Repentance, Rebellion, Resignation, Reincarnation

“….now I have been discussing four fundamental attitudes that are found in the various religions of the world towards the human predicament and as you see still on the blackboard they are given to be four hours instead of the three hours repentance opposite rebellion and resignation opposite reincarnation — the latter word being used in a special sense not in the ordinary sense of ‘rebirth’ but of an affirmation of the humanistic iment of getting with Life —

And this morning I discussed the attitude of repentance — The frame of mind in which it is felt that there is something profoundly wrong about being a self-conscious isolated individual Human Being and I try to show that when this attitude is carried to an extreme point, it results in your discovering that you are a total phony.

And I said that the difficulty of The Repentance Attitude is that people don't carry it through — with each screen part and they use the attitude of repentance and the indulgence in punishment for whatever they think is wrong about themselves as a kind of lifestyle — which assures you that You're in The Right.

they carve you her and because you insist that you're wrong sometimes suggested that this statement I am a sinner is logically equivalent to the statement quote this statement is false unquote because you see if that is a true statement it's a false statement and if it's a false statement at the true state and go on forever and to say I am a sinner is really the same thing because it implies that the statement itself since it is the statement on earth inner is the sinful statement and it could attract called a double by and so I thought often quitted my clergy friends about this and to their great amusement because the clergy are as bad as you might think least that many of them they have trouble in making it with their congregations and they clicked that their congregations will want the good old religion our wallowing in sin because come many congregations I found out love to be scolded and if you make everybody feel temporarily guilty but also make each individual feel assured that everybody else was more guilty than years this is an extremely much sought after emotional experience but the point that I was making was that if you pursue this idea of being sinful of being phony of being insincere to its ultimate point where you discover that all you do and all you are is a big act then this raises the question of what is reality what lies behind phone and so then and there you have an initiating experience because it leads in the discovery the fuel Connie shot called tatsumaki that about that the real you is not the isolated conscious ego that is only again being played all over the place by what there is not there and what there is is coextensive with the whole cosmos and is the imperishable reality and everyone is that but the game since era we started on the premise that existence is a game the game is hide-and-seek the gain is pretending that is not So we then move on you see to another possible response, not repentance, but that of resignation "I quit The Game, I won't play it." There are all sorts of ways of doing this but basically this is an aristocratic posture, "You ordinary mortals with all your Desires, and all your Involvements are deluded - You Get attached to Things. But there are a certain minority of Us, Who are above it all. And since We've resigned We're not going to follow This now. " This as I say is an artistocratic, [be aware] that it may be aristocratic in two ways There's the aristocracy of the Hindu Sannyasi the people outside and above caste and there's also the aristocracy of the actual aristocrat - I get so mixed up with my British and American pronunciation on this - but The Aristocrat who comes on with the position of always being bored, who has complete hogwash who is imperturbable Kaiser Ling's study of this mentality is marvelous in his book of Europe the essay on Hungary portrays the rightly he calls the grand signeur. He always identified himself as a type disrobe the grand familia cannot be saved, who could always be always rise to the occasion under any social circumstances whatsoever, without trying to do so or without apparently trying to do so. In other words if he goes to the Opera wearing blue jeans he will somehow make it apparent that everybody else is improperly dressed. This is a very interesting type of person you know there was an essay written by someone whose name I can't remember in the Centennial Review which contrasted the Attitude to Time of the aristocracy the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; It said The Aristocrat lives in The Past because his ancient forbears have achieved everything and his very by the fact of his birth in his existence he has nothing to strive for and he somehow I never need overdo it - he's always cool. The Bourgeois on the other hand feels that it's necessary to arrive and he's always striving for The Future Whereas the aristocrat lives in the past, on the other hand, the proletarian lives in the present because he doesn't care about his reputation and he just lives, and so of the two the bourgeois of the three the bourgeois is the sucker because the formula is always cheated because well it's going to come someday see you're going to get it even your money when you pull it out of your pocket, there says on it "Promise to Pay" - watch out for that! It's poverty and the bourgeoisie use the news on from the whole the whole economy is the United States being the great bourgeois country is in a state of expectancy of feeling