Why Shadow Work Fails

I have posted multiple articles here on Augoeides discussing errors in the psychoanalytic model that have been revealed by modern neuroscience research. It should come as no surprise that a model of the mind from a century ago would turn out to be incorrect and superceded by newer and better science. Nonetheless, in the magical community a lot of writing about psychology seems to be stuck at some point around the 1920's. This is especially true of Thelema, in which the use of Jungian psychology is practically a cliche. Some examples of this are David Shoemaker's Living Thelema, which devotes a full third of the book to Jungian principles. As a personal example, at the last NOTOCON I attended a presentation on alchemy that sounded fascinating from the description of the talk, but basically turned out to be a walk-through of Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, which I read back in college when working on my psychology degree. It was published in 1944.

One area in which I will give Carl Jung credit is that he took Freud's psychoanalytic model about as far as anyone ever could. The problem is that the Jungian version preserves all of Freud's original errors and tries to build its foundation on top of them. I should point out that prior to neuroscience findings on the nature of memory, I considered myself an enthusiastic Jungian. This thesis that I wrote back in 1991 considers the idea of using chaos theory to model Jungian personality structures in order to generate a functional and predictive model of the mind. The central idea is a logical conclusion that can be drawn from the self-similar nature of Jungian complexes, but falls apart when we realize that the Jungian complex does not exist in any real sense. It is an abstraction that rests on the incorrect notion of conflating the brain's conditioning and cognitive systems.

According to the Jungian model, the mind consists of complexes all the way down. A complex is defined as collection of impressions, memories, ideas, and so forth linked together into a unified structure according to similar feeling-tone. Feeling-tone is a term that describes the subjective experience of an emotion connected with an impression, memory, or idea. Jung considered the Freudian ego as a sort of "master complex" united by the feeling-tone of self-identification. In other words, all of the impressions, memories, and ideas surrounding our sense of self combine to create the sense of self-awareness and subjective consciousness. This implies that complexes gain self-awareness once they reach a critical mass of elements, and that implication is a key aspect of the Jungian model not found in Freud or Adler or any of the other psychoanalytic systems that preceded it. In Jungian psychology, the actions of non-ego (and therefore unconscious) complexes play an important role in producing mental illness symptoms.

What we actually know now from brain research is that the phenomena Jung attributed to the actions of unconscious, autonomous complexes actually arises in the conditioning system, a portion of the brain that is present in virtually all animals, from human beings to the Aplysia sea slug that has only twenty thousand total neurons. This system is in many ways a marvel of evolution in terms of simplicity and efficiency. It runs on a small rule set and implements "conditioning loops" that prompt the repetition of behaviors that have been reinforced and the avoidance of behaviors that have been punished or resulted in negative reinforcement. It essentially builds up a "database" of these behaviors, their results, and the situation in which they occurred. It does not think, it does not reason, and it does not "want" anything. None of its processing remotely resembles conscious cognition, and in fact that processing is done by a completely different part of the brain from that employed by the thinking and feeling systems.

Psychic Ability Versus Intuition

Back in April, Vice posted an article about a recent study in which almost one in five American claimed to have psychic abilities. I actually don't find that number particularly surprising, since the question was about psychic ability in general. Lots of people have experiences that seem psychic, which is why paranormal beliefs exist in the first place. Psychic abilities are "real" in the sense that people keep experiencing them. The debate is over what their actual nature is.

A new survey of 2,000 adults from Talker Research found that 19% of respondents straight-up believe they have psychic abilities, another 71% lean on intuition at least some of the time, and over the past year, the average person logged around 18 moments they’d describe as psychic. Only 11% said they don’t buy into it at all. So what’s actually happening?

Nobody was predicting earthquakes or lottery numbers. The experiences people pointed to were more like: knowing something was off before anyone confirmed it (33%), clocking that someone was lying (28%), or just feeling like it was time to leave a situation (26%). Twenty-five percent had a bad feeling about something before it went awry. Twenty-four percent thought of someone right before that person texted. Psychic or just paying attention? Depends on who you ask.

Adam Dickinson, a former FBI intelligence analyst, didn’t dress it up. “Intuition is your body compressing years of experience and pattern recognition into a clear signal you can feel right now.” The people who sensed dishonesty before it surfaced, or finished someone’s sentence before they got there—they’re reading data. They’ve just been doing it long enough that it no longer feels like work.

The part of the survey that deserves more attention is the anxiety overlap. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they genuinely can’t tell the difference between a real gut feeling and anxiety spiraling. Dickinson’s way of separating the two: get still, get neutral, and notice whether the inner voice feels steady or frantic. “That urgent, demanding tone is usually anxiety trying to control uncertainty,” he said. Not intuition. Just the nervous system doing its thing.

While this is a skeptical take that assumes psychic senses could not possibly exist, otherwise I don't really disagree with most of it. There is a difference between psychic awareness and intuition, but a lot of the time what is happening when you get "a feeling" about something is definitely the latter. Psychic abilities aren't called "paranormal" for nothing, after all.

Cognitive Dissonance?

