Some knob gave a talk on magic about a decade ago. I transcribed and edited it for reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-cxBuRU09w
What if reality itself is fundamentally malleable? What if the individual self we cling to so desperately is merely scaffolding for a greater evolutionary leap? These are not abstract philosophical questions but the core implications emerging from twenty years of lived experience at the intersection of counterculture theory, occult practice, and consciousness exploration. Standing before you, a self-described "kid from Govan" turned conduit for paradigm-shattering ideas, the journey reveals a startling truth: the seemingly fantastical claims of figures like Robert Anton Wilson and Aleister Crowley are not metaphorical musings but practical instructions. They are blueprints for hacking reality. When tested with rigorous, albeit unconventional, methodology in the turbulent laboratory of one’s own life – fueled by intentionality, psychoactive catalysts like hashish and DMT, and the potent symbolic language of comic books – these methods demonstrably work. The consequences demand we abandon outdated notions of isolated individuality and embrace a radical multiplicity of being to navigate, infect, and transform the world we inherited.
My entry point was the promise buried in the countercultural canon devoured as a twenty-year-old. Wilson’s claims of extradimensional contact and Crowley’s manuals for summoning intelligence and altering reality seemed, at first glance, like tantalizing science fiction. Yet, a persistent conviction arose: were these authors merely bullshitting, or did their systems hold water? The answer arrived definitively in 1994, not through passive reading but active pilgrimage: a journey to Kathmandu with the explicit, magically-charged intent to encounter the alien. Climbing to the roof garden of the Vajra Hotel, heavily dosed (but rooted in the critical awareness honed by extensive experience with psychoactives—one recognizes the garage as the garage, the 7-Eleven as the 7-11, even when perception is heightened), the entities manifested. They appeared precisely as Terence McKenna had described year earlier, morphing silver "blobs of chrome that think," confirming a principle often overlooked: our expectations and symbolic inventories actively shape the interfaces of non-ordinary reality. This wasn't mere hallucination; it was contact.
These intelligences—or perhaps a higher-dimensional facet of consciousness accessed through the ritual—immediately redefined existence. Displaced from my physical body, a state unexpected with hashish but familiar to DMT voyagers, they offered a cosmic travelogue. Requesting Alpha Centauri, I was instantaneously immersed in its tri-solar reality, moving with flawless astronomical consistency. Their core message, however, transcended planetary tourism: reality is a complex, layered construct designed for ontological development. They articulated a chillingly materialist spirituality: our familiar universe is a "larval breeding ground," a temporal incubator created by timeless, higher-dimensional intelligences existing in a "sea of pure information." Within this structure, the three-dimensional being we experience is merely a single "section" or slice of our actual, temporally elongated self. Imagine the human lifespan as a centipede, stretching from birth to death, writhing through the corridors of experience. We are that centipede, but our consciousness is typically locked onto one segment at a time, the fleeting "now," unable to perceive the totality. Point to your ten-year-old self—it exists, yet remains perpetually elusive. This multidimensional perspective demolishes separation. Just as fingers penetrating a flat plane appear as distinct circles to hypothetical 2D beings, all human consciousnesses are distorted perspectives of the same fundamental "hand," the same underlying process evolving in the fifth dimension—time itself being a crucial dimension within this sea.
This revelation filtered into work, specifically the comic book series The Invisibles, consciously created as a "super sigil." It became an experiential tool to explore why "we feel different," why we perpetually sense truths withheld. Crafting narratives intended to explore control, duality ("us" versus "them"), and reality manipulation provided terrifying confirmation of magic’s efficacy. When a character endured torturous trials—burst lungs, captivity—precisely those physical traumas manifested in my own body months later. Desire sigils aimed at replicating a fictional character's romantic partner summoned uncannily similar women, albeit lacking connection, highlighting magic’s raw power but demanding responsible navigation beyond base urges. Similarly, the iconic traits I bestowed upon characters (bald head, leather jacket) defied cultural trends and manifested influence. The comic proved cave art's ancient lesson; depicting reality reshapes it. Symbols—whether bison on a wall, corporate logos like Coca-Cola's sigil, or comic book narratives—are words within an operating system. Magic is the programming language for reality's quantum substrate. And the simplest hack? Sigilization.