happy, not on what you have but on what is going to come The Aristocrat is happy on what has happened, these great achievements of the past mean there's nothing left to do except sort of glory in it. The Proletarian wants it right now, see and they often get it; About the poor bourgeois, my uncle once said The Poor have it given them The Rich have it anyway so The Middle Classes do without So both the aristocrats and the sannyasi have resigned. Now, the more interesting of the two types is Acosta Sonia who resigns from The World Game, let me review for you the role of the sannyasin in Indian culture you know there are four castes because the priests or Brahmins the caste of warriors and rulers called Kshatriya the caste of merchants called Vasia and the caste of workers called Shudra And to belong to a caste means that you are in the state called grihastha, which is householder that is to say you are One Who is Involved in The World, you are engaged in what is called loca Sandra and loca means The Well, Sandra, upholding, upholding the going on of The Great Illusion and so you are playing for money for position for status, for success and hoping above all that you could win - You can beat The Game. But it's supposed in the same culture that every man who attains the age of or so, who has now a grown son to take over his work, will quit the game, will resign and so, when you come to be at age you're supposed to move from the state of grihastha, householder to vanaprastha which means forest dweller. You give away all your possessions to your son, you change your name, you take off your clothes and go more or less naked, because you have abandoned status. So in spite of the fact that he has no status, he is however respected in the culture for being an upper outcast, whereas the Aborigines of the Indian Peninsula are Untouchables the lower outcast and the upper outcast always mimics the lower for example Buddha had his disciple wear ochre robes because ochre robes were worn by convicts. So in the same way if today, in San Quentin, they all wear blue jeans with special kind pants and a kind of a blue denim jacket and this could well become the uniform of a new kind of sannyasi in the Western world and to some extent this is happening. So this guy says "The Game is not worth the cap, the richer I get the more miserable I get" You know how this is, you think that your problems may be monitored and you get more money. What do you do then we've got enough money, you start worrying about your health and you can never never stop worrying about that Or if you're not worried about your health you worry about politics, if somebody's going to take your money away from you, worried about taxes, about Who's Cheating You. And so a person who goes through all that he's finally "I don't think The Game's worth it, I'm going to resign." And so resignation or renunciation the difference from repentance it hasn't it hasn't got the same kind of passion in the resolve that the repentant person feels he's wrong who made a mistake has committed sin and wants to get better about the renounce first didn't concerns of that country he knows that better progress whether moral or material is an illusion and you have to understand this when you approach for example the study of Buddhism I think one of the most withering remarks I ever heard, from an oriental, he was Japanese he said once he was "Never forget that whereas Jesus was the Son of a Carpenter, Buddha was the son of a King" You know Wow! Take that! And it's choose it is something always about about that this is not the this is ead to see which Christianity historically was the protest of the slave class again if the Roman, establishment Buddhism was different it was the abandonment of position by an aristocracy - That We've done it We've seen it all we've had it so now we check out and we will be therefore we will resign from all games and if you follow this attitude to an extreme you're going to make because it all goes to the center the same discovery that is made by the person who follows repentance to an extreme. Just as The Repentant person discovers that his contrition is phony the person who tries to resign will discover that he can't, that there is no way of not playing games Let's go a little bit then into this Game Theory there are a lot of games that we play and not only the game of Can I get One Up on The Universe, of Pretending That I'm me This Ego, With Its Name and Its Role, The Man, but also we have what I call meta-games, for example the game My Games Better Than Your Game, or the game "I Won't Play With You Because Your Game is Vulgar, Stupid, Banal, Inferior or Whatever." One of the most, therefore, effective games in saying My Game is Better Than Your Game is that I'm Not Playing Games At All You are now at the lowest level we find that in the form of You're Not Sincere, I am sincere You are Fooling, I'm not Fooling You and Being Honest with You Now, that's a great game and of resignation is a form of it as to say you are children claim with toys and you haven't ever really woken up to the important concerns of life you haven't reached the dimension of ultimate sincerity all, that is to say Ultimate Reality, and in order to reach it you have to resign from distractions You hear a great deal in the literature about meditation of getting rid of distractions wandering for well I you might ask when you think about all that what are wandering for what are wrong for what shouldn't I be doing with my mind, well they all say actually every day you think about this and then you think about that in your thoughts run on