In the past I have been highly critical of "meltdown stories" involving Enochian magick. The story goes that there is something specific about Enochian that makes it highly dangerous to a person's mental health, and many people allegedly develop mental health problems after working with it. I personally have worked with the system for decades using the methods published in my Mastering Enochian Magick series and never have encountered anything like that, and I can't say that any of my students have either. But I recently heard a bit of information that might suggest something about what could be going on with those narratives.

Magick and mental illness have very little in common. Despite some superficial features - for example, schizophrenic auditory hallucinations versus communicating with spirits - it is not the case that magicians are in some sense working effectively with states of consciousness that might otherwise be pathological. If you spend any time at all with schizophrenic people, it becomes pretty clear that the famous Joseph Cambbell quote, "The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight" is not even remotely accurate. About the only thing psychosis and mysticism have in common is that they both involve altered states of consciousness, and all alterations of consciousness are not the same.

It is also difficult to build causal relationships between mental illness and any sort of practice, spiritual or otherwise, because between a quarter and a third of our population has some form of mental illness. While there are of course mentally ill people in the magical community, I have never seen any valid statistical evidence pointing to the incidence being anywhere near as high as a quarter to a third. If the rates are the same between magical practitioners and the general population, you can't conclude that magick of any sort somehow causes mental illness. This is the main reason I remain skeptical of the alleged Enochian meltdown narrative.

What is true is that people who develop delusions generally develop them in the context of their lives and activities. A person who practices magick and develops paranoid scizophrenia is likely to have delusions about magical ideas, like evil magicians or spirits attacking them. A fundamentalist Christian is likely to have the same delusions about demons. A person who grew up around UFOlogists is likely to have those delusions about aliens. And a person without exposure to any of these alternative communities is probably going to develop them about secret government agencies or law enforcement.

Ancient Wisdom Beats Psychoanalysis

I recently came across this article discussing a recent study on managing anger. The study examined the concept of "venting" to see if it reduced anger effectively. This concept is very much a part of our popular culture, and it goes back to the psychoanalytic model of the mind proposed by Sigmund Freud over a hundred years ago. Freud was not a good scientist, but he was a pretty amazing popularizer.

It is something of a cliche that psychology (and magick, for that matter) tends to latch onto the latest new technology as a metaphor for how the mind works. The recent fascination with computer-like models bears this out today. Before computers it was telephone switchboards, before that it was electricity, and back in Freud's day, psychoanalysis latched onto a model based on something akin to hydraulic pressure. Freud saw emotions as a kind of energy that could be bottled up ("repression") or transformed into socially viable outlets ("sublimation") rather than expressed directly in socially unacceptable ways.

The idea of venting anger comes right out of this schema. Anger is seen as a building up of pressure, like water boiling in a closed pot. "Blowing off steam" in theory reduces this pressure. But in reality, the scientific basis for this has not been supported by studies. Conditioning theory, for example, suggests the opposite, that acting out in anger feels good in the moment but reinforces acting out. This can lead to more suboptimal behavior, not less. But again, studies that directly support this conditioning model are likewise sparse.

So that is what these researchers sought to test, in order to determine how to actually reduce anger. What they found was interesting because it lines up perfectly with recommendations from ancient spiritual practices and does not exactly fit either of the modern models. The most effective methods for curbing anger were found to involve reducing physical arousal - by means of, for example, meditation. That's advice they could have gotten from the Buddhist sangha up the street, and from many other sources including Hinduism and even contemplative Christianity.

The Babble Hypothesis

You might think being acknowledged as a leader has to do with your intelligence or even your natural charisma. But a new study suggests otherwise. According to the study, quantity far outpaces quality when it comes to communication that convinces others that you are leadership material. Research has dubbed the findings the "babble hypothesis" of leadership, since it suggests that the key to being regarded as a leader is to talk a lot, regardless of whether anything you say is useful or even relevant.

If you want to become a leader, start yammering. It doesn’t even necessarily matter what you say. New research shows that groups without a leader can find one if somebody starts talking a lot. This phenomenon, described by the “babble hypothesis” of leadership, depends neither on group member intelligence nor personality. Leaders emerge based on the quantity of speaking, not quality.

Researcher Neil G. MacLaren, lead author of the study published in The Leadership Quarterly, believes his team’s work may improve how groups are organized and how individuals within them are trained and evaluated. “It turns out that early attempts to assess leadership quality were found to be highly confounded with a simple quantity: the amount of time that group members spoke during a discussion,” shared MacLaren, who is a research fellow at Binghamton University.

While we tend to think of leaders as people who share important ideas, leadership may boil down to whoever “babbles” the most. Understanding the connection between how much people speak and how they become perceived as leaders is key to growing our knowledge of group dynamics.

Reading this I can't help but think of what goes on in a lot of occult discussion groups online. People who post a lot and get into a lot of online arguments tend to develop followings, while those of us who avoid much of that often find our work ignored. To be clear, I'm not saying that the more vocal folks have nothing useful to share, but rather than they tend to attract people regardless of whether or not they really do.

