Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of data which is thrust in your general direction? Emails, texts, facebook and all the rest. Those pesky Youtube adverts, those annoying screens at the Post Office telling you about their latest service, posters, bill boards and all the rest?

I was chatting with a Sister recently and talking to her about a lecture I once attended which was delivered by Ramsey Dukes (Peace Be Upon Him). As part of his presentation Dukes produced two images. One of a modern day ‘data warrior’ some suited chap sitting in front of a bank of monitors providing him with stock exchange data, simultaneously using two telephones. This was contrasted with an image of Ramsey as a young muscular adept, standing alone in a forest glade (and looking pretty buff if I remember correctly). The point that Dukes was making with these images was that, although it looked like the stock broker was up to his neck in information, he was in fact data impoverished when compared to our dashing young sorcerer in the woods.

Streaming vast amounts of data

In a ‘natural’ environment, Dukes argued, when we are seeing, for example trees, there are many more colours in the tree than might be represented on our data warrior’s VDU. Then there is the way that the figure in the woods is receiving information in the form of smell, the complex sounds of the wind  and of the nearby stream. There are the shifting patterns of warmth as the clouds occlude and reveal the sun. The buzzing and movement of insects, the kinesthetic sense of the uneven earth beneath the feet…you get the picture.

My Sister and I were talking about idea in terms of psychogeography, of getting out into the landscape. We were discussing how we make ourselves sensitive through the various techniques of interacting with landscape (some of which I’ve written about HERE). Being silent when we walk is one simple example. It’s often pleasurable to talk as we travel in the landscape but there are undoubtedly times when it’s a good move to shut up, to listen, to be receptive to the place rather than focus on expressing our internal dialogue through conversation.

As we fall silent we no longer need to attend to the narrow bandwidth of the human voice, and, since human interaction is a large part of what are brains are built for, this frees up plenty of processing power in our minds. We can then practice those lovely exercises such as seeing if one can hear five natural sounds (if walking in a rural or parkland environment) or seeing how many other conversations we can perceive (if exploring an urban space).

By becoming more open to outside impressions. Basking in the complex data flow of being, as I was today, beside a huge Cornish waterfall, we can open up not only our dominant senses (of sight and hearing) but we can open to the dark senses – the sense of barometric pressure, the ionisation of the air, even the scientifically measurable but (for most people) exceedingly subtle senses we have of geo-magnetism and of the lunar phase (if you want to know more about the dark senses the classic text is the one HERE).

A couple of days previously I was working with some academics from The University of Exeter. We were having a conversation, via Skype, with some game designers in London. When we’d done the lecturer explained to me how she’d spent almost the whole day in her office, doing on-line meetings. She described how she felt ‘blinkered’. Being tuned into the one channel of communication how she’d forgotten even to eat properly that day (a half munched apple lay on her desk). Here was another example of how we get tuned in to a particular channel (in this case video conferencing) and that actually causes a reduction in the amount of information we receive (remember, food is both fuel and information). Her abandoned apple represented a loss of gustatory data in her day.

Now this isn’t exactly a bad thing. Humans need to be able to focus on a given task and be persistent in their attention. Trance techniques (from drumming to TV) exist as ways to focus us even further into a very narrow band of attention. This is useful for many things including of course many types of magickal work

Thing is that in entering a trance we may loose, at least for a time, our global sensitivity to our environment. We don’t notice the world, and, if we do this too often, selecting only one channel of experience, we slip into information poverty.

What may seem odd then is this idea; that today many of us are actually not overwhelmed by information (like all those emails) but seriously under whelmed by it. And what’s more this relative paucity of information may be the thing that may make us less sensitive to the range of environmental data that’s always around us (whether we are inside or out).

There are practical consequences of this. Wikipedia teaches that after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami:

Anthropologists had initially expected the aboriginal population of the Andaman Islands to be badly affected by the tsunami and even feared the already depopulated Onge tribe could have been wiped out. Of the six native tribes only the Nicobarese, who had converted to Christianity and taken up agriculture in place of their previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and mainland settlers suffered significant losses. Many of the aboriginal tribes evacuated and suffered fewer casualties.

Perhaps in the light of the suggestion above the aboriginal people of the Andaman Islands simply had more data at their disposal and, as a result, were more sensitive to the impending disaster than their neighbours who had abandoned their traditional practices. Unlike many of the victims from elsewhere in the region ‘something’ told the Onge tribe to take to higher ground. I suggest this may have been because they had so much data at their fingertips in the form of a receptive engagement with the environment. They were able to notice subtle clues which, when correlated with cultural memory (of previous tsunamis) or perhaps emerging simply as a gut feelings, got them out of harm’s way.

So if you want to deal with your email backlog successfully, and indeed to work smarter (as they say) the best strategy is probably to go for a walk. To get out into that sea of data that is the landscape, open all the channels and max out on geosphere and biosphere bandwidth. And it may be the case that, if you want to write that article which has been in your brain for several days, you just need to go get some nature and fill up on living information. Then have some nice homecooked food, turn up the tunes and, in just a couple of hours, you can have (what I hope) are 1169 interesting words to share.

JV

Twelfth night. Yule itself and Christmas too have come and gone. Family gatherings have happened, we’ve comforted ourselves in the darkness with rich foods; roasts, figs, chocolate, wine and more.

