Brave Noö World... a preview - part 2

 

In our last exciting episode, we published an excerpt from my upcoming new book with the working title of... "Brave Noö World - A Guerilla Ethnography of High Strangeness" ...As you recall, in part one of this series, we introduced you to the perplexing paranormal paradigm of our Brave Noö World. We reviewed just how crazy our world had become, and how a once-given consensual reality had been replaced by multiple, competing realities. As we indicated, one of the resulting casualties of our ever-changing paradigm, is a quaint little idea known as objective truth.

Sacrificed before the alter of expediency, the (relatively) singular, objective truth of even the previous decade has splintered, and virally mutated into competing, convenient truths. And it was precisely at this juncture, at the divergence of once unmitigated truth, where things began to get… really weird...

Brave Noö World... a preview part 2

In an environment of conspiratorial mistrust, certain cultic thought-streams became increasingly attractive to those who were marginalized over the past fifty years. Within the political arena, ideology became dogma, political party became religion… faction became cult. The so-called Cultural Wars have since gone from a domestic cold-war, to white-hot cultural rebellion. Issues such as gender, racial justice, climate change, the legitimacy of US presidential elections, even the very reality of a mutating coronavirus, have been weaponized by Psy-War factions.

Such issues have been turbo-charged by none-other than our newfangled communications technologies. As we all now know, social media platforms have a way of isolating, insulating and amplifying the content of an individual’s newsfeed, based upon past searches and likes. The most insidious feature of these platforms, is the way in which their algorithms increasingly point to more extreme positions on whatever topic the user has pursued. It is as if the devilish algorithm is saying: “If you think that last article was extreme, wait until you see this next one!”…BAM!

Consequently, over the last few years, we have witnessed a radical rise in magical thinking. Such thinking can be construed in a negative light, as unrealistic. However, magical thinking can also be intentionally pursued as a mental and psychic tactic. Here, the emphasis is strategically placed on intention.

The upsurge in magical thinking has been succored by a dramatic influx of people who have turned away from technological, linear thought. They have become disillusioned with a world culture that increasingly favors those at the top of the capitalist food-chain, at the expense of, or on the backs of, those who have been less favored.

This reemergence of magical thinking is evident in the cultural awakenings of political Left and Right ideologies, alike. Each bloc now recognizes the manipulation of the many, by the few. Tellingly, the extreme factions of Right and Left appear more similar than different… to the extent of appearing as ideological twins. Where the two extremes diverge however, is in their response… in the countermeasures and tactics they deploy. Like ideologies, magical thinking also manifests in a dichotomy… a right-hand and left-hand path, if you will.

Back out on the frontier of the fringe… flickering at the outer limits of reason (where logic has never really had that strong of a hold), age-old thought streams re-emerge, their time come ‘round once again. Those of us who frequent these wilds, have intuited, realized, and consequently come to describe this rise in magical thinking, with the cultic adage: “We are living in Gnostic times.”

Such a notion may seem foreign to some, however, using the heretical, biblical-era Gnostic world view… as an analogy to our own time… allows for a perspective where worldly and spiritual domains operate simultaneously. The Gnostics saw their daily struggle as a reflection of their spiritual struggle. Today, within this time-scape, logic takes a back seat to intuition, where those ancient tricksters, The Fates… spin their web of synchronicity.

Crucially, Gnostic thought never relied on an ordered, clockwork universe… preferring a more chaotic, overriding matrix of a-temporal, a-causal interconnections. Such archaic thought rode upon a wave of meaningful coincidence, and sought understanding through gnosis (ancient Greek: γνῶσις) or intuitively derived knowledge. In these strange days where our consensus reality splinters into multiple, alt realities… gnostic sensibilities become useful once again, in navigating a world where reason has failed us.

PART ONE