolutionary value of abnormality is incremental and works over great swathes of time - driving the abnormal into normality, as in the drive for the New Scientific Man or in transhumanist fantasies where minds cannot keep up with technologies, is driving humanity not into transcendence but into dysfunctionality. Instead the abnormal should be allowed to flourish in the now because of its incremental potential in the future and that includes abnormal cultures and communities as much as persons/ Homo Sovieticus is matched in its self-induced psychosis by the Rights agenda of Liberal Internationalist loons. This is why we must have both a general theory of social normality (which observes it at a distance and decides whether it suits the person), one that treats the claims of the social critically, but also a private theory of the self, against the insanity of denying the ever-present Self, where the Self is to be measured against its own and not society’s standards of normality and abnormality as it moves from birth to death. All is flow, nothing is fixed and Reason is a tool and nothing more.

On Magic as Techne ...

"While the black magician at the time of signing his pact with the elemental demon may be fully convinced that he is strong enough to control indefinitely the powers placed at his disposal, he is speedily undeceived. Before many years elapse he must turn all his energies to the problem of self-preservation. A world of horrors to which he has attuned himself by his own covetousness looms nearer every day, until he exists upon the edge of a seething maelstrom, expecting momentarily to to be sucked down into its turbid depths. Afraid to die -- because he will become the servant of his own demon -- the magician commits crime after crime to prolong his wretched earthly existence. Realizing that life is maintained by the aid of a mysterious universal life force which is the common property of all creatures, the black magician often becomes an occult vampire, stealing this energy from others. According to mediaeval superstition, black magicians turned themselves into werewolves and roamed the earth at night, attacking defenseless victims for the life force contained in their blood." (Quoted by Manly P. Hall, 1928)

The matter of magic (not conjuring but something more complex) requires some questions to be laid out before the sceptic (the mind that sees nothing before it but incomplete fact without possibility) and the small believer or dabbler (the mind that thinks that mastering codes, words, numbers, habits, lineages, transmissions or initiations are sufficient to be a magical scientist):-

1. Is it possible that the discoveries of physics indicate dimensions which have properties of mind, either intrinsic or in the form of 'inhabitants'?

2. Is it possible that, if such mental dimensions or inhabitants of such dimensions exist (and these are two very different concepts), human beings can make contact or use of them?

3. Is it possible, if such contact can be made, that human will can master such forces or would such forces master human will?

4. If human will can master such forces, how are such forces to be used responsibly?

In short, we are speaking, if magic exists as more than fantasy of which we are still doubtful, of the complexity of magical thought and its many barriers to safe and responsible use as technique.

To be 'real' to us, it must be known in scientific terms. Its origins must be contactable or its methods usable - either as as a relationship with alien forces or as a technology.

It must also be used or contacted on human terms if it is not to be either an expression of the death instinct in us or a mere animal acquisition of power in the short term that is destructive in the long term - that which may turn a man into a vampiric werewolf and a woman into a lamia.

Magic is just undiscovered science and, as we know, science in the wrong hands is destructive of soul, body, society and even the ability to exist as a species.

It might, therefore, be advisable to know before using ... and to know yourself before knowing anything else. But what is it that we have to guard against?

• The use of technique to command the minds of others. The use of technique by others to command our minds.
• The dragging up of the mores of the dead, of custom and of habit to drag down the living.
• The sucking of the life force of one person to sustain some vampiric other.
• The willing of power to harm others.
• The binding of others to you. You being bound to others without choice.
• The re-creation of yourself to suit society or another and not yourself. Complicity in the social construction of others
• The loss of self into technique normalising or socialising demands by others.
• Selling what people do not need or want. Having sold to oneself what one does not need or want.

Yes, these contain choices for conventional good and evil. Magic in this sense of the fantastic exertion of alien powers on our own being is real and all around us. The alien or the demon is not in another dimension but in the most alien of worlds, the social.

It is the social against which we are alienated and it is only by mastering the social, the core of the magical, of the claimed and the fantastic, that we can hope to master our alienation.

Where unknown dimensions are most likely to come into contact with us as humans (without stating finally and incontrovertibly that such dimensions cannot exist in the world independently of the social) is where our mind, embedded in matter, meets other dimensions of matter.

This is within our complex brains, dimensions that may or may not extend beyond us in space and in time, zones of the unknown that might be dark or light or dawn or twilight. Our mental representations of others, of the social, are the sources of both the angelic and the demonic.

Magical technique, extended from this unknown sub-conscious, exists wherever one mind uses the past or personality to crush the soul of another and where the social construction of reality crushes the spirit of the one person in favour of the habits and prejudices of the many or another.

Politics and ideology are always prone to magical technique. Somewhere in minds are dimensions of instinct involving power and desire, fear and hate, which are scientifically ill-understood but whose laws permit mastery by some at the expense of others and so techniques of oppression and control.

Whether sub-conscious dimensions exist as aspects of being human or of being-in-the-world or the dimensions speak as inhabiting gods, or whether these are all just our fantastic attempts to explain the phenomena, it takes a 'true will' to choose to understand them and wisdom to remain their master.

Only the greatest magicians can do this and the choice of good or evil then becomes something beyond good and evil at the moment of mastery. The choice is beyond the technique, the magic, the technique, a mere tool for the good or the evil that comes from the will behind the choice.