Magical Substrate

The collective unconscious as a distributed substrate for magic as subtle communication

Magic as subtle communication

I love the aesthetics of magic - I love the robes, the smoke, the energy powers, manipulating the elements, the celestial bodies, the mythical creatures - it just rocks. And on top of that it seems like a bunch of people are committed to practicing disciplines that seem to work despite seeming to lack grounding in physical formalism.

Usually people treat magic as a word for "stuff that we don't know how it works". I don't think that's wrong but we can try to be more specific. Let's take magic as subtle communication - processes that work thanks to information bypassing the conscious propositional mind.

For this definition, we can recognize many disciplines that recruit magic in some way: music, dance, seduction, persuasion, humor, community organizing, church services, propaganda, advertising, skillfully navigating crowds, and so on and so on. More classical examples of magic I would name are invocation (deity yoga, affirmations), and evocation (sigil craft, spinning up tulpas, and publishing hypersigils), and manifesting. (I should mention I have only surface experience with most of these)

Subtle communication: music, dance, body language, pheromones, EM fields

Examples of disciplines that recruit magic

• Navigating crowds: An example of using subtle communication in real time that everyone does: when you navigate crowds, you read subtle cues like momentum and gaps in movement flow, transmitting signals through gaze and body orientation such that the crowd orients around you a little more.

• Community organizing makes all the difference between a loose set of strangers and a group that looks more like an organism able to propagate information bottom-up and expel entropy. There are tricks for quickly establishing trust and structuring group dynamics and time spent together, but spinning this up in a stable way may require subtle perception of the superorganism. Same for tending a church. Tending the mood at a party is related;

• Obviously some advertisement and propaganda prey on subconscious blindspots to extract some work or money from you by subtly injecting some information in your world model that you'll later act on.

• Music and dance are much more than the sum of their parts. Sequences of timbres and body positions in time move you through precise winding paths in high-dimensional emotional and archetypal spaces.

• Pair dancing can be seen as reading others' creativity and impulses through subtle cues. Also transmitting information and moods through leading and responsiveness.

• Deity yoga is the practice of focusing on a deity with the intention of downloading its archetypal set of attributes that will color the practitioner's behavior patterns.

Intuitive crowd navigation

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Deity yoga

So how does this work? What might be a naturalist explanation of these magical phenomena? 

The collective unconscious as the substrate for magic

Magical substrate

Magic is about processing information in channels other than conscious attention. And a lot of the examples above have a big interpersonal component. So let me venture that magic may refer to software... running on the collective unconscious...

The collective unconscious being something like an operating system. An OS is an intermediate layer between applications and hardware usually providing IO and memory management among other things. Idk if the analogy fully tracks but I see the CU as an abstraction over the asynchronous, distributed network of body-minds. You could argue that other living beings and the rest of physics play a part but for simplicity let's consider humans only.

The network structure of the CU is the same as the regular social network of human interactions. It is a scale-free, nested topology and constantly routes huge amounts of subliminal information. The analogy with the internet is right there, you may be routing other people's packets. That's sort of how I imagine manifesting works. More on that in a moment.

Manifesting as Packet Routing

Manifesting

Ok the CU is there and you can influence it with subtle communication. What does the interface look like, how does IO work? You do it through your body language, emotional affect, touch, stress patterns, word choice, social signaling, pheromones, EM fields, visual aesthetics.

Everyone's already doing it all the time, it's just a matter of doing it intentionally and skillfully. You can carve it up in two ways: reading and writing.

To read, I wager you can get sensitive enough to track entities and patterns in the CU by perceiving evidence in people's subtle patterns, as well as from group interactions, as well as the state of the environment. A crucial interface is your own internal state: maybe the way you're feeling or some tension in your chest maps to some feature of the high dimensional space you're trying to track.

To write to the CU, to have an intentional effect on it, I imagine you can DO it consciously by modeling the system closely and making the intervention that triggers the cascade you intend (Idk how interesting I think this is). OR you can NON-DO it holding a clear intention and flowing as the system rearranges itself around you, while being adaptable to obstacles.

Non-doing writing to the CU is close to what I see manifesting / the law of attraction as. Idk about you but serendipity seems way stronger than it should be in my life. I clarify my intentions and suddenly stuff that matches them pretty well shows up. It's like running searches on the unconscious web - the shape of your intentions shines through in your subtle communication and other people route signals that have the complimentary shape to what you're broadcasting. The catch is that you need to increase your contact surface with the network. If you're not spending time with people, you're not connected.

Motivation, Next steps, and Conclusion

Why am I talking about this? Next time I'm going to make a call for a science of the collective unconscious, statistical mechanics in the noosphere.

"Why would you want to do this?" Why would you want to be better at apprehending, navigating, and transforming any other substrate? For survival, for getting more comfortable, for making life better. FOR CONTROL. (jk (or else? (no really technology can be used for good or evil etc and more work could be done to decide whether it's good or bad for people to know more about this but in general if the capitalist environment is already magically adversarial then people ought to be able to perceive and defend against threats - it's CogSec (cognitive security))))

Anyway, to me it seems like the social sciences and philosophy have been sort of on it for a long time but I think by studying magic and religious and spiritual traditions we can learn about the noosphere where archetypes and egregores and group spirits and memes and angels and demons and machine elves dwell. And since all this unconscious stuff is upstream of all the conscious stuff if we can see the landscape and terraform it, we'll be able to make stuff nicer I guess.

Epistemic warning: THIS IS ART. To me magic feels like a huge beacon since it seems so influential and widespread while lacking a propositional framework grounded in physics. Can't ignore the alpha there.

Research caveats:

• There's a wealth of reading I should do about the topic that I haven't because otherwise I'll never get this out..

• I'm missing a ton of examples and if I wait until I have enough examples I'll also never post