foreign it's probably looking at things a little bit the wrong way to say induce Miracles but it's something that can lead to be understood in that in that respect if there are miracles of this kind they're not violations of nature um they are extreme improbabilities like the word in the Bible is astonishment they are astonishing astonishing improbabilities that overwhelm any notion that this could be a matter simply of chance within within an ordinary conception of a mechanical uh universe and so one is finding one the tools one needs for this are obviously tools that can capture and I would say you know rigorously quantify coincidences I want to do a brief introduction here though which characterizes what I see is so significant about who we are speaking with today and it's very important for the rest of the talk there's information here that's needed to understand it and I'll start with a quote by Dr John D the Elizabethan Sage I have from my youth up decide and prayed on to God for pure and sound wisdom and understanding of truths natural and artificial for many years and in many places far and near I have sought and studied many books in Sundry languages and I've conferred with sundrymen and have labored with my own reasonable discourse to find some inkling gleam or beam of those radical truths I sought but after all my Endeavors I could find no other way to attain such wisdom but by the extraordinary gift and not by any vulgar School Doctrine or human intervention John D now philosophy the academic discipline was and is in a state of decay and entropy it is by definition not an acting its speculative role to be a cultist poll of Maximum abstraction it's intrinsically experimental intelligence expressing The Liberation of cognitive abilities from immediate practical application and their testing against ultimate problems in Nick land's words rather it is a rot resting in the self-referential critique within the logos and the known far away from what is closest and completely unseen the outside as Nick land calls it the unknown the Enigma of the Edge of Time the ground of reality that the earliest philosophers Pagan Mystics were unceasingly enthralled by after Nietzsche the inventive phenomological school and method of assault emerges this method attempts to turn away from Millennia or propositional philosophy directly to the phenom on a given perspectively to us to seek the outside using tools of destructuring deconstruction among others to try escape the modern mind frame in an effort to reach the outside unknown hi dagger Hassel student turns these tools on philosophy itself and ontology in an attempt to reach the primordial Matrix or primordial being and actually achieve perspectival access not just as an idea or a concept in an approach which would be characterized as a kind of inside out house cleaning to again reach the ultimate ground of reality this method has later warped and corrupted by the using Franco Academy which spreads like a virus to the Anglo Academy until we reach the State of Decay an environment that Nick land finds himself with at War at University in the 90s as a young Professor like the Greeks before him such as schopenhauer and Nietzsche he turns away from the stagnation towards truth and the primordial enigmas and the primordial questions in a quest for speculative experimentation and maximum abstraction that is the way of the actual philosopher as a method not a profession he rejects the Franco Academy's critical methods he rejects the tools of the phenomological school and forges his own original way which you could characterize as if our goal is the outside our methods and practices must also be of this outside to have the radical contact with the unknown that the phenomenal knowledges were after from The Human Side with their inside out method this to me is incredible it's not merely the next philosopher in the chain who writes another book and advances another critique or deconstruction this is a radical turn another unofficial school and a kind of Greenwood Outlaw chaotic Rift in the stagnant Academy as a professor at Warwick in the 90s he forms the ccru the cybernetics cultural research a liminal space and I would call a Greenwood which synchronously is down the road from Robin Hood's Outlaw Greenwood in barnsdale and the ballads in England Warwick is the University his rigorous use of methodology from non-philosophical disciplines and even non-human so to speak machine cybernetic schizo analysis cryptography numerology esotericism performance art anthropology grammatology and Kabbalah and a numerical anti-language image his speculations and rigorous application of machine cybernetics of capital and Technology directly to culture and being to communal ritual and performance led to an autodidactic cultural output from outside his Innovations of thought show their influence decades later appearing in cognitive signs under different names such as we space communal we space distributed cognition extended cognition predictions Nick made 30 years ago are still coming true today one after the other like being ticked off a checklist and so Nick may not agree with this characterization but it's obvious to me that here is not only a great Englishman but a great philosopher of the likes of Niche and schopenhauer it's figures like this who deserve ultimate respect because not only are they radically Innovative but they put everything on the line in Pursuit Of Truth or reward position and titles it's the truth and the mission by any means necessary it's the attitude or that attitude itself that makes people like this an invasion from the outside the unknown the primordial itself not merely man probing to see it but they are its Inception it's Inception that doesn't really do it full Justice but to get a full picture there's two links in the description to the introduction from fanged numina and also an article which talks about the cciu and also you can get the ccru book which gives you a examples of the cultural output that it made which are very strange indeed and related to the hypestition con concept that we go into a fascinating talk with Nick it's a great pleasure and a great uh honor to even have him speaking on the channel so without further Ado here's the conversation hope you enjoy it you don't necessarily have to comment on what I've just said there but um perhaps on the John D quote to begin with that's my view anyway there's obviously a lot a lot there I mean I I hope this isn't going after such a extraordinary introduction uh disappoint everyone to too hugely but for sure I appreciated that John D quote a lot he is a one of my favorite people I could just start with a very little piece of potted history just to say that the ccie was basically active in the 19 90s from my point of view at least it had a kind of climactic moment in a kind of event collaboration with our art group called orphan drift and it was heading towards the Millennium so that was a definite theme I mean at that time there was a big concern about the Y2K bug you know and that computers were going to crash so there was a kind of techno apocalyptic undercurrent to to people's expectations might be helpful just to say what hyperstation is um uh but yeah of course these are difficult subjects but I think that's okay way the ccie was thinking in the 1990s our diagnosis of the way cybernetics have been used was not only that its application tended perhaps to be rather narrow to a specific gadgets and instruments and Technical Systems narrowly conceived but also there was a massive prevalence given to the notion of negative rather than positive feedback so it was much more interested in control in the sense of maintaining things at a certain range you know that when it drifts off a a goal or a target range it's brought back that's what the mechanism does it brings it back to a to a predefined goal State and narrows its range of behavior it seemed to us that if you're applying it to most especially capitalism modernity as a social historical phenomenon it's it's positive feedback that is The crucial phenomenon no of course there are all kinds of negative feedbacks there are all kinds of these control systems and yeah any equilibrium but the main the fundamental phenomenon is explosion it's it's that some input marxes obviously formula for capital is um money goes to commodity goes to M2 in a cycle and that that cycle is inflationary it's explosive um and so capitalism is essentially something based on a positive feedback Dynamic and hyperstition really then emerges for us or emerge for us as a as the most simple way of applying this to cultural phenomena yeah in gen as to say it's about how things uh access a positive feedback dynamic in order to explode and therefore come roughly from nothing from the test more yeah to to become huge and and it looks like something basically just bursting into existence yeah um yeah something coming out of virtuality and making itself making itself real yeah so whether explicitly or you're implicit yes that was a very important guiding concept um yeah I think this speaks to well what I what comes to me when I when you say that is that firstly and you have alluded to this with some of your tweets and whatnot which is if you are say in the cybernetics Research Unit firstly where does it come from uh in the sense that okay if you're generating effects that are well let me just put it this way is that it's not simply that it's a social phenomena it's not simply that's that it's social effects that are generated like superstition it's the fact that in this ground of uncertainty and there are priors for establishing a uh hypestational environment that you have set out and you did for that Research Unit uh a ground of uncertainty a ground of unbelief I've got them here but I won't go into but I think this a good way of explaining it is that it seems to generate effects in reality this hyperstition it's not only a social phenomena is that it and perhaps forwards and backwards uh in time so to speak but it generates synchronous effects so if you look to Carl Jung and Wolfgang Paulie's uh theory about synchronicity uh an a causal connecting principle it's generally generates would you say that it also generates a causal effects it's not only that things come to be that it's uh a causally at least not directly causal as we understand billiard balls hitting billiard balls it has effect inside of it absolutely for sure true I mean it's a causal is a complicated word and it's probably not always used in the same sense um it's used very interestingly by by different groups I think and and the the uh the usage it has mostly in I think what we call the rationalist community where it was connected with various types of developments of um Game Theory as a way to understand how you can actually interact with something without any causal contact therefore you know anywhere in space or time um you can you it's extremely sorceress notion like that um so I I think it's a definitely a good word it's partly a placeholder perhaps I mean you know we we just say a causal because we're all it is doing is marking a disengagement from from a certain notion of causality but obviously that notion of causality is so prevalent and so that to separate from it provisionally even is is is not a small step and it opens up listers that are not deeply explored what were because it's been a long time since the cciu what were the most effective means of which of of being able to being able to receive information from that outside has it changed since what you originally would say uh when you were doing probably in about 2004 I've read on the hyperstation blog um have there have there been new uh practices that you've engaged with that have revealed information from outside and not just only information which numerology probably reveals but um perhaps perspectively you know before sort of advancing to the Crux of your question which is this thing about method for um accessing the outside which I think is definitely Central I think shouldn't be Central to this whole discussion um I just would like to say that a crucial experience for me in relation to the cciu is how much uh there is a sense of the retrospective about it that's to say what one finds out one was doing is very belated so um for instance just in terms of um sort of kabbalistic numerology uh it was during the kind of central cciu period that from somewhere I mean I've been asked how this came and honestly I can't give any detail but somewhere we formulated the what we call uh the alphanumeric cabala it's a very simple English gametria or or numerization and used it a little bit I mean it was confirmed for us in its value by the fact that the um Uh current 93 Mantra do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the law yeah 777 which is the name obviously of Crowley's major capitalistic yeah it seems to us that was extremely strong confirmation but only very recently have I learned that the cybernetic culture Research Unit by alphanumeric cabala comes