==== Magick, Mistakes and the Multitude of the Matter ====
//[[Lecture notes]] of the talk by Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney at [[http://www.designmarch.is/designtalks/|DesignTalks]], part of the [[http://www.designmarch.is/|Design March]] Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, on the 14th of March 2013.//
Talk in video form: https://vimeo.com/66260826 \\
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Before we begin we'd like to note that every word in our title is “beyond speech or thought or silence”. Therefore, we invite you to listen in between, behind and underneath everything we say.
{{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/7006377422/}} \\
I'm sure you know that any form of magick - like the future - is ultimately unknowable. We can try to explain, analyse and justify how magic works, but it will never be the same as experiencing its effects directly on your own skin. In today's materialist culture direct experiences tend to raise sceptical eyebrows, or be dismissed as archaic and all together irrelevant. However, such experience is able to take us outside of structured time and allow us to grasp our intrinsic interconnectedness with other beings and environments. It doesn't matter that we can't put it in words, we just know, that we are just this...
When we let go of expectations, predictions and judgements for a while, we can absorb and start to see things as they are and see what bubbles up. There are many traditions, techniques and situations to produce these experiences - meditation, parenting, physical exertion, sleep or sensory deprivation, prayer, walks in the park, psychedelic trips, gardening, computer programming - for each of us it is something different. What is common in all of these experiences is the intensity and abundance of experiencing the moment. Magick - as we see it - is nothing more than a way to channel this intensity of experience to transform the person and their environment. Magick allows us to temporarily step outside of the mundane, consensus reality. It broadens our perspective and shows the hidden faces of reality as a malleable, impermanent tangle of relationships that keep flicking in and out of existence. This interpretation can work for both stage magic and ceremonial magic, but also for more informal rites of divination and invocation, such as reading tarot cards or burning demons on winter solstice.
And again, may be no way for me to convince you of the meaning and joy of direct experiences and magic, so I'll stop trying to explain it.
Instead I invite you to join me in a small invocation experiment. We'd like to try to invoke Viriditas, the vegetal side of our minds. The medieval mystic Hildegard Von Bingen had a vision that behind all life there is a greening force that connects all beings and keeps us fresh and alive. You could see it as an invocation of the quiet but tenacious force of spring. I realise that it might be quite a challenge to invoke Viriditas in winter, inside a dark theatre… however Viriditas is a force that not only greens our landscapes, but also our thoughts, emotions, language and actions. Whether you believe that such a force exists or not doesn't matter - you can simply invoke a feeling of freshness.
To begin, I invite you to stand up (if standing is a problem, feel free to remain seated).
Plant your feet firmly on the floor and direct your attention to the soles of your feet. Feel that you're standing, feel the sensation of contact and pressure. Breathe into the soles of your feet. You can close your eyes if that helps, or direct your gaze at the screen without really looking at it.
Remember to breathe…
Feel the connection between your feet and the ground - through your shoes, the floor, the tubes and cables that bring heat and light in this room, all the way down to the ground…. as if you were putting down roots. Breathe a few times. As you breathe in, feel the freshness entering your body, as you breathe out sink deeper and deeper under the soles of your feet. Your awareness reaching all the way to the ground, and into the ground, becoming rooted…
Now slowly, with every in-breath, move your attention upwards towards the freshness and lightness of air in your lungs. With every out-breath spill out into your roots. Breathe in, you're fresh, breathe out, you're here…
Your body becoming alive with every breath, and dissolving with every out-breath. Every skin-cell is breathing, dissolving, reaching out. Through your limbs, your spine, your trunk, neck and head. Soaking up the greenness, opening up like a brave but fragile leaf in early spring. Being aware of the touch of air, the temperature, the scent and the sounds of the space, of other people breathing, growing and dissolving.
Feel your edges melting into greenness, becoming one with the air in the theatre, the air in the streets of Reykjavik and across the Icelandic landscape. Extend your mind all the way to edges of this island, breathing a green breath over the frozen ground… If you dare, try dipping your thoughts in the ocean…
Then slowly return to your seat, your mind and your body. sit down and relax.
Keep your mind and your body open to these sensations that ebb and flow with each moment. Keep breathing while Nik reads a few quotes to tickle your vegetal mind.
Try not to think or interpret too much, just let the words and images wash over your senses…
It is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
Eyes in the ocean of sight, Ears in the ocean of sound, Tongue in the ocean of taste, Nose in the ocean of smell, Body in the ocean of touch, Mind in the ocean…
Matter is made of space and space of matter.
A world apart: nowhere, anywhere, everywhere.
It is the beauty of things unconventional.
Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness
The moment when sedentary systems begin oscillating
Thalience is an attempt to give nature a voice without that voice being ours in disguise.((Karl Schroeder))
Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness... these delicate traces, this faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness (…) nothingness itself - instead of being empty space (…) - is alive with possibility.
Being is the Noun; Form is the adjective. Matter is the Noun; Motion is the Verb.
I suggest we look at plants–look more deeply, more closely, and with a more open mind than we have done before.
“If the light is sufficient to disclose to us the way of contemplation that lies within ourselves, we may by pursuing it to the end come to know not as a mere static dictum but as a winged intuition, carrying an infinitude of significance both for mind and heart that the One is the Manifold, and the Manifold is the One.”
Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate, and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterized by the solid state, the fixed, and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of the vegetal imagination.
A dead branch is a flower on its was to become garbage, to become another flower.
...you have to slow way down, be patient and look very closely.
Once-hard edges take on a soft pale glow. Once-substantial materiality appears almost sponge-like.
Look at the pattern the seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. […] There's a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity
Metaphors have a curious way of embodying themselves.
I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the 21st century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century.
True art must be based in deep observation.
"Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin. We need a new set of lenses to see our way into the world."((T.McKenna))
When mistakes occur, loosen your model of reality.
Minimise borders, maximise edges.((FoAM))
It is spoken of the sephiroth and the paths, of spirits and conjurations, of gods, spheres, and planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results follow.((Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice))
The process begins by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Let us declare nature to be legitimate.
A magical perspective sees non-apparent links and connections amidst an illusion of order, control, and restriction. An alternative worldview that summons the creative and prophetic power of the multitude.((Centre for Tactical Magic. http://www.tacticalmagic.org/CTM/thoughts/tactical%20magic%20text.htm))
Making the familiar strange, or rather making the things of this world divine again through the alterity of new signs. Making moist and green what threatens to become corrupted, mendacious, ill-used and dried out.
There is an “outside” now, maybe an infinite number of outsides, places to stand with a lever in one hand - and a magic mushroom in the other. The dispossessed have always believed in a millennium, a magickal resistance, a heaven on earth, a world turned upside down. This is it. Well, time’s up.
It is the discipline that chooses among multiple successful scientific models based on which ones best satisfy our human, aesthetic/moral/personal needs. In other words, given two or more equally valid models of the universe, thalience is the art of choosing the one with the most human face. It is the recovery of the natural in our understanding of the Natural.And with that thought, we'd like to move from monologue to dialogue, perhaps not yet with plants, but with all of you, hopefully invigorated by the spirit of Viriditas and Thalience. //With warm thanks to Edda K. Sigurjonsdottir and Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir for their invitation and hosting, as well as Kristin and Goddur for a unique insight into Icelandic nature & culture and everyone else of Design March who has made our stay a most inspiring one.//