So that at least bears pointing out - don't assume that because somebody has a big following their work must necessarily be good. It might be, but if they are also the sort of person who gets into it with everybody on social media and is always posting, they might only have a following because of that. As is usually the case with magick, always do your own experiments so can you know firsthand what works best.

More Support for the Quantum Information Model

I recently came across this article, describing a paper outlining the discovery of scale-invariant fractal patterns within the information dynamics that are believed to give rise to the subjective experience of consciousness. Yeah, that's a mouthful. The ramifications of this study, should it stand up to peer review and all that, are huge for my quantum information model of magick. So far all the latest discoveries related to consciousness have been consistent with the model, and I actually have been a little surprised at how close they seem to line up. I'm pretty sure none of the folks behind this research are familiar with my work, so it's significant that results emerging from the scientific community and results emerging from the study of magick seem to be coming together.

Major breakthroughs in the study of the physics of consciousness—and information dynamics in general—are occurring through the discovery and elucidation of holographic and fractal principles underlying fundamental properties of nature. For instance, in a fractal organization the degree of complexity of a system is scale-free, or invariant under any translation of magnitude. This means that one can “zoom in” or “zoom out” forever and the same degree of complexity will be observed—patterns of patterns reiterate ad infinitum. This has implications for the science of consciousness, as it is often assumed that consciousness emerges in a system once it reaches a significant threshold of complexity and integration. Yet, if the complexity is scale-invariant, is it not possible that the same information processes engendering consciousness at one observable domain are occurring at smaller scales as well?

The authors of the paper—Dr. Meijer, professor emeritus at the University of Groningen; and Dr. Geesink, a biophysicist who has developed novel EM-shielding technologies and led projects on polymer development and mineral nanotechnology DSM-research —have been performing ground-breaking work in biophysics research that is answering some of the most difficult outstanding questions in biology and other major scientific fields. From a meta-analysis of more than 500 biomedical publications relating to electromagnetic (EM) radiation and interaction with the biological system, Geesink and Meijer identified a novel and specific pattern of coherent EM frequencies that have statistically significant bio-resonances. With the identification of specific EM frequency domains that have significant effects within the inter- and intra-cellular system, the researchers were able to correlate their data with known wave resonances of nucleotides in aqueous solution, proteins and enzymes, as well as sound-induced vibrations evoked in bio-polymers and cellular membranes.

The research describes in detail the interplay of light and sound within the biological system—how photonic, phononic, and solitonic waves are instrumental and integral in maintaining and directing coherence and order of the inter- and intra-cellular system in development and information processing. Solitonic oscillations in large bio-molecules can result in quantum coherence, known as Fröhlich condensation, which Meijer and Geesink have explained can create quantum geometric wave patterns that guide biomolecules and cells much like the pilot-wave structure of Bohmian mechanics. Showing how the living system, and the information processes underlying life consciousness reside at a much deeper, intrinsic level of the universe.

No Internal Monologue is a Thing

Over the years you may have noticed that I don't have a lot of patience with arguments or ideas that require consciousness to be based on or constrained by language. Some of that has to do with experiences from the cognitive science of the early 1990's that I felt gave way too much credence to "symbolic artificial intelligence." That mostly consisted of linguists arguing that if only you could get the word and symbol relationships right in your AI computer program, it would be the same thing as consciousness. I knew it was nonsense from the start, and it never really did work. As it turns out, a lot of time and money was expended on that particular doomed idea, when we probably should have started working on machine learning ten to twenty years before it became the focus of AI research.

While that story in and of itself isn't necessarily relevant to practicing and/or learning magick, how I knew it was nonsense from the start probably is. I don't think in words. I never have. Or at the very least, I don't think exclusively in words. I don't really have any sort of "inner monologue" that guides my thinking unless I deliberately create one - which, for example, is how I write fiction. I guess that a person with an internal monologue experiences the world kind of like how I experience writing a book. The difference is that for me, it requires some discipline to keep my thoughts running that way. Otherwise my focus expands and my thoughts turn back into - well, thoughts. They're kind of like a combination of images, abstract relationships, dynamic unfolding processes, and memories.

When I remember things I don't "hear" a description of the memory in my mind. I literally re-experience it, but without the same intensity of it actually happening. I can take "the experience" of that memory like an object and relate it dynamically to other memories, ideas, concepts, philosophical principles, and pretty much anything else that I can experience internally or externally - up to and including the sensory information I am processing in the moment. I talk about individual differences between magical practitioners a lot, because there are a lot of them, and while I don't have a set of experimental data to draw from in this respect, my guess is that whether you have an internal monologue or you don't likely makes a difference in how magick will work for you.

The Power of Luck

Why practice magick at all? Some of us, like me, have been fascinated by it from a young age. For most people, though, it remains a niche interest that they just find weird - if they even understand what it is.

The truth is that there's a really compelling reason to practice that has to do with the power and influence of luck in our society and for that matter the rest of the world. Vox has an article up that talks about just how pervasive luck really is, and how much it has to do with how our lives really turn out.

These recent controversies reminded me of the fuss around a book that came out a few years ago: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, by economist Robert Frank. (Vox’s Sean Illing interviewed Frank in 2016.)