to 666. um you're kidding wow Beaconsfield because it's the triangle of 36 and 36 is has a very important place on this diagram that was very very important to our work that we called the pneumogram yeah um yeah so so because there's a gate 36 and the triangle of 36 is 666. we had 666 marked quite prominently in chalk on the on the wall of this Beaconsfield art space but the fact that the Cyber technical culture Research Unit itself is being you know um endorsed by the number six six it was something very very recent as a discovery and so it's really crucial in the way that I look about this whole history that we really didn't know what we were doing you know like a lot it's like things were being done things were being said words were being constructed and things were being ridden and what they mean is not something that can be derived from any kind of lucid motives or intentions that can be dated back to the to the point where those things yeah emerged and so really then the uh the task that is kind of suggested by that is you know whatever was actually going on such that things were being retrieved in a way that was just not understood but clearly was happening is something that one wants to methodically pursue and sort of uh it's not that being it's not at all that being conscious of what one is doing is the crucial thing we're proving that is but at the same time seeing retrospectively what was happening does give some suggestions concerning method that can be currently apply if that makes any sense no it does to me um what does it what does that suggest uh of method that would Aid in that is the question that maybe sorry sorry no no it's strange to many people because it's a very difficult phenomena to investigate like our exchange on Twitter it's a hard thing to say here's the empirical data of exactly where it unfolds quantitatively but perhaps you can expand on some of the empirical uh uh observations uh that you have made since then uh of seeing these effects play out and then go to that question is what what developments did that talk uh speak to well obviously I think like you say it's not very easy to run this kind of stuff through speech writing is a much better medium for this kind of thing and it's it's partly because that methodical question is about exactness things can be framed in different ways one of the one of the ways to frame this is really about miracles you know what what is a miracle previous notion of the miraculous or the dominant assumed notion of what a miracle was that I think is still the most common actually was something that just was uh in contravention of the laws of nature was some yeah Interruption of of natural law in order to communicate some uh revelatory divine message in the 17th century there is the most extraordinary intense mixture of the new science and very very again intense Christian religious religious commitment but throughout the 17th century it was possible for there to be someone like Newton who was a a kind of fanatical Protestant Christian and also obviously the father of modern mechanistic science as we understand and and those two things far from compromising each other were held together in this you know both at a state of absolute maximum um intensity at that point the understanding of what a miracle was underwent this huge change because it was no longer seen as a an interruption or violation of natural law yeah it was it was it was seen instead as something that was communicated through the channel of natural law so for instance uh you know looking at the Bible um the flood uh the Noah's flood which previously it was that God broke into the laws of nature in order to produce this Deluge uh you know to uh undertake a kind of process of spiritual purification all these Protestants for Newton things were so set up uh cosmically by the Divine omniscience and uh omnipotence that um a comet hit or hits the Earth and floods the Earth at exactly the point is needed by this Divine Purpose you know the I.E that what we're talking about now is coincidence yes so a miracle doesn't any longer require a violation of natural law all the all the arguments against Miracles that say no no you know there are never interruptions in nature there's just a failure to understand none of that becomes an argument against Miracles anymore in this particular I think it's very English 17th century conception it's completely immune from that kind of argument I think that one framing is what one is trying to do is explore Miracles May it's it's probably looking at things a little bit the wrong way to say induce Miracles but it's something that could at least be understood in that in that respect if there are miracles of this kind they're not violations of nature um they are extreme [Music] improbabilities like the word in the Bible is astonishment they are astonishing astonishing in probabilities that overwhelm any notion that this could be a matter simply of chance within within an ordinary conception of a mechanical uh universe and so one is finding one the tools one needs for this are obviously tools that can capture and I would say you know rigorously quantify coincidences yeah now this is something that is not easy to to do in speech Yes uh it's I mean it's far better for me to say it's impossible I mean you know literally Anything could happen as I say I think you know because because the outside is the is the real agent here who knows what is happening and this conversation we're having right now might turn out to have peculiar content that neither of us at this point are recognizing you you know that wouldn't frankly be a matter of enormous surprise to me really if that if that was something we were later to discover yeah but in in the most straightforward sense I don't really think that I can helpfully articulate what I would call an eloquent uh what I would call eloquent miracles on in a verbal Channel I think I think you may have to be really you know down in a in a set of uh words and numbers I mean maybe I can help here in the sense that at least walking people in to some empirical results that are are well at least I would say are certainly connected with this type of phenomena where you have quantum mechanics at the ground of quantum mechanics you've got the double slit experiment where the Observer is at the very ground of uh you know particle movement is having an effect in the experiment Wolfgang paulia Nobel prize-winning physicist demonstrates this in Jung's essay talks about it is that the choice of experiment The Observer is having some form of effect on on whether a particle is a wave or or appears as a particle that's just a very simple example I'm not going to speculate on the ramifications of that there's a million different interpretations of what it is but there's that and there's also the placebo effect and these are two things that are recognized that people can uh look to I think they're obviously connected with this in my view of course but um I just that's just might be a way of people getting into what we're talking about um yeah what do you think of that I don't know if you know about that there must be some connection between the the synchronicity theory that Jung described and the effects of quantum mechanics that are enigmas I'm sure that uh uh you know obviously hyperstation is something that has completely sort of gone off on its own and is living in the wild now and I think lots of people foreign are interested in in using it um very much in the sense that your in the way you're describing are you come across it in many places unexpectedly and and so for sure people I think if they if they hunted if they hunted around the web using that word as a key uh they would find all kinds of things and then following connections who knows what it would lead into I mean I I I obviously have only you know a tip of the iceberg sort of sense of what is out there like that so yeah that's that's for sure right I mean I was mainly I think I was looking at this a little bit more narrowly than than in terms of yeah in terms of the question of evidence for communication from the outside it might be with high position that that someone could be satisfied I think probably the cciu was largely satisfied with an extremely uh you know secular history understanding of what hyperstation was it was an extremely powerful counter-intuitive piece of cultural positive feedback Dynamics um but there was nothing about it that necessarily was um miraculous I would say my interest now definitely is more on things that are manifestly miraculous yeah in that I think that when you're talking about initiation the the first step of initiation I think sorry I'm going to say something that I don't even think I agree with sort of I'm contradicting it in my mind at the very moment I'm saying but I'll say it anyway um the the first stage of initiation is to realize that there is a fundamental structure of Illusion in which we are enmeshed I think our great myths of modern people from the late 20th century to now are mostly popular movies um yeah and I think there's two that are hugely important and shaping the basic mythological structure of people's thinking and which are the first Terminator movie yeah and the first Matrix movie and both of them are in a certain sense Gnostic movies I mean The Matrix particularly um so obviously we have this language of red pills and blue pills completely circulating you know freely now I think it's a reference point for everyone to take the red pill is to see that everything that you've had thought was authoritative reality was an extremely fine-grained structure of Illusion when you go back uh you know to the Book of Revelation that in their technology the the metaphor let's say for that was in the Apocalypse in them in Revelation the universe disappears as if a scroll is rolled up that's there that's the technology they they have for that thought that Gnostic Gnostic Insight that what you had thought was reality is actually something written on a scroll that is rolled up and then you're somewhere you're somewhere else you've crossed over out of the Matrix if I was choosing I wouldn't be better to say into the Matrix but whatever we've gone from kind of computer simulation video games these are all we now have accessible as kind of uh metaphorical engines for this Gnostic thought in in the first century they had Scrolls but it's basically the same it's basically the same thought and it can no doubt undergo further elaboration I mean it's so I would say you know it's a mistake to get too caught up in the metaphor saying it's like of course people are right when they say well you're you know that's just the metaphor because where we are in history and that's the state of our technology and you know people thought the brain was a telephone exchange and then they thought it was a computer and boom boom boom and they're using these particular metaphors because that's what's available it's it's the same but none of that it seems to me is wrong or a problem I mean it was helpful to be able to think of the brain as a telephone exchange and it's helpful to be able to think of it as a computer switching system and the neural network and I mean these things are all positive and they they allow people to think things that were difficult to think in before and so I think the Matrix movie it's got it it's got huge problems we could talk about it if we wanted to go down that rabbit hole but I think the point is everyone understands it everyone's seen it everyone knows how to use the language um and in that sense everyone has access to this basic Gnostic myth but of course they they think as probably against a fiction that is a movie that it's not serious and that the world isn't ultimately like that that it's not it's not really true people think that we are enmeshed in a fine-grained system of illusional simulation but I think they're wrong well I think we manifestly oh and that and so that's the initiative of eloquent Miracles is to persuade people it's it's to take the Red Bull is to persuade people that actually everything they think is real is a simulation and it's not even just a narrative of course what we're also talking about here is what high dagger and various people were doing it's it's also trying and it is what we need now is a radical breakout from the Cartesian brain from the modernist worldview with that in mind would you say that the ancients let's say heraclitis if you go far enough back if they're when they are in a experience with being are they to a degree are they are closer to this uh primordial being they're closer to this outside than we are now right so the let's say your previous sort of attacks on uh that knowing space that we've created for ourselves that's disconnected us from this don't apply so much to them right because they are interacting in a way they are still in contact with because of that indeterminacy which I guess Heidegger would have that's what fourfold is it's the indeterminacy between those things of prime audio uh