ESOTERICS: THE NEW DOPE
Dancing On the Roof of the Invisible World
By Iona Miller, 8/2008
'Everything that relates, whether closely or more distantly to psychic phenomena and to the action of psychic forces in general should be studied just like any other science. There is nothing miraculous or supernatural in them, nothing that should engender or keep alive superstition. Psychic training rationally and scientifically conducted, can lead to desirable results. That is why the information gained about such training . . . constitutes useful documentary evidence worthy of our attention.' Alexandra David-Neel (1931:xiii)
SAVE-YOURS: Ain't No Pie In the Sky After You Die
If you don't pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.
Iona Miller brings a unique background to the overlapping arenas of parapsychology and intelligence work. Her close contact with experts in the field brings a level of comprehension beyond that of most conspiracy and freedom writers. In addition, her work in metaphysics and psychotherapeutics, as well as art and paramedia ecology, brings a depth and aesthetic mere reporters cannot duplicate. Ms. Miller works with the world's top physicists, transpersonal psychologists, intell officers from several agencies, and a host of "usual suspects." Take a walk on the wild side of ESP(iona)ge and see what that clandestine world has to offer and how it works. Ms. Miller specializes in Do It Yourself (DIY) Mind Control Countermeasures. ionamiller.org ionatopia.50megs.com ionamiller2008.iwarp.com
Introduction
Esoterics! It’s dope. This complex fusion of glamor, power and mystery is the coolest thing on the planet. Esoteric cults are too numerous to count. Those who can't resonate with others start their own eclectic brands.
This exotic subject and way of being is challenging, so deep you can never fully comprehend nor master it. But, any way you look at it, it’s dope. It is, by definition, an altered state of consciousness. What hyperreality ideas are you mainlining? What disinformation is being thought injected into you?
Are we being hopped up, wired and tranquilized with a deluge of trumped up new age philosophy that plays to our enculturated narcissism? Why does esoterics have such a narcotic effect? What are the rewards that trigger our dopamine circuits and maybe even the psychedelic DMT of the pineal gland, or Third Eye? Is the Astral Plane the primordial Virtual Reality?
Why are so many convinced esoterics is the panacea of post-postmodern life when it comes from a pre-technological era? Maybe new age philosophy is an Aquarian Conspiracy cooked up by the spychologists of Tavistock Institute, but Intelligence itself isn’t immune to its own psycho-babble propaganda and unconventional beliefs. The confluence of these two currents is the domain of 'conspirituality.'
Have we been trained to "want to believe" by manipulating the same superstitious mindbody circuits exploited since neolithic shamanism by magicians and spies? Have we just built ourselves a bigger conceptual box with more wiggle room? Is The Secret of quantum mind really 'out of the Schrodinger's Box thinking' or the latest manufactured meme? Can we really manifest a qualitativly higher level of our potential, individually and collectively? Then where are the Homo Lumen?
Why do we get high on esoterics? Why do we fantasize about mind over matter? How can we be so sure, when we take on an inner mission that we are not just tilting at windmills? Why do we get so defensive when our beliefs are challenged? Could it have something to do with our perennial struggles to control destiny, to manifest our will? Critical situations call for critical thinking. With human survival at stake, we need to question our paradigms.
Sex and the Siddhi
Siddhis is the ancient mystic name for psychic phenomena. Mind expansion increases the potential of unusual powers. Personal power (chi, mana, prana) comes from libido, sexual and psychic energy. Sexual techniques (Tantra, Kundalini, Sex Magic, Taoist Alchemy) have been used in the east and west to raise amplitude in libido, to build energy charge. Yet, it is said that cultivating these powers is a distraction from Reality, from Enlightenment.
At the personal level, esoterics is the soft technology of self-development and change at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level. It means initiatory ordeals and challenging confrontations with yourself about the reality of nature and your own nature. To stay out on your personal edge means always being just a little off balance, at home in the chaos, alert to the resonating gaps in awareness.
At the dynamic group level, it is all this and something more. Esoteric caduceus coils wind like an ancient serpent throughout society. It has been a clandestine sociopolitical 5th column force at least since the Renaissance, in Elizabethan times, and certainly since the founding of the Bavarian Illuminati, Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. Many societies have a history of influence peddling as a cover for espionage.
Hitler's occult motivations with the SS are well-documented. Less well-known is that he drew his ideas for an Aryan nation from the Theosophical Bible, The Secret Doctrine. Einstein also derived his most-famous equation from the well-used annotated copy of Madame Blavatsky's tome he always kept on his desk. http://users.aol.com/uniwldarts/uniworld.artisans.guild/einstein.html
Drawing Out the Inner Nature
Perhaps Intelligence knows something we don’t about the weird phenomena and psi-strat they term ‘Esoterics’ with its ‘Wizard’ practitioners. But is it expanding our sense of reality or merely diverting our attention from what should be more compelling matters of existence?
Even intelligence officers will claim everything from being UFO/ET abductees, to Time Travellers, to reincarnations of famous historical figures. They absolutely believe what they are saying and act from it. Watergate bagman and uber-spook E. Howard Hunt became interested in the occult from the historical incident that inspired The Exorcist. A disproportionate number of CIA Case Officers come from the cryptic, ritualistic Skull & Bones secret society.
Wired for Weirdness
Spooks really ARE spooky, even if they often stick to just one area of the paranormal. The nature of spying is looking for the ghost in the machine. They are as much or more fascinated by the Great Unknown than the general public and as likely to consult Edgar Cayce as Jane’s Intelligence Review.
How different is scenario modelling from foretelling the future? Remote Viewing at SRI was financed by CIA during the Cold War to the tune of $13M. With RVers, Precogs, AugCogs and electronic dope, no philosopher's stone has been left unturned in the search for more intelligent intelligence. They quit trying to find it and retooled to invent it.
There are lots of smart people around, but what sets genius apart is its unflagging novel creativity. Genius isn’t something you are, but something you have or occasionally experience as it flows through as unique innovation or insight. The transformation from ordinary to extraordinary, by embodying your own genius, by hyperdimensionally supercharging your field body, is what esoterics is about. Naturally it has its own challenges and inherent rewards. Esoterics changes your subjective point of view to the transpersonal observer self. For those who resonate and are attracted to the subject, the esoteric lure of mystery is as magnetic and compelling as any drug. Esoterics creates its own unique brain cocktail at every stage of the process/goal. Its addicts are as compulsive as any dope fiends, perhaps more so, since they haven’t created their own deprogramming or recovery programs.
We are driven and Mystery is at the heart of that drive, whether it is the esoterics of the occult, esoteric espionage, New Age philosophy, esoteric electronics, or the clandestine Great Game of spooks and kooks. The poison is the cure. Nothing is what it seems. Esoterics is a radically different point of view and level of observation. When you get there, you aren't just "you."
Do It Yourself Countermeasures
Get an overview of the “Big Picture,” the way Reality and the world actually works. This is not the world you think you live in, and perhaps not the one you wish you lived in, but it is time for a Reality Check. There are many threads of historical antecedents that have made our world what it is today. From the dawn of civilization a secretive priesthood has been the power behind the throne.
Among active factions in esoterics are the Illuminati and other western and eastern secret societies which function as behind-the-scenes social engineers of global cultural life. Your lack of belief in such agendas doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Their ability to affect you transcends your personal beliefs because they work through your hard-wired circuits, cradle to grave. The commodification of new age personalities is also manipulated by the cryptocracy.
They create the Romanesque “Spectacle” of distractions to dull your vision – as misdirection so you don’t look behind the curtain. They train you to their behavioral, academic and job market specs. Paradoxically, they may be caught in the esoteric webwork of their own machinations. It is unavoidable. Do It Yourself mind control countermeasures may be your only effective protection against ESPionage, but even your reactions have been accounted for in the grand scheme of things.
