Magick & Spirituality Are Due An Upgrade!

Im not talking about base elements. Im not saying replace nature with virtual reality, im not saying take away actual fire for a graphic one. I am talking about using technology we have to enhance the methods we already have. For example, we are still using paper sigils, why arent more people using projectors to project the sigil onto a screen to provide a larger more immersive focusing aid? Why are we relying only on our intuition to measure experiences when we can measure them with equipment such as heat detection cameras. I am not saying we get rid of the old methods, I am talking about expanding on them and bringing them into the new age with technology. I am not talking about replacing.

If anything it takes more willpower and action to go out of our way to scientifically measure our results with the equipment that exists out there. Mainly because it then give a lot less wiggle room to look at what results you actually get other than just personal biases. In all honesty folks who measure results just on how they feel rather than actually measuring them with available equipment are in a way more lazy than those who take the time and dedication to get measurable results.

Bare also in mind this is just food for thought. Im not implying technology should take over magick, Im simply suggesting that we could benefit by including it in our work with the equipment that is out there, and to look at outdated concepts and debunk them.

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Have you seen the large neon MacDonalds sigil that hovers over just about every city on Earth? This technology is already in place, and not necessarily to good end. The measure of ANY society is when its technology catches up with its morality. This we are woefully behind.

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I personally always adapt. I use whatever works, I don’t care. I use a broken laptop as a black mirror.

I imagine quite a lot of people here do the same. Now, the purpose behind these articles you post here is clear to me: you want to make others think. While I find nothing wrong with that, I find it a tad pointless. Take a look at it this way:

You post an article

The person reads it,-- maybe thinks about it – and then they’ll return to whatever works for them. Primitive or not. If it works for them, it works.

I do like some of your work, but I find this, as I’ve said, pointless. I mean, if it works for them, and there’s no benefit to them incorporate something new just for the sake of it being new, why bother? Improving, advancing, and evolving is always good, but you need to direct it somewhere. It must have a purpose. Getting/doing new things for the sake of doing them, and without other benefits is nonsensical.

Now, you seem to be pushing the narrative that science and magick / spirituality are not at odds. While that, technically, is true, bear in mind that we live in an age where many scientists adapt materialistic dogma. If you were to go to these very scientists you may praise, they would call you outright delusional. Even if you pose magick under the guise of psychology. Go ahead and attempt to explain The Principle of Mentalism (ALL is mind) to a materialistic scientist (without butchering the principle!), you’ll just be laughed at for believing there’s a higher mental force/higher mind and that we’re manifestations of it.

Things such as ouija boards, pendulums, and so on are easily debunked. But there are things which are definitely transcending our reality as we know it. To claim that science (atm) understands everything (related to magick) and even can understand everything is 1) pretentious 2) arrogant 3) false 4) a faith claim, thus antithetical to science itself, ironically.

We operate in a very small window of this reality, as I’m sure you know. To think that forces currently unknown to science do not exist, and are a fantasy delusion is, again, a claim based on faith.

Whenever the so-called skeptics are presented with compelling evidence of paranormal (reincarnation documentary, clinical death, and so on), they attempt to nitpick, and when they fail, they’ll just resort to insults and shouting “bullshit fantasy delusions!”

Tone it down, @asbjorntorvol , is what I’m saying. You do not understand everything (or even the vast majority of it) about magick. Your arrogance may just be the very thing that will fuck you in the ass when you’re not looking well enough.

edit: typos and added comments

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i’m talking about practicing magicians like ourselves doing this, not a corporation who uses psychological techniques to manipulate you.

Here is a question for you, if we magicians started incorporating those same techniques, would people be as easily manipulated by the big fast food signs?

Not so much no.

If we were to use technology more, understand those techniques and write about it so we can help others do the same, the simple awareness that big companies are doing this to us would be significantly less as that information is being consciously filtered instead of being subconsciously processed.

yes corporations are shit, that however is another topic.