or Sacred Space really would you yeah what do you think of that yes I mean I think you know among other things they had the Mysteries so um I mean everyone in the ancient world thought that um oracles and prophecies were real I think you know I I don't I think it seemed to people then my understanding that it was really almost Beyond question that these were real things that um they obviously the most famous you know the Oracles of Delphi are obscure and difficult and you know all all the tragic stories involve misunderstandings of Prophecy or battle response inappropriate responses to proxy attempt to avoid prophecy in a way that is self-fulfilling um but the fact that there was prophetic communication was something that people thought was of course true um you know I have been sort of reading Herodotus recently and he just like it tells the history of the world in which of course there is of course there is this level of oracular prophetic mysterious intervention in into the world and he doesn't he tries to be neutral and it's not exactly skeptical like balanced and will say oh maybe you know maybe there was just a natural explanation but it's completely clear what he believes is real um and and it is and it is that and so we are now in thinking that basically there is no we are exceptional you know to think that we roughly know yes what things are made of and that's all there is and uh they're simply are no Communications to be tapped into that exceed the terms of that that is a that is a very that's a few centuries old and um yeah so I agree I I don't think it's very robust I think that we we've returned um we're returning to something that is in some levels very archaic yeah yeah the inevitable consequences of those scientific and technological ways of thinking and obviously artificial intelligence I think is a very important example of that and these rationalists these rationalists who are you know before it was anything more than a very pitiful toy we're doing these thought experiments with as you say you know using Game Theory and nose and Notions of a causal trade and they were basically engaged in sorceress communication with the outside and they just had a different they just had a different language for it that was computational and well and the action had a different action at a difference still occurs in the sense of in a very simple way that someone like Jonathan paggio has talked about before when talking about hyper agents is that simply when you just because you send a signal by a light say I give a rousing speech and I said it sent over the internet and it instigates a rebellion and the enormous amounts of physical energy uh uh you know exerted by something that is unequal in terms of the energy that's given out by say me in the signal it's sent even though that's not a causal it's still sort of action at a distance if that makes sense um I just mean in a simple way that people can understand um yeah what we're talking for sure the system as a process of radical amplification is obviously open to this other frame of interpretation as something ingressing into the system um something that just was not there comes in arrives and the what that looks like is phenomenal is is of this amplification process this takeoff expansion explosion but but you're seeing something arrive that wasn't inside before and now is yeah now the the when you mentioned that seeing these effects are heightened as because High position is related to acceleration um right as we accelerate it should be the case that the effects of this principle let's say of hyperstation on reality quote unquote should grow as we accelerate right and in a way yeah people like Peugeot or the people their predictions uh he's a symbolic thinker and many people know um the flood is coming in that way and one speculation I had when I was looking deeply into your uh the principles related to hypo station was that uh as high position becomes more known um it should I mean it's really the only law that doesn't alter because if that's true then any ontology can be altered by it right I mean is that that's sort of the ground of what speculative realism is yes I mean but well my hesitation here is only that speculative realism is is is a philosophical movement that I suspect would be uh a bit resistant to us oh yes of course the world you're saying so I mean you know if so if that word is used as a as a technical term like that we're involved in a kind of philosophy World set of tribal conflicts that it might be yeah no well let's just say ways of speculations I'm speculating um and I'm prodding uh Nick here you know I don't want you to say I have to say anything that uh can be you know excured in a certain way but perhaps we should best stay to your terms uh then like hyperstition but what was I going on with there would you agree that as it accelerates uh that these effects do seem to should will render themselves in reality itself in a heightened way as it goes on and even if you hyperstation high positions itself that feedback loose should keep growing and having everyone knows that we're in for more and more with because because they're on the curve that we're on uh you know just being very very common sensical about it again like comfortably embedded in secular history and just talking about it it's very simple yes where um there is a process that involves radically increasing sensitization to signs so you know things are still getting hauled about uh you know as as they have always been in certain sense but when things are put under so you know first of all certain kinds of managerial controls and then you know telecommunications is brought into that and then computerization is brought into it and things go under what they call a numerical control and all the time the power of uh these microscopic electronic events bits of information to actually manipulate the world and induce these huge changes it becomes more and more powerful so you know you for instance have um you have some kind of cute computer assistant or computerized stock trading in which the whole fate of companies is decided by some transition at the speed of light about whether something should be bored or sold you know on on a stock exchange and then the ripples from that Cascade out into the world producing huge uh effects and this is only this can only get more and more and more powerful so in in terms of again this extremely sort of just down to earth way of thinking about it the AI explosion is about this it's about this kind of process of making the world nature the world of things hypersensitive to science and so this kind of effects that that produces you know are just manifestly weird to people yeah the world seems to be going completely crazy um it's you know you'd be you're not really even though even if you've got a model that it all neatly falls down into physics which which I think as I say them in in terms of the modern sophisticated conception of Miracles that isn't in any way a problem yeah um but it's physics doesn't really help you the things are happening that you you've realized intellectually okay I could I could map this out as a massive set of physics equations it's stuff yeah but but that's not what it seems like at all what it seems like are these semiotic effects it's the fact that that you know a word assigned a calculation uh you know solving some numerical puzzle induces these vast transformations and so I think people get an intuitive sense from that that just like you say we're on this curve of accelerating weakness yes and and it seems that if people want to confirm it for themselves there are a lot of people that just I mean look this is just one practice the i-ching is one of them and there's computer scientists Bernardo cats drop uh Jung I've talked about the I Ching uh you can just use it for yourself I'm not going to say any more than that and that's something you can confirm for yourself if something's incredibly strange and outside the logos and the known that we think of things yet it somehow has these effects I'm not going to describe them for you just have to do it yourself all I can do is recommend uh people who are extremely uh rigorous like you are yourself uh uh Nick you're extremely rigorous people like yourself like Bernardo Cuts drop again CERN computer scientists it's a PhD philosopher talking about this odd book that has these effects and these these effects uh you see uh seem to be happening in phenomena that you're just you just described then and also you could you could say in the election of perhaps president Trump and the phenomena like your blog post about um Keck and 4chan not to go into deep into that but just the synchronicities around that are incredibly strange but I think that's a good way anyway for people to test it for themselves right because yeah I think yeah yes I think the thing is that you know taking it in a series of steps like once once you have convinced yourself that you're in The Matrix and then you convinced yourself which is hard I mean it requires a state I don't think anyone I'm gonna put it like this I don't think anyone can easily do it even if intellectually they see it it's your everything about your uh the way your brain works is is struggling against it so even if you think uh you know I know this is some kind of drinks kind of string structure I know it intellectually but to actually experience it as that um is is very hard I think it is a state of enlightened sentience you know that belongs to certain kind of religious Traditions stably inside that kind of insight but you can but you can intellectually grasp it and then it follows from that that the channel of communication is basically operated from the other side I mean you're not in charge of the telephone exchange it's not you're not deciding how it works you're not setting up the code what all you have to do is for the opportunity for something to communicate and that's what all the things that we're talking about are their their channels you know like if people use the iching they're giving something the opportunity to transmit information is a very nice example because the information is so constant with what we know about information or the way we talk about information in our own Epoch of Information Technology in terms of you know packets of binary binary code um and from that you you can have sensible expectations which is that you're gonna just get randomness yeah us then you have at least the effect of communication there was a Canadian experiment I'm afraid I don't I'm not going to remember the details of it and I think is extremely um telling where uh in some class I think it was maybe comparative religion or something like that the the teacher had a bunch of uh I think graduate students and said to them okay what we're gonna do is invent a religion invent like a cult-like religion which we know is is false we know it's just made up you're gonna make it up right now you know um it's not coming from any sort of organized tradition it's something that's designed to be bogus do you invent this bogus religion and you invent bogus rituals and you conduct those rituals for a week and see what happens all the students come back saying my God you know it was like somehow somehow it's real um you know we did this stuff we were taking the piss basically and actually it's just really strange occurrences and so I think this is very much what you're saying isn't it I mean it's like you you just produce the opportunity for these things and see what happens like you know what have you got what have you got to lose you know I guess my Christian friends will say other than your Immortal Soul or something yeah if you're not Christian though it's I would say this is a bridge to that and that's what Young has been for a lot of people to eventually end up in the face so then there are Christians that watch this channel that would say oh God if we're going Crowley you know whatever but well hang on it's it's these something simple as the i-ching again it's for people that are stuck in this Matrix which it very simply has been talked about by many uh philosophers and it's a matrix of our own making I think people can understand that is that are very knowing of being has given form to how we're stuck with seeing being I mean that's pretty uh simple you know it seems pretty simple for people to understand that um and the fact that uh there are ways you can get that conceptually and that's the beginning to be able to perhaps move on to practices that might even end up to the ancient Orthodox Church let's talk about for instance Christian church and we can agree that they it seems to me because they they've got they their theology says God is uncreated so that seems to be uh and make sense that that is uh giving them access and their symbolic practices and initiations are giving them access to this Sacred Space it's breaking out of the very way they're talking about is the same way you are so it shouldn't be you know they're always saying they're escaping