Affirmation Rituals

Affirmation rituals are multi-sensory trance states designed to build a bridge between your conscious and subconscious. Because your subconscious is the source of creativity and all inner secrets, learning how to negotiate a free exchange between your subconscious and conscious allows greater understanding of yourself and your creative talents.

An affirmation ritual begins by gathering components.

You will need sensory artifacts, items that represent each of the five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.

• Sight can include pictures or artwork or magic symbols or candles, etc;
• Sound most often involves music or some other type of auditory recording like rain, a rain forest, theta waves, white noise, etc;
• Touch is something you can feel like fabric, ice, a sharp tack, sand, glass, leather, etc;
• Smell might involve incense, food, perfume, gasoline, ganja, etc;
• Taste naturally food, gum, candy, etc.

These examples are just off the top of my head and you can naturally improvise.

A database of anchors can be easily created of important images that conjure positive feelings:

• Boardwalk fries drenched in vinegar
• The warm tingle of a good stretch
• A cold shot of rum stinging your throat

Objects and abstract ideas can also be captured by associated senses. One of my fondest writing experiments was to capture the senses of an addiction by describing an object:

• the cold sweating can, the crisp sound of the can opening, the carbonated fizzle, the chug, the sizzle in my throat

Don't know if I captured the addiction but I'm speeding through a tangent here, eh.

More specifically, though, the items that you choose aren’t meant to be chosen at random but rather deliberately collected as symbols, usually with a theme connected to a particular person, idea, revelation, trauma, etc, related to the goal of your ritual.

For example, with all of the troubles that I have with relationships, I might chose items representing a relationship with a particular person, for example:

• A picture of an ex-lover, a power symbol, a blue candle, and a red candle (sight)
• A CD of Pink Floyd songs representing our favorite band (sound)
• A shred of Cashmere fabric bought from a rag shop representing a sweater that I wore on a date that a boyfriend rubbed his nose in while we were making out in a department store (touch)
• Strawberry incense (smell)
• A chocolate covered strawberry representing something I ate with a boyfriend before kissing on a second date (taste)

Hopefully you can see how the above list can have so many substitutes.

After re-reading the final issue of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, I found a superbly perfect example:

Morpheus asks William Shakespeare what type of wine he would like to drink and Shakespeare responds,

When I was young, my first month in London, a gypsy-girl gave me wine to drink. It was tawny-colored, and sweet as honey, and after I had taken a sip, she kissed me, and no kiss has ever tasted so finer. Nor no wine neither.

This isn't even my memory and I am impressed and happy. Sensory blurbs like these can be created -- although the power of affirmation rituals comes more from the objects themselves. Then again, other magicians might argue that representations or simple images in one's head are just as good.

To continue, naturally you need other practical items like a CD player, matches or a lighter, and other stuff.

The purpose of these items is to create sensory stimulation that invokes a particular feeling or association.

Most people only engage one or two of their senses (usually sight and sound) and rarely engage in their other senses. Description using smell, taste, and touch are generally more creative because they are underused. The affirmation ritual engages multiple senses to activate unused section of the imagination for more vivid creativity.

To begin the actual ritual, go somewhere. I prefer somewhere in the middle of nature (like a field or a forest) or somewhere in a desolated part of a city. Night time is best.

I recommend that you record your experiments either on a tape player or some type of video camera.

Draw three circles. I recommend using some type of disposable substance like whipped cream in a can to draw your circles. It’s cheap, tasty, and biodegradable. Just make sure to test the can that it works. I once had a ritual where the whipped cream can was broken and I couldn’t draw my circles.

Or use simply chalk. Chaos magick is about using whatever works.

Each circle has its own name and purpose.

Circle 1: “behavior”

Circle 2: “intent”

Circle 3: “creative”

Gather your items in the Behavior Circle. Sit down. Activate your sensory items as necessary by lighting incense, turning on your music, lighting candles. Focus visually on your sight items. Inhale the smell. Listen to the sound. Feel your touch item. Taste your taste item.

Breathe deeply from the pit of your stomach until you feel yourself relax.

Gather your thoughts together and meditate on any of your negative behaviors. What are you doing that you want to change? Don’t think just pour out all of your undesirable behaviors one by one. Force yourself to spill your guts; dig deep and admit your darkest secrets (“Incest turns me on”) or admit to superficial problems (“I don’t brush my teeth three times a day”) until you are exhausted.

Or focus on one particular problem: you'll often find that one thing leads to another…

With each behavior problem, associate as many sensory details as you can associated with your behavior, even if they don’t make sense or may be a stretch. For example, anger can conjure images of the color red, screaming, a sharp knife – what is the smell of anger or the taste? Come up with as many associations as you can with each problem but focus on all the senses.

You are adding to your affirmation image database.

You will know when you are done with the Behavior Circle.

Move on to the Intent Circle.

Focus on the following question: why do you engage in these behaviors? What is your purpose, reason, or intent with these behaviors? Figure it out. Why are you angry? Why do you fall in love with anyone who shows you the littlest attention? Why can’t you engage in simply hygiene on a daily basis? Force yourself to come up with as many answers as possible. Ramble on saying whatever comes to your mind. Don’t stop talking. You’ll be surprised what comes out.

Talking to yourself and even better yet asking questions of yourself is a powerful yet simple way of getting answers.

You will know when you are done with the Intent Circle.

Move to the Creative Circle. In the Creative Circle, you propose alternate ways of fulfilling your intents. In the previous circles, you went through your negative behaviors and the reasons behind them: now your goal is to come up with alternate ways of fulfilling or managing or dealing with your problems and behaviors. If behavior is merely a way of handling a situation or a problem, that means behavior is a type of solution. Then why not come up with alternate solutions?

Every problem can have more than one solution; every behavior can have alternate behaviors. Why do you fall in love so easily? Are you lonely? Do you feel socially isolated or obligated to have a relationship to feel important? Has the importance of a successful relationship been over-impressed upon you? What else can you do to ease the loneliness? What other types of social obligations are there to take the place of your relationship problems? How can you socialize more? What other types of relationships can you form or negotiate? Do you get angry too easily? Anger is a response to a frustrating situation so what can you do instead of getting angry? How else can you react? How can you deal with your anger?

In the Creativity Circle, examine your problems, perhaps even returning to the Intent Circle if you get stuck, and come up with as many alternates to negative behaviors. In Freudian psychoanalysis, this technique is called sublimation, transferring your desires or behaviors from one object to another or from one behavior to another. Instead of getting angry or yelling at someone, twirl around in a circle like you were a top or start singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Instead of searching websites looking for a new significant (knowing full well that it'll end in ruins), practice drawing and creating your visual affirmations. Instead of contemplating suicide, practice shooting targets at a shooting range.

Hmmn, for some reason I'm thinking about Twister (the game).

Unconscious Competence

The majority of your skills and abilities are not conscious. You act at a subconscious level, having learned certain behaviors and abilities until they became automatic responses.

Consider for example, sports. Take any sport you enjoy and can do fairly well: tennis, football, basketball, ping pong, and break down the process involved in playing.

I’ll use the example of throwing a javelin. In order to throw a javelin, you have to hold your hand properly, hold the javelin level to the ground, run in a certain way, and step a certain way before throwing.

When you play, do you consciously think, hold my hand this way, stand that way, step one, step two? Probably not. You just play.

