psychic censor Archives

Reality is a funny old thing, isn’t it? For starters, everyone thinks they know what it is. We all have clearly defined ideas of what is ‘real’, and what is ‘a bridge too far’, and while there is some degree of variance between individuals, on the whole there is still something of a consensus.

This my good people, is what is known as “consensus reality”.

Examining Consensus

I’ll admit, the first time I heard the term “consensus reality”, it somehow managed to make all the sense in the world, and also sound like bullshit all at the same time. It just sounds like one of those terms that crazy people make

reality - VR — Another wonderful experience in a human-created reality! Thank you for trusting Rekall for your memory needs!

up, that sound scientific, but really are not.

However, when you think about it, and especially in the context of what we know about how the brain perceives and stores information, it makes a lot of sense.

You see, consensus and prior experience (which is also subject to consensus) provide the framework for how we perceive and remember the world around us. This is part of why the Overton Window is such a big deal. Because if you shift the consensus, then you shift the very framework through which people perceive and interact with the world. (Those “culture wars” don’t look so fucking stupid now, do they?)

But how does this all work?

From Senses to Storage

Our senses take in a lot

of information per second. According to the Hungarian-American psychologist, Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we take in around 2 million bits of information per second through our five senses. Now that’s a massive amount of information, and so it’s probably no surprise that the brain cannot store it all. After all, the brain is like any other storage device – it has finite capacity.

So what does the brain do?

Well, this is where the conscious mind steps in and basically edits, deletes, distorts, and generalizes this information down to a more reasonable 134 bits per second.

Or does it?

There is some disagreement as to the amount of compression taking place here, with the Encyclopedia Britannica citing a compression ratio of 11 million bits of information perceived to 50 bits stored. Which suggests that we remember even less about what we perceive than believed by Prof. Csikszentmihalyi.

The Editing Room

So how does our conscious mind decide what to store and what to dump?
Multiple studies suggest that interpretation and storage of information is massively influenced by prior knowledge and experience. In other words, we interpret what we encounter and build a complete picture of our world, from within the framework of what we think we already know.

This is also where consensus comes in, as part of that prior knowledge is informed by consensus. It is quite literally the ‘style guide’ for your brain’s internal editor.

So when I see arguments online about “reality” that are largely based in the enforcement of the scientific materialist consensus that has dominated for so long, I can’t help but roll my eyes.

Why?

reality - fairy — Unbelievably, Pixabay has no images of fairies wearing roller skates with neon signs. I am disappoint.

Because if you hold to that consensus strongly enough, a fairy could literally skate by you wearing a tutu and leg warmers, with big, flashing lights saying “I’m here!”, and it wouldn’t matter because your brain would just edit it out anyway. It would just be another bit of information out of 2-11 or so million that just gets edited out within less than a second. You wouldn’t even know you’d seen it. Hardly makes you an arbiter of reality, right?

Let’s not kid ourselves here, there is no objective reality when it comes to your senses and what is stored. If anything, the consensus that people cleave to is probably best thought of as being something akin to the Matrix. So why not go ahead and trust your senses (after you’ve ruled everything else out)? Well you know, as long as they’re not leading you to do something harmful to yourself or others…

Hacking ‘Reality’

However, unlike the Matrix, both the brain and consensus are somewhat “hackable”. All you really need to do is just change the narrative and keep repeating the same narrative until it becomes the prior knowledge that “everyone knows”. This is basically how people like Donald Trump get entire groups of people to believe in things that would have been considered too ridiculous to consider even five years ago.

This is also how you can consciously choose to change your perception. Ever wonder why some people always see weird shit and others don’t? It’s all down to perception and the ‘style guide’ your conscious brain editor is working to.

In my opinion, this is a big part of why you see some of these ‘trends’ in the kind of phenomena that people report experiencing around the same time that entertainment media is focusing on similar things. Are people really seeing that stuff, or are those things arising from the energy and belief of the consensus and becoming entities in their own right? Who knows? It’s kind of like Schroedinger’s cat in that we just don’t know and cannot know without somehow opening “the box”. But ultimately it doesn’t matter either – especially for magic workers. Because we tend to have to work with what we encounter, in the form in which we encounter it, and at the time when we encounter it regardless.

