Simon Terebro

Alright, done.

Pretty sure turning the Monas Hieroglyphica into an avatar is still funny though.

Time to think of alternatives.

Hmm, I'm starting to feel weird about stealing the name of an adept from a different magical tradition than mine. Don't want to accidentally make enemies of his ghost!

...I _am_ having fun, though.

I never learn this lesson.

Last week Franz: Let's do religious/magical workings that invoke fear intentionally. That sounds like fun. This week Franz: NO ONE TOLD ME FEAR WAS SCARY!!

I almost feel like it's silly to post these, because it feels so obvious, but my sense is that it's not obvious to everyone.

And the following strike me as very similar processes: - Emotional release in the form of crying, shuddering, etc. - Kundalini - The "Body Keeps the Score" idea of releasing trauma via shaking - Various methods of "breathing out" energy and/or emotions

Things that seem clearly related to me: - The "energy" in energy healing - Qi/prana/odic force in various religious/magical systems - Chronic muscle tension - Body-stored trauma a la "Body Keeps the Score"

This leads us to one of my primary research questions at the moment: What techniques have been historically effective for discovering and learning how to propitiate new gods? Are there trends and best practices? How might we do it now, in our unique situation?

Premise 3: There are ways to surface previously-invisible things. This happens at both the individual level and the social level. ("meditation", "mysticism", "revelation", "magic", "myth", "ritual", "prophecy").

Premise 2: We're currently having trouble as a society with all sorts of out-of-control egregores.

Premise 1: Cultures have usually had ritual ways of interacting with/propitiating/learning from/exorcising egregores. (Often talked about in the language of gods or spirits.)

So how do we integrate and accept the fact that we live in a post-modern (or post-post-modern) world, in a way that's liberating and powerful rather than nihilistic and irrational? (3/3)

Complexity Magic, to me, is the idea that we are embedded in and made up of a huge web of overlapping complex systems. Any attempt to explain "how the world works" covers at most a small slice of the whole thing. And yet choosing to go without a map is... unwise. (2/?)

My username (ComplexityMagic) is my attempt to think about what comes after Chaos Magic. Chaos Magic was an important way to break the frames of existing magical systems, but it was also an awful idea because you can't just summon gods willy-nilly without any consequences. (1/?)

I've gotten my first followers and likes on this account. I can feel myself pulled back towards scarcity mindset. "Must interact in that way again immediately! There might be likes involved!!" Thankfully, the deeper, quieter pull of creation is easy enough to return to.

I still don't love it, though. When you get rid of viscera, there's danger of losing visceral joy, visceral love, visceral awe. (4/4)

This makes me more sympathetic to their project of escaping the "evil" physical world than I was previously. It becomes a sort of transhumanist vision: Take the abstract possibilities we see between the gaps of our evolutionary heritage, and become them. (3/?)