You stop explaining yourself when you realize people only understand from their level of perception—but perhaps you may be open to my perception and perhaps it will help you on your journey through life.
The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the chronology of the universe, scaling its current age of 13.8 billion years to a single year in order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in science education or popular science. In this visualization, the Big Bang took place at the beginning of January 1 at midnight, and the current moment maps onto the end of December 31 just before midnight. At this scale, there are 437.5 years per second, 1.575 million years per hour, and 37.8 million years per day.
Humans, in the entire span of existence, have only been around for one day of the cosmic year calendar. Humans didn’t even start cave painting until the last 60 seconds of the cosmic year calendar, a mere 30,000 years ago. Scientific practice didn’t occur until the last second. The last second. Everyday we discover something new about our reality through the practice of science—and we’ve only been doing it for one second.
Collective reality and personal reality are concepts affected by perception. For a very basic example of the collective, humans once believed the Earth was flat, now we know the Earth is round. Our reality today is simply different than the reality of our beginning. Reality changes according to what we perceive and know.
On a more immediate, personal scale, a patient takes a placebo pill and suddenly they are cured. Was it because, in their reality, they believed or knew that the pill would cure them? Or was it because they were never really ill in the first place? Either way, the placebo pill altered that individuals reality. In a very basic sense, perception equals reality.
As I mentioned before, we are only in the first second of scientific study. There are still elements to be discovered, cures to be found, tools to be invented that can read and measure energies we never knew existed in a scientific sense. We’ve only explored 5% of the ocean and only 1% of the ocean floor. We are constantly discovering new species of plants and animals. We’ve discovered a planet so large that it technically shouldn’t exist according to our current laws of physics. Humanity still fights wars in the name of religion resulting in needless casualties. We still kill animals who feel the same pain and fear we do when we are just animals ourselves—taking our very first steps on two legs.
For some pre-mind metaphysical prep, let’s talk about the 21 grams experiment. In 1901, Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts, who wished to scientifically determine if a soul had weight, identified six patients in nursing homes whose death was imminent. Four were suffering from tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from unspecified causes. MacDougall specifically chose people who were suffering from conditions that caused physical exhaustion, as he needed the patients to remain still when they died to measure them accurately. When the patients looked like they were close to death, their entire bed was placed on an industrial sized scale that was sensitive within two tenths of an ounce (5.6 grams). On the belief that humans have souls and that animals do not, MacDougall later measured the changes in weight from fifteen dogs after death. MacDougall said he wished to use dogs that were sick or dying for his experiment, though was unable to find any. It is therefore presumed he poisoned healthy dogs.
One of the patients lost weight but then put the weight back on, and two of the other patients registered a loss of weight at death but a few minutes later lost even more weight. One of the patients lost “three-fourths of an ounce” (21.3 grams) in weight, coinciding with the time of death. MacDougall disregarded the results of another patient on the grounds the scales were “not finely adjusted”, and discounted the results of another as the patient died while the equipment was still being calibrated. MacDougall reported that none of the dogs lost any weight after death.
While MacDougall believed the results from his experiment showed the human soul might have weight, his report, which was not published until 1907, stated the experiment would have to be repeated many times before any conclusion could be obtained. Despite its rejection within the scientific community, MacDougall’s experiment popularized the idea that the soul has weight, and specifically that it weighs 21 grams. If he had not been so rejected by the scientific community and was instead encouraged and supported, what might have he gone on to discover? How would his possible discoveries have affected society? Who would we be now? What would life be like?
With all of that said, we are still in our very beginning and there is still so much to know—it would be foolish to believe that we can’t willfully change our reality any further than it already has. Ultimately, it would be childish to assume anything.
So how does magic work? What is magic? No one really knows, yet. The majority of the population doesn’t know or believe it exists, much like an astronomer from the 17th century didn’t know Pluto existed. I won’t sit here and tell you facts because there are none, yet—but there are very convincing theories just waiting to be tested to their full extent in a distant future when controlled experiments for metaphysics can be properly conducted without biased criticism and with scientific tools not yet invented.
Let’s start with the Chaos Theory. Chaos is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable. It teaches us to expect the unexpected. While most traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, long-range weather, the stock market, our brain states, and so on. These phenomena are often described by fractal mathematics, which captures the infinite complexity of nature. Many natural objects exhibit fractal properties, including landscapes, clouds, trees, organs, rivers etc, and many of the systems in which we live exhibit complex, chaotic behavior. Recognizing the chaotic, fractal nature of our world can give us new insight, power, and wisdom. For example, by understanding the complex, chaotic dynamics of the atmosphere, a balloon pilot can “steer” a balloon to a desired location. By understanding that our ecosystems, our social systems, and our economic systems are interconnected, we can hope to avoid actions which may end up being detrimental to our long-term well-being.