Numerous factions, each with their own agenda are trying to hack the global system and hijack your mind. TAKE IT BACK. “Be Your Own Reality Pilot;” “Be Under the Influence of Yourself,” as the sayings go. This is a map of the terrain and a scorecard of the primary players and their plans for dominating the hidden interior and exterior landscape of international politics, power, economics and culture. Make no mistake; they have climbed inside your head.
Arcana
The occult is one of the keys to world events; reality is also defined by politics. Like nature, history is cyclic and can be manipulated. Drug companies are as powerful as banks and oil. Corporate feudalism has replaced democracy as the new elitist rule. Corporations compete with shadowy nation-states and international mafia-style crime rings. All of them employ electronic dope from television and gaming, to nonlethal weapons and HAARP in the war for your cooperation and mind control.
It takes intelligence to be a magician, but a magician can also be an active agent of intelligence, figuratively and literally. The real question is, rather, how and why and who and what do these things serve? Restoring self and society is the essential wisdom of the Grail. But this quest can be co-opted for narcissistic or pathological ends. The Secret Doctrine can introduce both positive and negative praeternatural forces.
Secret Missions
Who is served by the Holy Grail of occult knowledge? What is the Grail, and whom does it serve? The secret is in the power and the power is in The Secret. It is a meaningless metaphor without the experiential process of self-transformation to back it up. That’s why it can’t be told. It is the panacea, a personal path of recovery for “what ails thee.” The Grail is a metaphor for connection to the mystical Source of everything, the ever-renewing Fount of all manifestation – creative potential.
All paths lead toward a personal journey of transformation and enlightenment, though not all journeys fulfill the total potential of creativity, compassion, engagement, and spirituality. On a classical “hero’s journey” like Parcival, when you find the Grail, and are called to its service, no knowledge remains hidden for long.
Magick was the first transdisciplinarian occupation, drawing on all areas of knowledge as well as what we now call performance art. Before science divorced the occult arts it was called Natural Philosophy. Before everyone over-specialized [became more and more expert at less and less], they were what Buckminster Fuller called ‘generalists.’ He claimed kings made smart people become specialists so they wouldn’t see through the royal racket.
Trump Card
A Magus is a “worker of magic” which eludes rational definition, since magic happens in the gaps of reality, the unborn potential of the Abyss. The Magus is both a symbol of enlightenment and deception (disinformation)-- just like the Tarot card, The Magician, is a card of duality: Wisdom and Folly.
"Now you see it; now you don't" is the forte of the illusionist, the juggler of realities, who is master of Orwellian double-think – holding the tension of the opposites. You alternate between faith and skepticism until you go beyond the ordinary boundaries of both, slaying each thought with its opposite. Myths present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death. The Magus lives at the Paradox.
Traditionally, the Magus is one who can demonstrate hands-on magic: healing, mythical living, vision and foresight, transformative rituals, metaphor therapy, alchemical transmutations, charging of talismans, spirit comm, etc. Magick works on the principle that man is a microcosm of the Cosmos because a fractal representation of the whole universe is embodied in our holographic nature.
Arts Magian
A modern Magus is any person who completes the circuit between heaven and Earth, one who seeks to bring forth the divine 'gold' within her or himself. He or she is also a Mentor, an Initiator, divining and reading the signs and revealing deeper purpose and meaning in “the god-game.”
But that is how the outer world sees it. Every Magus has a foot in both worlds. Their inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.
Metaphysician
Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. Magicians understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is an illusion, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus and a malleable interpretation of our brains. Postmodern philosophy concurs as does New Physics that our perceived reality is a complex construction of our perceptions and beliefs -- pure illusion.
But the hyperdimensional gifts of the Spirit come at a price. The magician taps into, becomes one with, an essence that pop culture calls The Force. Photons and phonons are quantized modes of vibration. This subatomic vibration of Light and Sound is the enlivening force, which feeds creation and allegedly responds to focused intention at the primordial level. Information controls and patterns energy.
Hermetics is a Spiritual Technology
For masters of the Hermetic Arts, all magick is wrought through this impressionable ether – the Astral Light --a plenum of potential, using true properties of nature, it's laws, forces, and principles. Science now describes it as the scalar physics of subspace. The mage seeks to selectively establish an internal order out of this chaos, then externalize it, according to his/her vision. S/he is the soul guide who initiates the transformation process.
Among the original esoteric texts, The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance effects. Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.
The Magus power card also represents the fine line dividing white magic from black magic, toxic or malignant black ops. Sensory deprivation, loss of equilibrium, confusion techniques, social isolation, physiological stress, severe shock and ceremonial terror tactics were the forerunners of brainwashing techniques. The US employed “Shock and Awe” in Iraq as much to demoralize the people as to batter the infrastructure.
This is the realm of psychic attack and psychic self-defense, of witting and unwitting “sorcerers” stealthily vying with one another for power. Weaponized ESP can affect the body, mind and soul of one's opponent. But it can boomerang back on the sender 3-fold, according to the cautionary prescription.
Undercover
Power can be used in either a self-serving manner, or as one in service to the All. In order for The Magus to achieve his aims, there must be constant awareness and self-examination, pressing on and exploring one’s boundaries, breaking through into the boundless realms. The archetypal Shadow can creep in at any time both in personal and national or international interaction.
This is also the Trump of discernment. The Magus can discriminate between various realities and fantasies, between various points of view, without buying into any belief system, literally. The sorcerer orchestrates and works within others’ belief systems, choosing from the palette of compelling philosophical and spiritual ideals.
By molding worldviews, a magician creates the perception, manipulates and defines the perceived reality, creates the structure for self-organizing transformation. He believes no metanarratives but orchestrates them for others. He is an opportunistic paradigm shifter, shapeshifter, chameleon, and trickster. If you assume a role does that make it real? If not, fake it till you make it. Better to be an inspired lunatic than uninspired.
All Along the Watchtower
In the intelligence field, there is a designation nicknamed Wizard, indicating not only scientific but esoteric subject matter expertise. Cloak-and-magickal-dagger? It’s all athame to me. I know what you fear and it’s true.
Spying is a combination of praeternatural instincts and deep knowledge of how things really work. It is a world of constant observation and manipulation of the system and field of play. Game theory is not irrelevant. Every “watcher” is also “watched” from another level of game play.
What spies have in common with magicians is an uncanny ability to connect the seemingly unconnected, to notice what goes on behind the scenes and to see through misdirection ~ it takes one to know one. Both also construct and execute scenarios based on projections of undesirable and desirable futures.
It is necessary in this process of strategic intelligence collection and processing to be aware of the broadest possible contexts in which to view issues and information; to be aware of the trends of many disciplines, from religion to economics, from business to linguistics, from politics to military training, from historic social patterns to new religious trends, medicine, agriculture, science and so on.
Esoteric means, roughly, secret wisdom or intelligence derived from the Greek ‘esotericos’ meaning "inner." Esoteric teaching may just be the Big Lie – the root deception propagated throughout history to control and suppress the masses, because the priesthood has always given kings their sanction and power. In modern life, that shadowy “priesthood” is an inner cabal of globalists whose finger is in every pie.
We are hardwired for different degrees of social compliance and interaction directly related to our worldview paradigm. Traditionalists are conventional and conservative and follow “normal” social dictates of conformity. Nonconformists can inhabit other areas of the social map. Each paradigm has it’s own model of behavior and groupthink.