When I first started throwing the javelin or playing ping pong, I practiced each individual step and learned how to put the steps together. After enough practice, the motions became natural to where I didn’t have to think about them. I had mastered unconscious competence.

The way that NLP guru Tony Robbins explained unconscious competence was

You don’t have to know how the electrical wiring in a wall works in order to flick on a light switch.

You don’t have to know how to garden or harvest apple trees in order to pick the fruit.

What he means is not to think too much about the whys and hows of why and how things work, just to know that this is what you do.

That’s life. That’s magic. Don’t think about it. Just do it.

Of course at some level unconscious competence is a ridiculous notion because the more you know about gardening, the more you can improve upon your gardening techniques to improve the productivity of your garden. You need to know the proper weather and season or proper soil mixture. You need to know how to properly water a plant and how much sunlight it needs. Likewise, you need to know how to prune your plants and what fertilizer to add. The list can go on and on.

That’s a different metaphor that we’ll talk about later.

The main point of unconscious competence is to learn how to act not based upon consciously focusing through our intellect but working with subconscious power. Remember that the majority of who we are is subconscious and our behaviors and talents come from the subconscious. Consider the creativity of dreams or how many ideas come when you’re in a relaxed state. If you sit down and try to be creative, you won’t get anywhere.

Real magick works not by fighting with your subconscious or actively focusing on how much you want your life to change but by letting go and letting your subconscious do the work for you.

Here are some examples to practice with before you even get started with using magick:

Watch a clock – not a digital clock but one with a face. Watch the second hand tick for one minute. How long does that minute take? It’ll feel like forever. Now set up a timer for one minute and walk away. How much can you get accomplished before your time is up?

Boil a pot of water. Stand there and watch the pot boil. How long does the pot take? It’ll feel like forever. Now restart the boil and walk away.

Think about downloading a movie from some type of filesharing program. If you haven’t tried it yet, the process can take a considerable amount of time. If you sit there and watch it download, you’ll drive yourself bonkers. Set up the program, walk away, come back and check in a little while, and stop the program in a day or so when it’s done. (I set up my filesharing before I go to bed or before I go to work so when I wake up or come home, the majority of the work is done).

Part of the trick is managing your psychic work. If you sit and watch your life, it'll take forever, but if you walk away and never check up on things to make sure they are working properly, then your life will go astray. An unwatched pot can burn the house down. Downloading files might get stuck and stop downloading.

Ask the local library to order a book for you. Asking people to do other things may be the hardest part of unconscious competence because you are relying upon someone else to do something for you. Many managers make the fatal mistake of trying to do everything themselves because they don’t trust the ability of their employees. Doing everything yourself will kill you so you have to learn to delegate responsibly. Notice responsibly. The hardest part of delegating is wondering if people will come through or fail. If they come through, the end result is that everything gets done while you are doing other things. Imagine if you could make money this way, while sleeping or golfing? You can.

I'll admit that delegating responsibility has always been hard for me because of how many people have failed me. The key is learning what is reliable and what isn't. It's a lesson learned in time.

Demons are servants who haven't been whipped into shape. They want to be obedient but don't know how. They resist and sabotage until taught how to behave.

Unconscious competence begins with small practice steps establishing a routine and repeating information until it becomes subconscious.

Decide upon your overall goal.

Divide your goal into smaller steps. Start with the first step. Do it. Even if you totally suck or fail, just do it. Practice for maybe 20 minutes and then move on.

The next day, practice again. You need to practice at least every 24 hours. Keep practicing the first step until you feel you’ve got it. Start the next step and repeat your 20 minute practice every 24 hours.

(As a side note, you might be thinking, but don’t athletes practice for hours a day? Yes, but they practice different things. A full practice in baseball won’t focus on hitting the ball for two hours but hitting, throwing, etc)

You’ll find that once you’ve got it down pat, you will do it naturally. What’s most important about doing it naturally is to relax. In order to do it naturally, you can’t think about it. Do you think about walking? No, you just do it. If you think about it, you lose your instinct and automatic reflexes.

An example:

I bought Heelies, those fagly sneakers with roller skates on them. I figured it would be easy to use them because I have been roller skating since I was a child. Wrong.

My first time wearing my Heelies, I couldn’t skate more than a couple feet. I would lose balance and fall. I would drag my foot and not go anywhere. I couldn’t skate on them because I had to lift and balance my feet in a certain way or else fall or drag.

I spent the first 20 minutes in-between two cars trying to skate. I would take a step, lift my toes, skate a couple feet, stop, and then walk back to the starting line.

Once I learned how to balance myself, I left the cars and started skating for longer distances. This was difficult because I was so afraid of losing my balance that I would stop whenever I went too fast. I had to conquer my fear of falling. I took a walk around the block and took small skate steps as much as I could.

Once skating became more natural, I practiced skating downhill. It was difficult because I was focusing too much on balancing my heels and toes. I was dragging too much and would lose my balance too easily. I skated down as far as I could and then walked back up. Each time, I would consciously say, lift my left toe, balance my right toe. I repeatedly focused on getting the motions down. Skate down, walk up, skate down, walk up. After 20 minutes of repetition, I stopped thinking about the balance and started doing it.

My next goal was for longer distances.

The process of continuously developing and expanding one’s abilities to better standards is called stretching. What makes magick so difficult is that it often sets up unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations occur when one sets out to do something that is beyond one’s abilities. Common examples include many weight loss programs. As long as you weight train three days a week, do cardiovascular exercise three days a week, and maintain a balanced diet without any fluctuation, you’re guaranteed to lose weight and build muscle. Got it. Now go try it. Good luck. See you later. Plans are only good on paper; the minute they are put into action, they fall apart.

Start with something you can do. Start with the most important component of your goals. For example, diet is more important than exercise, cardiovascular more important than weight training. Work on your diet first. Once you have your diet down pat, work on cardiovascular exercise. Once you have your cardio down, move to weight training. Once you’re able to bench press fifty pounds, go for sixty.

Stretching simple means upping the ante. Once you feel you have the hang of something, try to do something harder.

Imagine all of the things that you can’t do. Find something marginally beyond your ability. Try it out. Push yourself to go a little further in small steps.

If you walk a mile, walk another block or two.

You’d be surprised at what you are capable of.

A good example of stretching is in the movie Unbreakable where Bruce Willis’ character David Dunn is lifting weights. His son keeps putting on heavier weights without Dunn realizing it until he finds out that he is benching a ridiculous amount of weight.

But if you find that you cannot do something harder, fall back and do something easier until you are ready to proceed.

All too often the biggest limitations on our performance are ourselves (and often other people). Having worked with the disabled, I’ve seen mindless vegetables do relatively impossible tasks that others had written off as beyond their capability. This is known as the Pygmalion effect, whereby people perform up to the expectations that other’s place upon them.

Don’t concentrate on it. Just do it and practice it. The skills will come surprisingly. You’ll wake up and say, wow, I really did this. I’m doing it.

The Oral Biosurvival Circuit part 1

We were all once alien babies cryogenically preserved for future world domination in the mothership.

We were once embryos floating in the micro-oceans of our mother’s wombs.

Our first trauma was to be born into this brave new world of bright light, pain, and gravity.

We were all born malleable like amoebas.

What happened to us?

How did we get such ugly, dirty shapes?