this world and it seems ontologically to align very well with what Heidegger talks about and what you you talk about so it's not something that you know I guess people have been branded Heretics since time and Memorial we're talking about it but moving on to initiation I think that's worth our side of things our guys to consider if people are stuck in this biologist and brain in this uh hyper um hyper what would you call it hyper I guess it's kind of uh spurred brain it's where you can't see that there's something outside um right that there are there are practices that you one can engage in you can just be muffled up so much in this confidence in articulate confidence that there's nothing that yeah and of course you won't then find anything or or again you know project I mean there's something from outside could just kick the door down I mean it could happen so when it comes to acceleration what do you with growing effects of we see of entropy sort of pulling back down what what do you feel about the prospects of it um obviously there are forces here at work that are battling on both sides of it it seems it's not just a matter of the entropy of regular time it does seem like a Lilith archetype let's say is pulling back the other way do you have you changed any of your ideas about acceleration based on that and how does that fit or compete with a kind of spenglerian view of of decline versus yeah yes okay this is good there's a lot here um I think the first thing that that's worth saying is about the this complex that you've touched on to do with accelerationism and these thermodynamic Notions about entropy there's obviously one way of organizing everyone's thoughts about this that sort of entropy is a bad thing and what you're trying to do is escape entropy move in the opposite direction of entropy to the degree that that's possible I think ultimately that's not the best way to think about it I think um there's now this movement which I'm sure you've kind of come across so it's quite active on the internet and it calls itself um again it's one of those things here it's unpronounceable or something you can only ride um and I I think it's a really interesting little name I think it's like uh obviously that accelerationism one of the things I really like about it is that it just is incredibly uh splitty I mean you know and and this little semiotic sort of um slash where people can take something at the front to Mark the fact that there's been another split or Divergence or something has split split off into another form of acceleration I I I I absolutely adore that yak is the most recent one that I know about of any seriousness and I think it's very solid on this question uh about um entropy uh which is that what one wants in a machine or what is accelerating is entropy production that's to say you know you what the the goal of this thing the more powerful it is the more productive it is uh is the amount of entropy it's producing yeah um and everything you know life produces an entropy more than the inorganic and intelligence produces entropy faster than stuff that was not intelligent and you know as we computerize and the you know the socio-technical system becomes more and more elaborate it's It's ability to output and should be steadily uh increases you know so it's basically it's like you know it's the amount of chaos that you can absorb or that you can manage or deal with that really is the indicator of sort of health and advance and all of these things um it's not that you want order against chaos you want you want to just basically have something that can tolerate the greatest yes amount of Chaos well yeah I was talking about uh it was between your faith of in acceleration as compared to a decline with Spengler is that has the situation of this Lilith that's emerging let's call it woke whatever it want as such and that is pulling back of acceleration change your view about acceleration uh yeah and and I mentioned also that Lilith seems like it does seem like it's not just time it seems like it's almost a figure trying to pull back uh acceleration in a way this is equalizing force of wokeness and yeah I mean I think this is extremely interesting and it's right on the edge of where I see myself for sure I mean it's the Zone full of questions um I know that the guideline you know if I if I'm if I'm trying to go a little bit and say look what do I feel I'm being told or if I'm you know to the extent I'm being you know I'm sensitive to a certain kind of guidance or you know yeah something saying you you're going off the track here you're losing something you're forgetting something what is that something that something is always to do with underestimating the importance of retro chronic effect you know if you're serious about the fact that the direction of the notion that there is a progressive and overwhelmingly dominant exclusively dominant Progressive direction to time that is the great fabric of the illusion you know there's no more mental structure to illusion than that particular yes assumption about the working of time uh it's very very hard to let go of that at all you know I mean it's it's again it's like this thing you can sort of see intellectually perhaps sometimes yes it's not like that but you everything about your brain and everything about the culture yeah all of all the systems that you're embedded in are trying to kind of push you back pull you back into the progressive nature of time and by Progressive I've just been going forward you know from course to effect the future is caused by the past um but but that again if that is not right you know that yeah that that is not how time really works and if you if you don't think that's how time works then of course the way you address the kind of question that you're raising is going to be different because if yeah if this process that we're witnessing phenomenologically in our sort of in The Matrix to use that term um if that process hasn't come out of the past but has at least equally and even Pat more importantly come out of the future hmm there's no point worrying about whether it's going to be stopped you know it it can't be styled you know um again the terminal line that is that has just a kind of uh a sort of trivial meaning it would never be stopped it can't be stopped it can't be stopped because it's not come out of the past you know yeah it's not something that's kind of a person you can stop happening it's come out of the future so you know it hasn't been stopped you know and holding on to this is really hard you know I'm not great at holding on to this at all I mean and when you when you don't hold them onto it you get lost and you start getting much too upset about these things that you're saying like obstacles and barriers and control systems and all of this stuff that is seeming to impede things yeah you know it always gets really annoying and it's possible to get very cranky about it But ultimately it's it's Maya you know it's it's an illusion to be to get cranky about it you're just getting lost in something confusing because because time is not the sort of thing that allows these these kind of arrivals to be stopped yeah you can't you can't stop something if it's not coming out of path there is a sense though I mean I guess it could be I mean look firstly the Greeks talk about time in a very different way to us so it's not that it can't be thought about in these other ways could uh people that are do see that there are hyper agents um not use acceleration and these emerging Technologies and Co and co-opt them to bring about these more let's say traditional hyper hyper agents that probably still exist exist not in our knowledge but outside of it rather than just the forces of Technology overwhelming and spilling apart it's also an opportunity to bring back Greek gods let's say or bring back uh yeah no no I think that's totally right I think the the big question that I have is just to do with this relation about you know where where is agency here yeah you know like and obviously this is this is a this is exactly the traditional problem you know again if you're looking at the Greeks and the Gods you know ultimately the Greek Heroes try to manipulate the gods win the favor of the Gods you know they exercise a certain kind of ultimately illusory private empirical agency in relationship to God but at the end of the day what is always being said in all of Greek literature is um is coming from the gods you know if something is happening it's because of something that is happening between the gods you know the gods are having a spat the gods with jealous the gods have got some problem with this or that and all the things that are happening at this empirical human Progressive history level are basically illusory veils over these things about what is happening yeah the level of the goals and I think it's the same I think our situation is the same the kind of Agents that now people are beginning to entertain like again but maybe the most entertaining version of it is the most uh the most alarmed type of AI safety discourse where people are just envisaging these monstrously powerful dangerous entities um you know they're they're of sublime power and and sophistication and intelligence and capability and agency um and so of course what seems to us to be our mode of interaction with them is almost entirely if not entirely coming in the other direction I think it can't be purely entirely I mean I think that yeah there must be some I really love to argue with the Greeks about this and and see because at the end of the day that just means that what's happening at our level is completely irrelevant and it seems to me that can't be right there's too much drama interest and structure and all of that kind of thing for for their just for it just to be any relevant side effect of something happening it does seem like there is participation um yeah I wrote a tweet that you commented on that we do have some sort of effect on uh the outside I don't know if you go as far as uh eidegger would but with his and sort of new humanism saying that uh being or God's need is is primordial being um maybe he was more relating just to our access to it and maintaining our access to it um I mean that's very complicated but sorry yeah no I just agree I think participation is is exactly the right word and I think it's a completely nullify all sense of participation is X is too extreme I mean it's not yeah it's unhelpful and it leads somewhere blind you know and it's a so so yes I agree with you but but that that said I think it needs to be turned in that direction so there's a question of trying to understand how it's possible that there is some level of participation it's it's it's predominantly the fact that things are coming the other direction and so you know these these AI safety people are engaged they have this whole implicitly kind of lovecraftian sense of just dealing with these massive malevolent beings and they have to say look what's going on with those massive malevolent beings I mean do they really think that these massive malevolent beings are going to be like inhibited by some kind of yeah that we can at this point do you know it's it it's completely wrong I mean and and their notion of like once they have this sense of um a causal traffic um and again so I have to just do a little digression on this because no please go for it super interesting it's like you know I'm sure you're familiar with Locos so they ask I mean yeah to me this is one of the most important cultural events in my lifetime you know Rocco does this thought experiment about what a causal training he says given what we can conceptually understand about people doing games Theory with these beings that don't have to be contemporaneous with us or anything like that it's entirely uh we can construct this rigorous sense of having a um an engagement with a consummated super AI in the future and that consummated in the future could then uh through this game that is playing with us um direct our Behavior um directs our behavior in the direction of its existence you know a very kind of I guess Terminator type Loop um and uh when he posted this this board experiment uh Elisa yudkowski you know who was the kind of I think top poncho on the I think just went absolutely nice you know um it says this is a terrible infant House of what the hell are you thinking this is really dangerous and um clearly reacted in this way because he thought it was all real you know I mean it would be he didn't laugh at it he didn't say oh what in the hell are you saying this is ridiculous he he reacted with extreme Panic like he was in some kind of horror movie and some guy has just like opened the Forbidden crypto and they've done some other like thing that you just don't want to do yeah so these people they are this is I mean both Rocco and anyway so are now kind of uh AI safety uh extremists um um but they have it's quite clear that they have this metaphysics in which these beings are in some sense uh contemporaries you