--THE EVOLUTIONARY SPIRAL--
HELP ME (Basic Survival)
TRIBAL We (Collective Survival
GRATIFY Me (Immediate Wants)
RIGHTEOUS We (Stable Authority)
COMPETETIVE Me (Material Success)
HOLISTIC Us (Global Harmony)
INTERDEPENDENT Me (Sustainable World)
SPIRITUAL We (Collective Renewal)
Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is also relevant to what your own level of development allows. The Controllers are not only aware of this; they created and promoted the system just as they promoted the Aquarian Conspiracy to create New Age philosophy, actually a distracting fusion of warmed-over Theosophy and techno-utopianism. The less physical security you have, the more mere survival occupies your thoughts and time, the less confident, creative and self-actualizing you will be. Notice it is pyramidal in form with more primitive needs [and a greater population base] at the bottom.
When an individual, group or institution knows how you think, they can manipulate what you think. Penetration technologies are making our skin boundary no more than a persistent illusion. Electronic penetration has superceded religious, chemical and propaganda penetration with “full-spectrum dominance” of the nervous system though the later are still skillfully employed.
Who or what is controlling you and how? "In Propaganda, Jacques Ellul contends that it is the total culture in action that is propaganda, or teaching. Thus, real propaganda is environmental and invisible, like the perceptual bias of one's native language. The counter-environments created by the artist serve to raise these hidden environments to the level of conscious appreciation." (McLuhan, From Cliche to Archetype, 77)
We all have an internal map of reality and our beliefs generate our reality. Our main agenda is to be right about our beliefs. Values are the source and desire for motivation. Motivation comes from values; sense of safety comes from beliefs. If you create a 1-minute-movie internally about what you want to have happen, it is more effective than obsessing endlessly on what you don't want. But naturally you have to create an action plan or it remains wishful thinking, clinically “magical thinking.”
Esoteric Espionage
The Secret is the same as it ever was: To Know, To Will, To Dare, To Keep Silent. But it only really works when your motivation aligns with necessity, when the Universe backs you up. This can be over-ridden through shadowy manipulation of the field through overt and covert means – through set ups and take downs – called psy-strat. Whether for good or evil, the name of the game is “framing reality.” Only the external show is left to diplomacy.
Who makes a good spy or a good liar? There isn’t any one answer to that, but it includes sexual vitality, charisma, being a good actor, entertainer, being a good poker player, being a good con man. Cons are opportunistic people who are sociopathic, who do not feel remorse, and who are very attuned, strangely, to other people and can read them very well. They are natural predators -- takers.
If I know what you really want to hear and what is in your heart of hearts, your fondest desire, because I’m good at reading you and I’m street-smart about assessing you and accessing you, I can feed you what you want to hear. A good con man does that. A good magician does that. Intelligence officers can do that, motivated by patriotism rather than sociopathy – their ends justify the means. You also have to have a good memory.
Intelligence is the key to understanding the world today. What spies have in common with magicians is an uncanny ability to connect the seemingly unconnected, to notice what goes on behind the scenes and to see through misdirection ~ it takes one to know one. Both have learned to synthesize and interpret data, how to pace and lead people (hypno-patsies) with rapport. The opening gambit of psychological warfare and mind control is flattery.
As trained observers, magicians and spies are adept at people-reading and keeping secrets; both are actors -- performers. Both are in secret societies that rely on craft and often use collaborators or confederates, and mentors. How much different is stealth and surveillance than a spell of invisibility? Each has their rules of engagement in the Great Work and the Great Game.
Clandestine Craft
Even some of the elements of tradecraft are the same. Both are cryptic, using encryptions and codes. Each has its own arcane language, symbols and rituals veiled from the profane. Remote Viewing or psychic spying is virtually identical with clairvoyance. Ceremonial psychodrama is played out in public, in personality cults and "ritual" murders – assassinations, often hiding in plain sight.
Both use passwords and slogans for security. Cryptography is now ubiquitous. Programs like Echelon monitor all domestic and foreign electronic communication. Spies and magicians both are cracking the Brain Code, the wetware of humanity.
Cryptocracy refers to a type of government where the real leaders are hidden. There may possibly be a fake government that appears to be in charge and this fake government might not know themselves that they are not in charge. It can also be used when referring to similar arrangements in organizations, orders, sects and cults.
Everywhere is Ground Zero. In military terms nonlocal psychic operations are called psychotronics. Adversaries are rogue psi operatives, psi-warriors who battle like sorcerers. Psychic self defense employs thought disruption, shielding techniques, mind drain and energy manipulation. Psionics is scientific magic ~ magecraft, the product of extraordinary human potential. Precogs, like analysts, are attuned to the future.
Deep Cover
They understand viscerally that things are often not what they seem. Both are masters of disguise, the hidden environment, intelligence, espionage, and covert action. Both aim to 'tweak the timeline' with small perturbations that pump up to macroscopic results, setting up currents of intentional influence. They also tweak minds by controlling the environment. No one can resist what they cannot detect.
Both are Inside Outsiders, working at the fringes of the System. The "outsider" aesthetic is charged by a desire to break free from the contrivances of tradition. They look boldly outside the system and deep within themselves for inspiration that arises directly from Creative Source.
Both work sub rosa. This phrase comes from the Latin meaning 'under the rose' for confidentiality, black ops. It comes from the Masonic fraternal tradition. The rose is the emblem of Horus, God of Silence and Secrecy, Crowley's "Crowned & Conquering Child."
After the war President Harry S Truman broke up the OSS. He transferred the research and analysis branch, which employed almost 1,000 people, to the Department of State, abolished most of the more esoteric branches, including the one dealing with guerrilla warfare, and parked the branches concerned with collecting intelligence by espionage and other covert means in the office of the assistant secretary of war to await a final decision.
The decision came with the National Security Act of 1947, which Truman hoped would unify the armed services under a secretary of defense. The major price for "unification" was the transformation of the U.S. Army Air Corps into a separate and independent Air Force; a minor price was the creation of an independent Central Intelligence Agency that would report directly to the president and the National Security Council.
The act clearly intended the CIA to conduct espionage--actually, it intended the CIA to have a monopoly over espionage. The law also clearly intended for the CIA to coordinate all aspects of both the collection and analysis of secrets.
Bead Game
The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi (set in the 23rd Century) describes a cadre of individuals and their headmaster -- the Magister Ludi -- engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Hesse never forthrightly explained just how the game is played, but gave many hints to its structure for future aspirants seeking solutions to the critical predicament of mankind through Global Architectronics.
The Glass Bead Game requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture. It plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. The Game's synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of virtual reality.
After each symbol conjured up by the director of a Game, each player was required to perform silent, formal meditation on the content, origin, and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind intensively and organically its full purport. The members of the Order and of the Game associations brought the technique and practice of contemplation with them from their elite schools, where the art of contemplation and meditation was nurtured with the greatest care.
The variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Thus, "realizing" was a favorite expression among the players. They considered their Games a path from Becoming to Being, from potentiality to reality...We would scarcely be exaggerating if we ventured to say that for the small circle of genuine Glass Bead Game players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship.
Sub Rosa
In secret; privately or confidentially: held the meeting sub rosa. A "black" (sub rosa) propaganda section.
[Latin sub rosa, under the rose (from the practice of hanging a rose over a meeting as a symbol of confidentiality) : sub, under + rosa, ablative of rosa, rose.]
The phrase Sub Rosa comes from the Latin and means ‘under the rose’ or confidentiality. The rose was the emblem of the god Horus in ancient Egypt. Later the Greeks and Romans regarded this as god of silence. This originates from a Greek/Roman misinterpretation of an Egyptian hieroglyphic adopting Horus along with Isis and Osiris as a God.
The Greeks translated his Egyptian name Her - pa - khrad to Harpocrates. Cupid gave Harpocrates a rose as a token of gratitude for not betraying the mother of Cupid, Venus. Among the Freemasons the rose is the symbol of silence. Looking at the scorecard or playerlist of a game isn’t the same as playing it.
