You stop explaining yourself when you
realize people only understand from their level of perception—but
perhaps you may be open to my perception and perhaps it will help you
on your journey through life.
The
Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the chronology
of the universe,
scaling its current
age of
13.8 billion years to a single year
in
order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in science
education or
popular
science.
In this visualization, the Big
Bang took
place at the beginning of January 1 at midnight, and the current
moment maps onto the end of December 31 just before midnight.
At
this scale, there are 437.5 years per second, 1.575 million years per
hour, and 37.8 million years per day.
Humans,
in the entire span of existence, have only been around for one day of
the cosmic year calendar. Humans didn’t even start cave painting
until the last 60 seconds of the cosmic year calendar, a mere 30,000
years ago. Scientific practice didn’t occur until the last second.
The last second. Everyday we discover something new about our
reality through the practice of science—and we’ve only been doing
it for one second.
Collective reality and personal reality are concepts affected by
perception. For a very basic example of the collective, humans once believed the Earth
was flat, now we know the Earth is round. Our reality today is simply
different than the reality of our beginning. Reality changes
according to what we perceive and know.
On a more immediate, personal scale, a patient
takes a placebo pill and suddenly they are cured. Was it because, in
their reality, they believed or knew that the pill would cure them?
Or was it because they were never really ill in the first place?
Either way, the placebo pill altered that individuals reality. In a
very basic sense, perception equals reality.
As I mentioned before, we are only in
the first second of scientific study. There are still elements to be
discovered, cures to be found, tools to be invented that can read and
measure energies we never knew existed in a scientific sense. We’ve
only explored 5% of the ocean and only 1% of the ocean floor. We are
constantly discovering new species of plants and animals. We’ve
discovered a planet so large that it technically shouldn’t exist
according to our current laws of physics. Humanity still fights wars
in the name of religion resulting in needless casualties. We still
kill animals who feel the same pain and fear we do when we are just
animals ourselves—taking our very first steps on two legs.
For some pre-mind metaphysical prep,
let’s talk about the 21 grams experiment. In
1901, Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill,
Massachusetts,
who wished to scientifically determine if a soul
had
weight, identified six patients in nursing homes whose death was
imminent. Four were suffering from tuberculosis, one from diabetes,
and one from unspecified causes. MacDougall specifically chose people
who were suffering from conditions that caused physical exhaustion,
as he needed the patients to remain still when they died to measure
them accurately. When the patients looked like they were close to
death, their entire bed was placed on an industrial sized scale that
was sensitive within two tenths of an ounce (5.6 grams).
On
the belief that humans have souls and that animals do not, MacDougall
later measured the changes in weight from fifteen dogs after death.
MacDougall said he wished to use dogs that were sick or dying for his
experiment, though was unable to find any. It is therefore presumed
he poisoned healthy dogs.
One
of the patients lost weight but then put the weight back on, and two
of the other patients registered a loss of weight at death but a few
minutes later lost even more weight. One of the patients lost
“three-fourths of an ounce” (21.3 grams) in weight,
coinciding with the time of death. MacDougall disregarded the results
of another patient on the grounds the scales were “not finely
adjusted”, and discounted the results of another as the patient
died while the equipment was still being calibrated. MacDougall
reported that none of the dogs lost any weight after death.
While
MacDougall believed the results from his experiment showed the human
soul might have weight, his report, which was not published until
1907, stated the experiment would have to be repeated many times
before any conclusion could be obtained.
Despite
its rejection within the scientific community, MacDougall’s
experiment popularized the idea that the soul has weight, and
specifically that it weighs 21 grams.
If he had not been so rejected by the scientific community and was
instead encouraged and supported, what might have he gone on to
discover? How would his possible discoveries have affected society?
Who would we be now? What would life be like?
With
all of that said, we are still in our very beginning and there is
still so much to know—it would be foolish to believe that we can’t
willfully change our reality any further than it already has.
Ultimately, it would be childish to assume anything.
So how does
magic work? What is magic? No one really knows, yet. The majority of
the population doesn’t know or believe it exists, much like an
astronomer from the 17th century didn’t know Pluto
existed. I won’t sit here and tell you facts because there are none,
yet—but there are very convincing theories just waiting to be
tested to their full extent in a distant future when controlled
experiments for metaphysics can be properly conducted without biased
criticism and with scientific tools not yet invented.
Let’s start with the Chaos Theory.
Chaos
is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable.
It teaches us to expect the unexpected. While most traditional
science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity,
electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear
things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like
turbulence, long-range weather, the stock market, our brain states,
and so on. These phenomena are often described by fractal
mathematics, which captures the infinite complexity of nature. Many
natural objects exhibit fractal properties, including landscapes,
clouds, trees, organs, rivers etc, and many of the systems in which
we live exhibit complex, chaotic behavior. Recognizing the chaotic,
fractal nature of our world can give us new insight, power, and
wisdom. For example, by understanding the complex, chaotic dynamics
of the atmosphere, a balloon pilot can “steer” a balloon to a
desired location. By understanding that our ecosystems, our social
systems, and our economic systems are interconnected, we can hope to
avoid actions which may end up being detrimental to our long-term
well-being.