It argued that luck plays a large role in every human success and failure, which ought to be a rather banal and uncontroversial point, but the reaction of many commentators was gobsmacked outrage. On Fox Business, Stuart Varney sputtered at Frank: “Do you know how insulting that was, when I read that?”

It’s not difficult to see why many people take offense when reminded of their luck, especially those who have received the most. Allowing for luck can dent our self-conception. It can diminish our sense of control. It opens up all kinds of uncomfortable questions about obligations to other, less fortunate people.

Nonetheless, this is a battle that cannot be bypassed. There can be no ceasefire. Individually, coming to terms with luck is the secular equivalent of religious awakening, the first step in building any coherent universalist moral perspective. Socially, acknowledging the role of luck lays a moral foundation for humane economic, housing, and carceral policy.

Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves of luck, and of the gratitude and obligations it entails, against inevitable resistance.

Read the whole article - it's quite good, and makes a point that a lot of people, particularly those who happen to be conventionally successful, don't like to admit.

Yoga. Meditation, and "Ego Inflation"

The occult community tends to be a little behind the times with respect to modern psychology. As I've covered here before, the psychoanalytic model of cognition is still something that some occult traditions work with, or at the very least a model on which some esoteric ideas are based. The trouble is that the psychoanalytic model doesn't work. Not only has it been shown to be ineffective under controlled conditions, it is mostly rendered meaningless by what we now understand about memory and so forth.

One psychoanalytic concept that has a lot of staying power in occultism is the idea of "ego inflation." After all, who hasn't seen idiots going on and on about how awesome and powerful they are, especially on the Internet? And one of the ideas is that, in theory, spiritual practices are supposed to prevent this. The problem is when people don't really understand how egotism works, or where it comes from - usually because they accept one or more of the many incorrect assumptions that are endemic to the psychoanalytic model.

Today's story is a perfect example. Two Australian studies claim to show that practicing yoga or meditation leads to "ego inflation." This is an interesting area to look into, but it seems to me that both studies have significant problems. The biggest is that it appears the researchers have assumed that high self-esteem is the same thing as an "inflated ego." On the other hand, I don't think this is true at all. While it is possible to evaluate egotism from a behavioral perspective, treating "the ego" as a "thing" that gets bigger or smaller has almost nothing to do with how cognition really works.

In the paper, published online by University of Southampton and due to be published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers note that Buddhism’s teachings that a meditation practice helps overcome the ego conflicts with US psychologist William James’s argument that practicing any skill breeds a sense of self-enhancement (the psychological term for inflated self-regard.) There was already a fair bit of evidence supporting William James’s theory, broadly speaking, but a team of researchers from University Mannheim in Germany decided to test it specifically in the context of yoga and meditation.

As a point, yoga as currently practiced in Western countries does no such thing. It's not really even Buddhist. It's (sort of) Hindu, and the spiritual goals of Hinduism are different than those of Buddhism. Furthermore, modern yoga is not even a traditional Indian spiritual practice. It is a synthesis of poses illustrated in Hindu scriptures combined with European calisthenics that was really only assembled into a system in the 1960's. Yoga from before that time was very different than what we have today. Yoga was practiced during meditation, which is maybe where the authors' confusion comes from, but meditation is a discipline in its own right that was performed in addition to holding the poses for long periods of time.

Regarding Confidence

So not Monday. Again. "Magick Tuesday" seems to be turning into a thing as of late. I have another project that I've been spending time on here at Augoeides that I think you all will like, but I'm not announcing it just yet. That may mean my Monday post will be delayed for a few more weeks, but such is life. There are only so many hours in the day, right?

One of the original assumptions put forth by chaos magicians is that belief powers magick. There are a lot of reasons to think that this isn't true, and it probably arose from the Christian idea of "faith" accomplishing all things. But what is true is that doubt will wreck your magick pretty quickly. You might read that and wonder what the difference is, since belief and doubt are basically opposites. The difference is this - once you believe in what you're doing, you can't "believe more." That is, once you have banished all doubt, you're as coherent as you're going to get. This means that a better way to think about the "belief" idea is to treat doubt as a kind of resistance that you overcome with successful practice.

An important related point is that psychoanalytic models of magick - like the "psychic censor" model found in early chaos magick - are nonsense not just because they are psychological and magick is bigger than psychology, but because psychoanalysis itself is a very, very inaccurate model of cognition. That's why in controlled experiments it performs no better than "sham therapy." There is no "unconscious mind." The brain does some unconscious processing, mostly in the form of running autonomic systems and conditioning loops, but that's all there is. No "repression mechanism," no "psychic sensor," no "unconscious self" that has its own agenda.

A more accurate model of cognition treats it as the interaction of three distinct systems - thinking, feeling, and conditioning. The thinking system is also called the declarative mind. If I ask "what are you thinking about?" your answer will be based on what is going on in your thinking system. The feeling system produces emotions. If I ask "how are you feeling?" your answer will be based on what is going on in your feeling system. Those two systems basically represent "the mind" as we usually understand it.