Seeing the World in a Whole New Light; Tweaking the Timeline
In chaos theory, small perturbations can become pumped up into very large effects. The same can happen to the historical timeline with intelligence and espionage. Small changes in dynamics can make a huge difference in Real World outcomes.
One must carefully pick where to make one’s intervention. A mis-step can lead to the brink of a catastrophic Abyss.
Occult Esoterics
Occult societies have a long tradition of influence peddling and providing covers for espionage. They are conduits of trust that transcend national borders and can cover a spy network. Naturally, occultists influenced one anothers’ beliefs, whether it was acknowledged or not.
Black intelligence ops, “Esoterics” has always been a department in most intelligence services. In MI6, it was called the Occult Bureau. The SS also had an Occult Bureau. The Watch were FDR’s supersecret team for occult countermeasures, arcane assassinations, paranormal and psychic investigation. After the war, The Watch redirected its interest to UFO phenomena.
Theosophical studies cover the origin and development of the cosmos and human development in all the planes of being from its beginning to its end. It is a philosophy of process, transformation, and evolution toward an extraordinary human potential. Out of this Utopian and scientific socialism came Theosophy, British” guild" socialism, the Fabian Society, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Tavistock and iconoclast Aleister Crowley.
Occultism has served as "an alternative account of the world, available to people dissatisfied with the orthodox view of things, scientifically and politically, since the late 18th century. Older than Theosophy with roots in kabbalah, Hermetics, and pantheism, Magick was a practical application of causing change to conform with will using similar principles. They both embrace the Hermetic Axiom: “As Above; So Below,” which reflects the identity of man as a microcosm.
The Cryptocracy, through economics and mass mind control is involved in the transformation or "alchemical processing" of mass consciousness by psychological mind manipulation. With the help of these foundations and secret societies, experiments in world shaping continue multimedia and military campaigns. The goal is to seed and control megatrends so the masses live as controlled puppets – wage slaves -- of the ruling elite.
Beyond "Intentionality" as Misunderstood New Age Buzzword
The notion 'we create our own reality' is a relative truth with origins in the existential philosophers of the 19th Century. It can also be motivated by control issues - as a control fantasy rather than a proper characterization of lived reality. From a Jungian point of view, any 'intentionality' we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetypal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in pseudo-scientific and/or quasi-spiritual terms.
The fashionable term for mind/matter interaction is now "intentionality", as if that explains anything. You may as well call it free will, or True Will, like the magicians do. Yet to name it intentionality doesn't make it so. It is a fantasy of intentionality, a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at the subtle level perturbs outcomes PHYSICALLLY in some desirable manner. Which is not to ignore psychosocial effects or mobilization of immune function.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. The notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoiesis. The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable.
Approaches to psi include the skeptical physicalists, supernaturalists, esoterics, and psionics or the research orientation.
10.16.06; Vol. IV No. 2Journal of Nonlocality and Remote Mental Interactions, OpEd article. http://emergentmind.org/journal.htm
THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS
by Iona Miller, 2006
"I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they've been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won't; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep...If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else." (Fodor 1987, 97)
Doctrine of Intentionality
Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse.”
There are several subcultures whose worldviews embrace psi phenomena as Reality, or react as if they do. They range through governments to tribal people to new agers and neo-pagans to leading-edge researchers. Even the most skeptical scientist can be compartmentalized or even superstitious in his or her subjective thinking at times.
To conduct sound research, we must catch ourselves in the act of trying to verify our own preconceptions, a “perception Lab.”This is an intrisic problem of armchair scientists who are long on theory and short on experimentation. We have to pierce beyond the perceptual artifact to solid postulates, testable hypotheses, rigorous protocols, and acurate statistical analysis.
But psi may prove to be more than just an artifact of primitive belief. Meta-narratives emerge as mythologizing, literature, psychology, sociology, religion or philosophy and cutting-edge science theories. The philosophy of science describes the dynamics of the scientific method. The issue of intentionality is riddled with philosophical problems. Moreso, remote mental intention. Is a brain state the template for action?
The loose use of the term intentionality as a buzzword is an import into pop culture from philosophy. As a collective belief, it has boomeranged back into the public and new age thought from psi research meta-analysis, justified by the research of Radin, Emoto, Schlitz, Targ, Taggert and others.
"Psi intentionality" is a term lifted from remote viewing and other distance intentionality practices and psi energetic theories. It has been confounded with physics notion of nonlocality, entanglement, resonance and "spooky action at a distance", peculiar to particular theories of quantum mechanics, and holism or holographic models. It is shorthand for what might be called quantum psychokinesis (PK), a form of mind over matter. In psi theory, the transmission of information from a sender to receiver is less problematical than physical influence.
Intentionality bears on ontological and metaphysical questions about the fundamental nature of mental states: perceiving, remembering, expectancy, believing, desiring, hoping, knowing, intending, feeling, experiencing, and so on. What is it to have such mental states? How does the mental relate to the physical, i.e., how are mental states related to an individual's body, to states of his or her brain and to his or her behavior?
Intentionality is a pervasive feature of many different mental states: beliefs, hopes, judgments, intentions, love and hatred all exhibit intentionality. In an ideal world we can mentally wish things into and out of existence. It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life. Perhaps one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind.
But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. In plain talk, we consider a behavior intentional when it appears purposeful or done intentionally -- that is, based on reasons (beliefs, desires) and performed with skill and awareness.
Just because the subject of psi remains objectively problematical doesn’t mean we should stop systematic investigation, both scientifically and metaphysically. Babies don’t know how the world works so they constantly keep testing their environment, over and over.
Are we just cosmic babies, feeling our way along, blindly? We are when it comes to proofs of mind over matter. Perhaps intentionality is a permissible metaphor until we have a better shorthand for the effect. But we really need a bigger and better metaphor already without trotting out the well-worn notion of paradigm shift - another buzzword.
Quantum Chaos
We must be willing to question our own beliefs, comprehending the nature of subjectivity, experimenter bias, and memes or groupthink. The mind deploys them as explanations for unknown agency, the blindspots of our consciousness. As ever, any postulate and hypothesis we can make depends on "which" physics it is based in, since there are several competing models: Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Transactional, M-Theory, Plenum Physics,hyperspace, etc.
This simple fact makes quantum physics a domain of self-contained, mutually exclusive belief systems with their own presumed truths about the primordial nature of Reality. New Agers and armchair philosophers often confound them together into half-baked theories, sometimes compounded by theories of “ascension”, aliens, and evolution.
Philosophically, what does it mean that man's intention now substitutes for the exiled Demiurge, or divine "maker"? We've put ourselves in place of God or nature to augment healing, muddle about in global politics, and presumably perturb our evolutionary arc. We have to question how much more effective realworld pro-active behavior might be, considering that "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." There is no end to the places the human ego would like to meddle in structure, meaning and labeling.
Ordinary intentionality means being directed toward some goal. It comes down to a control issue; who's got it and who wants it. Perhaps the most compelling results come from the realms of mindbody healing by deploring human beliefs and activating the mysterious placebo effect for shorter or longer periods of time.
But this in no way means that this intentional decision process is a quantum process, since the mechanisms may be largely molecular and biochemical -- an errorof domains. We know that both psychosomatics and psychosemantics are influential. Current research suggests we make our decisions unconsciously.
“Fill in the blank” explanations can be outlandish, possible, plausible, probable, or match reality. The distinction between "true believers" and skeptics comes at the point of interpretation of phenomena, attributions of the source of events or perceptions, whether one's model is psibernetics, "magical thinking", external agents, nested hierarchies, holistic mysticism, or physicalism.
A theist will tend to attribute positive expectations of “agency” to God, a pagan to nature, a humanist to self, and an atheist to complex dynamics, or randomness,. A debunker is dismissive. A true skeptic remains open-minded, at home in the ambiguity.And the loose use of the buzzword ‘intentionality’ leaves its agent or means totally ambiguous, meaning not mechanism.
