Friday, December 22, 2017

Evidence - Failure to Communicate


You can call if you want but there's no one home,
And you're not gonna reach my telephone,
Because I'm out in the club, sipping that bub,
And you're not gonna reach my telephone!

Telephone, Lady Gaga

If occultists rarely talk about their experiences, prefering to conflate magick with extraneous topics, they next to never talk about the failures.  Lets hear about all those times you attempted magick and... diddly squat... and find reasons why things went wrong.  Well-recorded failures are evidence, a failure is a success to the diligent scientist.  From time to time its good to review the standards of how we measure success and enjoy a little campfire Qabalah.


In this post I want to talk specifically about failures in communication and in the following post  what successes look like in my experience.  For a laugh, we'll look at it through the lyrics of Lady Gaga's Telephone:

  • I can't hear a thing, I have no service in the club, you see - Sometimes spirit communication fails because no service/broken lines/crossed lines, equivalent of getting no communication, partial communication or wrong communication, we should strive to be honest about the quality of the communication itself - space weather, time weather?
  • I'm Kinda Busy - the spirit is busy with something else and will get to you later, maybe, the equivalent of being on hold - how long did you wait?
  • You Should Have Made Plans when you knew I was free/No-one home - failures regarding astrological timing, experienced esotericists know that ''when'' is a key question when it comes to all magic, if communication was unsuccessful did you call when you knew they would be out?
  • Now you won't stop calling me, I am sick and tired of my phone ringing - Hassle spirits, and they stop taking your calls
  • Stop Calling, Stop Calling I don't want to think anymore - lack of interest in your questions, concerns, are you badgering the spirit, is this only go to work if you force the spirit to answer?  What does that make you?  Desperate, obsessive, or just really really keen?  What does that look like?  Should we strive, above all else, to be cool?  There is an element of timing involved in texting etiquette isn't there?
  •  Sometimes you just don't have their number
If you go to the lengths of ''making a call'' you are heavily invested in success and emotionally excited enough to the point where you can make yourself see, hear or feel things that are not genuine and whilst your mind is the portal through which successful spirit communications have to occur (as it has to be) it is also the source of all potential delusion.  By census, the esoteric arts don't always invite the ''cold, impersonal investigator'' to the party, and highly emotional, fantasy prone individuals with rich and fertile imaginations could just be talking to themselves.  On the other end of the spectrum the nominally more rational members of our community are normally also paranoid (I include myself), which in my understanding is a form of evolved, useful on the tribal scale, Shamanic, ratio ad absurdum, and therefore equally likely to jump at shadows.   By increasing our sensitivity in any way we are also increasing the chance of self-delusion. This is further complicated by, as I explored in Out of the Corner of My Eye, spirits actually using ''the shadows'' to communicate and in testing those Jungian outer reaches of our imagination are we are then not also testing those Jungian outer reaches of the universe and/or universal mind?  After all, our perception is suspended in the rest of our mind, conscious and subconscious,  before it is ever suspended in a physical reality.

The psychogeography of the lunatic fringe, like Nature herself, is a bitch to navigate.
Boy the way you blowin' up my phone make me leave no faster,
Put my coat on faster, leave my girls no faster,
I should've left my phone at home cause this is a disaster,
Phonin' like a collector, sorry I cannot answer!

Telephone, Lady Gaga

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