Aphorisms – Chapter 3 – Change

(Binah)

Every action changes everything.

– Mandel, Mathemagicks, text for Causal Synthesis 3.6 (required),
New Ab curriculum

In science, this effect is well-known:  even the act of observation can change the result observed.  The reason for this is the essential interconnectedness of everything with everything else.  There’s no ‘undo’ button in serial time, and as such any action is “permanent,” meaning it is fixed to the particular moment in time.  Even if later “undone” by further actions, the original effects of the action remain indelibly.

For example, you dig a hole, decide that there is a better location for the hole, fill it in, and dig another one in the new location.  Both holes are about the same size, and the spot where the first hole was dug and filled in looks pretty much like it did before the hole was dug.  Was the action of digging the first hole undone?  No.  Rocks and dirt were moved, microbes and small worms disrupted, perhaps even an insect perished.  Placing the dirt back into the hole did not place every molecule back where it originally was, nor did it restore the disrupted creatures to their former happy burrows, nor bring the unfortunate insect back to life.  The time spent digging the holes will never be recovered either, along with the opportunities for doing something else that expired when the decision was made to abandon the first hole and dig another.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  Neither:  it is simply a permanent change to all linked causal systems, which can be shown to include the air that was moved and breathed, the displaced seeds that now will never germinate, and the offspring of the insect that will never be born…and all of the things that would have been influenced by that air, those plants, and those insects.  The action has therefore forever closed off innumerable possible futures.

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Change is like taking a shit after having been constipated:
Nothing, nothing, and then it all comes at once.
You’d better know it’s coming
and be ready to deal with it, or things can get messy.

– Than, mentoring a student

Observation of the behavior of changing systems indicates that change is not a smooth, continuous, or flowing process.  It proceeds by fits and starts:  it builds pressure against the inertia of the status quo until that inertia is overwhelmed and breaks down, loosing a flood of change like waters through a broken levee.  It is possible to perceive these building change-pressures, to ascertain their likely effects, and to make contingency plans for dealing with the change.  Changes taking place as result of natural processes are not stopped or diverted easily or without causing trouble elsewhere; changes coming from the actions of individuals can be easy to stop or divert, or impossible short of war, depending on the reason for the change and the mindset of those encouraging the change.  Either way the process of change still has its tipping points.

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The breath of Life is change.

– The Book of Gnegis, Volume 1

Living systems in particular are dependent upon the ability to change constantly – to adapt, to evolve, to refine, and even to transcend.  The mind and soul are likewise dependent upon change to fire the imagination and inspire aspirations.   Conversely, in the intellectual and spiritual realms, sameness and rote are deadly bores that make the wit and will go flaccid in those who are lulled easily to sleep, and destructive and perverse in those for whom activity is an imperative.

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Aphorisms – Chapter 2 – Potential

(Gathering Forces)

Potential?
Whoever lives up to their full potential must be a God!
You, Gnegis, are no God.

– Elhannan, High Priest of Soulsforge, speaking before the Quorum.

The line between infinite and finite is just so:  that which is fully self-realized is Above, that which is still working on it is Below.

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Causality, as it occurs in the natural world,
never selects the best potential outcome,
it selects for the most possible, and then the most viable.
‘Best’ is subjective; causality is objective.

– Nwen, Mathemagickal Transforms in Causality,
study guide for Mathemagicks 2.2 (required), New Ab curriculum.

Causality is the science that deals with the potentials that affect outcomes.  All things whatsoever have a causal trail behind them, known or unknown, obvious or hidden.  A child bumps his knee and gets a bruise – obvious cause-and-effect.  The same child gets hit by a car, and walks away with only the same bruise – hidden forces were at work, often characterized as “guardian angels.”  But were there literal entities involved, or a carefully constructed set of vectors designed to spare the child?

Since many of the forces involved in causality are “blind” (unconscious natural forces, such as classical mechanics), there is no “optimization” of outcomes possible, so causality, unmodified by conscious intervention, ever selects the “best” solution.  Being a purely mathematical construct, it selects for the most possible.  Autopoietic (self-organizing) forces sometimes come into play, in which case selection for the most viable (potentially self-organizing, such as life) outcome may occur.

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The potential of that Love shall set you free.

– Dahliah’s prophecy.

Not the Love itself, but the potential (energy) within it.  Love has the ability to draw out hidden potentials within all of us.

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Aphorisms – Chapter 1 – Prophecy

(Keter)

True Holy Prophecy is a two-edged sword:
it will come to pass,
but not necessarily in the way you think it will.

