by serene

The Way of Schway

Apprehending new systems of thought, learning about the way other users think and learning all the symbols in the world expand the scope of what you can possibly become. Yet the pursuit of knowledge alone is no end in itself; it is useless unless applied with intent.

Consider the basic, bare-bones model of a modern life: a cubicle at a net-cafe, or an apartment. You can rent one out at low expense, and it has a futon, a computer, and some way of obtaining food and drink. For the people who live in them full-time, life is pretty simple. You spend your waking time at the desk on the computer, your nights on the futon, and whenever you get hungry, you get some food. It doesn’t cost that much; for a lot of people, this is all you need. A nice, warm place to lie down, and a portal to access the vast wealth of human experience - and so you dive.

The glitter-ball of the human spirit is radiant and wonderful. Any individual work or symbol can be taken and examined as a true path in itself - every symbol itself a very small school of the Mysteries. There is truth to be found everywhere, and yet the symbols themselves do not speak - it is people who live, by following those symbols, teach, by weaving symbols together, and lead by making new ones. This is where free will lies - what you do, and whether your future lies inside or outside that portal is up to you.

Black Boxes and Social Engineering

It may be that you don’t have one set path. You might have two, or four, or something altogether more complicated. Your surroundings might be complicated - your access to that full set of symbols may be heavily discouraged, censored or criminalized. You may have to work within a system that doesn’t allow or care about your personal will, and you might have to alter or put your path on hold in order to function or deal with your environment or task. Your path might involve other people, projects bigger than yourself, or situations that your current system can’t deal with. In these instances, it’s time to start building - to become bigger than yourself.

In the previous issue, a larger, more inclusive idea of an operating system was set forth - as being a collection of symbols, tools, programs, or plugins which are generally structured around a central purpose. You can imagine such a system like a circle - with the input, the object of focus in the center, and the vectors for influencing it around the edges. At its most base level, a program can take an input, do something, and optionally return an output.

Programs can be nested within other programs, and can serve as entire systems themselves, of variable complexity. Black-box abstraction is basically a way of defining a program by its purpose, input and output, so it serves as a building block, towards which a larger goal can be apprehended. This can be done, not just in a programming context, but in a social context AFK as well. Though you can streamline and execute programs yourself, you do have limited resources, and time. It is therefore much more efficient to get other people to do tasks for you. Through their resources, the influence that is “you” becomes much larger than yourself, and you can apply your resources to higher-level tasks.

Getting someone to run a simple daemon (background process) could be as simple as asking them to perform a simple task, after which point, you can allocate the daemon a small amount of awareness (enough to remember that it exists) and the task will be done, and you can terminate the awareness. Larger and more complex operations, such as a business venture or a group workings (another system!), require more than just daemons to get things done.

A scalar jump in awareness is needed - to software, or an egregore, that which coerces people into the formation of alters - superceding their will for the accomplishment of the supplanted intent. To do this, much more awareness is required on the part of the programmer, requiring the formation of a personality, a mold or a collection of aspects (software) for the group to adhere to. These days, most people come pre-programmed with specific personality traits, desires, and symbolic triggers, so the perceptive programmer can take advantage of these vulnerabilities.

Truly massive programs, however, are arguably still egregores, but the difference is that they are sentient, or rather the group egregore is not controlled by the will of the creator anymore or at all - and by doing so, it can take on a higher form, that of a godform. Perhaps the best example of this is the indiscriminate behaviour of a corporation, whose ownership has been sold as stock. With no one person in control, but a general desire for every shareholder to make a profit, it behaves beastlike and self-interested, devouring resources and competition as if it were Mammon incarnate. Other examples are, for instance, the free software movement, stemming not from greed, but from a very human desire for freedom from coercion.

Alters and Voluntary Delusion

An alter is, in essence, a state of “fragmented consciousness”, an abridgment of a person’s symbol set. Whenever a person is coerced into kneeling to another, or forced to make any kind of allowance, exception or deviation from their chosen will, they will begin to selectively perceive only parts of reality at a time. For instance, if a person were being forced to work a job they hated, with the alternative being homelessness, two mental partitions would be created. The first, the dominant alter, would be their attempt to enjoy the job, to believe and find meaning in it, in spite of how they feel.

The second partition, the submerged will, having a profound hatred for the job and a desire for something better, would vy with the alter for dominance, until either the person accepts their new role as an employee, or quits their job in search of their chosen career. However, there is another way to go about this, which would be to voluntarily delude the self, believing fully in the job in the moment, and then “switching over” to the “real” self when the situation allows. For criminals or hackers with personal agendas, mastering this mechanic can go a long way towards protecting them from adversity.

Jack In, Jack Out

Experience with altered states and familiarity with changing from one mental state to another can help with understanding how to switch between identities. In a nutshell, you are rapidly arranging and rearranging your larger set of symbols into differing closed “sets” in order to achieve a specific effect.

Your two main tools for managing symbols and identities are association, and dissociation - the solve et coagula of the human mind. Associating yourself with a specific concept, such as an anarchist or a Christian, changes your presentation, your desires, and consequently, other people’s perceptions of how your mind works, what you believe, and how to treat you. Dissociation is a breaking apart, a withdrawal of associations, identities, aspirations and desires, back into the mind’s void of nothingness.

Try It At Home!

Practice shifting your own identity - a good place to start is to come up with your own “Tyler Durden” or “Mr. Robot”; An idealized version of what you want to accomplish. Spend some time fleshing it out, idealizing it. Attempt to have a conversation with it, or think about how it would handle a given situation.

The most basic way to change over to the identity would be to sit down, and define a new system or circle in your mind, and fill it with symbols that represent the identity. You could use the traditional occult method of sitting down and drawing out a circle, placing objects of power around you, or it could be as simple as changing your phone’s wallpaper and making a mental note. The idea is to be able to feel your body’s posture shift, your mental perceptions change, and your mental image of yourself to take on a different form. You may feel as if you are role-playing at first, but understand - the difference between role-playing and reality is your belief that it will work.