/psy/ - psychology and psychonautics

I came to chaos magic through Discordianism and the works of Robert Anton Wilson. I don't actively practice, but I'm interested in the occult and fringe knowledge in general.

These things seem pretty cyb to me re: altering consciousness, the idea of (virtual) realities being dependent on the mind, etc.

But I somehow think that not many Lains would be attracted to this stuff, in virtue of being more hard-line scientists (in the sense of scientism).

For skeptics of the occult, I would recommend the works of Robert Anton Wilson, especially Prometheus Rising. He comes at these topics from a purely skeptical, empirical standpoint, and is more philosophical than esoteric.

>>146
How do i start as a beginner?

>>148
soykafpost

>>147
Prometheus Rising is pretty soy. It's not anything new, really, just the same "dude what if matrix" pseudophilosophy and infinitely stereotyped "positive thinking" self-help tripe. Maybe don't jump the gun, chum.

>>147
I came to chaos magick through Discordianism too.
Not only altering consciousness looks cyb, but also the fact that it allows the use of technology, it's called
"cyber magick", it's another way of modifying subjectives phenomenas of the mind.

>>148

I would recommend the following books:

-Principia Discordia. It doesn't talk about magick, but it talks about the tunnels of reality and the truth. It's great to understand the theory.

-Liber Null And The Psychonaut. This book talks about theory and practice of magick, it's a classic.

-Psychonaut field manual. It has a lot of techniques to go to altered states of consciousness.

-Kybalion. That would be optional, Kybalion talks about hermeticism, a neoplatonic philosophy. You don't need to agree with everything that is in the book, but there are important things to understand in this philosophy like: "the all is mind", "as above, so below".

>>148
Gordon White has a practical guide to chaos magic oriented towards personal finance called The Chaos Protocols.

>>150
Prometheus Rising can be read as a re-working of Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness, with emphasis on the anti-essentialist elements: avoidance of the "is" cognates, and rejection of all authority with regard to perspectives. None of this has much to do with "The Matrix" or "positive thinking", though in some ways it resembles self-help in the sense that it provides practical guidance and exercises for the reader.

Maybe you'd be better off providing some constructive criticism or alternate suggestions, instead of brewing soykaf and spreading misinformation.

>Chaos Magick
Eh, soykaf-teir occult. The communities are usually filled with RPers as well.
Pic related, everything that you REALLY need to get started in the occult if you don't want to digest any "religious" type of material. The greater portion of the books are there to teach you. To fully understand this subject there is a lot of information you have to digest first. I don't agree 100% with the picture, but it does its job well.
Experience:
I have been actively practicing the occult for several years now. I know what works, how things work, and ways to get the best results. Thanks to this I'm living quite comfortably and spend several hours each day spiritually advancing myself.
If someone wants to chat, just ask me in this thread and we can agree on a form of communication. Otherwise I'll just leave this post here.
Also, if you want the books in the related picture, check out: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/5jbvucjd1cyq8/
(Not my folder, it was made by someone from the now dead Fringechan)

>>163
>I have been actively practicing the occult for several years now. I know what works, how things work, and ways to get the best results. Thanks to this I'm living quite comfortably and spend several hours each day spiritually advancing myself.

So you owe your comfiness to occult mumbo?
How and what did you do?

>>167
>occult mumbo
You won't get anywhere with that mindset, as a part getting good is believing.
>How and what did you do?
Writing it up everything would take too long. Once you understand the basics of the occult then you are able to study the more important details which really refine the ability to manifest things into reality. With only the basics (or worse, such is the case with chaos magic) you won't be able to get anything amazing.

>>163

Thanks for sharing those books! How much days did you need to get any effect? I just started meditating about two weeks ago, so I am practicing mindfulness meditation like 15 minutes a day (only), soon I will try other types of meditations.