– Tel-Thet, Essays on the Ethics of Magick,
study guide for Ethics of Magick 4.2 (required),
New Ab curriculum

The study of prophecy and the interpretation of prophecy reveals this truth.  For example, imagine yourself in the ancient holy lands, seeing modern America.  What would you make of the airplanes?  Of TV and movies?  Could you tell that TV and movies were fiction?  This is how we ended up with apocalyptic descriptions of things, written with palpable fear since this is how the scribes felt when they witnessed marvels and atrocities devoid of context and beyond their power  to understand.

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Woe unto him who is the object of Prophecy.
His name shall endure forever, but so shall his pain.

– Mandel, in a report presented before the Quorum

When a prophecy is sufficiently important to a culture, much speculation will occur, and this will evolve into a set of expectations that will be visited on the object(s) of the prophecy, and these expectations may not be realistic.  But they will still be expected, and will cause great mischief to the object(s).

When a prophecy is fulfilled, the object of that prophecy becomes as much legend as the prophecy itself.  This sort of celebrity brings its own attendant mischief.

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The Absolute grants Prophecy to those whom
He cannot otherwise break.

– The Book of Gnegis, Volume 5

Prophecy can be a curse:  it takes a toll on the mental and physical  health of the prophet.   This was certainly the case with Gnegis, who received the commission of Holy Prophet as punishment when he killed the true holder of that title, his brother Elhannan.  Gnegis never fully figured out that he was cursed by the Holy, and he died believing that he had fooled the Holy and bent Him to his will…when in fact it was Gnegis who was broken.  Gnegis’ elevation to the position of first Wizard Supreme, creation of the Realm, and almost absolute power were taken by many to be a sign of favor with the Holy, and it took a number of generations for the truth to be spoken aloud about him.  Not all Prophets, then, are “good” or “favorites” of the Holy.  Sometimes they are simply meat puppets, harnessed by a Will beyond the comprehension of their limited egos.

We would do well to remember this lesson when our leaders prove to be only human after all – or even shockingly corrupt.

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How ‘Promise Keep’ Started

Cliché as it might seem, it was a dream. I was fifteen years old, and it was early summer. I had been slowly gathering my magickal forces back together after a very traumatic childhood, and had been through a number of “exercises” designed to get the aethyric blood pumping again with the goal of being fully back on-line by the time I reached adulthood.  The dream was remarkable not due to the content – that was cliché also – but because of the characters and the backstory.  It was in this dream that I first encountered the characters of Avery and Dahniah, and got my first glimpse of a society ruled by gentler, more civilized magick than appears on Earth.

First, I wrote down the dream, knowing even as I wrote it that it wasn’t the point.  Then I wrote extensions to the dream, and it was during this stage that I started to really understand the concepts by which these characters lived, and around which their society was organized.  Over the years, details emerged, synergies formed with the materials I studied, and it became possible for me to compare and contrast magick in a more ideal state with magick as currently manifested on Earth.  With maturity, those comparisons began to yield the secrets of why Earth magick skews from the ideal.

To encapsulate these lessons, I walked my characters through situations that exemplified the problematic thought processes and beliefs, and the result of this was the history of a people – the Worthies of Caldria, and to some degree all of the citizens of that world – which I begin to reveal in Promise Keep.  While the history is theirs, the lessons are Earth’s, and you will see familiar themes again and again, but from a different perspective.

In the Beginning…

Welcome to the universe of Promise Keep.

I promise that you’ll learn something new here – but if you’ve come looking for fundamentalism, Hogwart’s or the Matrix, you’re in the wrong paradigm.

This blog is where I will be gathering and sharing my thoughts and inspirations as I prepare to undertake the final edits of the Promise Keep novel, a work that has been in some stage of development since I was first inspired to put pen to paper at age 15, but the material I draw on predates that for, oh, about an Eternity and a half.

There are specific meanings to many of the words I use here and in the book that may be different in character and nuance from the dictionary definitions; I encourage you to review the Glossary periodically, as I will be adding to it as I go.  I’m sorry I can’t get the whole thing up at once – I just don’t have that kind of time, but I can manage to add a new term every now and again as I’m doing other updates.

I won’t be writing every day, but updates will be frequent enough that odds are something fresh will be waiting for you when you visit.

IMPORTANT: I invite constructive commentary, but I will delete all spam, close-minded lectures on competing worldviews, and religious rants.