The mind is actually quite flat. It's not the tip of some giant iceberg of "repressed material" and it's the only mind you have. For example, Freud's whole model of trauma is fundamentally wrong. If you look at actual patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, you find that the problem isn't that the trauma is "repressed" - i.e. the patient is unaware of the trauma and can't consciously think about it. The problem is usually that they can't stop thinking about it, which is why it causes distress in the first place.

Apophenia, Pareidolia, and Paranormal Beliefs

I talk about apophenia and pareidolia a lot here on Augoeides when evaluating claims of the paranormal. The two concepts are important because while legitimately paranormal events do happen, mistaking normal events for paranormal ones is far more common. You know, because if paranormal events were commonplace, they wouldn't be "paranormal" at all in any meaningful sense. Pareidolia refers to the natural human tendency to perceive random or semi-random stimuli as clear images, like when people see the face of Jesus on a piece of toast. Aphophenia describes the process by which our minds create and assign meaning to random or semi-random events. These two phenomena are responsible for most of the cases out there where normal events are mistaken for paranormal ones. In fact, a new study conducted by Tapani Riekki at the University of Helsinki in Finland has found that people who believe in the paranormal tend to have a higher capacity for both of these phenomena.

Riekki recently asked sceptics and believers to view simple animations of moving shapes, while lying in a brain scanner. He found paranormal believers were more likely to see some kind of intention behind the movements – as if the shapes were playing a game of “tag”, say – and this was reflected in greater brain activity in the regions normally associated with “theory of mind” and understanding others’ motives. Riekki has also found that people who believe in the supernatural are more likely to see hidden faces in everyday photos – a finding confirmed by another team at the University of Amsterdam, who showed that paranormal believers are more likely to imagine that they had seen a walking figure in random light displays.

Added to this, Riekki has found that believers may have weaker cognitive “inhibition”, compared to sceptics. That’s the skill that allows you to quash unwanted thoughts, so perhaps we are all spooked by strange coincidences and patterns from time to time, but sceptics are better at pushing them aside. Riekki gives the example of someone who is thinking about their mother, only for her to call two minutes later. “Is it just that sceptics can laugh and say it is just coincidence, and then think of something else?” he wonders. Significantly, another paper reported that paranormal believers also tend to have greater confidence in their decisions, even when they are based on ambiguous information. So once they have latched onto the belief, you might be less likely to let it go.

Even so, most researchers agree that sceptics shouldn’t be too critical of people who harbour these beliefs. After all, one study has found that various superstitions can boost your performance in a range of skills. In one trial, bringing their favourite lucky charm into a memory test significantly improved subjects’ recall, since it seemed to increase their confidence in their own abilities. Another experiment tested the subjects’ golf putting ability. Telling them that they were using a “lucky” ball meant they were more likely to score than those simply using any old ball. Even something as simple as saying “break a leg” or “I’ll keep my fingers for you” improved the participants’ motor dexterity and their ability to solve anagrams.

The fundamental problem that I have with the linked article is that to my way of thinking, it asks the wrong questions. It really should not be difficult at all to see that paranormal believers are believer because of their own direct experiences with what they consider paranormal events. Riekki's research entirely supports this notion - a person who mistakenly identifies more normal events as paranormal is pretty much by definition going to experience more "paranormal" events. From my perspective as a magician, the real question should be how we can train our minds to discern genuine paranormal events from misidentified ones. The article doesn't even touch on that, because it assumes at the outset that all paranormal experiences are the result of misinterpretation - since OBVIOUSLY nothing paranormal really exists. Of course, we practicing magicians beg to differ.

Free Will Truthers and Magick

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, the "Free Will Truthers" have been at it again. Now I just made that term up, but it seems appropriate for those psychologists and neuroscientists who are busy trying to prove that their idea of "free will" does not exist. As a magician, I obviously think the whole idea is ridiculous. If you have no conscious will at all, the very idea of practicing magick doesn't make sense. At the same time, the idea that our conscious wills are entirely free, at every moment, regardless of what we are doing, is also probably wrong.

To be clear, the formal "free will" debate is to a large degree over a philosophical question rather than a scientific one, since the definition of "free will" can refer to many things. Obviously, human beings can learn, so we're not talking about free will as opposed to absolute determinism. What psychologists and neuroscientists are trying to tease out with these studies is to what degree the mind as we experience it directs the body. And even that Cartesian breakdown isn't really correct. It's pretty clear at this point that the mind and body are not separate, but rather components of what we perceive as a unified human experience.

So really, the free will truthers are not necessarily trying to argue that human behavior is constrained in certain ways, but rather how much of our behavior is really motivated by "the unconscious." In a way, they're a little like the Freudians from a hundred years ago, arguing that our conscious perception of the world is merely the tip of a metaphorical unconscious iceberg. So that's not the same thing as what philosophers mean by "free will" at all, and that's not what I'm talking about in this article. When I use the term "free will," what I really mean is a sort of "unconscious will" versus "conscious will" as we generally experience it.

At any rate, the original "free will" observations came from studies that seemed to show that brain scans could predict the decision a person was going to make before said persons were conscious of having made them. As I have previously mentioned, these studies were undertaken around the same time as Daryl Bem's presentiment studies were going on. Using a similar technique, Bem seemed to have proved the existence of precognition, showing that subjects seemed to react to emotionally charged images before the images were actually displayed.