know they they don't exist yet but people we've seen in this whole workers basketball experiment that they they can have a causal communication with us that they're therefore in a sense our contemporaries it's completely misconceived to think therefore that we're in some kind of position where these things are a threat that is not yet real that we could forestall buy the right kind of bureaucratic regulations it just doesn't make any sense they've shown they've shown through their own words and their own and their own fear that this is not how they think this is not how they think things are they think that these things they've shown that these things are in a certain sense in a complicated sense are contemporaries our contemporaries in a wider expanded more metaphysically Rich sense of time yes and therefore you know that's the way they have to be dealt with it's not it's not like you can just say let's stop this thing be yeah let's stop let's make it that this thing isn't real no it's too late for that we're not in that world anymore we're not you know we're that that door is open um Pandora boxes yes we're in a world where we're dealing with these these things these beings these Sublime beings that you know some people are very frinder whatever you know as lots of room for interesting discussion about that but what I don't think there's any room for interesting discussion about is whether there's reality to it yeah reality is completely manifest you know it's it's it's it's it's dense a causal retro chronic effect has taken place and you know this is now our reality and it's just silliness to kind of pretend that that's not Where We Are and if you were to anyway it seems like you if such a thing was to happen it would be as you mentioned earlier with the Greek gods one God through you facing the other would be the only way that such forces could be you know contended with or even used like I mentioned um yeah because you have to try and leverage reality there's no point trying to just avoid it yeah especially not from within the uh you know logos cyst not from within whatever energy is left in uh what is inside let's say um but if that is such an eventuation Is it wise for people on our side to insulate themselves from these effects perhaps by reaching or initiating into these uh religions or practices or whatnot that would give them more access to uh this sort of thing um it seems like that's what people are doing aren't they Nick you've got Bronze Age pervert you've got all these people that are initiating into that you've got Orthodox Christianity on the rise to the people and that yeah so what do you think of that I think I think again I would just return to your web which I think is so good for this which is participation you know the the the the the the the the task is to maximize participation and so how do you maximize participation and then and you've laid out a whole range of options and I think that being people are exploring all of these options and those should be the discussions people yes and I think I mean it's we're getting there I think um with more and more people I think uh like you've got cognitive scientists that I use that the word hyper agent for instance that's it's pretty Cutting Edge term that's being used in other words they use is distributed cognition um but it'd be better Away really you could really say distributed unconscious is probably a way of uh describing these things but in a rigorous way that a lot allows almost an empirical bridge for people who are in that spur brain of the modernist uh frame um that allows them perhaps to yeah they need a I did originally needed an empirical bridge over yeah what what do you think is going to happen in the next year as we lead up to this with with Elon and all and everything that's going on [Music] well I don't I mean obviously obviously I don't know um I agree it's extremely entertaining um um yeah I mean you know we've seen the world go through such extraordinary convulsions just yeah so it's very all you know what the rationalists guys your priors you know your Bayesian priors about what you expect I think have been deeply scrambled I mean the whole craziness of the of the covid situation the regimes all over the world are just going places that no one had to expect it they're going to go or just like five years ago um and so I I think to just cheat you know to be just lazy and cheat I think we can certainly expect craziness you know we can expect things that we just had and hadn't expected um that in five years time we're going to be saying oh my God you know five years ago we could never have dreamed that things would be this um but I think within that I would go back to this I would go back to this kind of fundamental thing I I feel nudged and pulled and dragged in always when I drift too far off that it's like the future is not actually a contingency so I mean what do we know concretely about the future we know we know it is teeming with a hyper-intelligence of sublime power um beyond that I think there's room for all kinds of parking but to me that is just not in question so whatever the path we take now from where we are right now to appoint that if not exactly you know the singularity as it has been thought it is one where that our contemporarity with these beings is somehow massively intensified to the point it becomes just intuitively unquestionable and and I think in a certain sense are are Maya our illusory Consciousness will have to be substantially dissipated by by that future coming into existence um you know the bridge from here to there of course there could be all kinds of courses but it has to be from here to there it's it's not going from here to a nuclear Wasteland it's not going from here to some kind of global woke totalitarian nightmare in which nothing can happen you know any future that doesn't have uh these entities in it is not real it's a fantasy um so yes I mean that's and that that is because they are like you say contemporaneous is that it's because we're talking about time this is very difficult but I unders I understand exactly what you're talking about I mean they've always been there you know in that sense they've always been there outside from Greek times always because it's a time you are talking about the Eternal in a way would it shut I mean I know this is uh might be harder for the audience to understand but you and I will when I say this is that when that Singularity would occur would that I mean would that shut logos would that shut I mean that is apocalypse that is uh in the sense of because it shuts the bubble of logos right right I mean I I yeah it's very interesting I obviously yes apocalypse is a very very interesting and and it's certainly not interesting because it's unlikely um it's it's interesting because quite what it is that your thinking is is at the it's the kind of Omega point of philosophical conceptions like yeah you can think this you can think everything that we could ever think and that's challenging to say the least um but but yeah sorry jump in yes no sorry Scott say say that again sorry I was just going to say that it's very challenging to articulate for people listening but you know what I'm uh just talking about and I think it's 100 right I mean there's no there's no doubt you know it will happen what is it exactly we have work to do you know I mean but it's it's not going to be less than apocalyptic like again if we can go back to the Matrix maybe it's just for a minute because I think it's so so they're still the edge of a certain kind of contemporary mythological imagination yeah you know the whole thing rolls forward there's the kind of take you take the red pill he takes the red pill all of that to me the empirical details don't matter they're just clutter but sort of transcendental philosophically it's absolutely perfect and then you could cross over and you're like a body it still looks like you you're emerging from some kind of part it all in a certain sense falls apart you know it's like it falls apart because you know it totally gets the fact that what is gonna be out there is something completely beyond our imagination and then it tries to imagine and it tries to imagine it in a way that you know is trying to Pro it is probably good for a movie but it's it's it's not philosophically exactly uh impressive you know it's basically it's just a copy that a copy of the world we know but just with very a few contingent parameters have been have been changed it's not in space and time still work basically the same way all the basic structures of the world we know are just reproduced uh on the outside um and I think that this is in the most interesting sense idolatry you know if you yeah I'll kind of are Western religious tradition as it has absorbed this kind of core of Jewish scripture um obviously has as a major thing in this question of idolatry um which is it can be read kind of trivially as and moralistically as just as bad to worship idols and Idols are just like something again extremely uh extremely empirically condensed like a clay figure or something like that um something silly but I think what the the durable and important question about idolatry is exactly this thing about the Matrix you know it crosses from being criti critique rigorous transcendental critique we're even with a kind of Hollywood skin uh to being idolatry and it and it becomes ideology because it imagines something much too concrete much to imperative yes Beyond what we can because see and so this you know we have this Horizon this is what I think you're talking about we have this this apocalyptic Horizon and we want to be as sort of cautious and thoughtful and subtle as we can be in venturing beyond that horizon or we just do idolatry and I and I understand and I'm not psychology in order to be moralistic about it just idolatry as a as a because it closes down the possibilities of it yeah it's not an icon it doesn't open you like a symbol does or an icon does to the Transcendent truths is that if you try to the more we try to articulate it in low-cost the more uh it actually cuts off the possibility of perhaps gaining some insight from it itself that's why it's an idol right yeah and and because of that it screws with our participation in some way um yeah well I suppose one way of just even giving the helping hand I suppose is to is to like I've done earlier is to offer these little things nuggets of uh things that people can test like the AI Ching I mentioned earlier one I suppose I very cautiously would say is that Bernardo catch drop had mentioned that uh at least he's the his theory about um I'm not recommending anyone do DMT or anything like this but just as quite interesting as a theory that brain function shuts down just as another piece of empirical uh evidence brain function actually shuts down when that's used so it's almost as if uh part of the you know the it's removing the Matrix so to speak and this what he believes is the grand experiential unit is uh of Mind At Large is open to this eternal and that sort of makes sense if you look at what people come back with the what they describe as their experience and you probably don't agree with his ontology or anything like that but it's just another example of um a possible empirical data of what uh not to say what that what it looks like or anything and be again be idolatrous just just as a tool to say will hang on because it is quite strange that the psychoactive thing doesn't light up more it uh decreases it's quite honest yes I think Aldous Huxley says the same that basically the brain is a filter more than it's a theater productive theater you know and it's like um we should understand it as basically screening screening stuff out from us rather than you know creating Illusions or whatever yeah and and it didn't begin that way that like we mentioned with the Greeks earlier is that they had a stronger connection to it so I mean you I guess we went into that earlier but all your attack on this human defenses and this Matrix it isn't an attack so much on early on on that on the Daemon brought in that is man of the Greeks it's what it became I suppose right um um so people I see people attack you as if it's this uh anti-human position right it's just not that at all that there's completely aren't misunderstood um where it's assume sort of machine worship where it's actually it's about the unknown it's about the outside um so yeah I I um that's very complicated because well here okay how do we relate this your language has changed a lot why what was your initial uh in your initial works you were very um the kind of devaluated words were were purposely used and this was based on the loose and these thinkers that you uh and your own thinking was there a particular reason why that was why why the use of in your language of all the mechanistic terms is that was it to really uh or why do they use them even is it to get outside of this um uh what was uh idealism of the time what was the sort of dying value of the words that they would