The world leaves its first fingerimprints on us as soon as we are pressed to our mother’s teat.

We can call these fingerimprints pleasure and pain. We suckle and then are denied. We experience the pains of our body and the alleviation of these pains and discomforts. We have not yet learned adult concepts like restraint and moderation.

As we become aware of our bodies, we respond the most primally to satisfy these biological needs.

All objects are originally neutral with no good or evil value. We learn to catalog experiences as either pleasure or pain. This cataloging is necessary in order to efficiently process information. We are overwhelmed with so much that our brain cannot process the totality of reality without tricks. If we were to lose our cataloging tendencies, the results would be paranoia– the inability to associate objects with a value system. The mind then makes up its own value system and makes random and dangerous connections. Street signs follow you. The Bee Gees plot to kill you.

Salvador Dali refers to the opposite – the cleansing of these pre-packaged catalogs – as the paranoid critical method. He explained it as the “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” What the fuck, right?

But still, the artist attempts to clear the subconscious of preconceptions and then make new connections between objects, effectively blurring reality into a new synthesis.

One might argue though that we are in the beginnings of magick, making up our own reality.

We learn what is pleasing. We seek pleasure. We move towards what is safe.

We avoid pain. We learn what hurts us. We move away from what hurts us.

If we were Freud, we have entered the oral stage.

If we were Maslow, we have begun to experience the physiological level in the hierarchy of needs.

Excuse me, sir, but do you mind if I stick my Freud in your Maslow?

One can see the oral stage as simply a component in Maslow’s theory of basic needs.

What are these basic needs? Simply put: breath, eat, drink, fuck, sleep, shit, stay the same.

Let’s create in our minds our world of pleasure and pain based upon our body’s needs (or at least mine, for an example):

	Pleasure	Pain
Breath:	All I need to relax are three deep breaths from the pit of my stomach. I am calm again. I love to see my breath in the cold air. I love the smell of coldness like hot coals burning in a barbecue grill. I love the subtle smell of vanilla perfume or any perfume with a cookie or dessert scent. The act of smelling alone is erotic, tracing my nose across someone’s skin.	I cannot stand the smell of cigarettes or the subtle urine smell of an unclean bathroom. When I wash my white clothes, the smell of bleach is too much. Or when I hang around someone with subtle body odor, I linger at a distance. I worry about my own breath and always carry breath mints.
Eat:	I like variety and self-service (since customer service generally sucks). Buffets are my favorite. I particularly like Chinese buffets and CiCi’s pizza restaurant where they have smaller slices of pizza where you can sample a whole bunch of pizza recipes. I like to go to hibachi grills where they cook in front of me (but they have to entertain me as well). I also like Fuddruckers: a nice medium-well Chipotle BBQ, but I like the fries and dips the most. When I go, I get one of each dip – hot sauce, mayo, ketchup, steak sauce, BBQ sauce, and whatever – and dip my fries in each. I like shrimp and crab legs. I like eating sushi. I also like making ice cream cones with as many scoops as I can balance. For dessert, I love Applebees triple chocolate meltdown, and my all time favorite dessert is Death By Chocolate. I’d like to have a buffet of pie, with small slices: strawberry-rhubarb, cherry, hot apple, blueberry, coconut custard, lemon meringue. I also like lamb chops and steak with plenty of A1 sauce. I like hot wings and have a hot sauce collection. I like cheese whiz and always ask for Pepperidge farm meat and cheese baskets for Christmas: I love making cheese and meat crackers. I like cruising the miracle mile and going through the drive-throughs for a smorgasbord: $1 menu from BK and MickeyD’s, KFC, a couple Taco Bells. I’d prefer not to eat in a restaurant but take it someplace else.	I don’t like heavy foods, which includes mainly German and Polish food. I don’t eat much pasta although a good meat sauce will sway me for a day. The same goes for any type of heavy carbohydrate or starch like potatoes or macaroni and cheese. I hate sit down dinners mainly because of the uncomfortable silence that comes along with them. I don’t like salty foods or most fried foods (with the exception of KFC or French fries).
Drink:	I drink Mountain Dew like a fiend for the caffeine and prefer the Code Red for the color. I like fresh carbonation that rips out my throat. I’m not much of a drinker of alcohol but when I do, I would prefer to lay out a variety of shots in front of me, usually a Buttery Nipple, a Flaming Rockstar, and Rumplemintz. A simple Rum and Coke would be fine with me. I like cold water and that yellow colored Gatorade as refreshers and a V8 Splash as the occasional alternative. Although the taste is horrible, I like ginger beer, and root beer when I’m off my Mountain Dew addiction.	I can’t stand iced tea or anything diet or those fruity flavored water things. I don’t drink coffee. Neither do I drink beer that often or enjoy the flavor of many stiffer drinks. I drink too much Mountain Dew and sometimes during my hectic stressful schedules can down a 12 pack in a couple days.
Fuck:	Fucking for me needs to be spontaneous and I tend to get horny in public places like department stores because these are part of a casual routine. There’s nothing natural about “going back to my place.” It’s artificial. I’m not a spooner. I like to get entangled with my lover’s face to face, particularly in sitting positions like Kama’s Wheel. Sometimes I just want to be a piece of meat and lie there passively while getting fucked till I orgasm while other times I need to worship and explore my lover’s body while in deep conversation. I also like it under the sheets. My fetish areas are my breasts, stomach, and back.	I sometimes see sex as a chore where I have to please the other person and go through elaborate rituals or use kinky devices to make everything fresh. I get so caught up in pleasing the other person – what position would please him the most – that sex becomes all about the act and not the enjoyment. The intimacy is lost and I become consumed in the bodily response. I don’t know why I hate that, where I have to fuck with my mind and not my body or heart.
Sleep:	A good sleep doesn’t end when I awake but leaves me in a comfortable in-between, awake but my eyes still closed, my body relaxed and limp. I can just lie there. On the weekends or days off, I like to sleep past the time I’m supposed to get up, so if I normally head to work at 11 am, I like to sleep until 12. I don’t like to sleep alone. I like king sized beds where I can sprawl out in any which way. I like lying on the bed when I’m wet, freshly out of the shower or the rain. I can’t sleep with clothes on and usually have to wear just underwear, a camisole(e), and socks. No matter how warm it is, I need to wrap myself in at least two blankets. I use a fan and soft New Age music as white noise. I hug a giant body pillow.	I get insomnia a lot. I sleep during the day and can’t sleep at night (no thanks to all the caffeine I consume). I often wake up within an hour of falling asleep, often in a paranoid state looking for cameras. I once checked the smoke detector in my dorm room and recently a patch of light on the wall made me suspicious. I always wake up half an hour before my alarm goes off. Many times I wake up just to check the time.
Shit:	Wow, what a topic but okay, I enjoy the type of shit where I feel completely empty. You know, the type where you know you’re done because you get this feeling of being totally emptied. You are cleansed.	I was actually a very anal retentive child because I had bad constipation. I would hold it in for days; one time my mother yelled at me because I ruined a party. I had horrible gas pains from not taking a shit and had to go to the doctor. When I tried vegetarianism for the first time, I became extremely constipated. I felt like I had to shit but couldn’t. It took me about an hour to finally take a shit and it was such an ordeal that I felt like Jesus resurrected afterwards.
Stay the same:	I need change. I can’t hold on to a relationship for too long before I need someone new. I have trouble staying in the same place; I usually lose my job every couple years.	I didn’t want my mother to die. I didn’t want to move out of my parents’ house. I didn’t want to lose a couple of my boyfriends. I’ve had long conversations and perfect dates that I didn’t want to end.

