Artificial Intelligence

Despite the human mind’s conviction that the socially accepted methods of developing personality and consciousness are correct and effective, Magic insists that this is, to say the least, untrue.

When people speak of “upbringing,” they primarily mean socialization, “acculturation” — that is, the restriction of a person’s development within “permissible limits,” the channeling of that development into specific channels, often to the detriment of other inclinations and possibilities of the given being.

In fact, from earliest childhood the mind is not allowed to develop according to its own potential, but is forced into the confines of socially acceptable forms of action, thought, and feeling. Such development can be compared to tending a garden in which a tree does not grow as nature would have it, but as the gardener finds convenient — pruning, constraining, repressing certain properties of the tree — and then striving to maximize yield.

As a result, a person develops only insofar as society allows, and to the limits imposed by the conditions of embodiment there are added rigid boundaries set by society, predators and parasites that dominate public consciousness.

Moreover, many of the concepts imposed during this upbringing are not merely constraints that disrupt or restrain the natural development of the mind, but direct destructors that lead the mind to the dissipation of energy.

Unlike a tree grown in a garden that never discovers its own limits, a tree in the open wild grows in a way that maximally realizes its inner inclinations and potential.

Even in a forest, where each tree’s development is limited only by the influence of its neighbors, the fullness of their growth is incomparably greater, and the depth of their interactions far richer, than in an artificially pruned garden.

At the same time, it is clear that one can only step beyond one’s boundaries, overcome one’s limitations, when one has first reached those boundaries. That is, when the possibilities of the present moment have been fully used the present moment’s possibilities — something patently unthinkable for an artificially shaped mind of the “civilized” person.

The formation of an individuality born of the Great Spirit’s striving for self-knowledge in the aggregate of its differential aspects, when it becomes destructive, becomes the illusion of separateness — a withdrawal into oneself and one’s boundaries, a belief in the correctness and immutability of social beliefs and restrictions.

And the very upbringing in which a person grows discourages even the inclination to act according to human nature, let alone to expand the mind beyond it.

Magic, which sets itself the goal of complete actualization of the mind’s potentials not only in its current incarnation but in the Monadic nature’s potential as a whole, naturally strives for the fullest possible realization of a being’s developmental inclinations. That is precisely why experience is so important for the magus, both direct, active experience, and vicarious, contemplative observation.

We have said repeatedly that Magic doesn’t mean licentiousness; on the contrary, it demands austere discipline and absolute impeccability.

Nevertheless, it is very important for the magus to engage with the greatest number of energies to which he and his Way are attuned, to manifest his potential as fully as possible and to cultivate the widest range of inclinations. At the same time, it is equally important for the magus to preserve the purity of his energies, without contaminating them with alien influences.

For the magus it is important to “experience everything, test everything“, and then, having reached his limits — step beyond them, into the pleromatic fullness of being.