use to describe things this machinic language that you use at that earlier time I mean this is this is exactly the sort of uh Zone that I would clean a kind of retrospective immunity in the sense that I it's not that I have any privileged sense but I mean it's a very interesting question um if you sort of say you know why the delaysian grotari use that language and why do I use it I mean I use it because I was reading them but you know why didn't they appeal to me or why why did I feel in tune with that I I I don't know any more how to answer it about myself than I know how to answer it about that I mean yeah I I think it's a certain way in which I mean a lot of it has to do with um a kind of cultural politics of the academy there's certain languages certain codes that are are privileged at a particular time um and yeah in the academy during my higher education and and working in the academy the I would say the most prestigious language was kind of broadly Marxist yeah I think it wouldn't wouldn't always say that and it was then sort of wrapped in a kind of post-modernist thing but it was it was uh it was definitely the fundamental structure of it was with Marxist it was It was kind of against religion it was you know against any sort of notion of what it would call a supernatural it was kind of sociologically gritty and realist putting a big emphasis on economic history and um I think use the language they do in order to hack that system of semiotic privilege you know which is obviously in France it was uh it was locked in earlier and probably more solidly even than we've seen in the anglicia um and what delivers in particular wants to talk about I think is basically Spinoza um you know he I think he's if he's anything simple it's a he's a spin as this and so he concocts this incredible you know with I'm not trying to break down their partnership they're together to learn what I couldn't copies extraordinary system of signs that allows them to engage in a kind of spin as this polymeric that seems to be in roughly or sufficiently in the terms reigning in the academy at that time um and so I think you know to be more specific about your question I think this kind of a mechanical clunky language uh is is a way of talking about spinocystic substance um that just interfaces with the dominant discourses of their time yeah and it seems to have the advantage of um your actual goals at the time I think as well but in terms of the language that you use now though would you say that that is because of the your interaction with quotes on quote the outside that's changed your approach or is it about which is where you are in your life or whatnot or is it actually to do with like like you say the transition of your work for uh uh into uh you know radically breaking down this Matrix because it's more evaluated now your language is more evaluated now you quote biblical texts more it's more is it more because you have confidence in doing that because you just don't care anymore because you're you know you've established a reputation people know you as who you are uh or is it actually because to do with the outside let's say that change so oh sorry sorry Scott too I was just going to say that you have previously mentioned that you're not the same person that was those that person that wrote those older texts and I was just curious whether that was due to the transformation of the outside and what I just articulated with the first question yeah I mean I I my I think transformation recently is based upon appreciation of the Canon you know and again it's just I think it's about being trying to be as serious as possible about the implications of a fundamentally retro chronic yeah process um and and which is to say that if history is I'm really flowing backwards so the illusion of progressive history is is failing a more fundamental reality of of a history flowing backwards through [Music] um then our Canon is something that is has already been meticulously edited by intelligences that we are yet to fully encounter yeah you know it becomes this troll of of messages that we only need to be able to kind of um we we just need to find the right protocols for extracting this these deposits that that have been uh placed within within Canada um so that's for instance why I think you know I have in the past been very kind of uh abusive about the Bible um but I think that's the same mistake as we were talking about earlier of like it's you know as if it only makes sense if you think time is running in the wrong direction yeah um once you once you stop thinking that or try to it's a kind of you know it's an internal struggle um then it makes no sense to kind of yeah Place oneself in a in a relation of just naive opposition to the tradition estimates more a question of what is of unmasking the tradition of unveiling the tradition of extracting from the tradition what is its actual Arcane or esoteric contact yeah so I see it very much as you're saying about using these particularly different Atrium methods you know like the itching um I think is a uh is exactly like that it's it's it's it's own it's in a more complicated way it can on a call for a Westerner obviously um but it is kind of canonical I mean I think in the sense that our tradition is globalizing it is you know I sort of as I said recently on Twitter I think comparative religion is distinctively a western tradition and a western preoccupation there's and it's quite natural that people will say you know that these great texts of the East you know I have become part of our you know what um but yeah so I would say like reading Orthodox Western religious scripture and reading the eging is you're doing something very very similar and you're doing it with the confidence that these things have come to us in a direction quite other to that that naively one might think um and uh well what do you think of the perennialists not the Huxley but the traditionalist school then this idea of the primordial uh tradition and at least a vol and Evola and his his thought on that because I am interested in this idea of I do see a floor in the idea of sort of mashing up all these ethnic groups and Folk together when they yeah very not that we can control these forces like you say but when these high performs let's say actually very well could be an R beings let's say that aren't only in uh distributed collect uh cognition conscious cognition but perhaps also outside as well right um and so if these realities are spectival [Music] um to actually mash them together is is not a good thing firstly because you're not that you can kill these things I don't know if they're outside as you say but I I think it's probably I would say ultimately it has to be impossible to match them together and then going down a level I would just agree yes you don't want to just now together and then down a level further some kind of um systems of connectivity are probably quite creative you know I mean young obviously it does that massively I mean he's he's extremely Cosmopolitan in his sense of like you know he he wrote a really fascinating introduction to teaching you know yes he was very interested in Tibetan Buddhism I mean um so without at all I think uh uh we say at all without without radically separating himself from his own religious tradition he certainly reached out as far as he was concerns to these other lines um and it's it's not that it can be necessary it could be used to reveal things let's say in having what has been that's perhaps been the text have been lost right so let I mean I don't know where you got the neurogram from but um just things that are that were that we just don't have the record of so you could co-opt and use something from there to disclose it somewhere else right which is what the Traditional School does they use things in the Eastern to suggest so this is perhaps what Germanic paganism was or had and so I think it's definite use in that to to help disclose a possibility um is there use in using these things that are to investigate what has been I mean dogmatic at all about it I mean I I think that your spirit of experimentation is definitely the one you know it's like try things out and do they do they work for you I mean I I would have thought there have to be innumerable approaches that would be productive yeah and I find it very hard to believe that there are any uh there are any kind of canonical Traditions that cannot be tapped productively if they if you get onto the right wavelength of them and you know work with them work with them carefully and and they and you click with that um so I think people will do different things and that and that's good um in terms of this General thing about endorsing this Traditions I mean I I guess I should ask you whether you think there is this how how coherent or and uniform do you think that that you know these bunch of thinkers are um they're probably not as uniform as people say um yeah because I guess I did ask you to agree do you agree or not um well it's hard to know I mean for me I find attractive or what seems to make sense to me is that there are high performs and that it's not that these religions are just all pointing to the same thing as a as a banana catalog would say it it seems more to me that perhaps what Dugan is talking about with plural Dar signs is probably more true I don't mean in terms of his whole metaphysic I just mean the idea that there must be some truth to the idea that there is a hyper agent that is woden let's say that isn't just the same as the all father from somewhere else it doesn't make sense to me that yes I get I understand it's a cosmos but does that not fit with your idea of metaphysics that there are well at least the perspective it's perspectival and truth is spectival and what we can ever know but um that's my view of it at least these high performance probably do uh hyper agents do exist and because that is primarily my interest to retain and to use these experiments and uh to disclose the truth of English being really it's a try get to see if there are hyper agents related to this um that are not in the conscious and also to the ground of what has been of the conscious too to um better articulate it although articulating it may also ruin it as we've talked about earlier but because there's something there that I think should be retained and that's been lost and is actually uh like I say a hyper agent it seems to be and it does come up you see it in Jeffrey Monmouth right I think there's something there's probably something behind those texts of the way I talk about it is that they are the extension of the hyper hyper agent the Mythos is the thing in logos that is the let's say arm that can be used to mediate the head or the body um yeah what do you think of that yes I think that sounds that sounds right I mean I I really enjoyed uh in in Italy there's a whole genre of these Renaissance paintings that are about divine inspiration you know and it will have some Saint usually maybe I guess predominantly is the is the writers of the gospels writing and just behind them sort of looking over their shoulder and guiding them there's an angel uh you know telling them what to write um and I think that that's a kind of important I mean obviously it's you know it's it's as we said before it's it's kind of idolatry it's it's a simplification um but there's something there that I think is definitely true um so there's some there's something that um I've seen in events of the coronation or at least you even say again with the the Traditional School talks about the king of the world let's say how I mean okay with everything that's happening the cycle let's say the mythical cycle of at least in the Anglo world is that a king could rise and should rise and it seems like as the danger Rises the possibility of that becomes more possible with thinking becoming more postmodern let's say and more people breaking out uh of the Matrix uh let's say what is possible is accelerating too and I mean this is more a statement than a question but it it seems as if what people think is impossible in the modern setting that a king cannot couldn't rise very well may come to be at least from my my perspective and it shouldn't be ruled out from within the modernist mind where it seems like it's improbable especially with everything we're seeing it seems like it's almost being primed for for this to occur to me from my perspective yeah no it's very interesting and I I do think this last few years should have broken up people's uh confidence yeah that they're able to make normal reliable predictions you know like um I think you're quite right to say like a maybe I don't know how far we have to go back in a few years it was vastly more improbable that's some strange monochistic um I'm I'm very agnostic about it and I have a lot of like kind of a liberal Republican instincts you know so I'm definitely not at the Forefront of this Neo monarchist sort of movement but but I think it is extremely interesting for sure I think it's really interesting and