Part 1 “The Imitation Dance”
Our society imitates machines for the same reason human societies imitated everything else: there is a deep impulse in our primate minds that causes us to contemplate power. Our main focus of contemplation always seems to be power. It is the shining beacon of our social selves. In ancient societies those lights were the powers of nature, but in our society we contemplate our own power amplified by machines. Like that old saying goes, “what you contemplate is what you imitate.”
We contemplate the machines because they extend our power over nature, and make us calculably more than the limitations that nature placed upon us. The catch is that we can only imitate, but never be the thing we contemplate. Thus no matter how hard we try, we are always faux machines. In essence, it is the one limitation that nature placed upon us that we cannot overcome.
Since our contemplation is based on our perception of machines as lifeless hunks that responds to our will and command, rather than what a machine actually is, we create a contradiction that we have to erase. Our society’s self-destructive refusal accept the living and conscious nature of the universe is our collective attempt to erase the contradiction. Everything in the universe is uniquely alive and conscious, even machines, but machines aren’t alive and conscious the way a person is, and thus manifest will upon the material world differently than we manifest our will.
We force ourselves to imitate our perceptions and create a conflict between our desire to be powerfully unalive like machines and our nature. The conflict between our desire and nature has three major steps. The first is the destruction of our inner lives which has, as we will see, multiple consequences. The second is the replacement of the self with our perception, and this leads to a kind of self-objectification, where a person makes themselves an object to be manipulated by external controllers. We perceive the machine as powerful lifeless hunks that we manipulate, and to be powerful we too must be lifeless hunks that are manipulated.
Dune beautifully explained that men created thinking machines to control other men. We, instead of creating thinking machines, set our minds to think like machines, which we interpreted as having no inner life and having an operator that commands us to life. We don’t consciously acknowledge the latter, but we aren’t supposed to be conscious anyway so it doesn’t matter. If we’re all acting like unthinking machines, who or what exactly is the controller?
Our society imitates machines for the same reason human societies imitated everything else: there is a deep impulse in our primate minds that causes us to contemplate power. Our main focus of contemplation always seems to be power. It is the shining beacon of our social selves. In ancient societies those lights were the powers of nature, but in our society we contemplate our own power amplified by machines. Like that old saying goes, “what you contemplate is what you imitate.”
We contemplate the machines because they extend our power over nature, and make us calculably more than the limitations that nature placed upon us. The catch is that we can only imitate, but never be the thing we contemplate. Thus no matter how hard we try, we are always faux machines. In essence, it is the one limitation that nature placed upon us that we cannot overcome.
Since our contemplation is based on our perception of machines as lifeless hunks that responds to our will and command, rather than what a machine actually is, we create a contradiction that we have to erase. Our society’s self-destructive refusal accept the living and conscious nature of the universe is our collective attempt to erase the contradiction. Everything in the universe is uniquely alive and conscious, even machines, but machines aren’t alive and conscious the way a person is, and thus manifest will upon the material world differently than we manifest our will.
We force ourselves to imitate our perceptions and create a conflict between our desire to be powerfully unalive like machines and our nature. The conflict between our desire and nature has three major steps. The first is the destruction of our inner lives which has, as we will see, multiple consequences. The second is the replacement of the self with our perception, and this leads to a kind of self-objectification, where a person makes themselves an object to be manipulated by external controllers. We perceive the machine as powerful lifeless hunks that we manipulate, and to be powerful we too must be lifeless hunks that are manipulated.
Dune beautifully explained that men created thinking machines to control other men. We, instead of creating thinking machines, set our minds to think like machines, which we interpreted as having no inner life and having an operator that commands us to life. We don’t consciously acknowledge the latter, but we aren’t supposed to be conscious anyway so it doesn’t matter. If we’re all acting like unthinking machines, who or what exactly is the controller?
The third step in our conflict is executing the tasks that we observe machines executing: the vast ecosystem of machines we’ve built exist to consume, extract, process, produce, and repeat. This is what we believe to be the life-cycle of machines. All the mental habits of our society formed around this simplified observation of machine behavior.
By itself the logic of the first and third steps would indicate that we are essentially faux machines that extract and consume vast amounts of energy for the sake of extracting and consuming vast amounts of energy. However, the second step indicates a far darker twist to the process, because like the machines we consume one form of energy, extract and process another form, and produce a third. To be like the machine we turned ourselves into faux machines to be used to extract, process, and produce energy for something else to consume. No matter how much energy we consume, we are never sated and are always driven to consume more, so we can extract, process, and produce more for our controllers. That perpetual hunger has a name.