Ill keep this short. My writing style is to promote discussion and debate. I have always done it this way. I pic a point of view, write about it then we discuss. Just because I don’t tip toe around topics to avoid offending people doesn’t make it arrogant, I state my view on something, then I expand on it, and then I leave that open to be scrutinized. All my work is aimed at promoting thought, debate and discussion, that is all. Its not my word is law, its here look at this view, lets discuss and debate it and see what we can come up with.

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I never said that. I admire your boldness and to-the-point writing style. The problem is when you claim that you understand magick completely or most of it. And that science can easily explain everything related to magick. It can’t right now.

Attempt to explain reincarnation, breaking reincarnation cycles, continuing after death as an independent entity using scientific knowledge only. No Hermeticism, no esoteric stuff. Just pure hard-core scientific information.

And that’s fine. But make these debates mean something, will you? You need to know WHY you’re fighting, and WHAT you’re fighting for, you know?

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Thought provoking content is good. It’s why we are here in the first place.

We challenge ideas, morality, dogmas and all in between here on BALG. Can’t say we have the same measure of freedom doing this in public without being ridiculed.

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Indeed it is. I love that sort of content. I for example enjoyed Asbjorn’s take on psychic abilities and life after death. But there is a trap we all fall into:

We replace one dogma with another, without even being aware of it.

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We all are hypocrites in some levels. We all have our set of ideas and beliefs, sometimes we challenge them but not us. We are imperfect but we can strive to learn from our mistakes and grow.

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Of course. That’s why I don’t cling onto any belief. Attachment is quite dangerous, don’t you know?

But~and I say this with the best of intentions, it’d be great if we would pull our heads out of our asses and slap ourselves more often.

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I have explained many of those concepts through scientific lingo and many scientists have come to several of the same conclusions on reality as my own work.

But as for Hermeticism, when I discuss hermeticism I always use science to outline those concepts. The Law of Vibration when you dissect it is itself a scientific principle, which is one of the first principles students who study physics learn.

And as for debating skeptics, I do this on a regular basis and typically get good responses. Yes there is the obvious insults when they loose a debate.

As for these debates meaning something, our community and society needs baby steps. I focus on topics to get folks thinking and debating. Society at this point cant handle debate, so ill take it one step at a time. My job is to instigate thought, discussion and debate, im not fighting for anything, I simply aim for magicians to talk and expand their own minds through that discussion.

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Do you have any of these discussions or debates recorded, I’d like to see them, thanks>

It is. The Law of Mentalism, as understood by Hermeticists, is not. Yet.

At least they let people know when they’ve thrown in the towel when they do that.

I suppose, but you have to kick it up a notch over time.

As for the word fighting, I used it metaphorically. I know exactly why you’re doing this.

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There are far more big corporations with master magicians than the rest of us peons. As to education, yes I am all for that. Your diatribe seems to suggest we can “awake the masses” when we all know this will never happen. Less than 10 percent are spiritually even aware, less still those who are open to change. A simple numbers game.

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Maybe you’re hanging around the wrong magicians. Try the DKMU group on FB. We had a couple of people with sigil covered supersoakers with butcher knife bayonettes cleanse a haunted playground the other day. People using media for hypersigls, all kinds of absurd stuff.

What magic needs is a unifying theory, such as Attention/Schema theory. I need to start pushing that more.

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Techno Paganism isn’t anything new its been around since the 90’s you just need to look in the right places and you will find tech pagan crowd lol

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It seems that we do use a lot of technology in our modern magic, both physical machine technology, and digital technology congruent with our dark ages approaches.

Common recognition is a tool to build trust. It’s basic marketing. It’s why large golden arch sigils are effective to evoke a sense of fun and comfort for the hungry, but it’s also why daily sigil meditation is effective to invoke the attributes of an entity. So familiarity breeds a sense of trust, and so does experience.

While printing out a sigil is wonderful and quick, there is also the tactile experience of creating and painting one’s own sigil that will provide a personal and tactile touch even more so than using digital Photoshop or Illustrator to design a pristine and linearly perfect one. Until there is a way to sign a holograph in blood, I’m relegated to the physical paper.

