Commencement of EST Magicians

It would be great to have a page with all the drawings and the video together. Then we can develop a thread that others can follow. My main interest is in creating a workshop atmosphere, which is different but related to the more conversational dynamics of our cafe and well established study groups. It would be nice to do the Clean Interviewing as an applied method for doing qualitative collaborative research. CL is a method for gathering high quality data. It is not a conversation.
However, good conversations may arise as we gather good data and that is important but it is important to keep the different discourse styles to cross-fertilize rather than fuse. I hope that makes sense. We are making baby steps after a long period of crawling around in the mud,

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As you know, I’m not big on our friend Peter nailing anything on the head, but I certainly agree with him on this one! :smiling_imp:

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Just a thought…we could do photo galleries using pages on the Metapsy site, then connect them to topics here in the forum. These pages/photos can be added an archive which gets organized over time…

An example is on this page:

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I like that each drawing made during a CL session could have next to it a verbal commentary by the modeler. This is modeling in motion. This is much more like a blackboard drawing than a digital photo or computer generated image. I want to see the movement of the person’s hand/mind moving across a page. This is analogue not digital. Digital =Death of the Magical.

I want to bring back incantation, ritual and dancing around the fire. Throw away your smart phones ye who enter here. This is to re-awaken what has been almost lost in early AI left brain isolationism. I would like a gallery of disciplined improvisations such as these Steiner elegant black board drawings, made during his lectures. We get his imagination in flight.

We need to get back in touch with our inner Steiner.
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Since you guys are being all magical over here … and I realize this has nothing directly to do with what you’re doing … but to help get passed the impending digital death of magic, you really should give a listen to the Weird Studies podcast on Crowley and Magick.

It is one of the sanest and clearest discussions of “magic” (even though Crowley is the starting point … as distasteful as that can be to some, he did bring the topic back into (almost) mainstream consciousness, at least for a while, but revisiting his thoughts in addition to the more down-to-earth reception of John Ford and JF Martell can be very helpful in getting a firmer grasp on what Gebser was most likely referring to as the “efficient Magic structure of consciousness”.

I haven’t (yet) been able to watch the video, but from looking at the maps that have been posted, it looks like there is a lot of overlap between what you guys were exploring and what Ford & Martell were chatting about.

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I haven’t seen the video yet of last night’s workshop. When I do we can discuss presentation and how we can make an intimate space more public. I am looking forward to the Crowley conversation. I enjoyed all of their podcasts so far. I am very attracted to weird, uncanny, synchronicity. The rapid pace our pf our cultural de-coherence is shocking, as evidenced by Jordan Brown’s film. Some of my millennial friends tell me magic is making a comeback. I imagine a re-attunement is necessary to healthy expressions of previous structures rather than following as Wilber did a crash and burn strategy trying to get to third tier. We already have what we need to get to the next phase. We need to learn to pay attention to what we are paying attention to. This is how the ancient magicians stabilized ambiguities through the in between liminal zones.

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Thanks again to my fellow magicians who compared maps and created enchantments together. I hope this intimate gathering of the Eastern Time Zone clan can gather momentum and help train our collective attention so that we can share with each other what is most valuable to us. I enjoyed the imaginal explorations very much and may we do more of it and do it even better. As TJ mentions it is out of these kinds of micro-dynamics that culture weaves us into the grand tapestry. I also imagine that as we model the micro-dynamics of the individual our imaginal participation shapes those macro-trends that get passed on from generation to generation. We work from the center and the field, as individual and as a group co-sponsoring each other’s best efforts. I believe this could become a pattern that connects and we are starting to embed those patterns that connect in the matrix as we balance our vital energies with informatics. We access the Kid TJ and the Kid Doug and invite their participation and allow the Mental structure to support the entire consortium. I imagine that by studying peak experiences, as we do here, that other peak experiences can be triggered as well. And it is nice to know that we can engage micro and macro and meso dynamics at the same time. Bio-socio-techno-symbio-poesis. Touching the boundaries of our shared umvelt. Inner and outer touches interior and exterior. Niche construction at it’s best. There is method in our madness. There is a place for us. Perhaps we already have everything we need?

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Well, I’ll just say, I had my own belly laughs listening to your conversation, and looking at your drawings. Kayla had to sush me because and I had headphones on and Beatrice was still sleeping.

There was some great thoughts shared in this session, and I took my notes.

The more I meditate on reading, the more mysterious and weirder it becomes. It has as much to do with telepathy as with symbolic processing, I am coming to believe. When I am reading at my best it is a form of disciplined dreaming: I am training my attention on the shape of the authors’s world as projected through the text, and incorporating the aesthetic into the phantasmagoria of my own inner space—which blurs at the edges with the transpersonal Cosmos. One day I will draw my own map!

I do feel that it would be good to have more fiction, poetry, visual art, music, and film in our overall Cosmic media mix, to take the edge off that love-hate relationship with metatheory, which I share.

And @TJ, I think you may have stumbled upon a whole new therapeutic sub-field of Gebserian marital therapy. “The family” is definitely a magical structure…though rarely a quiet one. :tired_face: :smile:

Thanks, fellas, for your initiative, and high play, and sharing your epiphanies. I think you are onto something…having to do with how the building blocks of culture can be rearranged into more joyful constructions.

Long live the EST Magicians!

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I look forward to viewing that map, Marco, and curious about the phantasmagoria of your inner world.

And disciplined dreaming…and what was disciplined dreaming before it was disciplined?..

It seems our inner and outer world, our map and our territory, when juxtaposed with the map(s) of our collegues can create conditions for cross-over effects. The boundaries between our inner and outer world become permeable and a vast source of aesthetic pleasure when contrasted and compared in an open space.

This kind of self- modeling while in communion, is the antidote to the disenchanted foams that pop and evaporate as they go down the tube ala Sloterjdiik. I believe, and I point to our videos and our drawings as evidence, that there is a deeper intimacy that we can share, rather than repeat the exhausted tropes of a dying civilization. And out of these minor gestures, I expect a re-birth. TJ and Doug point to in their drawings, in a kind of show and tell, the next phase of human development.

We are bringing about by sharing our minor gestures, a set of aesthetic relationships in motion, and this is the stuff that the post formal, poly-phasic, planetary culture is made of.

Thanks for viewing, Marco, and for your insights. I trust that we can make a difference that makes a difference. The EST magicians look forward to the participation of other magicians from other time zones. May we use all of our knowledge and use all of it well!

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It felt right to me to say yesterday, but oddly enough, today I’ve thrown out all my discipline and am just taking the day, including my reading time, as it comes. What I think I meant, however, is that with my various commitments and responsibilities, I feel I have to actively and deliberately (in a ‘disciplined’ way) make the time for reading.

However, when I’m ‘reading at my best’ I am not trying to be productive in a typically ‘disciplined’ way. Rather, I am following the current of the writing wherever it takes me—and to allow it to take me there, I have to make it a point to set aside the time, and establish the right set and setting (a quiet space, etc.) so I can get into the dream (or trance) state of deep reading.

But before the disciplined part, I think there is only the lure of the dream. There is a madness, an irrationality and magic, at the heart of what we’re doing (as readers and writers, I mean) which makes the discipline worthwhile, even though it’s also good to throw it away sometimes and purely follow the current wherever it leads.

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