Magick and Mental Illness

So this is a "Magick Tuesday" post. Yesterday evening I was at a writing event promoting my fiction, and didn't wind up with enough time to finish writing this up.

Lately there's been some discussion here on Augoeides regarding magick and mental illness. People who think occultism is evil like to throw around ideas like magicians who mess up developing severe mental illness, or wind up in abject poverty, or both. Back in 2007, I posted this article on the topic, which discusses my statistical approach to evaluating claims like those.

These days, fundamentalist Christians - particularly those of the "Green Gospel" persuasion (or heresy, really) - particularly have trouble with the idea that an occultist could ever be financially successful. After all, they believe that material success means God favors you, but they also believe that anything occult is sinful. So a financially successful occultist is a threat to their worldview that needs to be dealt with.

Some of them still buy into the "ritual abuse" nonsense that Satan is blessing occultists when they do things that are "evil enough," basically a Manichean inversion of the Green Gospel itself. But when occultists like me explain that magick just doesn't work like that, again, it's a threat. In fact, it's the Green Gospel that is messed up. There's nowhere in the New Testament where Jesus says that the rich are blessed and the poor are forsaken. In fact, Jesus says the exact opposite in The Sermon On The Mount.

Aleister Crowley gets brought up in this context a lot as an occultist who died "broke and insane," but a lot of the basis for that comes from John Symonds' tabloid biography The Great Beast. This is very inaccurate account of Crowley's life that accepted every claim about that made it into the press as true, regardless of how outlandish it sounded. Crowley was not seriously mentally ill in his old age - read The Book of Thoth, which was written towards the end of his life. It's dense like most of Crowley's writing, but it's lucid, comprehensive, complex, and deep. It is not the work of a "crazy person."

And Crowley was relatively poor at the end of his life, but for an entirely obvious and non-mysterious reason. By that time Crowley had spent his entire family fortune self-publishing his occult works. Back then book production was extremely expensive because it was still done mostly by hand, and works like The Equinox never made much if any money. Had Crowley lived in the time of CreateSpace, I imagine he probably would have died a wealthy man.

Fundamentalists Versus Pornography

Nope, nope, and nope

It should come as no surprise that fundamentalist Christians are opposed to pornography. Unlike LGBT issues, which Jesus did not mention at all, Matthew 5:28 is pretty clear: "But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Technically, "adultery" only applies to those who are married, so it might not be sinful for a single man to view pornography of a single woman, but that would be seriously splitting hairs.

Even though I personally find such repressive religious worldviews kind of silly, in the end there's nothing wrong with practicing your religious beliefs as you see fit. It only becomes a issue when you try to use your religious beliefs to restrict the lives of others who don't share those beliefs. But basically, the problem is that a lot of fundamentalists are seriously bummed out that non-fundamentalists can look at whatever they want.

The fundamentalist establishment decided that the only solution to this problem was to ban pornography for everyone, and in order to do that they needed to show that it was somehow objectively harmful. First they tried "think of the children!" initiatives like the Child Online Protection Act, but those failed. So more recently, they have been pushing the concept of "porn addiction" - which, as this article from Salon points out, probably doesn't exist.

“You see, your brain comes equipped with something called a ‘reward pathway.’ Its job is to motivate you to do things that keep you and your genes alive — things like eating or having sex to produce babies,” the anti-porn site Fight the New Drug argues. “The way it rewards you is by releasing dopamine into your brain, because dopamine makes you feel good.”

The notion that feeling good is suspect should be a reader’s first clue that this site is dealing more in conservative Christian propaganda than science, but I reached out to an expert, Dr. Nicole Prause, for a response to this argument. Prause, a scientist who started the research firm Liberos, has done research that turned up no real evidence for porn addiction.

“Sex films are rewarding,” Prause explained over email, “and there is greater activity in dopamine associated with learning rewards (not pleasure) when people view sex films. However, the same could be said for watching puppies play, and we do not call puppies addictive,” she added.

Mental Illness Versus Spirit Possession

In some of my previous posts, I've pointed out that the Roman Catholic Church has strict guidelines for performing exorcisms. Before a paranormal cause can even be considered, all normal causes such as mental illness must be ruled out. So how do they do they do that, since priests are not necessarily experts on mental health? That question was answered by this recent article from the Washington Post. It turns out the answer is fairly prosaic - they work with psychiatrists.

What's not so prosaic, though, is that the author of the article, psychiatrist Richard Gallagher, has seen a handful of cases that defy explanation and seem to point to some sort of paranormal agency. On that basis, he concludes that possession is a rare phenomenon, but it does exist. He probably would be the person to ask, too. In more than twenty years working with the church, he has probably reviewed more potential cases than almost anyone else.

For the past two-and-a-half decades and over several hundred consultations, I’ve helped clergy from multiple denominations and faiths to filter episodes of mental illness — which represent the overwhelming majority of cases — from, literally, the devil’s work. It’s an unlikely role for an academic physician, but I don’t see these two aspects of my career in conflict. The same habits that shape what I do as a professor and psychiatrist — open-mindedness, respect for evidence and compassion for suffering people — led me to aid in the work of discerning attacks by what I believe are evil spirits and, just as critically, differentiating these extremely rare events from medical conditions.