Is anomalous intentionality a catalyst? It came into the psi lexicon from consciousness studies and a few psi experiments that showed some promise suggesting mind/matter interaction. The protocols of all these experiments are questionable in terms of rigour even though the field polices itself. Replication for these studies is far from exhaustive.
So, maybe it isn't outlandish, and perhaps it is possible, and maybe its plausible. But in no way is it probable. And we don't really know the deepest nature of reality to know whether it matches or we are simply deluding ourselves with a romantic notion.
My Karma Ran Over My Dogma
This fashionable term for mind/matter interaction, "intentionality", fails as a shorthand to explain anything. "Free will" has been dismissed as an agent by most consciousness researchers, though evolutionary intentionality is connected with the dynamic behavior of systems. You may as well call it karma, luck, or True Will, like the magicians do. Karma, whether you believe in it or not, at its root just means natural consequences of behavior.
Does it really work to claim an intention to be intentional? Doesn’t intentionality always imply future tense rather than concrete results?If the paradoxical implication is that the intentional result is acausal, isn’t that a pretzel-twist in logic?
Jung tried to account for an acausal factor with his notion of synchronicity, but it is hardly testable, though most of us notice meaningful coicidences all the time. But then human beings have an inclination to look for "signs". Why this is so is another avenue of sociological investigation.
Even in clinical research, to name psi expression intentionality doesn't make it so. In actual fact, most of us can’t form enough intentionality to drink the amount of water the body needs each day or eat healthy. The unresolved New Year’s resolution is a truism.
What makes us think we can be more consistently intentional in the extradimensional? It is a ‘fantasy of intentionality,’ a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at some subtle level perturbs outcomes in some desirable manner. It might express our insecurity in an uncertain, uncontrollable world more than a physics process.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. It is endlessly interesting to speculate on, but the notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoesis, myth-making.
In mythopoesis many cultural forms meet and form an organic fusion. Does the contemporary revival of myth with focus on our creative potential point to the possibility of a unified world, a neo-Utopian variant where we wish and make it so? If collective intentionality could create a better world, why didn't we do it long ago?
The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Mythopoesis means change, re-mythologizing in times of cultural chaos. What I mean here is not a mis-spelling, but an amalgamation of mythopoesis or story-making and the autopoeitic self-organization of chaos theory; self-maintaining unity.
Autopoiesis describes the way living systems address and engage domains in which they operate. What human need do these mythically patterned meta-theories fill? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable, to push the agent beyond the threshold of observability.
The Emperor’s New Intentionality
The notion "we create our own reality" is a relative truth.From a Jungian point of view, any "intentionality" we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetyal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Existentially, we are moved by more than a single metaphor, a single role, a singlular self-image.Whatever you choose to call them, we harbor nested competing agendas, conscious and unconscious.
Even in chaos theory, many forget there are strange repellors as well as strange attractors. Resonance is another buzzword rapidly equalling the old standby of spiritualism, “vibrations”, which has found vindication in allocation of electromagnetic frequencies as well as quantum and vacuum fluctuation But somehow, both in our lives and quantum mechanics, these extradimensional entanglements are unobservable, beyond physics, and therefore strictly speaking, metaphysical.
The ancients conceived of magic working through focus and will.Now a diffuse holistic awareness is preferred, perturbing the quantum flow. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in perennial truths and pseudo-scientific terms.
If it bothers or offends you to think otherwise, this is more likely true. There is emotional attachment there, not clarity. If you think you can do it by "aligning" yourself rather than manifestation, why are you harboring fantasies of misalignment? It makes little sense that the particle "intends" and the field "corresponds". In Nature, the reverse leads to manifestion. You wouldn't stand on a riverbank trying to levitate a drowning child. You would take action.
Is this notion harboring a demiurgic God-complex, a control fantasy in an otherwise uncontrollable world?If we believe in God, why do we presume to interfere with that fiat by introjecting our small agendas? Does it conceal a spiritual hubris to be co-equal or co-creator with divinity? Or, more to the point, why would we look to the divine as an agent of psychophysical dynamics?
Nonlocal Intentions
Intentions may or may not exert a nonlocal organizing effect. They do when they mobilize effective action. Often the 'butterfly effect' of chaos theory is invoked for pumping holistic mental effects up to macro- proportions. But chaos theory doesn't organize through intentionality; just the opposite, by criticality.
Correlation is not identity. There is appearance being and process being, which correlate with particle/wave. We are both particle and field, and they are both complex, and may be analogous or metaphorically connected to the hypothesis of intentionality - but that doesn't make it real: it makes it a belief, an operational worldview. The ego somehow facilitating the holistic self to manifest is solipsistic, because the field self is in no way diminished even by negative thinking by personality.
If you think distant intentionality works for you, that is an interpretation, an arbitrary allocation of a cause to a perceived effect, which may be largely unrelated and/or statistically irrelevant. Once the narrative is "set", that becomes the story and the person zealously sticks to it, right or wrong. This is human nature and the nature of emotional investment. It may be the eternal human yen to create order from the fear and chaos of our lives and cleave to faith in the Great Beyond, whatever one thinks resides there.
A myriad of "brandable" new age technologies are based on non-scientific interpretations and confabulations of scientific theory. Though having its own organic root in metaphysics, new age tech has hijacked and romanticized the philosophical territory of psi research with its own prosaic interpretations. Because it makes a romantically appealing metaphor doesn't mean it matches up with naked Reality. Often incompatible physics theories are confounded together for the so-called explanations.
Psi and Intentionality
Four models of psi intentionality are drawn from relativity theory and two from quantum mechanics. First is the energetic transmission model, which presumes the effects of conscious intention are mediated by an as-yet-unknown energy signal.
Second is the model of path facilitation. According to general relativity, gravity "warps" space–time, easing certain pathways of movement, so acts of consciousness may have warping and facilitating effects on the fabric of the surrounding world.
Nonlocal entanglement is drawn from quantum mechanics, suggesting people, like particles, can become entangled so they behave as one system with instantaneous and unmediated correlations across a distance.
Actualization of potentials reflects the act of measurement in quantum mechanics collapsing a probabilistic wave function into a single outcome. This notion of observer effect relates only to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Researchers claim conscious healing intention and alignment may actualize one of a series of possibilities; for example, recovery from a potentially lethal tumor.
Psi researchers must be careful to see these explanatory buzzwords like 'alignment' and 'intentionality' for what they are, smoke and mirrors explaining nothing, not what some say they are. Like the next new buzzword, "extradimensionality", it is just a displacement into the Unknown of a process that may be something entirely other than what the experiencer thinks it is.
To get to the Truth we have to follow the age-old axiom to ‘Know Thyself,’ and be willing to engage in some conceptual atom-smashing of our cherished notions. Otherwise, one engages in a pre-conceived, self-confirmatory journey for validation not a Quest for knowledge.
Rather than extradimensional participation in some subtle physics process, it may just be another trick of the mind - in the end, nothing more than a concept that doesn't match up with nor describe Reality. Oh sure, intentionality may function mystically in some nonfungable parallel universe, or that could be just another mentally attractive perennial fantasy. Those most concerned with “changing the paradigm” may be among those most firmly attached to their own idiosyncratic interpretations.
If there are memes in our culture, there are strange attractors in our thought patterns, that can harden into fixed beliefs. The fact is we don't know, and anyone who charges you and says they do is a either a fraud or self-deluded, or both. We are components of mythic culture which recursively regenerates itself in a network of self-similar productions.
Anywhere there is non-equilibrium, a gap in personal or cultural awareness, myth will self-organize a meta-narrative to fill the lacuna. Mythic beliefs are self-contained. Even fantasies of holism automatically exclude other options, except through embedding and hierarchy.
