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PARADIGM SHIFTS AND AEONICS, by Pete Carroll
All the philosophies, creeds, dogmas and beliefs that humanity has
evolved are variants of three great paradigms, the Transcendental,
the Materialist and the Magical. In no human culture has any one of
these paradigms been completely distinct from the others. For
example in our own culture at the time of writing the Transcendental
and Magical pradigms are frequently confused together.
Transcendental philosophies are basically religious and manifest in
a spectrum stretching from the fringes of primitive spiritism
through pagan polytheism to the monotheism of the Judaeo-Christian-
Islamic traditions and the theoretical non-theistic systems of
Buddhism and Taoism. In each case it is believed that some form of
consciousness or spirit created and maintains the universe and that
humans, other living organisms, contain some fragment of this
consciousness or spirit which underlies the veil or illusion of
matter. The essence of Transcendentalism is belief in spiritual
beings greater than oneself or states of spiritual being superior to
that which currently one enjoys. Earthly life is frequently seen
merely as a form of dialoque between oneself and one's deity or
deities, or perhaps some impersonal form of higher force. The
material world is a theatre for the spirit or soul or consciousness
that created it. Spirit is the ultimate reality to the
transcendentalist.
In the Materialist paradigm the universe is believed to consist
fundamentally and entirely of matter. Energy is but a form of matter
and together they subtend space and time within which all change
occurs strictly on the basis of cause and effect. Human behaviour is
reducible to biology, biology is reducible to chemistry, chemistry
is reducible to physics and physics is reducible to mathematics.
Mind and consciousness are thus merely electrochemical events in
the brain and spirit is a word without objective content. The causes
of some events are likely to remain obscure perhaps indefinitely,
but there is an underlying faith that sufficient material cause
must exist for any event. All human acts can be categorized as
serving some biological need or as expressions of previously applied
conditioning or merely as malfunction. The goal of materialist who
eschews suicide is the pursuit of personal satisfaction including
altruistic satisfactions if desired.
The main difficulty in recognizing and describing the pure Magical
Paradigm is that of insufficient vocabulary. Magical philosophy is
only recently recovering from a heavy adulteration with
transcendental theory. The word aether will be used to describe the
fundamental reality of the magical paradigm. It is more or less
equivalent to the idea of Mana used in oceanic shamanism. Aether in
materialistic descriptions is information which structures matter
and which all matter is capable of emitting and receiving. In
transcendental terms aether is a sort of "life force" present in
some degree in all things. It carries both knowledge about events
and the ability to influence similar or sympathetic events. Events
either arise sponataneously out of themselves or are encouraged to
follow certain paths by influence of patterns in the aether. As all
things have an aetheric part they can be considered to be alive in
some sense. Thus all things happen by magic, the large scale
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