Principles
of Chaos
The
Butterfly Effect: This effect grants the power to cause a
hurricane in China to a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico.
It may take a very long time, but the connection is real. If the
butterfly had not flapped its wings at just the right point in
space/time, the hurricane would not have happened. A more rigorous
way to express this is that small changes in the initial conditions
lead to drastic changes in the results. Our lives are an ongoing
demonstration of this principle. Who knows what the long-term
effects of teaching millions of children about chaos and fractals
will be?
Unpredictability:
Because we can never know all the initial conditions of a
complex system in sufficient (i.e. perfect) detail, we cannot hope
to predict the ultimate fate of a complex system. Even slight errors
in measuring the state of a system will be amplified dramatically,
rendering any prediction useless. Since it is impossible to measure
the effects of all the butterflies (etc) in the World, accurate
long-range weather prediction will always remain impossible.
Order
/ Disorder: Chaos is not simply disorder. Chaos explores the
transitions between order and disorder, which often occur in
surprising ways.
Mixing:
Turbulence ensures that two adjacent points in a complex system
will eventually end up in very different positions after some time
has elapsed. Examples: Two neighboring water molecules may end up in
different parts of the ocean or even in different oceans. A group of
helium balloons that launch together will eventually land in
drastically different places. Mixing is thorough because turbulence
occurs at all scales. It is also nonlinear: fluids cannot be
unmixed.
Feedback:
Systems often become chaotic when there is feedback present. A good
example is the behavior of the stock market. As the value of a stock
rises or falls, people are inclined to buy or sell that stock. This
in turn further affects the price of the stock, causing it to rise
or fall chaotically.
Fractals:
A
fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex
patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are
created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing
feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic
systems – the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in
between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely
familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees,
rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc.
Now that you know the basics of Chaos
theory, let’s delve into chaos magic. What is chaos magic?
Because
of the tumultuous nature of chaos, it can mean different things to
different people. But according to Phil Hine’s Condensed
Chaos (the
book to read about chaos magic if you want to delve further into the
subject), chaos magic is a form of practice that helps you change
your circumstances so
that you can throw off societal structures, achieve freedom, and
“strive to live according to a developing sense of personal
responsibility.”
Chaos
magic relies on using focused energy to disrupt the Universe. Much
of the science of chaos magic involves the practitioner using a
properly
executed release of energy
to affect the turbulence that naturally occurs in the physical world.
To oversimplify the concept: since most of life is irregular and
chaotic, if you put a specific, focused energy out into the world,
you’ll be able to influence that chaos and affect the world around
you.
The
biggest difference between chaos magic and more traditional
left-hand/right-hand path magic is that with chaos, there’s no set
boundaries for what you can and can’t do. With other forms of magic,
you’re thrust into a more strict
set of guidelines for
how you have to practice. Much of traditional magic is made up of an
endless amount of ritual that you can get into if you want, but just
by taking on the mantle of a chaos practitioner, you’re saying that
none
of that ritual is important unless it needs to be in the moment.
You
don’t have to love
math or
freak out about patterns like a lot of people do who get into chaos,
but it doesn’t hurt. If you’re going to be practicing chaos magic,
you should at least be cognizant of things like synchronicity,
semiotics, fractals, and mathematical coincidences. Practitioners of
chaos magic may use charts and equations as ways to think about
chaos, probability, and what is possible.
To
achieve maximization of all these factors the magician may in
practice need wands, robes, visualizations, symbolic systems, sigils,
old languages, rituals, deities, and other means of egress
from normal states of mind, even
though in theory a supreme exponent of magic could achieve it all
whilst sitting quietly in a chair, rather like a mathematician
working without pencil or paper, waste paper basket, blackboard,
geometry instruments, books of reference, or a computer. In
summary, chaos magic is the liberating practice of expressing your
will (focusing your energy, your desires, releasing them to the
Universe. Exempli
gratia:
cause and effect.) through any means possible and/or desired to alter
the chaotic Universe in your favor through the Chaos theory. You
are the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a powerful
hurricane.
Popular
Chaos practitioner quote:
“Nothing is true, all is permitted.” It means,
“Nothing is certain, all is possible.”
Nothing is certain, but all is possible. Let that soak in.
You know how I said before that we now know the Earth is round? What
if it’s not and NASA is a lie? I’m not saying it’s not (I firmly
believe in NASA), but what if the Earth is flat? What if there is
life after death; what if there isn’t? What if you get reincarnated
as a cockroach; what if you don’t? What if we do have souls; what if
we don’t? What if magic really exists; what if it doesn’t? What if one day
you believe in God and the next day you believe in Ra, the Egyptian
sun god? What if one day, you become an Atheist?
What if all of the Multiverse theories are true, causing an infinite loop of possibilities and what if we can tap into those alternate realities; what if we can’t? Whatever you believe
has the possibility of being false. That realization may seem
negative but it opens up the possibility that all is possible. In the
end, reality is what you choose to believe.