There are many aspects of psi, some more credible and testable than others.ESP (information transfer) is the most plausble, psychokinesis (mind over matter) most problematical. Serious researchers are beyond parlour tricks such as seances, regressions, or ghostbusting.
Still, there is no scientific or spiritual consensus about the mechanics of physics or consciousness, much less mind/matter interaction or the influence of one mind on another organism. Some models appeal to our intuition, others are profoundly counter-intuitive. But Mystery doesn't need to be metaphysical, mystical, nor dismissed as "noetic nonsense". It simply isn't limited by any of our concepts nor scientific blindspots. We can just admit we stand in the Mystery.
The way to keep a path alive is to walk on it. Studying psi phenomena invariably involves extracting a signal from a lot of noise: the only credible way to do that is scientifically. But for many researchers, those disconcerting or luminous moments of utter uncanniness in our own personal experience sustain our interest, year after year. The effects aren't so much in question as the images and the way we imagine them.
REFERENCES
Fodor, Jerry. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987.
Leder, Drew (1995) "Spooky Actions at a Distance": Physics, Psi, and Distant Healing, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Oct 2005, Vol. 11, No. 5 : 923 -930 Schlitz, Marilyn and Braud, William (1997). "Distance intentionality and healing", Alternative Therapies, Vol. 3, No. 6.
Evidence mounts that brains decide before their owners know about it
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13489722
Unconscious Decisions in the Brain http://www.physorg.com/news127395619.html
Decision-making May Be Surprisingly Unconscious Activity
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414145705.htm
The fashionable term for mind/matter interaction is now "intentionality", as if that explains anything. You may as well call it free will, or True Will, like the magicians do. Yet to name it intentionality doesn't make it so. It is a fantasy of intentionality, a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at the subtle level perturbs outcomes PHYSICALLLY in some desirable manner. Which is not to ignore psychosocial effects or mobilization of immune function.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. The notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoiesis. The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable.
Approaches to psi include the skeptical physicalists, supernaturalists, esoterics, and psionics or the research orientation.
10.16.06; Vol. IV No. 2Journal of Nonlocality and Remote Mental Interactions, OpEd article. http://emergentmind.org/journal.htm
THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS
by Iona Miller, 2006
"I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they've been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won't; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep...If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else." (Fodor 1987, 97)
Doctrine of Intentionality
Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse.”
There are several subcultures whose worldviews embrace psi phenomena as Reality, or react as if they do. They range through governments to tribal people to new agers and neo-pagans to leading-edge researchers. Even the most skeptical scientist can be compartmentalized or even superstitious in his or her subjective thinking at times.
To conduct sound research, we must catch ourselves in the act of trying to verify our own preconceptions, a “perception Lab.”This is an intrisic problem of armchair scientists who are long on theory and short on experimentation. We have to pierce beyond the perceptual artifact to solid postulates, testable hypotheses, rigorous protocols, and acurate statistical analysis.
But psi may prove to be more than just an artifact of primitive belief. Meta-narratives emerge as mythologizing, literature, psychology, sociology, religion or philosophy and cutting-edge science theories. The philosophy of science describes the dynamics of the scientific method. The issue of intentionality is riddled with philosophical problems. Moreso, remote mental intention. Is a brain state the template for action?
The loose use of the term intentionality as a buzzword is an import into pop culture from philosophy. As a collective belief, it has boomeranged back into the public and new age thought from psi research meta-analysis, justified by the research of Radin, Emoto, Schlitz, Targ, Taggert and others.
"Psi intentionality" is a term lifted from remote viewing and other distance intentionality practices and psi energetic theories. It has been confounded with physics notion of nonlocality, entanglement, resonance and "spooky action at a distance", peculiar to particular theories of quantum mechanics, and holism or holographic models. It is shorthand for what might be called quantum psychokinesis (PK), a form of mind over matter. In psi theory, the transmission of information from a sender to receiver is less problematical than physical influence.
Intentionality bears on ontological and metaphysical questions about the fundamental nature of mental states: perceiving, remembering, expectancy, believing, desiring, hoping, knowing, intending, feeling, experiencing, and so on. What is it to have such mental states? How does the mental relate to the physical, i.e., how are mental states related to an individual's body, to states of his or her brain and to his or her behavior?
Intentionality is a pervasive feature of many different mental states: beliefs, hopes, judgments, intentions, love and hatred all exhibit intentionality. In an ideal world we can mentally wish things into and out of existence. It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life. Perhaps one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind.
But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. In plain talk, we consider a behavior intentional when it appears purposeful or done intentionally -- that is, based on reasons (beliefs, desires) and performed with skill and awareness.
Just because the subject of psi remains objectively problematical doesn’t mean we should stop systematic investigation, both scientifically and metaphysically. Babies don’t know how the world works so they constantly keep testing their environment, over and over.
Are we just cosmic babies, feeling our way along, blindly? We are when it comes to proofs of mind over matter. Perhaps intentionality is a permissible metaphor until we have a better shorthand for the effect. But we really need a bigger and better metaphor already without trotting out the well-worn notion of paradigm shift - another buzzword.
Quantum Chaos
We must be willing to question our own beliefs, comprehending the nature of subjectivity, experimenter bias, and memes or groupthink. The mind deploys them as explanations for unknown agency, the blindspots of our consciousness. As ever, any postulate and hypothesis we can make depends on "which" physics it is based in, since there are several competing models: Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Transactional, M-Theory, Plenum Physics,hyperspace, etc.
This simple fact makes quantum physics a domain of self-contained, mutually exclusive belief systems with their own presumed truths about the primordial nature of Reality. New Agers and armchair philosophers often confound them together into half-baked theories, sometimes compounded by theories of “ascension”, aliens, and evolution.
Philosophically, what does it mean that man's intention now substitutes for the exiled Demiurge, or divine "maker"? We've put ourselves in place of God or nature to augment healing, muddle about in global politics, and presumably perturb our evolutionary arc. We have to question how much more effective realworld pro-active behavior might be, considering that "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." There is no end to the places the human ego would like to meddle in structure, meaning and labeling.
Ordinary intentionality means being directed toward some goal. It comes down to a control issue; who's got it and who wants it. Perhaps the most compelling results come from the realms of mindbody healing by deploring human beliefs and activating the mysterious placebo effect for shorter or longer periods of time.
But this in no way means that this intentional decision process is a quantum process, since the mechanisms may be largely molecular and biochemical -- an errorof domains. We know that both psychosomatics and psychosemantics are influential. Current research suggests we make our decisions unconsciously.
“Fill in the blank” explanations can be outlandish, possible, plausible, probable, or match reality. The distinction between "true believers" and skeptics comes at the point of interpretation of phenomena, attributions of the source of events or perceptions, whether one's model is psibernetics, "magical thinking", external agents, nested hierarchies, holistic mysticism, or physicalism.
A theist will tend to attribute positive expectations of “agency” to God, a pagan to nature, a humanist to self, and an atheist to complex dynamics, or randomness,. A debunker is dismissive. A true skeptic remains open-minded, at home in the ambiguity.And the loose use of the buzzword ‘intentionality’ leaves its agent or means totally ambiguous, meaning not mechanism.
Is anomalous intentionality a catalyst? It came into the psi lexicon from consciousness studies and a few psi experiments that showed some promise suggesting mind/matter interaction. The protocols of all these experiments are questionable in terms of rigour even though the field polices itself. Replication for these studies is far from exhaustive.
So, maybe it isn't outlandish, and perhaps it is possible, and maybe its plausible. But in no way is it probable. And we don't really know the deepest nature of reality to know whether it matches or we are simply deluding ourselves with a romantic notion.