Part 2 “The Ecosystem of the Wendigo”
By itself the logic of the first and third steps would indicate that we are essentially faux machines that extract and consume vast amounts of energy for the sake of extracting and consuming vast amounts of energy. However, the second step indicates a far darker twist to the process, because like the machines we consume one form of energy, extract and process another form, and produce a third. To be like the machine we turned ourselves into faux machines to be used to extract, process, and produce energy for something else to consume. No matter how much energy we consume, we are never sated and are always driven to consume more, so we can extract, process, and produce more for our controllers. That perpetual hunger has a name.
Part 2 “The Ecosystem of the Wendigo”
Every species has a very limited range of energies that can sustain them, and everything else has to be processed into that range or it isn’t usable. A petrol engine doesn’t do too well on diesel or crude oil, after all. It holds to reason that the Wendigo spirit also has the same range of limitations, because it is also alive. As we reduced our vastly complicated inner ecosystem into a simplified machine ecosystem, we opened ourselves to be used as processing facilities for other life forms. Consume, extract, process, produce, and repeat is our perspective of the life cycle of the machines, and it is now also our life cycle.
In every way the suppression and destruction of our inner lives mirrors our suppression and destruction of the outer world. In both cases we are taking an ecosystem of communication and exchange and trying to reduce it to something that fits our favored mental patterns. The problem is that we didn’t actually reduce the ecosystem to something so simple, but instead we shifted its complexity in a direction that is harmful to us. The average suburban lawn may look simple and regulated on the surface, but beneath the veneer of sterility there is a healthy ecosystem of bacteria actively consuming and processing all those chemicals we dump. The ecosystem may not be healthy for us, but it is certainly healthy for some form of life.
Our society’s imitation of our perception of the machine’s life-cycle has produced an inner and outer ecosystem that is increasingly hostile to us. William Walker Atkinson said in his book “Mind Power,” that every place has its own specific mental current that is created by the environment and the people living in that place. Although he doesn’t explore non-human mental currents and their interaction with human mental currents, his theory about mentative currents exposes a part of the ecosystem that we don’t generally acknowledge.
The mental currents that we are constantly absorbing and exuding play a role in the ecosystem. Our internal lives are the equivalent of a biome that allow us to be a part of our environment. When we are healthy there is constant communication between the internal micro-biome and the external marco-biome. We are communicating with our environment and participating in the effort to keep it healthy, but instead of cycling material energies we are cycling mental energies. We do everything that we perceive machines do, and likely do much more on a mental level, but instead of accepting this process and working with it, we reject and try to destroy it, because the “more” isn’t part of our perception. Our rejection of the conversation creates a feedback loop.
Industrial systems generate tremendous amounts of waste, and all waste needs to be processed by some part of the ecosystem. Technically, there is no such thing as waste in nature, only accumulated material that hasn’t been processed yet. Waste in any ecosystem can be processed out as long as a biome is stable and healthy. Bio-accumulation becomes pollution when there is too much of a material to be processed out, and it starts destroying parts of the biome that do the processing or support the offending species in some way. If bio-accumulation keeps building into pollution, it makes the environment too toxic for the offending species to survive. Destabilize the biome by destroying parts of it and you guarantee a situation where bio-accumulation turns into pollution. Bio-accumulation isn’t just problem on the material plane, it is a problem on the mental plane too.
As we chemically sterilize our internal environment, we create imbalanced feedback loops, and stop processing the produce of others. Unfortunately for us, the new cycle we’ve created continues to produce mental energies that have nowhere to go or safely discharge. In a village of a few hundred people the mental output of the village is likely easily digested by the surrounding environment, while the output of the environment is digested by the people. This creates a stable cycle. The people are part of the biotic community, and as long as they respect their place in the community they are able to survive and thrive. The problem occurs when you have a city of millions or a civilization of billions, where the environment is extracted and consumed to meet our “needs,” the selfsame needs that we’ve determined are a part of the machine’s life cycle. This inevitably builds up dangerous mental currents to the point of toxicity, all of which have no place to go except out into the surrounding environment. In this case ‘out’ is into the people, who are the largest concentration of biomass capable of processing the excess energy.
Think about the term “trigger” that became immensely popular over these last few years. People are concerned that a word or action out of place will trigger an outflow of emotional energy. Like all species when a machine discharges its energy, it must fill up with more energy to continue its life. It’s a part of the lifecycle we actually accept as real. Why is this such a painful and frightening process for people? In what I believe to be a process similar to breathing, when a person discharges their mental energies they create a vacuum that is filled from the surrounding environment. Unfortunately, the surrounding environment is full of the toxic affluence of our society. The discharge of mental energy temporarily feels good, in the way exhaling after holding your breath feels good, but the inhale brings polluted air back into the lungs which sends you into a coughing fit. It is a satisfaction that can best be described as eating nothing but one’s own waste. It isn’t actually going to sate your hunger and it will make you sick.