(As an aside, this is also why it doesn’t matter what fairies originally were. If you don’t work with what they are now, learning from the people who have continued to experience them, then you’re not only being an arrogant dick to the cultures in which these beliefs still survive, you’re also probably going to run into trouble sooner or later. That is if you’re actually encountering them, of course.)

To return to the main point though, this is also how you can work to hack your brain to see more stuff that you may not otherwise see. And you do this by repeatedly and consistently setting down the layers that change your ‘prior knowledge’ about the world and what is possible. In other words, you demolish that “bridge too far” brick by brick.

Unpacking Realities

All of this talk of a somewhat malleable consensus reality though, does beg the question of whether or not there is an absolute reality that is untouched by consensus. A reality that exists regardless and that serves as the foundation upon which all else is built.

Personally, I think this is something that is self-evident. After all, if we are editing things out to fit in with this created reality of the consensus, then it’s

reality - elephant — “Is it me, or is this reality thing a little cold, hard, and wrinkly?”

logical that the unedited version is the absolute reality, or at least as much as a human can perceive of it. Moreover, if dogs can smell more than us, and mantis shrimp can see colors we cannot even conceive of, then we can infer that this absolute reality is also beyond human concepts.

But what is this absolute reality?

I don’t know, but I personally believe it is one that is interconnected – that we are all connected in a tapestry of energy, consciousness, or whatever other word best fits here. And that the interplay between absolute and consensus realities is best imagined as being like a glass of milk with melted butter floating on top.

This absolute is beyond concepts and limitless. It is also a state in which a magical practitioner who is able to perceive and manipulate even the smallest portion, would not only have greater wisdom, but also possibly the ability to do some truly wondrous stuff.

There’s just one catch though: if this absolute reality is one of interconnectedness, then if you ever get to that level, it’s a cookie either poisoned or blessed by your actions that we must all ultimately eat.

Thank goodness for that psychic censor, right?

Resistance to Reenchantment

As far as invocations go, this had been a disaster.

I’m not going to go into all of the ways I’d fucked up, but I had. The pinnacle of that fuck up

however, was the fire alarm going off. Instead of giving up though, I’d chosen to see the first attempt as some kind of botched practice run, attended to the fire alarm, and started again. There’s a lot to be said for perseverance and not giving up too quickly.

So I’m standing there in my living room, with my less than stellar table of art set up (I’m really no artist), surrounded by various sigils, and rattling through invocations. You know, as you do. Time passes, and I begin to feel a little hopeless – I’m used to getting things in the air much sooner than this – but I carry on.

Then I start to doubt myself and this can be disastrous for a magic user. Maybe I’d messed up too badly? Maybe I’d gotten something wrong? Maybe I’d even offended the spirit I’d been attempting to conjure? There had been a sense of build-up before the fire alarm, so maybe the alarm had put the spirit off somehow?

Refocusing again, I set myself once more to purpose and continued to rattle through the invocations, allowing myself to fall into their rhythm. To pull me up and build with them. In short, I allowed them to put me into a kind of altered state – an ecstatic one in which my body thrummed, my voice soared, and spittle formed on my lips. My vague swaying became a purposeful rocking as I moved with the words.

And somewhere in that, that’s when things began to happen.

There was a sensation of something with weight descending into the scrying bowl before me, then a sense of expectation.

I greeted the spirit in the water and waited for a response.

Nothing.

I had been so certain it had been there, but I was beginning to have serious doubts. Forcing myself to refocus on the water, I let my eyes relax and got into my usual headspace for scrying.

Still nothing.

The doubts began to coalesce and take on a life of their own. Melding together, I found they formed an almost tangible barrier – something against which I could push and that would in turn push me back.

I tried a different tactic and fell back on the physical cues I’d programmed into myself over time with self-hypnosis. I’d done that work for times such as these when the doubts and disbelief weigh heavy but I need to work anyway.