These fragments of pleasure and pain shape the way in which we interact with the world. Positive interactions with our flesh mold us into a peaceful relationship with the environment. Negative interactions leave us hostile and full of hatred.

Does it all stem from the teat, as Freud would argue, our relationship with the (un)divine mother?

Although pleasure and pain are of the flesh, they have no human form, but we see them personified throughout mythology and psychology as sections of our whole. Joseph Campbell might call these personifications the Goddess and the Temptress. Neither mytheme represents pleasure or pain but both wrapped into ambiguous forms. The Goddess is a source of comfort and restriction, the Temptress a source of pleasure that fells us.

Jung might call this pleasure and pain the anima or animus, the opposite part of our soul, unconditional and perfect love, with which our soul can unite in the sacred marriage of syzygy, of hieros gamos.

But perhaps a better way to look at the needs of our body is through the acquisition of our boons.

As we grow older, the mother becomes lost to us and we are forced to transfer our attention from the original object of comfort (“the mother”) to a more suitable object (“baseball”) in a process called sublimation.

Our culture is filled with objects that are sublimated teats, any symbols that are round, domed, or spherical:

Would you prefer to look up at a flat white ceiling or stare up at a domed ceiling high above you, perhaps painted with fascinating artwork?

How often do you see pictures or paintings on the wall of flatlands, of deserts that stretch out for hundreds of miles? Or do you see instead images of mountains looming over their own reflections above a lake? Perhaps you’d like to go hiking in the mountains?

As a child, did you love those clowns that did balloon sculptures? Or water balloons? Maybe just blowing up balloons? Wouldn’t mad scientist experiments like these be awesome: Balloon Car, Balloon in a Bottle, and Balloon Rocket?

Can you balance a spoon on your nose or flip a spoon in the air into your hand from off the table or do the old spoon bending trick? Have you ever spoonfed a lover moist chocolate cake?

Have you ever gone to the grocery store and meandered in the produce section? Mm, nice oranges, melons, and grapefruit?

Do you like decorating Easter eggs? Do you amaze your friends with tricks involving eggs?

Do you like sports? Do you play baseball or basketball or volleyball, maybe even hockey or golf or tennis? Or do you like super balls and play with them all day, bouncing them while you walk? (I used to have a nice collection). Or do you juggle or play beer pong?

How many rings do you have on your finger? Why do we give rings as symbols of love?

Do you know all the names of the planets? Have you ever made a solar system out of Styrofoam balls? Do you look up at the moon or watch for UFOs?

These are all sublimations of the mother, unconsciously built into our software as we grow and grow. Have you consciously accepted these symbols and played with them?

In neurolinguistic programming, we sublimate more deliberately through a process called anchoring. The anchor itself is an object of sublimation that is linked to a desired emotional state through a process similar to classical condition (a la Pavlov’s dog).

Pavlov sounded a bell as his dog was given food. The dog salivated when it saw the food. Every time Pavlov served his dog its food, he rang a bell. Eventually, the dog would salivate when hearing the bell without the food. The bell represented food to the dog and triggered an emotional response as if the food were there.

The crisp clean sound of a can of Mountain Dew opening puts a smile on my face as does the sexual anticipation of a man who slowly pulls at the bottom of my shirt.

Pleasure and association can cause pleasure with just the association.

Think of something that gives you pleasure. It must be a real memory, not something that you’ve never experienced. Play that memory in your mind, imagine with every sense. The Mountain Dew is cold and sweaty in your hand, green and red like Christmas colors. You could make a tree from cans of Mountain Dew. The sound of the can opening is crisp and loud. The Mountain Dew singes your throat as your drink it. When was the last time you drank a cold, stinging can of Mountain Dew? Remember that specific time.

Some magicians believe that you need a token with you as a tangible anchor, perhaps a Mountain Dew T-shirt or just the logo in your iPod or a can of the tasty beverage itself. Other magicians believe that you can hold the symbol in your imagination, withdraw into that world to reenact the pleasure. Some believe anchors are permanent, others like myself believe that new anchors will always be needed as the pleasure of one burns itself out.

But what about the pain side?

In Freudian terms, dwelling too much on the pleasures of the oral stage leads us into oral fixation, a preoccupation with putting things in one’s mouth.

Do you smoke?

Do you drink too much alcohol?

Do you eat more than you should?

Do you bite your fingernails or chew on pens?

Maybe you like bubble gum and/or oral sex?

Failure to ascend beyond the needs of the body results in a childish and egocentric personality dependent upon others to provide safety.

We rely upon others to solve our problems because we see our problems as other people’s problems being forced upon us.

This is your problem, not mine. You fix it.

In times of trauma we inevitably and automatically revert (“regress”) back to infantile states of mind, back to the psychological teat.

Have you ever been paralyzed below the neck for six months?

Have you ever broken down into tears when reading an unexpected e-mail telling you that your best friend just died?

Have you ever fried your brain on too many sedatives?

Have you ever lost your job? Or a long term relationship that you thought would end in marriage (it only ended up ending instead)? Or moved 300 miles away and back again in the course of a couple years? Or worse, moved back in with your parents after being on your own for years?

In these times of anxiety we reach out for the teat again.

Boo-hoo, but these are times ripest for change.

We return to infancy when everything was possible, happy little amoebas again.

A person or even a culture under trauma has a choice of two directions to move in: Backwards towards pleasure and safety (the flight reflex) or forward to fight the danger and face the future.

Look for example at the conundrum of Victorian society: they obsessed over the dead with séances and re-established traditional social values to honor the Golden Age; all movements into the past. But they also developed science and futuristic visions of marvels to come that propelled them at the speed of the steam engine into the future.

Which way do we go?

Magick Moment?

Last year, I had a terrible break up.

His name was V__ and I loved him so much. I'll spare you the poetic maudlin descriptions of the passion between us and skip to the heartache.

He changed in less than half a week. We spent a Sunday taking pictures -- those "pictures of us" that every teenie bopper with a boyfriend has on her Facebook -- and I took one of them, with his permission, for my purse. On a Wednesday over a nice Italian dinner, I took some small items out of my purse and he saw the picture I had of him. He called me a stalker right in front of everyone in the restaurant and I was left there with a shock of feeling stupid on my face.

Some of you know my temper. I would have killed him right there but I needed the ride home and that only increased the tension. A fight broke out and to keep the story short, I simply cut off my ties with him. He tried to make peace but I simply told him, "I never want to see or talk to you again."

This was seven month ago, actually on my birthday.

Being born on the 23, I had a bad feeling that something was going to break down. There was a fight in the air. It was raining. I was stuck in a long boring training and my work performance evaluations had come back horribly against me.

I should've just stayed home but I wanted to be with him so much.

I've spent the past several months avoiding him. I was so afraid of what would have happened if I ran into him. I wanted to kill him; I had this anger of betrayal raging inside me that I couldn't calm down. Part of it was the fear that should I try to resolve a happy ending, he would make me regret it with his own simmering stubbornness. I just didn't know what I would do if I ever ran into him again.

It took me months to relax, to convince myself that any accidental meeting would occur.

A couple weeks occur I played Kevin bacon on Facebook. Y'know, how often you can start out with a friend and then just go from one profile to another and after a few profiles run into someone you know.

I ran into V__, more specifically into a backdoor that lead to one of his photo albums. A few months after we had broken up, he had uploaded "our" pictures to his Facebook.

Why? I thought. Or better yet, what the fuck? Why would he attack me so bizarrely and then hold on to the same pictures that destroyed our relationship?

And what would I say to him? I wanted the pictures gone but I had made it clear that I would never talk to him again and if I confronted him, he would ask me how I knew that he still had the pictures.

I kept my magickal diary up to date of the mundane events in my personal soap opera, and synchronicities started popping up.

His favorite snack was chocolate covered pretzels. While I was up in the Poconos, I kept passing a chocolate covered pretzel factory that just made me say, wtf?

A friend of mine with whom I hadn't spoken in several month contacted me and said, "hey, I was watching some of the new Knight Rider TV shows and did you know who was doing the voice?" Yes, by one of those odd coincidences, the voice of KITT has the same first name and same birthday (December 31 - notice the 23) as my former lover.

As the synchronicities poured in, I kept them all in my magic journal. The language was quit poetic.

He and I were going to run into each other again. It was an impossibility but I knew it was going to happen.

My schedule was off. I was just sitting around. I had to be at work but just didn't feel like going. I had time to kill and was hungry. I left my home later than usual.

I stopped by a Burger King. The service was slow with few people behind the counter. They gave me half my meal and I ate it while waiting. I went to threw the hamburger wrapper away when I turned towards the door.

HE walked in.

We stared at each other from across the restaurant with that what the fuck are you doing her look on both our faces.

He came over to me and we hugged, that lame hug like a dog shaking your hand.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

What a stupid question. Obviously I was getting a fucking hamburger, but I've asked that stupid question myself.

He stood back away from me, a good several feet so I couldn't even reach out and touch him. I thought back to my Speech class where I learned about proxemic communication and personal space.

We talked about or jobs. His dog had died. We talked about car accidents we had been in involving deer.

We were both shaking.

He looked awful. I thought, I can't believe I fucked this guy.

He said he was thinking about me recently. He had taken up to writing again and could have used my help but didn't have my number anymore. Bullshit, I thought, and I called him on it.

"Here, I got a new phone. I'll give you my number." I did but I doubt he'll ever call me.

The woman at the counter told me my meal was finally ready. I told her to wait. A few minutes into my conversation with V__ it felt like we had never fought until that uncomfortable silence came.

"I think that uncomfortable silence means our conversation is over" I said. I turned, paid for my meal (actually threw money at the woman at the counter and told her to keep it). I couldn't focus.

"I'll see you…?" he said.

"Probably never" and that was it.

I ran into a co-worker on my way out. I didn't process it but I e-mailed her later and asked if she knew V__. She did. Actually several of my new friends were friends of his by some odd coincidence.

Today he removed the pictures of us from his Facebook.

I don't know if this counts as a magickal record but for the second time my premonition was right. I had been focusing on this moment for months and it wasn't ever going to come. But it did. It shouldn't have. It was scary.

Clean Up

You cannot control the elements, only release them.

But you may tame them if you speak their language.

Fire only understands directness. You must be forward. Subtlety will get you burned. When playing with fire, it is a power play. Fire understands power. You cannot fake power with fire or it will burn you. You must earn its respect with security of being. You cannot kneel, bow, plead, apologize, or abase yourself in the presence of fire.

Earth only understands material gains. It communicates with objects of value and taste (both good taste and good eats). It will listen patiently and you must be patient with it.

The wind loves to communicate. You need to speak to it like it was your friend. Tell it stories. Ask it interesting questions. The wind is always distracted so don’t expect it to stick around.

Water doesn’t understand words, only movement. Water speaks in the movement of its waves and every move you make will move it away from you.

If you reject them, they will not come back. You must let them inside you. They will howl and burn and stuff you up and make you loose and scatter your thoughts to the four corners.

Tame them. Control yourself.

Give thanks. Start a fire. Plant in the earth. Keep the air clean and fragrant. Keep your water clean.

Ask the universe to solve your problems but remember that fire will solve using force, earth will use bribery. Air is the most seductive communicator. Water will not solve your problems, only reveal them.

Water and fire make steam but water can put fire out or fire evaporate water. Earth gives stability to fire if it does not put it out. Fire turns earth into lava so that it can move. Air ignites fire. Fire puts air in motion.

Earth and water make mud. Earth gives water consistency. Water gives earth fluidity. Earth gives air gravity so that it doesn’t fly out into space but air isn’t meant to touch the ground. Air will give earth castles in the sky.

Air gives water something to think about; water allows air to feel.

The universe is a system like your body. The heart pumps your blood while the brain thinks. What are the organs of the universe? What are the organs of your life? Everything has its function in the universe. Everything has a specific function. Everything has a job to do. Let them do their jobs.

Demons are merely angels who aren’t doing their job.

The most important taskmaster is the one who unifies the universe.

If you are not in full agreement with yourself, the magick will never happen.

Pretend you don’t care. Isn’t that the magician’s job? To play make believe?

Enjoy being absent-minded. Practice it. Savor it. What do you have to lose but your mind? What mind you gain in return?

The subconscious is not a junkyard. It is the closest thing to the library of God where all of your secrets are hidden.

Don’t deny your body.

Cut-ups

I’m sitting in an IHOP with five friends and a baby. I’m crunched in the corner with bad black bean chili when “Walking on Sunshine” plays on the muzak channel. I hate that fucking song. It’s a message from the universe.

My past couple blogs have been more incoherent and random and although I would like to say that was my point, it was more of an aftershock.

To summarize my ramblings for the past couple weeks, life can get un-stochastic sometimes, too formal and rigid, and to preserve our sanity, we need to drift, we need to explore and act in random ways to break the formulas that hold our creativity captive. We should search out new information outside of and beyond our current interests and knowledge to add to our mental real estate to allow ourselves greater flexibility and improvisational skills. I think of it as a colon cleansing of the mind.

I’ve become more hostile to communicating with the universe since destiny always seems to come in riddles (or perhaps lil ole me is incapable of divining the will of the divine). There is an uncertainty in the universe or perhaps in ourselves (or at least myself) that makes actions almost impossible. Knowledge is unknowable. Systems are chaotic. We can never act with true certainty and expose ourselves to risk on a daily basis. The smallest rounding of a fraction can destroy the best laid schemes. The answer then it seems comes in not taking on the future with certainty but rather embracing the uncertainty, moving away from formulaic behavior and learning to improvise. It isn’t about control but rather how we react in uncontrollable circumstances.

To make an artistic flaw and announce today’s blog topic: I will be talking informatively about the cut-up.

A quick background history.

In the 1920’s, surrealist poet Tristan Tzara started a riot while creating a poem from random words he pulled out of a hat.

In 1959, painter Brion Gysin noticed that some accidental slices into the newspaper he had underneath his artwork formed into an interesting arrangement of words. He had created a verbal collage similar to visual collages.

