Astral Planes, Metaverses, and Cyber Magic
I got an email this weekend with an intriguing question:
“Jason, you have laid out a scheme of levels of reality that goes from non-dual, to mental, to astral, to etheric, to physical. Where do you think cyberspace fits into this? I feel like with the internet, we are giving everyone wider access to the astral plane. Do you agree?”
This isn’t a new question by far, and I remember debates on it from the 90’s and probably earlier. It hasn’t come up in a while but perhaps with the promises of virtual reality and the metaverse finally starting to be realized it is only natural for people to circle back around to this idea. So, is Cyberspace the astral plane?
In the words of Lana Kane: NOPE
Cyberspace is just part of the physical world. In the end, it is all a lot of very physical transistors turning on and off reaaaaaally fast. The transistors create patterns of ones and zeroes, which we call binary code. Physical people at physical desks designed assembly languages, to handle the crazy amount of ones and zeroes generated by these transistors in order to make them do something cooler than just be ones and zeros. On the basis of theses assembly languages, we invented advanced programming languages to handle the still bulky assembly languages. Then we invented compilers to handle those, and….. well you get the idea. We have done a lot of fancy shit with what really amounts to a lot of off/on switches. Fancy, but Physical.
“But Jason…. its like… a cloud now….. ”
Weirdly, “the cloud” makes the internet less like an all pervasive decentralized cloud than even the old Arpanet. Whereas the internet was originally designed to function even if large cities got destroyed in nuclear wars, the modern internet runs on servers that are mostly owned by Amazon and Google. When Amazon Web Services has just one of 23 centers go down in 2020 it took down a shocking amount of the internet. Everything from Coinbase, to Roku, to 1Password to the Washington Post was effected. That same year journalist Kashmir Hill tried to experience the internet with Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft blocked. She blackholed their IP’s and found that she basically couldn’t do anything. Netflix isn’t Amazon, but it runs on their servers. Unrelated sites that used captcha to to prove users are not robots became inaccessible because that is owned by Google. Uber and Lyft use Google maps…. etc etc. You get the idea.
The internet is not a layer of reality. Its a thing we do on the physical plane.
If you REALLY want to think of it as a layer of reality, place it as an additional level after the physical plane. Something father removed from whatever you consider to be the base layer than the ordinary world. Whether you see this source as God, or Emptiness, or Non-duality, if you want to consider the internet its own layer of reality, it is FURTHER AWAY from that source or that truth than eating a hot pockets and watching Archer, which is what I hope to do a little later.
WHAT ABOUT CYBER MAGIC
So, does this mean that Cyber magic isn’t a thing? That the internet isn’t magical?
Lana…. help us out again…
Of course you can do magic on the net and with computers! You can do magic with anything. You just have to know what it is you are actually doing and conceptualize it the right way.
In one of my courses I have students go out and gather dirt and place talismans at places in their life: bank, job, etc. A student recently pointed out that they do most of their banking online, and worked online, and shopped online, so perhaps they should go to these websites and perform the ritual at home while they were “at” these sites.
I pointed out that these are not “places” at all. They may give the illusion of places, but they aren’t places. It’s just you at your desk or wherever you do your computing. You are at home. When you get hungry you go to your kitchen. When you need to shit you use your toilet. You are at home. I advised that by all means they should do the ritual where they use their computer, but then get out and go to the physical bank or job location if there is one. If not, then come up with other important places to substitute or reduce the overall number of places.
Pretending that websites are places, even metaverse/second-life/occulus places, is not good magic in my opinion. I’ve tried it with fairly piss-poor results. Maybe others get great results with this concept, but I haven’t seen much to indicate that.
So what does work then? Placing a sigil on a website for people to see is a classic, that has worked well for a lot of folks, but you want to know what kind of cyber magic gets great results?
Sympathetic Magic.
Patrick Dunn once described the Information Model Magic as “speaking to reality in a language it responds to.” If that’s not classical sympathetic magic, nothing is. Burning things and bathing things. tying or untying things, nailing or releasing things. Nothing is more basic to Witchcraft or Sorcery than this and nothing is more relevant to magic on the net.
We just have to figure out what we actually do. We delete things, we install things, we copy things, we paste things, we move information and numbers between accounts. This is just as much a basis for sympathetic magic as stabbing a lemon with nails or tying two orchids together.
One of my favorite things to do is when I feel like sales are slow on something I move money from my paypal account to my bank account. I make a short invocation to powers of wealth (big fan of Red Dzambhala for this particular one, but Mercury is also rather sublime) then decide that the money I am moving from paypal creates a vacuum that needs to be filled.
I can honestly say this has never not sparked movement within minutes of me doing it.
Think about what the internet actually is, and what it consists of, then compose spells of sympathetic magic based on that. Maybe that will be my next book.
Want to take it next level? This is a blog post, not a book, so I only have time for a hint: Ba Gua.
Yin and Yang as broken and unbroken lines. Just like the ones and zero’s generated by those transistors that we talked about.
These get woven into sets of eight sets of three lines to create the Ba Gua and then combined again for the 64 I Ching hexagrams. Kind of like the assembly languages we make out of binary.
There are numerous advanced systems of magic and spirituality that have been put together upon this basis. Kind of like programing languages.