“STOP THAT!”

The voice rang through my head, loud and booming, and the doubts – though still persisting – began to fall away.

Then the surface of the water began to change, appearing to ‘burn over’ with what I can only describe as “purple fire”. With the exception of my level of focus, this was more typical of my scrying sessions. They all seem to start with that burning over of “purple fire”.

Suddenly though, this time, a face rose from the fire, and startled me a little as it turned from side to side (presumably to show me its profile).

Normally when I scry, I don’t get anything like that. Usually I have to hold the bowl in some way and receive images, each one seeming to bubble up from a depth deeper than the shallow bowl I use. Each image is preceded by an icy coldness, the bowl paradoxically switching between colder and warmer despite being held in my hands for the entire time.

This was a far cry from the usual flat images sent though, and somehow clearer despite my working in broad daylight. Moreover, I wasn’t even touching the bowl, when normally I get nothing if I do not.

Regardless, my brain still went into debunk mode.

The mouth began to move, “Why do you do this when you know what is real?”

And thus followed a 30 minute berating session with a spirit in a bowl.

The Question

We talk about reenchanting the world in modern Paganism/Witchcraft a lot, but there is relatively little discussion of the barriers to that re-enchantment. Or indeed, whether that re-enchantment is a case of needing to bring something back, or simply see what has been with us all along.

It’s one thing to advocate for something, but it’s quite another to get down into the weeds, examine strategy, and come up with a plan. The spirit’s question to me was insightful.

“Why do you do this when you know what is real?”

I’ve seen and experienced so many things that are considered ‘impossible’. I’ve seen, heard, felt, and been physically moved/scratched/touched by unseen forces. You’d think someone like myself would no longer have any doubts or constant urge to debunk what I experience. You’d think my world already completely re-enchanted.

Yet if there’s one thing I’ve found in around two decades of this kind of thing, it’s that in the cold light of morning, the walls always come back up again. It doesn’t matter how many scratches you’re wearing from whatever you were dealing with, or how many other people witnessed what you did, the walls always come back.

So why does this happen? Why do those walls come up in the harsh morning light and the brain work to convince us that what was lived is not real? After all, that’s pretty rich coming from a brain that functions in a remarkably similar way dreaming as it does while awake.

Introducing the Psychic Censor

The best explanation for this, in my opinion, is the Chaos Magic concept of the “psychic censor”. In Psychonaut, Peter J. Carroll introduces the concept and provides the following description:

”When people are presented with real magical events they somehow manage not to notice. If they are forced to notice something uncontrovertibly magical they may become terrified, nauseated, and ill. The psychic censor shields us from intrusions from other realities. It edits out most telepathic communication, blinds us to prescience, and reduces our ability to register significant coincidences, or recall dreams. The psychic censor is not just put there out of divine malice; ordinary physical life would be impossible without it……The psychic censor on the other hand, is a material thing, which protects the mind from magic and from being overwhelmed by the awesome strangeness of the psychic dimension which appears to us as chaos.”
Liber Null and Psychonaut 162

Now, how many of us have felt that? How many of us have found ourselves pressed up against that barrier and wondering how to bring it down because we know there’s something there seemingly just beyond reach? How many of us have felt it resurrecting itself after an experience?

It can be hard to see the psychic censor as the necessary and protective thing it is. But imagine a world in which it did not exist! Carroll talks about this on the individual level, but imagine it on a wider societal scale. Imagine if everyone had nothing but certainty – it would be a disaster. You would have an entire world full of people either going insane or trying to change reality to fit with their ideas of how it should be.

Which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if we humans could agree on how things are supposed to be, but you know, we can’t.

So we struggle with the censor, and anyone who doesn’t is likely either lying or just plain crazy.

The Censor and Reenchantment

This concept of the psychic censor though, raises a lot of questions about the very idea of re-enchanting the world. After all, at what point has that re-enchantment gone too far (and to what lengths would the censor go to maintain control)? And yet, it might be argued that we live in a time in which the psychic censor not only exists but is further supported by human-made material distractions and barriers.