Beat poet William S. Burroughs was influenced by Gysin’s discovery and collaborated with another artist self-named Genesis P-Orridge who worked more with audiovisual media. According to Burroughs, this cut-up technique was a way of altering reality. Using film as a metaphor, if everything is recorded, it can be edited. P-Orridge more specifically wrote:

Everything in life is cut-up. Our senses retrieve infinite chaotic vortices of information, flattening and filtering them to a point that enables commonplace activity to take place within a specific cultural consensus reality. Our brain encodes flux, and builds a mean average picture at any given time. Editing, reduction in intensity and linearity are constantly imposed upon the ineffable to facilitate ease of basic communication and survival. What we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we touch, what we emote, what we utter, are all dulled and smoothed approximations if a far more intense, vibrant and kaleidoscopic ultra-dimensional actuality.

Cognitively, this is true. Because of the vast amounts of information being thrown at the brain through our senses, we are forced to cut out a large degree of information. We ignore so much of reality and since our everyday lives are made up of boring mundane acts, we filter the boring and focus on the interesting.

The hypersigil or fictional representation of a person’s life then gives the writer the possibility of editing his life. Memory is in essence a recording of the past that is skewed by cognition and emotion. Memory can be edited, trauma undone, and the past retroactively recreated. Don’t tell me you’ve never had a significant other tell you “we never had a relationship” even though you know you did?

Burroughs believed that cut-ups also allowed for divination into the future. In an interesting scene from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, the character Ozymandias has a television room made up of dozens of televisions each set to a different channel that changes every 10 seconds. By noticing patterns in the content of the images, Ozymandias is able to predict customer needs for his corporate business. I’ve seen this myself, noticing that every so often for an unknown to me reason, the same actor will appear in multiple movies on different channels at the same time or in a row.

Burroughs also developed a painting technique by setting up spray cans at random distances from a blank canvas and shooting the cans with a shot gun, causing the cans to explode paint on the canvas. Why not just use paint guns, but the idea of random art is clear.

What Burroughs also did was keep a detailed dream diary. Dream resumes are another important aspect of oneself to develop: we spend eight hours a day sleeping. We should use this time to develop ourselves. Keep a resume of things that we have done in our dreams. I like to splice my dreams into my writing. My most powerful hypersigil can from a dream that I worked into a larger work of fiction. Am I the only one who has gotten confused between reality, memory, dreams, and déjà vu, wondering if a certain experience was something that actually happened?

Cut-ups can also be seen as a type of therapy, deconstructing our demons and rearranging them into a more suitable, poetic expressive form.

Automatic drawing and writing are pre-cursors to the cut-up but the key difference is that automatic writing creates from nothing while cut-ups take from pre-packaged content to produce or reveal something new.

Burroughs cites T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as one of the original cut-ups.

Spoetry is the most current rendition of cut-up poetry. The poet takes subject lines from spam and arranges them into poetry. I’ve tried this: it doesn’t work.

In theory, the best art often comes by accident and improvisation. You cannot will spontaneity but you can use a pair of scissors to introduce it. Cut-ups are a technique to introduce improvisation: prepare to improvise.

Cut-Up Poetry begins with your medium of pre-print, usually magazine or newspaper articles. Headlines work best. Famous poems or song lyrics might work or old love letters.

The simplest cut-up begins with a whole page that is cut into four quarters. The magician rearranges the quarters into a new page and then looks at the juxtaposition of words along the borders of the pages.

More detailed, the magician cuts out words and segments of lines at random and then lays them down together. You will need to rearrange them a bit and snip off some parts to make the transition more coherent.

Too much precision cutting out individual words doesn’t work because it is giving too much control to the cutter. Longer phrases combined with shorter phrases using variation in length of the cut-up works best.

Some magicians recommend splicing in your own works to the cut-up mix. A project I am working on currently is a collection of my favorite song lyrics and poems stream together into one long poem. I’ve removed uninteresting lines so that more powerful segments stick out. My next steps will be to splice these lines into my own autobiography, cutting up the lines to see what juxtapositions occur, and writing new poems using snippets of the lyrics and poems.

The act of cutting up, the power and violence of the scissors, is important. Cut-ups introduce a kinesthetic element to language, touching the words.

Cut-ups can be behavioral as well. One can change one’s life by splicing together two common behaviors into one, for example, the book Recipes for Disaster talks about "Public Transportation and Public Speaking" whereby the magician makes public speeches on subways or the bus. Create a list of ordinary things you do every day and then combine two of the activities.

Here are some good or bad cut-up sites and portals. Just to wrap things up, I decided to create some cut-ups using e-mails from between a lover and me spliced with random selections. The results are below according to each of the websites:

Lazarus Corporation: A portal of cut-up and random poetry generators. A little difficult to navigate.

How does than the MULTITUDES
for left brainers respond
to fold on talk
to express that a gun

is never going to have an incredible
chocolate topic of Jesus Christ
Who cares
- your worst politicial sweeteners
are pinheads now

Since I could copy and paste the text, it was easier for me to eliminate any garbage meaning. The next cut-up machine was more difficult but I think more satisfying.

Language is a Virus: A portal of cut-up machines and randomizers. Doesn’t allow you to copy and paste your results. Results tend to be garbage with some interesting juxtapositions.

Drug people
Monkey look
If screwing
Ape Talk
Cherry accounts
My plan
Gun and rope
Before cookies
Needed meditation
military schizophrenic
still knot-tying
I needed irish chocolate
The human price
Comes to never stations
Homo Monkey student
To suit God
Say little to write e-mails
For myself
To write with knot-tying
Think pleasure
My love is mental
Waste myspace
End plans were not balanced
May need breaking up
Solid cherry presence
Mental stations
Mundane craze

I pulled out information mainly in kennings. While writing this, I needed at times to fill in the gaps. Words joined together but not fully and were often separated by filler words that needed to be cut out. Reading this poem, I saw some interesting Freudian slips. What type of relationship do you think this is?

Improvability and Impracticality

Originally the laws of chance and nature were attributed to gods whom we worshiped (and whom magicians still worship). We make sacrifices to probability hoping to gain its favor.

Eventually though people noticed patterns in the behavior of the gods and started working these patterns into scientific theories. We took two steps forward and one step back as scientific progress brought about an opposing idea: if there was no arbitrary god-rule then the universe must be ruled by a universal constant. An understanding of universal laws would allow manipulation of them. If one could simple know all of the information in the universe then one could be God. Kind of like Groundhog’s Day.

Chaos theory peeks its head in: a butterfly flaps its wings in Cairo and Hillary Clinton becomes senator of New York, but the same butterfly flapping its wings didn’t help her win the presidential nomination. The same initial circumstances don’t lead to the same results.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states the knowing the circumstances of the universe is impossible. According to the Uncertainty Principle, subatomic particles can never be accurately measured because observation of these particles influences them away from their natural state. The same goes with social dynamics: only an invisible outsider can observe natural social behavior. There goes our shot at becoming God: we can never know with certainty the universal laws. Bullshit in, Bullshit out.

Even though information is unobservable, quantum mechanics has been able to pinpoint particles in waves, imprecise measurements, not where a particle is but where it statistically is most likely to be. We’re able to know that the particle will be in either X, Y, or Z but not which specific place. But these states are interconnected so knowledge of X allows knowledge of Y and Z.