My Karma Ran Over My Dogma
This fashionable term for mind/matter interaction, "intentionality", fails as a shorthand to explain anything. "Free will" has been dismissed as an agent by most consciousness researchers, though evolutionary intentionality is connected with the dynamic behavior of systems. You may as well call it karma, luck, or True Will, like the magicians do. Karma, whether you believe in it or not, at its root just means natural consequences of behavior.
Does it really work to claim an intention to be intentional? Doesn’t intentionality always imply future tense rather than concrete results?If the paradoxical implication is that the intentional result is acausal, isn’t that a pretzel-twist in logic?
Jung tried to account for an acausal factor with his notion of synchronicity, but it is hardly testable, though most of us notice meaningful coicidences all the time. But then human beings have an inclination to look for "signs". Why this is so is another avenue of sociological investigation.
Even in clinical research, to name psi expression intentionality doesn't make it so. In actual fact, most of us can’t form enough intentionality to drink the amount of water the body needs each day or eat healthy. The unresolved New Year’s resolution is a truism.
What makes us think we can be more consistently intentional in the extradimensional? It is a ‘fantasy of intentionality,’ a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at some subtle level perturbs outcomes in some desirable manner. It might express our insecurity in an uncertain, uncontrollable world more than a physics process.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. It is endlessly interesting to speculate on, but the notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoesis, myth-making.
In mythopoesis many cultural forms meet and form an organic fusion. Does the contemporary revival of myth with focus on our creative potential point to the possibility of a unified world, a neo-Utopian variant where we wish and make it so? If collective intentionality could create a better world, why didn't we do it long ago?
The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Mythopoesis means change, re-mythologizing in times of cultural chaos. What I mean here is not a mis-spelling, but an amalgamation of mythopoesis or story-making and the autopoeitic self-organization of chaos theory; self-maintaining unity.
Autopoiesis describes the way living systems address and engage domains in which they operate. What human need do these mythically patterned meta-theories fill? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable, to push the agent beyond the threshold of observability.
The Emperor’s New Intentionality
The notion "we create our own reality" is a relative truth.From a Jungian point of view, any "intentionality" we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetyal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Existentially, we are moved by more than a single metaphor, a single role, a singlular self-image.Whatever you choose to call them, we harbor nested competing agendas, conscious and unconscious.
Even in chaos theory, many forget there are strange repellors as well as strange attractors. Resonance is another buzzword rapidly equalling the old standby of spiritualism, “vibrations”, which has found vindication in allocation of electromagnetic frequencies as well as quantum and vacuum fluctuation But somehow, both in our lives and quantum mechanics, these extradimensional entanglements are unobservable, beyond physics, and therefore strictly speaking, metaphysical.
The ancients conceived of magic working through focus and will.Now a diffuse holistic awareness is preferred, perturbing the quantum flow. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in perennial truths and pseudo-scientific terms.
If it bothers or offends you to think otherwise, this is more likely true. There is emotional attachment there, not clarity. If you think you can do it by "aligning" yourself rather than manifestation, why are you harboring fantasies of misalignment? It makes little sense that the particle "intends" and the field "corresponds". In Nature, the reverse leads to manifestion. You wouldn't stand on a riverbank trying to levitate a drowning child. You would take action.
Is this notion harboring a demiurgic God-complex, a control fantasy in an otherwise uncontrollable world?If we believe in God, why do we presume to interfere with that fiat by introjecting our small agendas? Does it conceal a spiritual hubris to be co-equal or co-creator with divinity? Or, more to the point, why would we look to the divine as an agent of psychophysical dynamics?
Nonlocal Intentions
Intentions may or may not exert a nonlocal organizing effect. They do when they mobilize effective action. Often the 'butterfly effect' of chaos theory is invoked for pumping holistic mental effects up to macro- proportions. But chaos theory doesn't organize through intentionality; just the opposite, by criticality.
Correlation is not identity. There is appearance being and process being, which correlate with particle/wave. We are both particle and field, and they are both complex, and may be analogous or metaphorically connected to the hypothesis of intentionality - but that doesn't make it real: it makes it a belief, an operational worldview. The ego somehow facilitating the holistic self to manifest is solipsistic, because the field self is in no way diminished even by negative thinking by personality.
If you think distant intentionality works for you, that is an interpretation, an arbitrary allocation of a cause to a perceived effect, which may be largely unrelated and/or statistically irrelevant. Once the narrative is "set", that becomes the story and the person zealously sticks to it, right or wrong. This is human nature and the nature of emotional investment. It may be the eternal human yen to create order from the fear and chaos of our lives and cleave to faith in the Great Beyond, whatever one thinks resides there.
A myriad of "brandable" new age technologies are based on non-scientific interpretations and confabulations of scientific theory. Though having its own organic root in metaphysics, new age tech has hijacked and romanticized the philosophical territory of psi research with its own prosaic interpretations. Because it makes a romantically appealing metaphor doesn't mean it matches up with naked Reality. Often incompatible physics theories are confounded together for the so-called explanations.
Psi and Intentionality
Four models of psi intentionality are drawn from relativity theory and two from quantum mechanics. First is the energetic transmission model, which presumes the effects of conscious intention are mediated by an as-yet-unknown energy signal.
Second is the model of path facilitation. According to general relativity, gravity "warps" space–time, easing certain pathways of movement, so acts of consciousness may have warping and facilitating effects on the fabric of the surrounding world.
Nonlocal entanglement is drawn from quantum mechanics, suggesting people, like particles, can become entangled so they behave as one system with instantaneous and unmediated correlations across a distance.
Actualization of potentials reflects the act of measurement in quantum mechanics collapsing a probabilistic wave function into a single outcome. This notion of observer effect relates only to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Researchers claim conscious healing intention and alignment may actualize one of a series of possibilities; for example, recovery from a potentially lethal tumor.
Psi researchers must be careful to see these explanatory buzzwords like 'alignment' and 'intentionality' for what they are, smoke and mirrors explaining nothing, not what some say they are. Like the next new buzzword, "extradimensionality", it is just a displacement into the Unknown of a process that may be something entirely other than what the experiencer thinks it is.
To get to the Truth we have to follow the age-old axiom to ‘Know Thyself,’ and be willing to engage in some conceptual atom-smashing of our cherished notions. Otherwise, one engages in a pre-conceived, self-confirmatory journey for validation not a Quest for knowledge.
Rather than extradimensional participation in some subtle physics process, it may just be another trick of the mind - in the end, nothing more than a concept that doesn't match up with nor describe Reality. Oh sure, intentionality may function mystically in some nonfungable parallel universe, or that could be just another mentally attractive perennial fantasy. Those most concerned with “changing the paradigm” may be among those most firmly attached to their own idiosyncratic interpretations.
If there are memes in our culture, there are strange attractors in our thought patterns, that can harden into fixed beliefs. The fact is we don't know, and anyone who charges you and says they do is a either a fraud or self-deluded, or both. We are components of mythic culture which recursively regenerates itself in a network of self-similar productions.
Anywhere there is non-equilibrium, a gap in personal or cultural awareness, myth will self-organize a meta-narrative to fill the lacuna. Mythic beliefs are self-contained. Even fantasies of holism automatically exclude other options, except through embedding and hierarchy.
There are many aspects of psi, some more credible and testable than others.ESP (information transfer) is the most plausble, psychokinesis (mind over matter) most problematical. Serious researchers are beyond parlour tricks such as seances, regressions, or ghostbusting.
Still, there is no scientific or spiritual consensus about the mechanics of physics or consciousness, much less mind/matter interaction or the influence of one mind on another organism. Some models appeal to our intuition, others are profoundly counter-intuitive. But Mystery doesn't need to be metaphysical, mystical, nor dismissed as "noetic nonsense". It simply isn't limited by any of our concepts nor scientific blindspots. We can just admit we stand in the Mystery.