These factors make the matter of reenchantment a far more complex issue than simply reconnecting with the natural world (both seen and unseen). Historically, we humans found enough danger in the natural world to limit our interaction with it. We built our hedges and gathered together for mutual protection, and that is something that is always worth keeping in mind in all the talk of rewilding and reenchantment.

By virtue of seeking to ‘cross the hedge’, the magic user, regardless of ‘flavor’, is the odd duck here. It is also no coincidence that the strongest experiences tend to happen away from the civilized world of man. ‘Consensus reality’ must be maintained, and there’s plenty about human habitation that is distasteful to the Other.

Mapping the Route Past the Censor

According to Carroll, the psychic censor is more active on some levels than on others. He subdivides human consciousness into five parts: unconsciousness, dreaming, awareness, robotic, and gnosis (Carroll 121).

The awareness level – the level of conscious thought and emotion – is given the greatest level of protection by the censor (Carroll 162). Dreams can be magically useful but the censor steals away memory upon waking. On the robotic level, insights and perceptions may be received when performing menial tasks that require little thought, but this time the censor works to steal our perception or memory of them.

What Carroll refers to as the ‘gnosis’ level though, a state described as being quiescent concentration or ecstatic excitement is the least protected by the censor. This gnosis level is not what we do when we engage in most trance work though – Carroll places these as typically lying somewhere between robotic and dreaming states. Gnosis is that which comes when the mind is focused entirely on one thing – that kind of altered state you may have experienced when experiencing so much terror or anger that the entirety of your awareness has narrowed down to a single point.

Sneaking By

So to sneak by, we must work to thwart the censor in a number of ways. We must train ourselves to remember our dreams, making them the first thing we think of and record when we wake up in those spare moments before the material world crashes in and those memories are stolen. Some may even try setting alarms in the middle of the night, or attempt to practice first and second sleep with the aim of moving towards more natural sleep patterns for humans in order to facilitate the incubation of dream.

Removing phones from one’s bedside is a good move here too – the psychic censor is a material thing, and those first interactions with that symbol of modern materiality is one of the best methods of banishing memories of dream.

On a personal note, I’ve found that the regular practice of the Stele of Jeu/Headless rite from the Greek Magical Papyri is one of the best methods of having richer dreams that are far more easily remembered. It’s probably not a coincidence that the rite is a form of exorcism and makes me wonder if the censor can be temporarily exorcised (or otherwise temporarily manipulated magically). The Headless Rite does involve some Judeo-Christian names, but seeing as it’s apparently “Shadow Work October”, this is the perfect time to finally confront that Judeo-Christian baggage, right?

We can also work to attain a state of gnosis by either inhibitory or ecstatic methods, and this is where the hard work will come in. Don’t be fooled, if you truly wish to reenchant the world, it’s not enough to just go spend more time in nature. Yes, it will increase your chances of coming across something simply by virtue of being in the right environment, but without working on all this other stuff you’re likely going to miss out.

There are numerous ways to attain gnosis, some more socially acceptable and legal than others. Ecstatic means include drumming and dancing, ordeal work, sexual methods, the use of excitatory drugs, forced over-breathing, and other forms of sensory overload. Inhibitory methods include concentration exercises such as image/sound/object concentration, some types of magical trances, drugs of a more hypnotic nature, and sensory deprivation. This is not encouragement, this information is provided in the interest of completeness. It is up to you to investigate the risks and legalities where you live, and make your decisions accordingly.

But the point is that none of this is easy. Reenchanting our worlds in so far as we feel comfortable is going to take far more work and experimentation than simply walking in the woods and leaving offerings (though none of that is useless either).There are also likely some very real dangers to reenchantment too – not the least insanity. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of the (currently?) Unseen that is just not that nice

As with everything pertaining to magic though, the real question is simple: how badly do you want it and what are you prepared to sacrifice?

Tag: psychic censor

“Reality”