Lucid dreamers would mention sometimes how the denizens of a dream are offended when the dreamer mentions it being a dream. Imagine being told that your entire life and universe will in a few minutes end, and that nobody would even care, “it’s just a dream”. Simulation withing a simulation, lacuna in a computing reservoir, a mixup between the resonances and dimensions, – a dream might soon be smoothed out by the learning algorithm. Dick and Neville both now voiced our idea of old, that a similar blotting out might happen to our realities and our parallel worlds: “*Those events will never come; those prophets for some reason, God knows why, remembered how it was before the scenery got whisked away and new scenery whisked in place, and as fast as possible described their visions.*”
“It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile.” A lucid dreamer boasting to the spirits of being in a dream is ignorant twice: for thinking that he himself is not a dream, and for thinking that the “eternal states of mind”, of which the dream is an interplay, are less “real” than his illusion of self.
Somewhere in the libretto of Parsifal, Wagner suggests that the great holy magic which God casts onto the world is a protective veil of enchantment to shield humble, frail and timid very mild lives, so that we, being unable to discern them, won’t hurt them; He creates the dokos, the veil, as an extending of His protection over them, for they have no other. Only we, the big crude cruel powerful strong hurtful creatures are visible. The veil is not to deceive us per se, but we must be deceived so that the little ones may live unseen, “untroubled by men, amidst the shadowy green/The little things of the forest live unseen” (The Bacchae).
Here Dick reminds us of a recent thought, that indeed the crude physicality of the static reality (the Weaver of the Mage Triat), the stubborn homeostasis of it, ((euterpe: is nothing but a protective layer that we use to protect ourselves from the more subtle, more dangerous, more alien elements of the multiverse)) is a kind of an armor or exoskeleton. To borrow from machine learning, reducing the learning rate α can give a neural network a chance, when otherwise it hits a numerical instability too soon. Some of the spirits/thoughtforms might be less resistant to change, so that a third of angels might Fall in an instance.
I believe I saw the Platonic Idea Forms, and there were many of them, and he was right; what we see here are copies, not the real actual source-thing. But they are active and alive. They are not static; they pulse with energy and life (cf. Bergson). It seemed to me, as I look back, that if anything what I saw was more change, more motion, faster, that the flash-cutting rate—but without that fast rate, recurrence. Recurrence, the eternal verities, the Forms, are within, an aspect of, the flux, and the more flux the more the Forms come into view.
Borrowing from this vision of Dick, it might be that the static reality copies are sinks, or else backups, or simply instances maintained by a learning algorithm. And the static reality itself – a kind of stochastic training dataset (Dick: “*Mere signaling systems to inform me of sequential whens: a series of signals, in specific order, arranged in order to release changes in me*”).
What to us looks like years and years of life might, to that system, be as cheap as a single minibatch, to run and discard in a millisecond, resulting in a small adjustment of “platonic form” parameters at best.
This sheds a funny light at the magickal application of the “first exercise”: by shifting our weights to match the other weights we might “trick” the learning algorithm to use our weights more in the equation, giving us a greater effect at some of the inference. If our weights result in a good fitness then there is a chance that they will be discovered and boosted in volume. That is, working miracles is in turn a sign of fitting in. Except there are different kinds of miracles (such as science vs psychology vs faith) and different kinds of situations to train for (aka the Catastrophic Forgetting).
It can explain also some of the aversion towards vulgar magick.
The Moon is the highest and the lowest; the Moon is the aspiration, the link of man and God; she is the supreme purity: Isis the Virgin, Isis the Virgin Mother; but she comes right down at the other end of the scale, to be a symbol of the senses themselves, the mere instrument of the registration of phenomena, incapable of discrimination, incapable of choice. The Niyama corresponding to her influence, the first of all, is that quality of aspiration, the positive purity which refuses union with anything less than the All. In Greek mythology Artemis, the Goddess of the Moon, is virgin; she yielded only to Pan. Here is one particular lesson: as the Yogi advances, magic powers (Siddhi the teachers call them) are offered to the aspirant; if he accepts the least of these — or the greatest — he is lost.
The ultimatum voiced by Crowley, that accepting a vulgar magickal power is an error (a sin), might sound overly demanding, and for no apparent reason (2022-01-27). Om Swami and Neville both have no qualms with the siddhi. But the idea here might be that gaming the learning algorithm is parasitic towards the actual goal of the learning, provided there is one.
We would rather assume a non-objective or novely search. And it is also futile to try to match the objective before we know it (cf. “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”).
Still, the idea that there might be a wider “output” somewhere, to which we are only a partial fit – is, of course, a natural one (even if that “output” is simply the Big Bang), and maybe a softer meaning of Crowley’s Moon is to keep an eye open for that wider reality, and to keep moving somewhere (2022-04-18), avoiding being stuck in a low-information (low-entropy) loop.
Now, looking at how the modern people are trying to unite around the “Физ подготовка АЗО Север” chat, flailing among incompatible systems of thought and ideas, never finding a purchase, bashing always at one extremity or another, it’s kind of obvious that society has developed in many vectors at once, whereas the “primate platform” is lagging behind, clinging to “consensual reality” for comfort. This exploration is, to the tribal mind – a host of anomalies (ἀνομίαν), and this mismatch – love growing cold (“оскудение любви”, Mat 24:12).