Category: Neuromancy


The Optimism of Pessimism

Filed under: Neuromancy — Comments Off
August 27, 2011

Sounds like a bullshit title, right? Aren’t those opposites?

Well, kinda like how if you go to the far left of the political spectrum it starts to exhibit the same behaviors as the far right as both become totalitarian, or how the color spectrum turns on itself to form the color wheel, I’ve found you can roll pessimism into optimism too.

It’s like this: what’s the worst that could happen if I took action X? Let your imagination run insane. You’ll come up with a crazy list, most of which you can immediately rule out as “not actually going to happen.” For what is left, you will find that giving a voice to your pessimism and fear sheds a different light on things.

And chances are you’ll find the worst case scenario will not faze you at all. And in fact often that worst case scenario upon examination proves to be an improvement over the current situation – after all, if it wasn’t, if things really were as good as they could ever be, you wouldn’t be looking to change anything.

If the worst thing about walking out the door is being alone for a while or even the rest of your life, do you stay in a stifling marriage?

If the worst thing that will happen to you upon quitting a job that’s become untenable is you find a better one, do you really stay out of inertia? What if the worst thing is you get an extended vacation to live off investments, write a book, work on music, and gradually build a consulting practise?

Call their bluff and take the plunge.

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Fuel Toxicity

Filed under: Alchemy In Action, Neuromancy — Comments Off
July 26, 2011

From a warning to a friend.

You can burn toxic fuels if you have to and you know what you are doing. Trouble is you don’t know whether or not you know what you’re doing til long after the combustion is complete. And the combustion needs to be 100% complete or you’re swimming in toxic waste.

Not recommended.

Re: exhausting the topic, it’s not that I don’t want to hear it, it’s that what I’m hearing sounds like a toxic state. I could address various symptoms, but let’s get to the root.

You’re in a big feedback loop from your intense focus on 11 as the alpha and omega of your world. It stems from obsessive force and I’m not seeing new blood thrown into the loop [ie, reciprocation from 11].

Feedback will fry your system very quickly, yes you can learn to control it and use it but learning to control feedback to stay on the brink of that abyss without falling over and without getting burned is beyond most magicians and yogis [and alas, you are neither]. It’s a dangerous balance to attempt if you don’t need to learn to manipulate vast quantities of energy to say, work a stadium or move a market or institute systemic changes in the blink of an eye.

Even then it usually only works for a short time before it all goes tits up.

For every 500 [or is it 5000?] idiots who think Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend will show them how to shoot smack and not get addicted, I only know one who succeeded. Most of the rest get burned and ruined their lives whether they survived or they OD’d. It’s not much different with emotional fixes.

I think you need to deliberately spend some time focussing on something or someone else. Detox.

Yes, it has been pointed out that you can meditate on any old thing (or any man) and the practise is as likely to get you results as meditating on the usual suspects or any inanimate object. Usually no one tries it and reports back, and if they do it’s usually after extensive experience in dharana upon some simpler symbol and usually the object is chosen for some quality the querent wishes to emulate in himself. In essence, the person is rendered on a level as the little placard with the yellow square on it or the candle flame or whatever. Or an artist fixates upon their muse to get a certain outcome, in time the original person becomes a shadow next to the imagined version of them that fuels the art.

This is not quite the same thing as we are speaking of here, though it may well be just as detrimental unless the artist or querent has learned discipline and distance enough to handle it.

Which brings us to 202. There’s not much to be said on that topic in polite society, but if you yank on an invisible chain and the hound howls, he’s yours to do with as you please. If you yank and the hound runs freely to the hills you are simply grasping at the air.

“Almost is worse than not at all” wasn’t what I was trying to get at re: 202. The tactics I use with 202 are predicated on hearing that howl. It would be quite different if I was trying to summon something I never owned before.

Ditto your statement about “behave as if 202 is already yours.”

In any case I recognize 202 for the toxic little gumdrop that he is. All his breed are extremely poisonous.

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On Point

Filed under: Neuromancy — Comments Off
July 22, 2011

Three things…

An old song by Andy McCoy when he had a band called Shooting Gallery for, oh, a week or so. Well, longer than that – they opened for KISS on one tour before disintegrating into the sort of thing they were named for and the singer Billy G. Bang essentially vanished off the face of the earth. Apparently you can transmute yourself up into a syringe if you’re foolish enough or too far gone enough… but anyway I digress.

The song was called “Nature of My Business,” a fantasy of having the power of life over death, or at least the ability to make the choice for another and get away with it.

 

I’m so surprised that I made it this far
I survived, I’m alive, hey, I love life

It’s just the nature of my business

 

Then there’s that infamous photo of Boyd Rice with whathisface from the American Front. A spoof pic for Sassy of all things that follows Rice to this day, not that he minds. Young American men with a swagger even seated and a dangerous energy as if they were capable of things you couldn’t even imagine and Boyd has that devil’s smirk as he holds a switchblade.

Not all titillation involves tits, and I bet most of the protestors at NON shows had dreams based on that photo that they’d never cop to.

The smirk that gets across in a nanosecond what McCoy needed five minutes and nine seconds to approximate.

Who says there are no more incubi?

And then there’s my old lockblade, found in the back of a drawer with assorted occult texts and knickknacks. “Kissing Crane,” which I believe is a German manufacturer. Well, they would know how to make their point, now, wouldn’t they?

And yes, it’s a Stiletto. Four inches, like so many others of another sort I have to make my points.

Now, back to the beginning… how does one take that knife and that photograph and transmute them into a song that actually fulfills their promises?

That is my work for the week.

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