I remember…uh oh, she’s going to start delivering some boring vagina monologue again. Shut up and let me continue my blog. After Grant Morrison had finished Animal Man, the series was taken over by a writer whose name I don’t remember but should at least give the courtesy of looking up. _______ did an arc which introduced me to the thought experiment now known as Schrödinger's cat. Schrödinger's cat imagines a cat inside an opaque box with a lid on it with a radioactive isotope and a package of poison. One of two events can occur: the isotope decays releasing the poison and killing the cat or nothing happens and the cat is still alive. According to Schrödinger, until we look inside the box, we do not know which event occurred. Metaphysically, both events could have occurred, did occur and exist in a state of superposition (both events simultaneously occurring). Once the box is opened, the superposition dissolves and one event occurs. (I’m superstitious like this whereby if I’m having a bad day, I won’t check my e-mail; the theory is that if there’s a bad e-mail waiting for me on a bad day, the e-mail will transform into a good e-mail if I open it on a good day). Quantum mechanics has even stated that Schrödinger’s cat illustrates the concept of parallel universes: in one universe the cat dies and in another universe the cat doesn’t. (A movie that somewhat illustrates this concept is Sliding Doors which was on a few nights ago).

What happens is there is no universal constant but universals constants. We can measure the universe at a particular time and predict what it will be like at another time but an understanding of one moment in time doesn’t allow an understanding of every moment. The universe exists in constant superposition with probabilities shifting as soon as we observe them. How can we ever travel the road not taken?

To make matters worse, without universal constants, we run the risk of violating laws of conservation which states that information cannot be destroyed. Why not? Doesn’t it come to a natural conclusion that probability should erode the strength of circumstances? Back to the butterfly, why then is it that initial identical circumstances produces drastic results? Information erodes, reducing knowledge of the universal constants. I guess we can call this entropy or even worse, change…

Quantum mechanics has found that microscopic and smaller particles are highly subject to random behavior. In tightly controlled experiments in which all factors are considered and tested for, random outcomes still occur. Definitive outcomes are impossible, only probable outcomes according to statistical evidence. A cop out theory to explain microscopic randomness is the hidden variables theory (or theories) which states that various factors not evident in the procedure are changing the outcome.

British physicist John Bell did research on Hidden Variables and found them not to exist. I’m not a physicist but in my drug-induced paranoias, I’ve always found the divine monkey wrench in the form of an x-factor or unknown piece of information that screws everything up. What this means in scientific terms is that the universe may be ruled by gods.

Randomness does not necessarily disallow predictability. In a series of flips of a coin, the chances of heads will always be 50% with half of the flips yielding heads. Quantum mechanics allows prediction within waves, meaning statistical probability, while wave theory does not allow knowledge of a thing but does allow knowledge of things linked to a thing.

Randomness may simply be superstition and lack of knowledge. An event appears random because the observer does not recognize the pattern.

Philosophically, determinism states that there are no random events, only events so small that the un-attuned eye cannot see them. A good book to read on determinism is issue #4 of Alan Moore’s Watchmen entitled “Watchmaker.” Free will and randomness go hand in hand; determinism prevents free will or the theory might be that the complexity of social conditions makes the determinism unnoticeable – one thing leads to another as the song goes and social interaction is merely a timeline of imperceptible microscopic events. Free will is limited to microscopic events while larger issues are predetermined.

One might argue that a notably chaotic system is actually ordered because there is a sense to the system and the chaos is predictable. Organized chaos is a term often used to describe a messy room where a person knows where everything is but a stranger entering the room sees only a mess.

Chaos theory in itself arose mainly as a way of describing noise in formulaic systems. As Shakespeare wrote, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, and exceptions to the rules, these more things, were soon acknowledged as valid parts and problems within any organized system. Magic could not be ignored.

Yes, we’ve all heard the stories of where chaos theory came from. Originally it was all about predicting the weather. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz used a computer to re-model a weather prediction. The computer when running the simulation rounded the mathematics off to the thousandth when the original numbers extended to the millionth. This small rounding-off created a totally different weather model.

Early chaos theory allowed and incorporated variations, believing that variations were constant influences that required planned over-compensations to balance out variables. Constant and consistent. Mathematician Benoit Mendelbrot, however, noticed that measurements became inconsistent according to the scale in which the measurements were being taken, reducing measurements and consistency to unpredictability.

The famous exceptions are fractals, objects that can be broken down into infinite identical pieces all maintaining the same dimensions, infinity within a finite space.

When looking at probability, it isn’t a factor of one but rather a factor of at least three variables:

1. Environment and outside influences
2. Initial conditions
3. The system in which the “game” is being played

Not every system is chaotic, though. The system in itself needs to be incredibly sensitive to variations from its initiation condition, that is, there are many many ways to go after point A. In some situations, like the alphabet, A is always followed by B, while a standard word can have A followed by 26 variations, the complexity of the system increasing as the word develops. The above example of letters and words however can still be seen as non-chaotic because a chaotic system also needs multiple variables within the system that in themselves are subsystems reacting with other subsystems. Think about the weather: there is no such thing as THE weather but rather atmospheric systems overlapping with each other.

Simplistic systems can be apparently chaotic whereby the initial conditions can deviate from normal responses but the system in itself is not chaotic, only sporadic. This is the noise that chaos theory tries to address: the noise is not the system but a system can be noisy.

Determining the chaos of a system means simply a cross-comparison of the same system over the same distribution of time. In other words, look at the behavior of a tomato plant growing in your garden and then compare its growth to another tomato plant in which conditions are identical. Variations usually mean an error within the system but this error doesn’t stop the system from functioning or produce drastic results. Each tomato plant will develop along a similar route and to a similar result, that is, producing tomatoes in the end, regardless of conditions. The time table in this measurement is important in establishing consistency and subjectivity to initial conditions.

Look for what is chaotic and what is not.

Divination, in particularly, has always relied upon observation of random patterns within nature. In some instances, patterns are noticed in natural objects or events, in others, more elaborate procedures are set up and interpreted. With augury, the flight patterns of birds in their natural behavior is studied free of manmade manipulation. With alectryomancy, however, the magician intervenes more directly with the birds, either scattering feed before them to observe how the birds peck or in some cases burying the bird up to its neck and surrounding it with seed sigils to spell out words in the bird’s pecking behavior.

Randomness is seen as the ultimate fairness or objectivity, free of bias. But random acts of violence or shit happens is rarely seen as fair.

In gathering my thoughts together on probability in magic, the lottery comes to mind. Isn’t magic like a lottery? Magicians scratch off magical tickets in the form of spells or what-not in hopes of achieving some wild fantasy? The thrill of the lottery is rarely in economic gain but more in the indulgence of a short fantasy of winning. Isn’t magic the same, the belief of successfully manipulating the universe?

A good metaphor for probability and randomness and how people should react is gambling. Dice, in particularly, has become the universal scientific metaphor for the mechanism of the universe. “God does not throw dice” Albert Einstein argued: the universe follows rules and is not about a crap shoot. But chaos theory has proven otherwise.

In many cases, playing cards, for example, the randomness of gambling is accompanied by the skill in which the gambler handles the randomness. Many card games are entropic systems; each card that is pulled reduces the cards in the system. This can be detrimental because information is being reduced or it could be beneficial because the complexity of the system is being reduced as cards/information are being eliminated. Card games also require decisions based upon lack of knowledge of other components (the Uncertainty Principle).