Our toxic mental energies continue to swirl in ever increasing amounts and this certainly attracts dangerous entities in the same way our bodily waste attracts bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Any life form can consume only a specific range of energy, all raw energy must be refined into a usable form, and we’re still absorbing and processing the mental energies of our environment despite our best effort to stop. The implications are very clear, we’ve created an ecosystem where we’re processing the mental energies for one species or several species of Wendigo. We extract raw mental energy and digest it into something that is wholly usable by them. The conditions we’ve created explain the emotional volatility because we’ve created a cycle of building and discharging mental energy, leaving people perpetually unstable.
Part 3: "Calling Hunger"
The degree to which a once healthy ecosystem is now so unhealthy for us, and so healthy for the Wendigo spirit is understandable if we realize how entrenched magic is in our society. Traditionally the wendigo spirit remained in the deep wilds, and attacked us only when we wandered into its realm, this was its place in nature. The rise of scientific materialism and industrialism changed the relation of our species to nature, but also changed the relationship of other species to us. For example, there currently exists a vast array of technologies that exist to make us hungrier, for hunger is the lifecycle of the machine according to our society. Each technological suite could be explored in detail how it has enhanced the Wendigo’s ecosystem, but of greatest concern here is the Iron triangle of communication technology.
Material science borrowed and built its knowledge on previous discoveries, and many of those discoveries were initially made by people well versed in the magical arts. The vast array of discoveries made by the magically astute came with clear warnings about their danger. However, understanding the danger would require accepting many of the other conclusions that spiritual practices arrived at, and this was unpalatable for followers of material science.
Instead the technologies were taken and stripped of any context except those that could be verified by a narrow range of observational practices. All of the technologies worked on multiple planes, as all things do, but it was only their measurable effect on the material plane that was relevant to adherents of scientific materialism. The well known magical laws of correspondence, all is mind, vibration, imagery, repetition, polarity, and many more were simply disregarded. Of course, just because you disregard a natural law doesn’t mean that it stops having an effect.
Sadly many of the underlying laws were discovered, and continue to be discovered, devoid of important context. Psychology has discovered many of the mental laws that Atkinson and his peers explained in the context of the occult, but we shall get to that in a moment. The Iron Triangle itself is pillared by radio, TV, and the internet. Radio works only on vibration and repetition, and these seem to be the least dangerous of the three. TV is viciously dangerous because it adds imagery to the mix, and the pictures actually vibrate at a frequence meant to lull the mind into a more receptive state. The internet is the sum of all the worst possible combinations of unintended consequences.
When the internet was first created it was simply a means for military and scientific personnel to move information as rapidly as possible from one place to another. The internet grew and entered public use as an instrument of the noblest intentions: the free access of all information for the betterment of society. The belief of early and current proponents of the internet is that it will help uplift man to a better life and help achieve his true nature. The underlying assumption is that the better life is a universally understood and accepted mode of being, which from our society’s perspective is the lifecycle of the machine.
The internet was created as a means to quickly move information, it entered the public imagination as a way to make the world a better place, and is now a symbol of our collective mind. Every occultist understands the value of symbols as a bridge between the physical, mental, and outer planes of being. Every occultist also knows that the mind is closest link the physical realm has with the outer planes of being, and we train our minds to shield ourselves. The internet was specifically, under the best intentions, created as an unshielded representation of the human mind. A representation to which we are, from the earliest age, now connected. The choice to prevent obstructions was again done under the best of intentions. The free flow of information was meant to uplift man, not drown him.
For a plant to grow it must have water, and these three plants, or pillars - Radio, TV, and Internet, were watered with the blackest magic possible. The whole field of psychology is the study of the manipulation of the mental plane, without regard for the limitations of the models used to analyze the mind, or the existence of the plane in relation to the rest of the ecosystem. Thought itself was reduced to a simple series of machine inputs and outputs. If the outputs were undesired then this was clearly a malfunction of the machine that had to be corrected with further inputs. Worse, the psychologists borrowed dangerous teachings from fields of spiritual study such as meditation, yoga, and use of psychotropic drugs.
Magic to make people more hungry, to crave what they could not have, to consume what they did not need, became the standard spell cast. These spells were then pumped through the transmission towers and blasted everywhere. Anyone who touched it became affected by the spell, and what else could a spell that calls hunger down upon us do but attract the attention of an ecosystem of hunger? So hunger came out from the wild, because there was more to eat in the lands of men than in the wild where few men now venture.