>>170
>How many days did you need to get any effect?
Depends upon what my goal it, how much energy I put towards it, along with several other factors. Not only do you need to be spiritually powerful enough, but there are many outside factors which will adjust how effective you are.
Currently I never really bother with mindfulness meditation, but for beginners it can help.

>>169

>You won't get anywhere with that mindset, as a part getting good is believing.

Sure, but how can one know for certain that the magic is the cause of the effects that you want, and not random chance? It sounds to me like a recipe for confirmation bias.

What's really needed to test the effectiveness of this magic is a double-blind trial with large sample sizes and a proper control group.

>>172

>put the fun away

Whatever nerd.

throws football

>>172

I don't think it's possible, nowadays,to use science methods to test the effectiveness of magick, because it deals with subjectives phenomenas of the mind, the experiences are not the same for everyone.

>>172
There is no true way to test it besides believing in it and experiencing it for yourself. The largest step for a beginner is to believe, if you can't do that you'll never experience the true you can gain.
Even as you run experiments your either conscious or subconscious doubt will cause them to fail. If you rely on tainted "science" throughout your life you'll never get anywhere.
Plus, the reading list in my main post will do very well to remove some forms of doubt.

>>175

>Even as you run experiments your either conscious or subconscious doubt will cause them to fail. If you rely on tainted "science" throughout your life you'll never get anywhere.

That's a bit hypocritical; "tainted science" is what enabled you to send that message worldwide. Integrated circuits don't run on magic.

Science is ony concerned with describing reality. If magic is real, then we should do what we can to determine the science behind it, so that we can put it to work in a controlled manner. We've done it before with an uncountable number of natural phenomena, like the electricity that's powering your computer.

>>176
>Science is ony concerned with describing reality.

Science is about predicting the behaviour of observable phenomenon, science does not make ultimate judgments about the nature of reality because for science this isn't important in predicting natural phenomena.

Magic isn't something scientific to believe in magic you need to believe in something you can't observe and test. But that doesn't mean magic is untrue, magic is more a thing of philosophy and faith.

>>177

>>Science is ony concerned with describing reality.

>Science is about predicting the behaviour of observable phenomenon,

That's what I said. That's just another way of saying "describing reality". It's always just a matter of developing the right mechanical tools to do the observing, and the right mathematical tools to do the describing.

>>180
>That's what I said. That's just another way of saying "describing reality". It's always just a matter of developing the right mechanical tools to do the observing, and the right mathematical tools to do the describing.

No, your operating on the ontological assumption
that all reality is observable reality, this is view
that must be philosophically argued for .

Science does not need to rest on ontological premises because it does not involve questions of what is reality and not, but simply makes inductions of a certain set of things i.e observable phenomenon, a person does not need to believe all reality is observable phenomenon to do science.

>>176
Even if you never touch anything occult, I suggest you at the very least read up on some basic philosophy of science and scientific (anti-)realism. It's all about overcoming these simplistic assumptions about the way science and the world work.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

What does alice think of Crowley. I was thumbing through some chaos magick pdfs and they all seemed to heavily pull from Book 4 so I just scrapped reading them and went to their source. Been meditating actively for a few weeks now, nowhere near getting my mind free of chatter to actually do magick but really excited for future development in the field. Oddly enough I was drawn to it because it seems like it will help my mental health.

Also Grant Morrison, hack or not?

Have recently tried getting into chaos magic. Here's a cool site I found

http://chaosmatrix.org

>>440

really enjoying the necronomicon. lovecraft is the best.

If you want to learn about neoplatonism, hermeticism and idealism, I don't recommend reading Kybalion, it's just a bunch of dogmatic affirmations . Read Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Representation, he explains in a direct way neoplatonism, for example, the One (Will), Nous (world of Ideas). You could also read Corpus Hermeticum.

>>442

this is kinda the route I inadvertently took and am now perplexed why everyone is spending pages explaining basic Vedic philosophy. The new age crap wears thin, I think I prefer the religious texts - ironically less navelgazing.