Now our group turns its attention to the symbolism of Octarine – the colour of magick, the north & midwinter. We gather for these rituals by the hearth of the Covenstead. In the corner of the room the Christmas tree twinkles its little lights. A large reproduction of Atu XV – The Devil, Lord of Misrule and capricious midwinter goat – graces the temple. There are drums and rattles for music (an essential component for our meetings) and the altar glitters with peacock feathers, holly and festive lights.

Breaking open the head

‘The colour of magick that can be described is not the true colour’. Octarine sits outside of our symbolic categorisations; it is beyond what we know and, more directly than the other ray of the chaos star, points towards the ungraspable nature of the Mystery.

We open the temple with the Gnostic Chaosphere Ritual (version 1.8), and pass a cup of ginger wine round the circle, which summons a warming, seasonal glow. The first ritual is the ‘Octarine Pineal Gland Working’. In this practice we install a homunculus in our brains, a miniature visualisation of ourselves, sat in the core of our brains, massaging our pineal bodies. The internal adept gently rubs the gland and from it the octarine secretions are released, flooding through the whole being. This magickal fluid opens us to the transcendental. Causing the brain to unfolds like a flower blooming in the night, unfirling like a receiver to cosmic consciousness.

The Brother leading the ceremony plays the singing bowl and thingshaws, and we sit for a while under the winter stars, bathed in octarine radiance.

In the next rite we conjure ‘The Chalice of Becoming’. Our Sister has drawn water from the sacred spring of St. Aldhelm, and this is poured into a silver cup. Using gestures and sounds at each direction the elements are called. The chalice is carried round the temple as we move to each quarter, the sacred water absorbing the words of power that we speak, quivering in sympathy with the moments we make.

We sit while a singing bowl sounds; meditating on what it is that we need, what we feel the drive to Become. When the meditation is done we each speak our desires aloud into the water, pronouncing our words over liquid so that it absorbs the vibrations of the sound.

We leave the temple and, in the garden, pour the clear (or is it octarine?) fluid onto the cold, dark earth.

Our next ritual is part of an on-going series of workings, delicate political magic and not something I can go into too much detail about at present. As Princess Irulan remarks in Frank Herbert’s Dune ‘A beginning is a very delicate time’. Suffice it to say that ‘the colour that must not be named’ was summoned to create a bridge between our group and the spirit we want to work with. It is perhaps lawful to provide a link to the music used for this rite HERE.

The final ceremony of the meeting concerned the impossibility of containing the Mystery. I’d been enjoying the work of an American fundamentalist preacher and considering how all his spiritual knowledge was refrenced to the King James version of the Bible. Understandable but still strange how we seek to limit, to know, to create certainty, even in our dealings with the Mystery, or God or whatever one wants to name it.

Still skyclad from the previous rite, we pulled the powers of the eight directions into our circle. Asking for illumination from each of the eight colours of magick, from the sabbats and energies  associated with them.

I wanted to call on the power of perhaps one of the earliest spiritual frames of reference, and to this end, had been researching the Yezidi and their key symbol of The Peacock Angel Tawûsê Melek. The Yezidi religion looks very like an ancient paganism of the middle east, wrapped in almost as old wrapper of text and tradition which (arguably) reaches back to the deep time of Göbekli Tepe and Sumer. The lustrous shine of the peacocks tail reminded me of octarine and of course the irridecent transformative stage of alchemy. Then there is the suggestion that the Yezidi (in common with Wiccans and Heathens) hold the north as the most sacred direction of the compass.

We made prayers. These had to be from memory and so for many participants they were those from the Christian tradition, the framework for the sacred that many of us learnt as children.

I then read the words of Tawûsê Melek, as given in the Kitab al-Jilwa, The Book of Revelation:

I lead to the straight path without a revealed book; I direct aright my beloved and my chosen ones by unseen means. All my teachings are easily applicable to all times and all conditions. I punish in another world all who do contrary to my will. Now the sons of Adam do not know the state of things that is to come. For this reason they fall into many errors. The beasts of the earth, the birds of heaven, and the fish of the sea are all under the control of my hands. All treasures and hidden things are known to me; and as I desire, I take them from one and bestow them upon another. I reveal my wonders to those who seek them, and, in due time my miracles to those who receive them from me. But those who are without are my adversaries, hence they oppose me. Nor do they know that such a course is against their own interests, for might, wealth, and riches are in my hand, and I bestow them upon every worthy descendant of Adam. Thus the government of the worlds, the transition of generations, and the changes of their directors are determined by me from the beginning.

Then we sat again in meditation, considering for ourselves the spontaneous, surprising and unlooked for moments in which we had each encountered the Mystery. Moments perhaps arising from ceremony or other spiritual work, but particularly those times where these experiences, of gnosis, of ecstasy, had appeared unbidden. We remember those times when our revelation over-turned our expectations and previous beliefs. The times where the octarine Mystery burst the banks of our paradigm and inundated our reality.

We take a moment to listen for the unstruck sound in the deep midwinter.

Moving from this space. We now open ourselves to the wild delight of Mystery, of the midwinter goat, and dance to the words of our fire-and-brimstone preacher, re-purposed as an invocation to Baphomet HERE. The god who has no myth, the deity without fixed form, the freakish hybrid of unknown possibility – Io Baphomet!

There is food and music and delightful conversation later that night (and another sermon from our favourite pastor, this time testifying about the pineal gland and illumination HERE). The year turns towards the light and, with full bellies, thankful of our riches and curious of the unknown nature of the year ahead, we step into the Mystery.

Yuletide glitz

JV