On Chasing Transcendence

Surprise is an innate feature of the Uncanny. Another defining feature is Delight, I'd say.

The paradox of the Uncanny means that "transcendent enchantment" can't be sought as a goal--because doing so is a quest for a private personal reward. The experience eludes the quester precisely because it's being desired, which implies predictability, which ruins the surprise. What the practice of magical rituals attempts to do--gaming the system to achieve the preferred egoistic result. The magus will get results, all right--the process being aided both by the human propensity to be fooled by randomness and by the ready resort to the post hoc propter hoc fallacy. But even with the shoehorning of expectations in place, the results are never really those intended by the working. Especially in the long run. "Beginner's luck" is another feature in that regard. Beginner's luck is a phenomenon perhaps most notable for how dramatically it eventually reverses.

Ritual produces its perceived results as a result of its power to effectively focus attention. But magical workings emphasize technical prowess and obsession with detail as a materialist engineering process, centering the would-be magus as the creator, arbiter, or critical mediator in the assembly code of reality. That’s a perilously presumptuous role to assume, especially for a mortal being. Humans lack the capacity to assume authority over those dimensions, to say nothing of the naive assumptions of moral and ethical purity that foolish human minds employ to justify their resort to “good magic” or “white magic.” Magical practice is always ultimately about personal desires—what the Tao Te Ching refers to as “private ends”, even if those personal desires and private ends are framed as noble goals for the cosmos at large. Very different from prayer, even as elaborated in ritual observance. Petitioning the Most High is a humble process, and one that acknowledges the inadequacy of ones self-awareness. Magical practice demands the exaltation of self-willed power. The awful fact is that magical practice is an amoral affair, and the magicians who obtain the most subjective success with their conjurings are those who assent to the advantages of wielding their will as they wish, for malign purposes as well as benevolent ones. When someone seeks to manipulate reality for an evil intention, they’re liberated from the quandaries related to the problem of pure intentions. But they also beckon an unfathomable fascination with horror and morbidity. The human mind contains some terrible recesses and shadows. It’s all too easy to imagine hell-realms, and wallow in unending negativity and grotesquerie. Whereas positivity and benevolence reside somewhere different than the realm of fantasy, a place that eludes conceptualization. Perhaps that accounts for why reading someone’s account of their imagined ideal of Utopia always sounds so bland and limited and hollow.

Back when I was much more naive, I dabbled a little bit. But between my moral reservations and my personal indiscipline, I never got very far with it. Just far enough to figure that the Universe is not a game to be rigged. And, much later, to intuit I was better able to access the supernal realm in the course of just…trying to help out. The process of entropy reversal, restoring the scared, and rebuilding this damaged world is a mission that relies on natural human agency, imperfect though it may be. Not an attempt to emply supernatural means with the solipsistic goal of remaking the world in one’s own image or bending the macrocosm to one’s own will, even momentarily.