in an undisciplined way from one association to another and you can't keep your mind fully on the job or whatever so you see, you're supposed to announce that because that's True Reality all those wandering thoughts they're not about the importance now what's important what should you keep your mind on well, something just as long as you keep your mind on. In an instruction one of the Buddhist scriptures says about concentration, when they concentrate on a yellow square on the ground, on the burning tip of an incense stick, on your navel, on the tip of your nose on the, center between the eyes, or anything. And then the footnote the commentator adds "But not on any wicked thing." As you know that commentators the world over, they never have any [sense of humour]. So anything will do just so long as you keep your mind on it, and don't wander, stick to it, so wandering is involvement in games, by this kind of definition, so then you try to get out can you now get out can you stop competing with other human beings In ancient Greek society there was a place in the center of the community called the argon AG om and this was a place for contests where they had wrestling matches and other athletic events because all the men were constantly trying to show who was the better and from this were the agonyax which means these the contest itself held in the argon we get our word agony, the struggle and striving to be superior and a lot of people that you meet among you, you will recognize this among your friends all the time are not happy unless they are involved in the contest it doesn't matter what it is, so long as they're trying to beat something they're happy And you may say over everything "You know can't we just sit around and talk instead of having to play a game, or bet or do something to prove who's the stronger...?" I was married to a girl who never was happy unless she was engaged in some kind of combat, when of course I had a game, it didn't look like one, and so it was a very superior game just because it didn't look like one, but it was a form of the game, my games that renews so you can't really not-play, you may go through the motions of not playing, but you still are. And one of the most marvelous examples of this is the Buddhist Sangha The Sangha means the order of Buddhist monks, or - monks isn't quite the right word because the basis of Buddhist monk-hood is a little different than Christian but I don't want to go into that technicality here are these people living in say Burma, Cylon, Thailand and so on who go around in yellow robes and never announce The World, but of course they've become as a community very prosperous empower and everybody you know makes the patients a month and feeds them and they don't they don't feed just on the rice gruel important monks get called into the houses of wealthy layer it and get given a fine dinners because the layman feels he's acquiring merit by being so generous to the month and you should see the scene in Japan although today the monks have lost their power to a large extent you can see the traces of the power they want hat in the Kyodo the Buddhist orders then Tendai and they especially shinshu sect have the best part of town if you stay a night in a Zen monastery as a guest go into one of the rooms there you are not in any hobble during the palace you live differently from the way we are customed - but you're liable to get shown into a room where the walls are entirely covered in gold leaf and painted by the greatest masters of Japan will say sit down to sleep by a car no motor no blue screen and the landscape around you the garden the views are gorgeous beyond belief this is the life of residence now it's true I know most about then monks rather than the other orders Zen monks live a pretty rough life but it's extremely Tony it's healthy it's it's absolutely non masochistic they have studied the art of enjoying poverty now this is a terribly important thing in the understanding of Far Eastern culture when a man in Japan diseases sort of inherits an old fashioned tradition makes a killing in business he doesn't go around showing off how much he does it he goes around showing off how little he possess even though he may drive to his office in a Mercedes or a Rolls Royce his house is relatively barren and he chooses objects of art and painting that look are extremely simple and he will likely as not have a separate house from his main huge establishment where it's like a Hermitage I mean it's almost as absurd in its own way as Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess after reading losses and having a little cottage rustic cottage the grounds of Zarephath but it's not quite as absurd as that because even the main house has an austerity about and they learn you see to love that offset to then it has the feeling of great comfort now you see what happened is this that long ago the best part of Kyoto the hill that ring the north side and each of the cities being so beautiful were owned by a bunch of Britons who were later the noble daimyo Lords of Japan great Google pounds and these people were as tough as all get-out they were always fighting and so the Buddhist monk rule did and decided they would take this property away from the Daniels buy out competing by playing the game our game more interesting than your game so they said to all those ridges so what you've attained all these conquests you have your castles you have your great estate within what it all falls apart you know especially when the brigand is getting a little elderly and has stomach troubles and the dizziness and so on and this month