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Occult technology

01:12 / 30.11.10

So this is my first topic started on barbelith. I am interested to know about fellow users experience in applying technology to their spiritual life. Are our prayers submitted via the internet valid? Internet confessionals? Cell phone athame? IPad grimoire? What deities have jurisdiction over Apple? Eris? Microsoft...Moloch? Does the afterlife support flash?

02:58 / 28.12.10

In answer to your questions, I'd say, in order;

Maybe.

Possibly not.

No.

Especially not that.

Moloch.

No.

01:23 / 04.02.11

Actually the idea of an iPad/ebook grimoire is an interesting one. So is a cell phone athame though I wouldn't use it as such because it doesn't seem to have the same idea behind it. Knife/sword vs. communication tool.

Prayers submitted over the internet? Submitted to whom? /dev/null?

I have to say that I don't really see these as good examples of technology integrating into spirituality. Instead this seems more of a tool replacement question.

One way I can think of in incorporating technology into magick is to use an old tv to listen and watch the static on a dead channel (echoes of the first line of Neuromancer) as a sort of improv sensory deprivation chamber. The static audio and video serves as white noise. The mind is accustomed to patterns and so it searches for patterns in the sensory input. As there are none patterns in the inner aspects of perception are then brought forth. Miniature inner workings can start to show up on a large scale of the macrocosm due to the macrocosm of the world being drowned out in a rain of television static.

Uhm..I hope that makes sense.

00:53 / 08.02.11

Actually the idea of an iPad/ebook grimoire is an interesting one.

How is that interesting? Is it not just a pdf? I have loads of them. You can go on a torrent site and downloads untold gigs of grimoires and other occult texts that previous generations would have had to spend years tracking down hard copies of. They could be viewed on an ipad or an iphone or whatever, like any other pdf. So what? This isn't exactly ground breaking stuff. It's no different from any other ebook.

It is also a waste of disk space if you don't read it and do something with it, and the massive glut of pdf grimoires that can be sourced very easily online does tend to encourage hoarding, rather than reading and doing.

Replacing an athame with a cell phone also sounds like a load of bollocks. To be frank, the mystery of the athame remains pretty inscrutable to me, after years of exploring it and trying to comprehend its depths. There are deep mysteries in that. It's not just "a pointy thing". Substituting it for a cell phone in some desperate, attention-seeking effort at being iconoclastic suggests a lack of understanding of the athame as anything other than "a pointy thing". It might be more constructive to slow down and actually figure out what an athame is, before you randomly substitute a bit of technology for it.

I was scrying into white noise on a TV set in the early 90s, and it was old hat then.

Why are all conversations about technology and magic so drearily tedious and unimaginative?

Laconic Verbosity

22:39 / 23.08.11

"Why are all conversations about technology and magic so drearily tedious and unimaginative?"

Good question. The only answer I can think of is that almost no one is thinking as far ahead as Paul Laffoley... and the stuff he comes up with no one knows how to begin making. Or the ones who do know are too busy figuring it out to talk about it much.

15:03 / 24.08.11

Cool book to read....Singularity is Near...Ray Kurzweil...I've read about 1/2 of it. Basic Thesis is that the pace of technological advance increases at an exponential rate..in the near future there will be a sort of big bang and a general intersection of spiritual, material and technological advances making us all godlike...

faintwhitelights

04:34 / 27.02.12

white noise is a pattern. equal power over audible frequency band.