The technique, elegant and verifiable, demands action, not passive agreement. Define a desire (simple and plausible; wish for lottery wins, but buy the ticket). Remove vowels from the phrase, discard repeated consonants. Assemble the remaining letters into a unique, abstract glyph—an image imbued solely with your focused intent. This sigil bypasses the analytical mind, planting the desire directly into the subconscious "operating system." Verify the results scientifically: duplication by others, cross-comparison with millennia of documented experiences from Tibetan mystics to Mesopotamian shamans, and the tangible shifts in your own timeline. This accessible power liberates us from the perceived impotence sold by dominant narratives.
Dominant narratives, however, are crucially flawed. We exist within a system exhibiting profound pathology, stemming from a critical miscalculation: the exaltation of the individual self. The 20th century, likely humanity's collective Basic Perinatal Matrix 3 experience (as per Stanislav Grof's transpersonal psychology of birth trauma mapped onto society), was our species' dark night of the soul—Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima manifesting Grof’s themes of constriction, mechanized torture, and toxic control reminiscent of a traumatic birth canal. We endured the very images of hell to inoculate ourselves. We emerged, not into final apocalypse or rapture, but into the dawn of BPM 4—potential, but scarred and carrying obsolete scaffolding: the bounded sovereign "I."
Inspired by Kafka, Orwell, and The Prisoner, we were sold individuality as the apex achievement. This construct, however, born from the neurological fusion described in Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory, creates the very divisions that cripple us. "I" necessitates "not-I." It breeds perpetual self-questioning, neurosis, and on the societal scale, borders, resource wars, and institutionalized hatred. Why hate the police? We created them! We, the "smart," "cool," middle-class fearful, outsourced violence to "lunkheads," demanding they protect "us" from the constructed "other," from the supposedly inherent darkness over there. Yet, the darkness is within. Denial is fatal. The archetype of the serial killer (our cultural obsession), the destructive impulses we all suppress—these cannot be externalized. We manufacture alienation, embodied in pathologies like Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), a state without context in our current paradigm. The "fragmented" mind of MPD might not be illness, but the nascent form of "Personality 2000": the ability to consciously house multiplicities.
Therefore, the transition to the 21st century requires shedding the individualist shell. The scaffolding served its purpose: building coherence out of primal chaos. Now it confines. By abandoning the rigid "I" and embracing intentional multiplicity—acknowledging the "hip-hop fan," the "Ballet lover," the "potential Manson," the "James Bond," all coexisting within—we expand. We become plex organisms capable of rapid adaptation and dissolving false boundaries. We stop fighting projections of our own darkness reflected in "enemies" and instead integrate them. This polyphonic self defies control mechanisms reliant on predictable, isolated identities. Blending personal experiences with Grof's model, the 20th-century horrors constituted humanity's birth trauma, a collective BPM 3. We are now in BPM 4: exhausted by the struggle but screamingly young. The task isn't retreat into counterculture ghettos replaying dead raves but forging nets, networks, and new operating principles.
This necessitates operating like the rogue protein in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). The CJD prion is undetectable to the host immune system; it integrates seamlessly, incubating quietly until it fundamentally rewrites and destroys the system from within. Our "culture"—corporate hegemony, panopticon surveillance (“cameras everywhere, you say? Fine, I’ll perform”), engineered alienation—is hungry for the raw energy, the perceived "secrets," of the margins. Feed it, not with opposition, but with the undigestable multi-sigil of expansive identity, practical magic, and the quiet erosion of the "self vs. other" paradigm. Infect them with the irrefutable, lived results of sigil magic. Infect them with the understanding that "money" is a consensual hallucination binding the middling classes. Infect them with the ecstatic, terrifying perspective of multidimensional consciousness filtered through personal narrative and artistic expression in The Invisibles. Don’t convince them; embody the mutation they can become. We do not seek to destroy the host; we seek to trigger its rebirth into our networked, multiplexed reality.
The evidence, tested over two decades, is irrefutable: magic functions as a tangible technology. The old operating system—dualism, individualism, separation from nature (a fallacy; atom bombs are nature manifested through us)—is obsolete. It breeds only neurosis and war. We are the unexpected 21st-century minds arriving without context. Our responsibility is to build that context by practicing the forbidden arts abandoned since the Industrial Revolution's occultation. Read Carroll, Hine, Crowley (without the arcane baggage), Wilson. Perform the sigil. Embrace the multiplicity. Dissolve the internal borders that create external ones. Become the complex, conscious embodiment of the larval universe reaching maturity. Let us stop talking about the counterculture, let us do the counter-technology. Let us prove, through direct action within the system's nervous system, that reality yields to imagination and will, and that the only "I" left standing is the interconnected plexus of all that is. The other is always a future aspect of the self. Let us meet them there. The time for scaffolding is over; the building calls.