Is it possible to be a sophisticated psychiatrist and believe that evil spirits are, however seldom, assailing humans? Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, because of their frequent contact with patients who are deluded about demons, their general skepticism of the supernatural, and their commitment to employ only standard, peer-reviewed treatments that do not potentially mislead (a definite risk) or harm vulnerable patients. But careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.

For the most part I agree with Gallagher based on my own experiences, though I do think that the church's theology is overly simplistic. Every spirit in the universe is not either a "demon" in league with Satan or an "angel" in league with God. The real world is far less Manichean than that. In my experience there are as many classes of spirits as there are people - though I expect the sort of spirit that would take over a person's body without their consent and not give it up probably could reasonably described as "evil," or at the very least, harmful and dangerous.

Free Will, Presentiment, and an fMRI Bug

Over the course of the last decade, a number of neuroscientists have come to the conclusion that "free will" is in fact an illusion, and that all human behavior is fundamentally deterministic. As evidence, they cite studies showing that brain scans can predict the decisions individuals make moments before those individuals become aware of their decisions. They have even developed a model built around this notion, called passive frame theory. According to this model, consciousness does not make decisions, but simply observes the results of autonomous processes.

But there's a big problem with this model and the studies on which it is based. Other studies have identified a phenomenon called presentiment, which appears to show that the brains of subjects who are randomly shown photographs that are either neutral or designed to provoke strong emotional responses react to each photograph a moment before it is displayed. This may not be evidence of some sort of psychic awareness, but it does call the studies on which passive frame is built into question.

Simply, you can't conclude that a free choice has not occurred if the brain can somehow perceive future information. Likewise, if a problem with the scanner is making it look like the brain can react to the future when it really cannot, the same issue is probably affecting the free will studies. When confronted with the presentiment results, most skeptics will immediately jump to the conclusion that something must be wrong with the scanner. But the free will studies have not received the same scrutiny.

Normally I find skeptics far too dismissive of possible paranormal results, but based on some recent findings I'm going to agree with them this time around, believe it or not. A recent review of fMRI data from the last fifteen years has turned up a bug in the software that runs the machines, and those bugs could easily have produced data collection errors in both the free will and the presentiment studies.

This is especially true because both sets of studies rely on tracking neural firing at a very high resolution, where any inaccuracy could significantly skew the results. Generally speaking, all it would take is a shift of a tenth of a second or so in the scans to produce results for both studies that conform to common-sense intuition. That is, they would show that the conscious mind is making decisions as they happen, and that it is not seeing into the future.

Satanists Confront "Satanic Ritual Abuse"

These aren't real occultists, though I've heard that the unmasked guy in the middle there is a Scientologist

So what happens when you hold a conference for people who believe themselves to be victims of a Satanic conspiracy and the Satanists actually show up? And then, not only do these Satanists deny having anything to do with this alleged conspiracy, but they present solid scientific evidence supporting their contention that the real abusers are the therapists who made these folks believe in a Satanic conspiracy to begin with.

It sounds like the plot of a movie, a sort of anti-"God's Not Dead" that would point out how ridiculous and hypocritical the fundamentalists still pushing "Satanic Ritual Abuse" really are. But it's not anything like that - it really happened, thanks once more to the solid activist work of The Satanic Temple. There are therapists out there who either still believe this nonsense is real, or are cynically unwilling to give up the reliable income stream of treating people for something that doesn't exist with techniques that don't work and never have.

Who goes to an event like this?

Some people believe they have suffered abuse they cannot remember, have alternate personalities of which they are unaware, or have even committed crimes they cannot recall, all because of sadistic rituals inflicted on them as a form of mind control. Who do they think is responsible for this psychological abuse? The usual suspects include unnamed “cults,” the CIA, and an alleged conspiracy of organized criminal Satanists.

These techniques of mind control are believed to be so insidious that conference attendees were apparently forbidden from touching their faces, for fear that any subtle hand gesture could be a cue that triggers a victim’s subliminal programming.

And then actual Satanists showed up?

They did. Amidst all this paranoia, Satanists actually had infiltrated the conference, and they recently went public with the reason why. In a twist worthy of a bad M. Night Shyamalan film, the Satanists claim that they are the ones exposing a dangerous cabal and that it is the conference organizers who are abusing their patients.

Who are these Satanists?

The Grey Faction of The Satanic Temple (TST). TST are atheists, and they do not believe in the supernatural. But they insist that they are an actual religion because they are a community with a shared body of symbols, rituals, and ethics. The group’s first tenet is to “act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.”

The Grey Faction is a division of TST that seeks to raise awareness about medical professionals who continue to promote conspiracy theories about Satanism. The Grey Faction protested a similar conference in April.

More on Linguistics and Magick

So my comments about linguistics in my article on Qabalah have prompted a larger discussion on Facebook. I suppose it's to be expected; I did slip a hyperbolic statement in there with my comment "linguistics as a discipline is not only overrated by magical practitioners, but furthermore has practically nothing to do with magick as it is commonly practiced."