Is there anything pass the kiddie-tier everything is what you perceive it as or some tendentious view of ayy lmaos being the psychic center of the universe, like god damn I just want to summon an arch-demon. I think I'll stick with Crowley he's at least interesting to read.

>>445

forgot my image and bump

Can someone explain to me the actual sorts of things that occult practice empowers you to do? The discussion started by >>163 doesn't do much more than make extremely oblique reference to 'living comfortably' as a result of their occult practice. I notice this problem a lot in discussions of the occult - everyone loves talking in abstractions about 'power' or 'spiritual advancement' without ever getting down to brass tacks. All the occult books I've ever read encourage keeping meticulous diaries of your magic(k)al work; it shouldn't be hard to give as an (appropriately anonymised) example of the kind of works you pull off and the sort of results you get.

Frankly, the philosophical/scientific aspects of the occult don't worry me right now. Whether you're really messing with the universe using your mind or just using psychological tricks to change your unconscious behaviors to breed success, I think both things are fine and useful. I just want someone to throw me a bone and say something straightforward about the kind of results they get out of this practice.

>>475

With chaos magick you can change reality tunnels, so you can do a sigil to ask for ice cream, you just wait and you'll eventually get an ice cream, then you can say that the cause of you getting an ice cream is the sigil you made. That's a result.

But I don't do chaos magick anymore because you can never prove and be certain that the cause of the ice cream is the sigil, it's just a belief, you would eventually get an ice cream anyway. You are just messing with your belief system.

Now I am into platonism and alchemy, I think it's more useful than just messing with sigils.

>>476
Changing your belief system sounds like it could be useful for quite a few people. It seems like there's a lot of people these days wedded to the reality tunnel in which they're depressed and anxious incompetents with no ambition in life. If chaos magick could enable those people to get their heads out of their asses it'd be a win in my book.

How do you expect platonism and alchemy to be more useful than sigil work? What sorts of results do you expect from them? From what I've read, alchemy is a highly metaphorical system and is more than the incompetent medieval chemistry that you hear about in high school science class. However, what alchemy actually is, involves, or results in is still quite unclear to me.

I'm quite curious about this stuff, the more I look into it the more it seems that there's a solid core of real, useful methods that had been independently developed by every human culture. The problem seems to be that millennia of obfuscation to maintain elites, obfuscation to evade church authorities, scams, misunderstandings, literal interpretations of metaphors, and insanity have rendered that solid core quite hard to find.

>>477

>What sorts of results do you expect from alchemy and platonism?
It's more about philosophy, knowing the objective reality (ontology) and transmuting your soul made of lead into gold (ethics). Alchemy is the science of the soul, it involves psychology too. And Platonism is a metaphysical system that postulates the existence of a world of Forms, then your goal is to know these Form through art and meditation. First time I heard about Platonism it seemed illogical, but I only understood it when I read Schopenhauer. I think that the first step to practicing alchemy, platonism or hermeticism is to study the metaphysics, see if you agree with it.

>>163
Is this really all one needs to get a good grasp of hermetics? The library offered in the site of the four leaves is very vast (more than 40gb holy soykaf) and this confuses me

Chaos magick and cyberpunk: https://hermetic.com/chaos/cyberpunks
Chaos magick files: https://hermetic.com/chaos/index

Lain is real.

>>475
Also, it's just fun to alter your reality.

I'm reading Conway's Primer and I'm at "Visualization training" but the methods he describes are very unclear.
Does someone know a good book/guide for visualization that gives clear instructions on what to do?

>>483
The problem with that huge library is that you don't know where to start.
I think the poster in that pic is full of soykaf but he got a point. Instead of reading everything and losing your focus, go to the essential works and study them first.

This spell creates a fireball.
To prepare the spell, find a glass bottle and fill it up most of the way with gasoline (leave some air at the top). Soak a rag in lighter fluid and plug the top of the bottle with it.
In order to cast the spell, visualize the target of the spell burning as you light the rag, then immediately throw the bottle. You will see effects almost immediately.

