vaxjedi | (no subject)

Another rant.... with the usual digressions and meandering.

I've been hanging out on the

technopaganism and it's gravitated a lot of discussion on what is essentially chaos magick. This makes sense, really, as chaos mahgick reflects the modern zeitgeit in many ways. It's a post-modern craft, which is suspicious of the concept of set truth and convinced of the importance of belief in consensual reality. Compare chaos magick and advertising and propaganda - you'll see very little differences. The main differences are the tated goal and how much they admit to themselves what they are actually doing. But they are all about crafting opinion into reality with the basis that most of what we consider real is, in fact, illusion. And they are all goal-oriented - theyt have thing that they want to accomplish. And isn't that the point of industry, of technology, of modern thought - let's get you to where you are going. Where do you want to go today?

But, I think there is something missing, both from the discussions of technopaganism and modern sensibilities. It's described vary well by the difference between intentions of thaumaturgy and theology pointed out by Isaac Bonewits, or Peter Carroll when he talks about the difference between the magician and the mystic. Thaumaturgy is the practice of magick to accomplish a goal, the magician does magick to do things. As Crowley says, magick is the enactment of change in conformity of the Will. You Will something, you have an end to a means.

Theurgy is the enactment of magick for religious reaons, to fulfill and embody theological/spiritual concepts. The mystic doesn't always have a specific goal - the end is not important, it is the enactment of the means. Not where do you want to go, but what do you want to be?

We don't have the concept of the monk anymore. In a goal-oriented culture, we've forgotten about the mystic, the one who look into the world and finds God there. You see a lot of that in the neo-pagan movement, but they almost always look to nature. The technopaganism movement (such as it is) seems to have lack of reflection, looking around to see what is there. Not just what can be changed, not just looking for resources, looking for sound-bytes and ideas for the next progressive ritual. But looking around to see the rhythm and nature of the modern technological world we are in.

It's easy to look at high school, or suburbia, or tech support, or Starbucks, or Stalone's latest film and declare it bereft of meaning, a symptom of the lack of modern society. But that's simply an intellectual nihilism aimed at where we came from and where we are. It's a cop out. It's a New Age intelligensia snobbery. We look at all these people and say things like 'most men lead lives of quiet desperation' and we call them 'sheep' and refer to them as 'the herd'. But each of those live out there, each person we pass by on the freeway, each peron we talk to on the phone is a person with a life a full as the one we experience. They have love, they have pain. They have dreams, both broken and realized. They have stresses and trials. They have joys, and triumphs. Some are small, some are large. Some we never hear about. Some we can't help hearing about. As Boromir says in Fellowship of the Ring: "Yes, there is weakness, there is frailty, but there is courage also, and honor to be found in Men"

The fact is that there is a whole world left behind in the wake of progress. All the geeks and hackers and enginners and thelemites and chaotes spin of into the reaches of the possible, they leave behind a trail of city streets and email lists and urban legends and popular culture. Millions of First World people live their lives in that maze, give it life and make it grow. And that's the world we actually live in - even those geeks (technical or magickal).

And that's where the technomystics live. It's there that the technoshamans find God in beats of techno music, spirits at the end of suburban cul-de-sacs, mythology in the melodramas of comic book and cartoons, and hymns in the space between the lyrics of songs on the radio. God is right here as much as out there. And that's where I live, right here, not out there. I don't need to matter in the big picture - that's not where I live. I live in the local, the here and now, I live in the small lives of a few people I've bumped into.

And that's where the technoshamans belong, being bodhisattvas on the street, in the coffee shops, at the bdsm munches and in company cafeterias. Because that's where the spirits and the people and the spirits of people are.