The same goes with board games like Risk that use dice to simulate randomness within the rules of the larger game. What role then does randomness have in the overall board game of life (or rather Life, ha ha, fuck you)? Board games involve not just randomness but also strategy, value management, risk management, and diplomacy.

Many casino games, the slot machines especially, seem to rely on chance but are actually rigged. Slot machines are rigged to reinforce gambling behavior. A slot machine that never pays out will soon frustrate the gambler and the gambler will leave (not put any more money into the machine). If the slot machine pays off every so often, the gambler continues to put money into the machine not realizing that the input exceeds the output. (Inconsistent behavior is actually the strongest motivator).

Randomness can be beneficial because it leads to the introduction of new ideas. Evolution is a quick example which relies upon random mutant genes/memes. However, as mentioned in my previous blog posting, creative invention doesn’t often evolve spontaneously but rather spontaneously after formal understanding of the components of a system. Think about all those stars who suddenly became famous. They didn’t suddenly become famous; many had long unimportant careers that went unnoticed until randomness allowed their skills to be noticed. Others may argue that there is no chance and that success is the result of pure skill.

In a universe that is unbound by lack of rules and subject to the whims of the gods, how then can one act? In a universe in which information and knowledge of a system is constantly being eroded and obscured, how can one act with certainty?

Improvisation is a necessity in understanding one’s role in the universal moment. How is one to react at any given moment, in particularly unexpected moments? Is there anyone who hasn’t had a freeze up when confronted with something unexpected? Shouldn’t we work to prevent these freeze ups?

People who learn how to improvise show less anal retentive tendencies. They don’t have to be in control but can go with the flow. One learns to better evaluate and focus on what is going on in real time. Distractions are reduced. Information is processed more quickly. Decisions are made more easily.

Wow, I’ve moved from the scientific to the philosophical and now I might actually get practical:

Improvised Visualization: Find a partner, a group, or do it by yourself. Name a location and then as many items as you can that belong in that location.

Template Tennis: Imagine a conversation (either with a human being, an animal, an imaginary friend, the TV). The other side is providing information that can in some way be categorized. I just had a conversation with a woman about underground music. Your goal becomes to continue the game using the topic as a template. “We’re talking about underground music. What do I know about the topic, what can I add to the topic, or what questions can I ask?” You volley back your topic or question and prepare for the next template (when it changes). Oh, we’re talking about…!

Advance: Eventually a template grows stale and needs something added to it to advance the interaction. Randomness is used to evolve the topic. You’re talking about underground bands and the topic is getting stale: throw in the topic of sports and make a connection between underground bands and sports. Don’t ask the question “what sports does Ted Leo and the Pharmacists play?” but rather make the statement about Avril Lavigne and skateboards; perhaps she should water ski…

Either/Or: You’re given two options. Instead of choosing, take both. In some cases, this may be impossible. Make it possible. “Would you like to stay or leave?” “I’d like to be cloned so I can stay and leave and compare notes with myself later.”

Yes, And?: If asked a question, “no” will stop the conversation. “Yes” will continue it. “Yes, and” means that when asked questions, you answer “yes” and add more information to the initial question. “Do you like underground rock bands?” “Yes, but only if they perform underground like in wine cellars.” Like with Advance, this new information allows the continuation of the idea.

Homeric Epithets: Greek bards had a nifty was of improvising: they used catch phrases inserted into a specific meter. Homer, who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, performed using a hexameter or series of sentences composed of 12 syllables. Whenever he had a brain fart, he would throw in either pre-planned descriptions or use the demands of the meter to introduce new descriptions (“Oh, shit, I need another two syllables; I’d better describe Achilles as gold-haired Achilles!”).

Dozens: An exchange of insults or self-insults. Also known as “Yo Mama.” Insults and self-deprecation are talents that should be developed.

Partiman Tenso: A debate with oneself about a controversial (abortion) or abstract (love) idea presenting two sides of the issue. “Love is a wonderful thing.” “No, it’s not.”

Role-Playing: It’s easier to act and react when you’re not being yourself. Being yourself requires reflection; role-playing someone else, whether it’s your crabby teacher or a knight in shining armor, reduces the performance to black and white caricatures, easy directions.

Appropriation: Take something and turn it into something else. Appropriation might include: appropriation, steal someone else’s idea and use it as the basis for your own work; combines, creating shapes out of unusual objects (paper clip art); intervention, fixing or changing objects because you feel something is wrong with them (Star Wars the Phantom Edit tried to remove Jar Jar Binks; draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa); readymade, taking common place objects and putting them somewhere else where they are out of context or place (like a toilet in the middle of a park) or using them for another use (a bidet drinking fountain) or simply making an unusual combination of objects (a small birdcage containing a thermometer, cuttlebone, and 151 marble cubes resembling sugar cubes).

10 Fingers: Requires a partner. Each person holds up all of their fingers. Your partner asks a yes or no question/statements – “you have a cat", "you have never stolen anything", “you like cheese” – if the asker is incorrect, he puts a finger down. If a question is yes, he can put a finger up if needed. Take turns. First person with no fingers up loses.

3some: Requires a partner. You offer an imaginary object – a slice of cheese – and player number two has to offer a related object – a slice of bread – you finish the set with a third related object – a pickle. Restart the set.

Dissociation: Requires a partner. Start with a word and come up with as many words NOT connected with the word until a connection is made, at which the game re-sets. Example: cat, deodorizer, house, green, grass. Here we restart, because grass is obviously an association with green.

Letter Association (pre): Come up with as many things starting with a chosen letter within a 15 second period.

Letter Association (post): Start with a word and come up with another word that starts with the letter which the previous word ended with. Example: juice, eggplant. Can also be done with celebrity names.

Sing-Song: Requires a partner. Start singing a song that both players know. When you start to fizzle, the other player has to take over with a new song.

The following are some additional suggestions with a change in format. Instead of games, these are more general advices:

Don’t be philosophical: The more you open your life up to open-ended questions that have no real answers or solutions, the more you freeze your response system. The more you expose others to open ended questions, the more you freeze them. Mutual exchange becomes impossible. Ever have a kid keep asking you “why”? Better yet, don’t ask questions at all: make statements.

Give information: When talking with people, give them something to work with, even if they don’t catch on – a talented improviser will catch on.

Listen: Pay attention to what people say and look for opportunities to respond to.

Allow response time: Give your partner a chance to respond to what you say and do. Don’t just jump in and cut them off.

Get lost in the soon, not the now: Many people when interacting get caught in stasis; they focus on the now and end up with nowhere to go. I was in Wal-mart and saw a tattoo on a woman’s neck that read “Leo.” I asked her if the tattoo was her sign and if she had a birthday coming up. She said “yes” to both and we looked at each other confused because the conversation was a dead end. When interacting with people (or whatever), your goal is to always provide and gain information, to make a change in your position. Otherwise the back and forth is really just bouncing a ball off a wall.

In starting this entry, my goal was to examine various aspects and theories that deal with randomness, uncertainty, and probability. My ideas are strung together haphazardly with only a minor attempt to provide coherent transitions. My purpose got lost somewhere between the divine and the practical but I think I’ve been trying to make some commentary on how to develop skills in surviving in a random world. Hopefully in my next blog I can take the information here and develop it into something more workable and formulized.