The way to keep a path alive is to walk on it. Studying psi phenomena invariably involves extracting a signal from a lot of noise: the only credible way to do that is scientifically. But for many researchers, those disconcerting or luminous moments of utter uncanniness in our own personal experience sustain our interest, year after year. The effects aren't so much in question as the images and the way we imagine them.
REFERENCES
Fodor, Jerry. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987.
Leder, Drew (1995) "Spooky Actions at a Distance": Physics, Psi, and Distant Healing, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Oct 2005, Vol. 11, No. 5 : 923 -930 Schlitz, Marilyn and Braud, William (1997). "Distance intentionality and healing", Alternative Therapies, Vol. 3, No. 6.
Evidence mounts that brains decide before their owners know about it
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13489722
Unconscious Decisions in the Brain http://www.physorg.com/news127395619.html
Decision-making May Be Surprisingly Unconscious Activity
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414145705.htm
Esotericism and Symbol, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz
Esotericism has no common measure with deliberate concealment of the truth, that is, with secrecy in the conventional sense of the term.
If it were otherwise, the writings such as the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, the Vedas and Upanishads of India, China's Tao Te Ching, the Genesis of Moses, the Gospels, the Revelations, and others would have to be thought of as colossal mystifications.
It is inconceivable that scholars, philologists, theologians, and, in general, all those interested in the history of this world, should not as yet have understood the importance of the Pyramid Texts. No other scriptural texts, preserved and transmitted across the millennia because of their sacred nature, have reached us intact in form. Various transcriptions, translations, and commentaries, if they have not altered the fundamental meaning, at best leave room for doubt as to the original form, which is precisely the vehicle for esotericism.
Carved into stone, the writings in the chambers of the Fifth Dynasty pyramids have been preserved, unaltered, for for thousand years. The Samaritans treasure as a sacred relic a Bible they claim as "authentic," while here at the holy places of Egypt, ignorant but curiuous tourists brush carelessly agains these carved stones where every feature each line, each arrangement of text, each color has aparticular significance, there being no doubt that every detail is intentional.
Although we may not yet know how to interpret these words, let us at least preserve them for those who will come after us. Was it not greatly to the credit of Bonaparte's mission that it scrupulously copied texts, which, at the time, no one yet knew how to decipher?
If the intention of the Gospels, for example, were to give to manking a moral code for ordinary life, and if the way toward the "Father" were explicable in simple terms, then why hinder us from reaching this aim by speaking in parables? Why should all these writings hide what can be openly said in order to help the unhappy masses of this world? Was it through a perverse need to create a mystery, and "opiate for the masses," as the materialists say? Was it because of the world of those days was so uncultured in cmparison with ours, which is so highly intelligent? Would it be because those prophets and God-inspired men did not better know how to express themselves?
We have enough evidence of the intelligence, wisdom, and unquenstionably high degree of civilization reached in the past to warrant dismissing such assumptions.
On the other hand, no cryptograph or riddle remains undecipherable. It is therefore naive to believe that such texts as ancinet Egypt has left us in great profusion would base an esoteric meaning on a mystification of this sort, were such esotericism expressible by writing. In the cmparison of sacred texts, the cryptograph and riddle never have any purpose other than to awaken the reader's attention, to place an accent on one aspect o fthe text, in short, to guide him toward the esoteric sense o fthe wriring. The same applies to a play on words or a parable.
Esotericism can neither be written nor spoken, hence cannot be betrayed. One must be prepared to grasp it, to see it, to hear it. This preparaiton is not a knowing but a being-able, and can ultimately be acquired only through the effort o the indidvidual himself, by a struggle against all obstacles, and a victory of the human-animal nature.
There is a sacred science, and for thousands of years countless inquisitive people have sought in vain to penetrate its "secrets." It is af ithey attempted to dig a hole in the se with an ax. The tool must be of the same nature as the objective to be woked upon. Spirit is only found within spirit, and esotericism is the spiritual aspect of the world, inaccessible to cerebral intelligence.
Those who profess to reveal the esotericism of such teachings are charlatans. They may try to explain the implication fo a certain word or forumula as with a conventional secret, but with regard to sacred science, they will never be able to do more than put one word in place of another, and at best this will be bad literature replacing a simple idea.
The true initiate can guide a gifted pupil and help him to travel more quickly along the path of consciousness, and the pupil, upon reaching stages of illumination by his own inner light, will read the esotericism of such teaching directly. No one can do it for him.
If it were otherwise, the writings such as the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, the Vedas and Upanishads of India, China's Tao Te Ching, the Genesis of Moses, the Gospels, the Revelations, and others would have to be thought of as colossal mystifications.
It is inconceivable that scholars, philologists, theologians, and, in general, all those interested in the history of this world, should not as yet have understood the importance of the Pyramid Texts. No other scriptural texts, preserved and transmitted across the millennia because of their sacred nature, have reached us intact in form. Various transcriptions, translations, and commentaries, if they have not altered the fundamental meaning, at best leave room for doubt as to the original form, which is precisely the vehicle for esotericism.
Carved into stone, the writings in the chambers of the Fifth Dynasty pyramids have been preserved, unaltered, for for thousand years. The Samaritans treasure as a sacred relic a Bible they claim as "authentic," while here at the holy places of Egypt, ignorant but curiuous tourists brush carelessly agains these carved stones where every feature each line, each arrangement of text, each color has aparticular significance, there being no doubt that every detail is intentional.
Although we may not yet know how to interpret these words, let us at least preserve them for those who will come after us. Was it not greatly to the credit of Bonaparte's mission that it scrupulously copied texts, which, at the time, no one yet knew how to decipher?
If the intention of the Gospels, for example, were to give to manking a moral code for ordinary life, and if the way toward the "Father" were explicable in simple terms, then why hinder us from reaching this aim by speaking in parables? Why should all these writings hide what can be openly said in order to help the unhappy masses of this world? Was it through a perverse need to create a mystery, and "opiate for the masses," as the materialists say? Was it because of the world of those days was so uncultured in cmparison with ours, which is so highly intelligent? Would it be because those prophets and God-inspired men did not better know how to express themselves?
We have enough evidence of the intelligence, wisdom, and unquenstionably high degree of civilization reached in the past to warrant dismissing such assumptions.
On the other hand, no cryptograph or riddle remains undecipherable. It is therefore naive to believe that such texts as ancinet Egypt has left us in great profusion would base an esoteric meaning on a mystification of this sort, were such esotericism expressible by writing. In the cmparison of sacred texts, the cryptograph and riddle never have any purpose other than to awaken the reader's attention, to place an accent on one aspect o fthe text, in short, to guide him toward the esoteric sense o fthe wriring. The same applies to a play on words or a parable.
Esotericism can neither be written nor spoken, hence cannot be betrayed. One must be prepared to grasp it, to see it, to hear it. This preparaiton is not a knowing but a being-able, and can ultimately be acquired only through the effort o the indidvidual himself, by a struggle against all obstacles, and a victory of the human-animal nature.
There is a sacred science, and for thousands of years countless inquisitive people have sought in vain to penetrate its "secrets." It is af ithey attempted to dig a hole in the se with an ax. The tool must be of the same nature as the objective to be woked upon. Spirit is only found within spirit, and esotericism is the spiritual aspect of the world, inaccessible to cerebral intelligence.
Those who profess to reveal the esotericism of such teachings are charlatans. They may try to explain the implication fo a certain word or forumula as with a conventional secret, but with regard to sacred science, they will never be able to do more than put one word in place of another, and at best this will be bad literature replacing a simple idea.
The true initiate can guide a gifted pupil and help him to travel more quickly along the path of consciousness, and the pupil, upon reaching stages of illumination by his own inner light, will read the esotericism of such teaching directly. No one can do it for him.