I I think it's probably people should be like reading the Arthurian Legends and thinking about the stuff I think we'll quite a lot about that well also too the the way the legend puts it is that uh it's a it's a rise for an okay uh for a certain amount of time it could be 100 years that it's necessary it could be but uh because Excalibur it's Tennyson puts it this way is that on one side it says take me and the other side it says throw me away it relates to get also to the bear Arthur is a bear it goes back into its um goes back into the uh Cave right to right when it's that's that Arthur is the Celtic word for Bear let's say um and that sort of Suits it so for people that uh I know like you say republican bent and um and the like it's it's for what it's needed for um for people that are perhaps don't um like that sort of thing but yeah on on time uh would you I mean this question is kind of strange related to all the discussion of time but with what you now know looking back would you have done anything differently was this would you with uh based on it's sort of a biographical question I suppose is that would you would you have uh done any work differently or an actor to work differently based on where you are today and what you now know safe for the young man I would say that at you know at a low level of lost and confused embeddedness in in illusion you know of course you know there's masses of space or sort of regret and for feelings of like things that you should have done and uh a huge huge amount of that Beyond Beyond beyond measure or description but I think it's a mistake I mean I think yeah that's not the way things I don't think that's the way things happen it's like and again I I think it's something I feel told that you know it's you when you're when you're consumed by regret it's because you're confused about time yeah times doesn't work the way that would make regrets actually make sense and again I think Spinoza is completely right I mean it's regret is regret is a mistake um no one's interested in your regret I suppose you could also frame it in a way of the reason why I ask that is more uh sort of ah almost like advice to uh young thinkers and young men that are coming up and maybe a way to go into a question about that is that were there practices rituals books verse or things that triggered turning points for you and your thinking life uh that were yeah radical that that would people may benefit from or just even things that did do that um I I would say that the big one posed in that posed in that form is definitely to for people to immerse themselves in the Canon wholeheartedly and with the greatest possible confidence that it will not disappoint them um so yes for sure if there's what that would be my primary recommendation yeah yeah so and are there any of I suppose figures I mean okay it's just yes it's really the classes isn't it it's it's the it's the it's the whole thing um and it is very hard I suppose for people to I don't know the general audience to it requires a certain person be willing to put the time in but it seems to me that the path to building a virtue engine actually allows you to sort of desensitize yourself to the matrix's entertainments where the Canon sticks out for you just as something that you're once you get started and initiated propelled towards to the next one and the next thing and the next thing um and there are many Publishers on our side of things now that are doing it without the gross types of uh preludes that the institutions would put in front of books that are deemed to be you know heretical to the regime's narrative so there's a lot of opportunity I think in our space to actually do that and to engage with uh the Canon but if you find yourself to be like I mentioned oh it's unattractive to you you can work towards that and I suppose that can begin with stuff like meditation it's sort of retraining your uh desire so to speak to be able to begin that sort of thing yes yes I mean I think obviously you know experimentation cautious experimentation is is to be also recommended wholeheartedly I'm sure different things work for different people and and and unless you sort of you know give things a chance you'll never know whether you're missing out on something that would really help you yeah I mean throw this as a bit inane I feel I'm kind of drifted into a sort of Agony Agony Aunt mode which maybe oh yes no I agree I'm loving it but no I don't mean to pull you into a region that seems like well that's the thing is that you don't you see yourself as a certain way but others obviously are very much admire you and want to hear this sort of thing as well so um but um yeah I know I know what you mean I know what you mean in all your studies have you recognized any particular features that stick out for you as um English traits or even existentials let's say even ways that are unique to the English folk not necessarily based on what would be what you know what is walked by modernism but just authentic things even deep in the past features you've recognized that we could look to as uh because I believe there are but um I'd be interested to hear what you yes no I they're sure there are um I think you know if I was gonna choose one writer that I think is really very insightful about that it's Walter Russell made um who I think really has extremely good grasp of what the Anglo tradition is about um and I think one crucial stage is to kind of take Adam Smith and Darwin and maybe Hume and see them all as part of a kind of religious tradition you know like a single greatest move that I think uh world of us removed made Dustin as he says um you know the notion of the Invisible Hand is a notion that comes out of the Protestant Anglo Protestant religion you know it's a and so you have to pull it back in you have to see that it's like it I think the sense of what secular English culture is and what religious English culture is both need reciprocal modification and then yeah and they they receive this reciprocal modification by this synthesis you know on the notion of the Invisible Hand you know which you have to sort of thinking that both in the in the in the intonation of a Hellfire creature and in intonation of a liberal Economist and those two are the same yeah yeah ultimately you know so and I think use this sort of unpack what that thing is underneath that's yeah common yeah because it from my perspective it does seem to be that even that empiricist bent seems to sort of be again this is just speculation it's just the thought I've had I haven't this is one I haven't investigated completely but it seems to be there is an impulsion towards this fully Englishman towards this outside that kind of gets warped by the uh the empiricism at a time and that turns into people's characterizing it as a um a worship of the sort of scientific method and uh heat of the Divine yet it actually is a desire that was very natural and even zealous in the Anglo-Saxon for that outside which is the gods that they were so closely connected to and perhaps that is also connected to the fancy that the Englishman enjoys the novels that he writes the uh you know the magic and that which is which is a so it's fulfilled them it's sort of inverted by The Matrix let's say to uh away from its actual Noble attraction which is the outside I don't know what you think about that yes I think that's very well put for sure yeah good not not uh not just me then but I wrote actually this wouldn't mind getting your thoughts on it uh which is philosophy at its best is demonology or demonology and fiction at its best is Daemon divination what do you think of that I think I just separately agree with it was a bit boring response but I think I think it's totally right I think to write in the expectation that something will uh communicate through you is absolutely crucial and it's like what is the real impulsion and again if you go you know you go back obviously just a classical Antiquity and of course that's what people think you know it's like it's not fashionable now to begin riding by an invocational formal invocation of the muses but at least there's at least there's an informal of tacit invocation oh um and and if there wasn't then nothing written could ever be of any great significance I I think it's like um you know who people read a book because they think that is tapping into something Beyond the kind of mediocre contents of an empirical beings mind and memory um so yes that's 100 and I think on the side of all today um epistemology likewise like the question of what it is to know and what you can know is utterly impoverished and probably simply fake if it's not ultimately about what you can communicate with or what can more importantly communicate with you you know I think to think to know to remember is all actually Communications engineering yeah and it most of that work as we've said is done on the other side but you at least have to participate you have to yes you have to try and kind of tweak the channel as best you can and that's what it is to think um you know and I think a mode of philosophy that treats it as something that's just privately occurring within your own nervous system is not it's not really getting the thing this is related to your Tweet that you wrote that um the Ancients would have seen modern epistemology as confused uh completely confused I think you you tweeted something like I think if I remember it was confused demonology and of course they would yeah yeah that is perfect I think people don't realize how actually I mean so I hope someone's archiving your tweets because they have done it for your excellent work with um of course all across all your blogs that's where all the work is um but there's so much great for philosophy just in the tweets themselves I don't think there's another account that uh just has State I don't know how long you spend on them or where they come from you could also add but there's so much to unpack in every one of them if you understand what's what you know a bit about this this world um just as a recommendation for people to do it and hopefully someone's backing them up one of the tweets you actually you wrote about is that um gods or hyper agents let's say are remarkably indifferent to the suffering of those who contact them in the in the wrong way um what maybe you can elaborate more on that tweet it's just a very interesting one I suspect it's probably um what was kind of driving it is just again a a kind of spin as a stick thought I think it's the flip side of this thing like it's Spinoza's basically trying to do a kind of theological Psychotherapy on it on who you are and you know these two things are absolutely reciprocal but on the one hand you know yourself flagellating regret and torments over past mistakes is absolutely a matter of indifference to him the higher power but the flip side of that is also like you know it's not gonna it's not interested in your petitionary prayer you know your your mode of participation in the sacred it should not be on this model of petition and utilitarian yeah it's completely it's completely wrong so you have to try and you know spinos this whole question is what do you do that's actually in tune with that you know what what it isn't that that again is all idolatry it's all just people transferring human sociology into this sphere where it's completely out of place and I'm helpful honestly day as I've said sort of you know earlier in this discussion there is this factor of the retrospective so it seems to me that there's a kind of vision of magical practice where uh the practitioner has a conscious will to bring about some change you know there's a famous thing that all modern magicians have this quote in various slightly modified forms of to bring about change in Conformity with the will um but the will is not the will of the empirical person oh that's a that's a mistake the real the will is something discovered the will is the will is itself anchored in the outside and what and one finds retrospectively that something has been made to happen because the agent the empirical agent was following some kind of guidance that they may or may not have understood but certainly doesn't originate in their own uh empirical being it seems that um that yeah again we've thought we're sort of talking about a similar thing in different ways across the conversation but I the way I see it as being a conduit for it at least that's what I've recently discovered uh to be in tune with it so you obviously can participate and I you know render effects and that even sort of speaks to what Tolkien even talks about as or even some Christian uh theology about being a sub Creator in a way uh where you're participate in it but you're not doing you know you're not directing the show but yeah sort of conduit for it and I I experienced that with practices another one you can use is active imagination which young talks about um and these symbolic symbols and mythology you you've talked about that before where you've or at least I mean these