That statement clearly is not literally true, as I would guess the majority of practitioners probably do make use of at least a few linguistic models and concepts in their practice. I want to be clear that in no way was I telling anyone to stop doing that. My first rule, above all else, is that if it works it works. As it says in The Book of the Law, success is your proof. I do think, though, that if those models and concepts are held up as essential to effective magical practice, it fails to take into account real differences in cognition among the human population.

I suppose, then, that this is the "Linguistics is Overrated" post I mentioned wanting to write for years, or at least part of it. The entire conversation is much longer and more involved than anything I can do justice to in a format that anyone would be willing to read, as like the science of cognition itself, it touches on many different disciplines. But I'll do my best to be concise.

When I was a kid I read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and was absolutely stunned that anyone could believe the idea behind "Newspeak" - that by eliminating words from the language, the Inner Party could control people's thoughts. I just figured it had to be satire, Orwell commenting on how stupid the leaders of the Party really were. Because, obviously, language is how you talk to other people, not how you think. It took me years to realize that there are people in the world who think like that, and after that I no longer knew whether Orwell meant the concept to be satire or if he found it plausible.

I imagine verbal thinkers are the exact same way, wondering how somebody could possibly think without using words or symbols. I've been told by more such people than I care to recount that obviously I must think in language and my direct perception of my thoughts has to be wrong - though how they could possibly know, I have no idea. My guess is that they're operating from the same "generalizing from self" fallacy that I fell into when reading Orwell.

Now I would normally just chalk all this up to individual differences and leave it alone, except that in my opinion generalizing a linguistic model of magick can create more problems than it solves.

Pornography = Occultism?

Many fundamentalist Christians are utterly convinced that the world is full of occultists and magical practitioners. This belief appears to be held without evidence of any sort; any occult author, myself included, will tell you that we wish the world was full of as many occultists as these Christians claim.

Real data from book sales, though, tells a completely different story. Occultism is in fact an incredibly niche interest. A magical title that sells a few thousand copies is effectively a bestseller in the occult market. Compared to the population of even the United States, let alone the world, that's a minuscule percentage.

But this article sheds some light on where the idea that occultists are everywhere comes from. According to Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, pornography and occultism are the same thing. And since most adults have looked at pornography at least a couple of times in their life, most adults are occultists. See what he did there?

"In order to understand the power of pornography, we must ask why Jesus warned us that lust is wrong. This is not because God is embarrassed about sex (see "Solomon, Song of"). God designed human sexuality not to isolate but to connect. Sexuality is intended to bond a wife and a husband and, where conditions are met, to result in newness of life, thus connecting generations," Moore said.

"Pornography disrupts this connection, turning what is meant for intimacy and incarnational love into masturbatory aloneness. Pornography offers the psychic thrill and biological release meant for communion in the context of freedom from connection with another. It cannot keep that promise," he continued.

Because sex is basically for procreation. Got it. No wonder I didn't last as a fundamentalist Christian. I swear, nobody is better at wringing all the joy out of life than fundamentalists - and I mean that in the general sense. Fundamentalists are largely the same everywhere, regardless of what religious tradition they follow. The one thing they can't stand is that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time.

Moore, citing biblical evidence, further explained why pornography is more than just immorality but occultism.

"In the ancient city of Corinth, the warning was given about prostitutes in the pagan temples of the city. The prostitutes were paid for sexual activity, disconnected from covenant. They were part of a cultic system that ascribed almost mystical powers to the orgasm. How is that any different from the pornography industry of today?" he asked.

A Mystery Tradition for the Modern World?

Mystery traditions are as old as human civilization. Nobody has any idea who first came up with the concept of exploiting the human brain's reaction to uncertainty in order to create stronger memory impressions, but it has proved to be an effective method for creating changes in consciousness. I belong to two organizations that make use of this technology, Ordo Templi Orientis and Freemasonry, which are not so much secret societies as societies with secrets.

People sometimes question why members of both organizations keep the details of our initiation rituals secret, and some conspiracy theorists have proposed that it is because said initiations involve everything from criminal actions to communion with the alien lizards who secretly rule the world. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the reason that we keep the initiations secret is simply because that's how they work. When you walk into a situation that is entirely unknown, your brain and mind react differently than they do if you know what's about to happen.

The rituals of Masonry in particular have been published in many places over the years, and if you look hard enough you can probably find them, or at least enough information about them to figure out what's going to happen. But if you ever plan on becoming a Mason, I highly recommend that you don't do this. Without the element of uncertainty, the degrees are far less effective, and if you read ahead you're not putting anything over on the fraternity - all you are doing is cheating yourself out of the experience.

In that context I found this article from Vice especially interesting. It details the operations of a group called The Latitude Society that was essentially a tech startup designed to take advantage of the mystery tradition playbook. Its products were unique experiences based on the structure of the secret societies of old, and in this respect it was a secret society specifically tailored to the Internet age. It eventually failed, but while it was operational it represented a fascinating experiment in group dynamics.