I wonder if a lot of us remain closer to the dark ages with regard to the miracles of digital technology because they still provide a bit of an impersonal barrier between the spiritual and the human.

Some of us are on board using our computerized devices for meditation, like YouTube for binaural beats, shamanic drumming, chakra mantras. Others feel more in tune spiritually using actual drums, didgeridoos, meditation beads, or chanting circles.

We are gradually modernizing into digital technology; now we can find correct pronunciations, timing, and melodies for mantras online; we can save our experiences in online grimoires, and print, edit and cross-reference them at our leisure with pdfs and the cloud. We can instantly photograph flames and smoke when we see our entity appear, and we can splat it all over social media, creating more recognition and de-occultifying the occult.

As the prices on complex audio and studio software go down with the amount of finesse and detail capture on the increase, more of us will be able to share our experiences with a critical audience at the same education level.

As an artist, I have used huge projectors (borrowed) to beam an image onto a surface…so I could save time and paint it onto the surface. Why not purchase the projector? I don’t want one; for the price it wouldn’t get used often enough, it requires electricity, not as helpful in a forest, cave, or bright light. I don’t need batteries for my painting, or my fabric magic circle (that I can order with a few taps online).

Biofeedback machines are effective and astronomically priced, as are many of the photographic machines (x-rays, MRIs, etc). We don’t yet have reasonable access to an EEG machine to absolutely verify if we ARE in a theta brain wave state during our meditations and evocations, let Alone ensure that we ARE experiencing synchronous gamma spikes rather than simply running on our delusions and hallucinations. If they made cellphones with that capability, however…

The use of technology is really about the bottom line: what can we afford, what is most convenient, what are we willing to pay for? Electricity is great…until I cannot access it. When my GPS dies, I’m fucked without a hard copy map, but the stars are marginally useful. Until digital technology gives me free and unlimited access to electricity, I’ll remain partial to the physical world of technology and use digital technology as a backup because I don’t trust it in the same way for the price. Then again, I’m not a millennial.

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Sometimes an old approach stimulates the mind better. Depending on the case (I am in the middle), a magician will be fine that way; another may prefers to know the stimulation’s details and how to get results with a modern method.
However, indeed I’ve read about four robots (sort of) to be placed in the corners or sides of the “cosmic laboratory”, i.e. the temple, with certain colors, sounds and motion; each one symbolizes an element or the corresponding kind of elementals.

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I’ve seen a few examples of combining old rituals with modern tech. Got me thinking of ways to incorporate cymatics into mine once i have space to set up a rig for it.
Will be interesting to see for example some of the dark staot given physical form through that medium.

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Wouldn’t any unifying theory just become its own dogma though, and therefore a trap?

Diverse approaches seem to work, and this forum at least has diverse belief systems being represented, including openly religious paths, by hard-working members who are plainly doing effective magick for their own benefit and that of other people, so enforcing a conformity of a “basic agreed-upon ideal” seems more like religion’s tendency towards thought-policing to me. :thinking:

This forum tends to push some limits on the nature of reality, busting dogma, and so on, I can think of other places with a far more traditionalist slant where more jimmies may be rustled by such an OP, on here we have a de facto shrine to XaTuring, created god of the internet itself, and plenty of people who have incorporated the core idea that belief is a factor in magick, and therefore, that belief can be adjusted according to will - an approach which is the death of dogma, and the birth of individual ascent, IMO. :thumbsup:

As for using technology to enhance magick, can any of you produce something like this idea I had in 2015, maybe? :smiley:

It’s based on a few different sci-fi concepts where aliens were given environments that matched their home planets, and while spirits may perceive time and space in a fundamentally different manner than us they do seem to like vapours., smoke, the moment of alchemical transmutation from one form to another, as gateways, and I think it would be awfully cool. :blush:

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:thinking: For some reason I had a vision of a liquid circuit sigil when I read this.

Water, blood, other fluids would work in theory to create an active physical gate similar to linking a gate to moving body of water like a river.

I think shaped glass would probably work best but copper pipe could work just as well maybe better since its a good conductor. If you could make it safely liquid mercury may make a good gate fluid as well.

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