The Butterfly Effect: This effect grants the power to cause a hurricane in China to a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico. It may take a very long time, but the connection is real. If the butterfly had not flapped its wings at just the right point in space/time, the hurricane would not have happened. A more rigorous way to express this is that small changes in the initial conditions lead to drastic changes in the results. Our lives are an ongoing demonstration of this principle. Who knows what the long-term effects of teaching millions of children about chaos and fractals will be?
Unpredictability: Because we can never know all the initial conditions of a complex system in sufficient (i.e. perfect) detail, we cannot hope to predict the ultimate fate of a complex system. Even slight errors in measuring the state of a system will be amplified dramatically, rendering any prediction useless. Since it is impossible to measure the effects of all the butterflies (etc) in the World, accurate long-range weather prediction will always remain impossible.
Order / Disorder: Chaos is not simply disorder. Chaos explores the transitions between order and disorder, which often occur in surprising ways.
Mixing: Turbulence ensures that two adjacent points in a complex system will eventually end up in very different positions after some time has elapsed. Examples: Two neighboring water molecules may end up in different parts of the ocean or even in different oceans. A group of helium balloons that launch together will eventually land in drastically different places. Mixing is thorough because turbulence occurs at all scales. It is also nonlinear: fluids cannot be unmixed.
Feedback: Systems often become chaotic when there is feedback present. A good example is the behavior of the stock market. As the value of a stock rises or falls, people are inclined to buy or sell that stock. This in turn further affects the price of the stock, causing it to rise or fall chaotically.
Fractals: A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc.
Now that you know the basics of Chaos theory, let’s delve into chaos magic. What is chaos magic? Because of the tumultuous nature of chaos, it can mean different things to different people. But according to Phil Hine’s Condensed Chaos (the book to read about chaos magic if you want to delve further into the subject), chaos magic is a form of practice that helps you change your circumstances so that you can throw off societal structures, achieve freedom, and “strive to live according to a developing sense of personal responsibility.”
Chaos magic relies on using focused energy to disrupt the Universe. Much of the science of chaos magic involves the practitioner using a properly executed release of energy to affect the turbulence that naturally occurs in the physical world. To oversimplify the concept: since most of life is irregular and chaotic, if you put a specific, focused energy out into the world, you’ll be able to influence that chaos and affect the world around you.
The biggest difference between chaos magic and more traditional left-hand/right-hand path magic is that with chaos, there’s no set boundaries for what you can and can’t do. With other forms of magic, you’re thrust into a more strict set of guidelines for how you have to practice. Much of traditional magic is made up of an endless amount of ritual that you can get into if you want, but just by taking on the mantle of a chaos practitioner, you’re saying that none of that ritual is important unless it needs to be in the moment.
You don’t have to love math or freak out about patterns like a lot of people do who get into chaos, but it doesn’t hurt. If you’re going to be practicing chaos magic, you should at least be cognizant of things like synchronicity, semiotics, fractals, and mathematical coincidences. Practitioners of chaos magic may use charts and equations as ways to think about chaos, probability, and what is possible.
To achieve maximization of all these factors the magician may in practice need wands, robes, visualizations, symbolic systems, sigils, old languages, rituals, deities, and other means of egress from normal states of mind, even though in theory a supreme exponent of magic could achieve it all whilst sitting quietly in a chair, rather like a mathematician working without pencil or paper, waste paper basket, blackboard, geometry instruments, books of reference, or a computer.
In summary, chaos magic is the liberating practice of expressing your will (focusing your energy, your desires, releasing them to the Universe. Exempli gratia: cause and effect.) through any means possible and/or desired to alter the chaotic Universe in your favor through the Chaos theory. You are the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a powerful hurricane.
Popular Chaos practitioner quote: “Nothing is true, all is permitted.” It means, “Nothing is certain, all is possible.”
Nothing is certain, but all is possible. Let that soak in. You know how I said before that we now know the Earth is round? What if it’s not and NASA is a lie? I’m not saying it’s not (I firmly believe in NASA), but what if the Earth is flat? What if there is life after death; what if there isn’t? What if you get reincarnated as a cockroach; what if you don’t? What if we do have souls; what if we don’t? What if magic really exists; what if it doesn’t? What if one day you believe in God and the next day you believe in Ra, the Egyptian sun god? What if one day, you become an Atheist? What if all of the Multiverse theories are true, causing an infinite loop of possibilities and what if we can tap into those alternate realities; what if we can’t? Whatever you believe has the possibility of being false. That realization may seem negative but it opens up the possibility that all is possible. In the end, reality is what you choose to believe.
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