There is no way to prove the existence, or anything about magic. There is no way for you to throw fireballs. Especially not Great Chaos Fireballs. You cannot get anything done with magic directly.

Magic is sort of like… an emotional, but unconscious realization that it is humanly impossible to be perfectly in control of anything, ever. There is always more variables, side-effects of far away things, and so magic tries to get things done by manipulating these indirect things instead of dealing with the problem head on. Hence why there never is anything tangible about it, no fireballs, no opened locks or guessed cards - rather there is a solid belief that even if everything points to your plan failing, there is still a chance.

Reality is a chaotic system, sitting around and drawing magic circles or throwing frogs in the fire leaves you with better chances of success than giving up and delivering defeat to yourself by your own hand. It takes only one successful magic to impress a person who had high stakes, but for the neutral observing sceptic, it is just ponysoykaf. The reason why magic matters less and less these days is because people are getting onto chaos theory, and off the anthropomorphic god/gods train, have a greater appreciation for random events and chance and thus are less likely to buy into will-oriented narratives. While most of them do not understand the specifics of many things, they can just google it and find that there actually are explanations, even if they don't have the brains or time to understand it, leaving all the less space for magic.


As for me, I am into chaos, without the "magic" or "theory" or anything. So, people have been conjuring up these 'arches' since ancient times, was pretty mainstream in e.g. Greece. Things like "everything is made of fire" or "water" or someone went "4 elements" while there was also a "void + atoms" theory. New age versions include "love", "energy", "matter" etc, all of these things that make up everything else. Plato added a twist by separating the thing and the general idea of the thing but that kinda just made "idea" the base material, while the finite real world was just "ideas spiced with the idea of imperfection/finity".
All these concepts are somehow fixed - imagine a huge network graph of how all things are related to each other (much like words). If you pick any concept (say, energy) as a sort of axiom, every other concept will have a relative position to it, and the whole network will have a certain shape with our axiom right in the middle. Picking different axioms might produce different-looking networks, but all of them still represents this one world. That is, except one which soykafs all over it, and that's chaos. Chaos can contradict human logic (which is just a little part of it), not exist (stay out of the exist-not exist dichotomy) and make things happen from there. In fact it can just ignore any rule but with the option of keeping the rule. Including these ones. Chaos can do a few things as if it was using one axiom, and other things as if it was using another one, without having to reshape/translate the entire network around the axiom. Everything that is ordered, no matter how long it has been and how full everything is of it, is just that tiny part of chaos which has been playing along with some rules; the rest is beyond reason, though probably still accessible to intelligence. When the patterns go, we're all lost.

>>163
Still want to chat? I want to initiate myself into the occult

>>487

Nice text, I like the concept and the philosophy. I just don't like the classical books like Libernull & Psychonaut, Thelema and also the community :I Someone my will is to write about chaos in a more formal way and with another name, so it could be taken seriously.

>>595
Glad you liked it. Like I said, I'm not really into occultism or wizardry but just like to think about chaos. I used to be fascinated with concepts that don't build or rely on other concepts, have no opposites and require no context. A few examples would be nothing, anything, everything, dream, kami, particle. Apparently chaos was the best, by virtue of not having any permanent pattern (including the pattern of not having a permanent pattern), this freely being all the other stuff. This is something that 'everything' can also do, but it can't really just be something, or nothing.

As someone who has delved into Chaos magick, (and a Chaos Cultist through Eris before exposure to discordianism) I'd say chaos magick is definitely good for getting new people into magickal states of mind, but I feel that while belief is important, breaking down all mechanics to it is disrespectful to the craft and whatever/whomever you implement, and that because chaos magick is rapidly changing dynamic since everything is 'just belief' (hence the name) that one can easily come up with an effective, personalised system, however, that magick can come at the price of sanity by holding what may, at an unforeseen depth, be contradicting concepts in working memory.

bump

>>487
holy soykaf nice post i really like your idea of chaos