longer.blue

So I was in the shower yesterday, thinking about metaphysical frameworks as one does and I was just sort of musing about how much I respect my friends, the agnostics, in their humble recognition of the limits of human understanding and how much it vibes with one of my own spiritual positions which is to ‘honor the mystery’. Furthermore I respect those who operate on a ‘uncertainty principle’, that the nature of ultimate reality or divine existence cannot be definitively known or proven through human reasoning or empirical methods. And then I was thinking about a different group of people, those who practice Chaos Magic (in the tradition of Peter Carroll and Robert Anton Wilson) and how they practice Epistemological Pluralism; the belief that multiple valid perspectives and belief systems can simultaneously coexist, with no single ontological framework holding absolute primacy. And with these ideas in mind I was thinking ‘is Chaos Magic a type of metaphysical agnosticism? ‘ After some googling I encountered that both frameworks share a core fundamental truth of the uncertainty of metaphysical knowledge. Chaos Magic goes and takes it to a pragmatic place even one that is performative in terms of its affinity for sigil magic for example but it keeps that same agnostic respect to the limitations of the Self. The fun thing about the chaos magic folks is they seem to turn uncertainty into a type of joy, that since you’ll never really adhere to any hierarchy of belief you can sort of maintain an experimental and constantly growing approach to your metaphysical understanding. This allows for the practitioner to allow basically any ontological framework to be seen as a ‘tool’ for your own personal discovery of reality rather than trying to divine the absolute ‘truths’ in these frameworks. And finally the end result of these positions are super interesting to me because you can arrive at a place where you are both skeptical in terms of phenomena needing to go through your own personal checks and balances but also an openness to exploration in terms of understanding that there is never a ‘complete’ understanding of reality. Anyway no real deep insights for today just thought id share some fun ways ideas and notions can snap together in interesting ways. I’d also mention that both positions can in their own way lead to some hang ups or spiritual ‘log jams’ as I like to say , Agnosticism can sometimes lead toward absolute skepticism, betraying the playful nature of unknowing by asserting that you KNOW that you don’t know rather an ever evolving sense of self discovery. And for the chaos magicians part, they can sometimes stumble lazily into other people’s earnest traditions without the proper respect due and fumble around with toys(other people’s spiritual systems) they have no business messing around with. I’m thinking about those baby witches on tiktok a few years back who decided to ‘hex the moon’ and how it didn’t go so well for them. Those who know me know that not only do I advocate for responsible firearm ownership, I specifically advocate for firearm safety and sometimes I feel like some spiritualists play around with phenomena they know nothing about carelessly and, like when people are unsafe with firearms, it usually ends up biting them in the ass. I’ll end with a Douglas Adams quote: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe