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heraclitean's avatar

"Ritual cannot rely exclusively on human

machinations to obtain the full effect. Forteans humorously kick around the

idea of a "library angel" that works for some of us. If I need research

material, sometimes I get it not because I diligently searched the stacks at

Cornell University, but because the material I wanted presented itself to me

randomly, like Hannibal Lecter says in Silence of the Lambs, with "desperate

randomness."

A first reaction would be to say I received the research material "by

accident." But then how is this doctrine of the accidental sustained in the

presence of someone who is accident-prone, for whom this "accidental"

transmission of information is a regular occurrence?

Ritual is obsession in motion. Obsessive people are walking rituals and

they attract, "coincidentally," aids to their obsessions. If this is done

consciously and the obsession happens to coordinate with the trend and

tendency of the time, a lot more "coincidental" magnification will be

forthcoming.

Coincidence can be summoned. It's a matter of attention and timing. First

you become aware of - believing in and observing - the mechanism of

coincidence when it agrees with your work, then you coordinate what you're

working on with what you were predestined to do.

When you start to see the pattern of coincidence and it becomes a

language for you, you have become either an initiate or a schizophrenic, take

your pick, because you lose the protection of materialism -- our protection

against the disordering of the arrangement we've given to the world to make

it manageable"

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Douglas Rushkoff's avatar

Yeah. I have a guest I just recorded, Eliot Edge, who brings physics and simulation theory into all this and ended up with the same conclusions as you.

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Richard Bell's avatar

I would be interested in knowing what your sources are when you write about "the kinds of magic that science is finally learning to accept, like ESP.."

Thanks!

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Douglas Rushkoff's avatar

Try Mitch Horowitz's Practical Magick. He lists the best studies for retrocausality, ESP, remote viewing, and other well established phenomena. This does not mean there's no physics explanations for these things. Only that we don't know them yet.

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