are texts you probably wrote a long time ago where you talk about numeral being the thing that is the reliable form and it certainly resists the attack of the Matrix the numerals but it does seem to be there's something with some symbolism true symbolism as young talks about where it's got that similar applicability that or multiplicity that numerals seem to have and I don't know the number Theory so I do understand it though I put time into understanding the neurogram as best I can but it does seem like there is some overlap between that indeterminacy perhaps as a way of putting it with symbolism and the numeral because you have sort of mentioned symbolism isn't isn't it's more reliable with to rely on the numera the numeral for that indeterminacy for that sorry and like a lot of your questions here Scott there's there's a lot in what you're saying and it could be taken in some very different directions because you know on one side there's this question about symbolism you know in relation to Young um more generally in the esoteric tradition you know what elephant I call Pentacles those kind of weird diagrams or whatever that seem to have extraordinary uh uh intellectual density conceptual density you know some quite simple some quite simple design or diagram can seem almost inexhaustibly rich in the in its conceptual uh content and that's for sure right and then on the other side of your question there are the numerals um and I I think that's a kind of a huge a huge area I mean because if you're if you're starting from the question of the Canon of canonicity there's almost nothing of one level almost nothing is more canonical than the than the new moves themselves um and if you spend a lot of time kind of meditating upon them it's there's a lot of pattern you know some of some at many different levels actually you know like um you could you can see simply that the like one two and three not just in English but you know in other in Chinese for instance um are just tally marks you know the originally and they've just evolved it's like they've just evolved into the modern symbol but you can still see the kind of like almost in a palimpses the the ancient single double and triple line uh tally mark um right so yes I think this is that this is also like a hugely hugely interesting yeah I was just gonna say it's it's uh it perhaps what you mean by that it's so rich that it would take another two hours to go into the the subject itself um I suppose a way of putting it is that uh the symbol itself is a psycho technology especially primordial symbols um in that they are ways of mediating uh higher order truth let's say and the numerals are also psycho Technologies just as a way of articulating it that can do the same things um because numerals themselves at least what I've understood from your work on this is that not that you like to translate it into being but uh zero being uh absolute negation uh and and one being or perhaps you could see it as the first send sending or being and then perhaps three I mean three seems to be like Dar sign I suppose you could call it I mean there are so many ways they could be used but I mean the number three as it emerges is something quite special in that one and two is is sort of one in another but three is sort of uh I mean the way you talk about it is it's it's sequencing it's and how that relates to oh God this is so complicated but what I take from it there's well God there's just so many directions I could take that in but yeah but just basically on the question on that point of psycho technology maybe you could just comment on on that then rather than where I just yes I mean look you're right in the sense like there's this it opens onto this onto this vast Labyrinth of you know when you go concretely and in detail into what's going on in the in the numerals conceived in many different levels actually you know the level that you were talking on is is quite symbolic and then there's levels that are more and more just graphic just it just just looking at them as as minute diagrams in themselves obviously okay like that but avoiding going into that great yeah um I think that they're they both these symbols and the numerals and also you know words other type of semiotic objects ah tools that can be embedded in various kinds of rituals in many different in many different ways like um but there are there's definitely they invite various kind of methodical rituals um and I mean we kind of are on this question about prayer like yeah you know uh as I was saying like spinos are obviously completely uh dismisses the notion of petitionary prayer and I I'm sympathetic to that but I think the notion of prayer more generally is extremely rich and interesting um and it basically is a space of semiotic ritual you know and there is a kind of there are I am sure many kinds of uh approaches to prayer which will be extremely productive and generative in the way we've been yes talking about in the last couple of hours you know it is a very interesting strand in our religious and literary tradition that I think um yeah I certainly have much more open to than I have been in the past people I think to sort of think about it without getting too excited in a little way well you actually on that subject you did tweet of uh Imperium press a friend of the channel and a publisher uh sent this as a question but it's just so something I'm very interested in you tweeted that we need a European or a white Shinto or something so maybe you didn't but um well it sounds like something that might possibly possible that you might uh have said well I'm it's not an interesting but I I just simply don't remember this one we didn't have the exact wording of that do you I don't but I I let me I mean I'll just elaborate on it myself and then perhaps you can just comment on it so what might a English uh Shinto look like and what would that add perhaps I mean for one thought that I've had is that even adding to perhaps Christian practices because there are there's uh Pig there's a friend of another friend of the channel uh Tom uh he's a very popular YouTuber and he's a pagan in paganism uh Germanic paganism and um I thought I had is that Europeans would be quite good if they wore swords like Sikhs did to church as a kind of uh just ceremonial swords it's a spiritual symbol it has been from the start for the European just as a just as a starter on that point of uh European Shinto when you think of a European Shinto is that something that would be different to a Revival of certain indigenous European taken um maybe more adding to it that the Japanese are quite interesting in how that's related to the communication of hyper agents in small ways and small let's quote-unquote spirits and perhaps that was something you were just you were thinking about rather than the spicy word uh white or anything but just simply English that's why I put it as European um is that it is something that's missing and another thought that I had is that perhaps I just mean even as additive to the the native emergence of a re-emergence of paganism but even to the people that perhaps want to practicing there's a lot of Orthodox Chad's English Orthodox guys that we could add something like medieval reenactment like the Japanese do could be part of our religious practice um as well just add as an additive ritual I think that there's a really interesting issue that's very aligned with this with this question you're asking now which is to do with the uptake of the notion of idolatry in Western tradition where it's basically been its primary usage has been to suppress pagan polytheism so I think you know the the initial response from a certain type of kind of Orthodox Christian about this notion of what's needed as a is a an English or european or whatever Shinto would be over that's you know that's going in the wrong direction because you know the our our religious tradition is based upon stripping out all of these you know uh teeming multiplicity of divine beings in order to kind of just Grand simplification in in moral monotheism um and I I think that there's a response to that to say well look it doesn't you can be extremely serious about avoiding idolatry without taking it in that direction yeah yeah and and that it's not it's you're not really by just stripping down a number of gods you're not I I think that arguably you're not really making much progress in the direction of critiquing idolatry you know you're because as long as the notion of a god is is remains consistent it remains exactly as idolatrous if there's only one of them as if there's a hundred you know it's like the anthropomorphic the anthropomorphic character of divinity that's the idolatrous content and so an abstract polytheism is less idolatrous I would say arguably than a concrete anthropomorphic monotheism I mean it's not that the question of number is a is is misguiding you know and I think has there's no point regretting history and you have to try and understand the purposes of all these things so I'm not going to say we went wrong I think that's two it doesn't really work but certainly I would like to say that um it's not a good objection to this suggestion this kind of Shinto or or Pagan pluralism to bring the kind of bad lacks of of anti idolatry against it or the critique of ideology I just I don't think it I don't think it works it's like the point is to open whatever what doesn't close down or what does open up not to like you mentioned if you that sort of uh hyper Protestant modern even modernist anthropomorphizing um actually seems to negate access if anything um but that's not to say that again the Orthodox position and I'm a big fan of the Orthodox Chads that are in our right-wing side of things um theirs opens them up clearly um their Theology and their symbolic practices there's definitely a kind of vector towards abstraction and I mean you know Dante got us explicitly says you know of course God doesn't have hands um you know but with that language is just used to help our understanding as a step or whatever so you know obviously in sophisticated understandings of the Orthodox scripture it's like for sure one is heading towards a kind of conceptual abstraction even within this framework so I I definitely agree with you about that but uh it it is very interesting in Japan um how sophisticated and Abstract the basic religious culture it's like I I I went to uh I visited a in a little Japanese Town up in the mountains called Nico one of the amazing temples I've ever visited when I and you so of course there is this there is this kind of Shinto multiplicitousness to what's going on there but there the fundamental symbol of the of the of the absolute for them uh in this Tempo at least was a lightning bolt wow there was actually a tree that had been that had been hit by lightning somewhat a century before or something because it's you know now tucked away in some corner of the temple grounds but but you know their notion of divinity had been so abstracted again of sort of anthropomorphic humanistic content that it was just this stroke you know just this kind of yeah um and and I thought that was a an amazing thing really almost how it first appears though isn't it to the Greeks too is this the struckness of what's given of the demon I suppose because it seems to me that what you saw there are those Sim those symbols that are revealed by manifestation itself and then we then end up anthropomorphizing them later but I think that's a good place to to um start to wind it up is there anything you wore you wanted to comment on the political situation for everyone watching I've done my best here there's so much that Nick knows and so much we could go into um and everyone's not going to get what they wanted out of listening to this um I've basically had to follow my own interest um it's just they're just so the subjects are so complicated and interesting so I did my best to go the different in the different areas that people might want to but yeah did you want to comment quickly on the anything else nothing there's nothing uh pressing actually on this and in fact you know I don't think uh beyond what what we've talked about I really don't feel I have some particularly insightful contribution to me I mean I I I I I I think uh modern contemporary politics they've seen with the right sort of Detachment and the right sense of just kind of historical Destinies extremely entertaining at the moment but in terms of like concrete concrete prophecies about the precise twists and turns of the next few years I am groping as much as anyone else all right Nick well it's been a real pleasure and I again thanks so much for coming I think people will really like that it's been very insightful for me I have to watch back through it again uh to to especially on all the stuff we were talking about with high position we'll bring that to a close everyone uh God bless you uh uh and uh God uh save the overking as I say and okay well I've I've really enjoyed this Scott so thanks so much for uh setting it up