comes along and furthermore the Munsters you can't scare me and the Griffin Show huh and he pulls out his sword much but now the point is he can't kill them up that then and there because if he does that he won't find out whether the month was scared or not and so the month look straight in the eye and nothing happens he doesn't flinch and the brigham has now in a contact think and he puts the sword quite right against his throat well the monk has it right there but you see how in a way easy the game was because the mount knows that he wins his point he W if the brigand killed him before the monk flinches he's obviously cheated now since there is honor among thieves the chances are although that will sometimes be a Brigid will feel put down by this contest that therefore killed among the chances are that he went but look what the monk stands to gain if he wins Brigid Wow would I like to have that courage because if I had that courage I would be that much better a warrior so the monk says our peach and as a result of that the monk Bell teacher he teaches in the practices then zazen meditations and all this kind of thing and puts it through the the work and so he comes to understand what the monk did understand anyway which was that it really doesn't matter if you live or die because the thing goes on it's perfectly indestructible if you happen to die it just goes on in a new way because you are the works so fine but the monk is playing again and so as a result all these then communities got given the old palaces the brigands all moved to Tokyo and set up there in business and all around the great court and the gorgeous temple grounds went to the monks where all those none of them owns anything personally which is a great idea project you don't have any responsibility the community owns it and you don't have to pay any taxes and since you're a nonprofit organization you're not taxable anyway always a great job and they they really did do what they did in effect was the condos brigham out of the best land in Kyoto by resignation pipe laying a higher game but you see anyone who goes through that go through the Buddhist process of resignation will come to a point where he knows that he didn't resign at all and this is what makes the difference between pedestrian Buddhist monks who think they've resigned and I feel a little bit guilty because it's such a prosperous avail to design because you live in the best places and those ones who know who go right to cause to do the small residue of great Buddhist masters who discovered that they can't resign at all let's consider an extreme example of resignation the life of Mohammed Far Eastern literature is full of the idealization of the hermit's life the wonderful idea of an old man somewhere in the mountain far off in part how couid describe such an individual who can't be found nobody knows where he is he leaves no trace and they consider that is admirable to tell him you know which says I asked the boy beneath the pine he says the map has gone alone ferb gathering on the Mount called it whereabouts on them and that idea of the far off man way way there but what does the Hermit is trouble if you try this get as lonely as you can get you become visibly aware which you can't get away from it because when you get very lonely very fast you become extremely thin and everything that goes on is or no ordinarily unnoticed cum spiritum first of all you will find with the community of insects and they are tremendously interested in not necessarily hostile in maybe sometimes but but alone in the forest when you get really quiet you'll notice little creatures will come and inspect you look you all over and they'll go away and tell their friends and they'll come and look to see what it is and you become aware of every single sound and you realize that alone you're in the midst of a vast burning crowd may not be human but it's everything else so that the the point of being honest the discipline leads you to understand that you can't design the lonelier you are the more you're joined together with everything else how do you get more sensitive so then I find then I cannot give up playing League a look at it - from another point of view supposing I say everybody's playing the game me first now I'm going to play the game you first to use the phrase of Bonhoeffer who called Jesus the man for others now let's see if we could play that game instead of me first you first after you see you know you see you know run away this is putting everybody down see I'm the one see who's so generous I'm the one who's so loving so self-effacing and all you in syria brats could go first you could play me so I'll play you I'll try and convince you to play you fur but the success is convincing on that is relatively small and therefore the in-group will always be the people playing useless and therefore they will get the honor so when you think that through and you see I cannot stop playing these up there's no way of not doing it as well now what does it mean when I'm in a trap that I can't get out of there's no way of getting out of this trap well what it means is that you and the trap of the same thing you're not caught because when there's nobody in the trap there's no trap see that as long as you think you're in the trap then the traps got you when you know you as a trap then what is the trap got if you're trying to get out of the game you're trapped no way out but when you have found that you and the game are the same there's no game to get out of there's no one to get out of the game and that's true resignation and then you can take the point of view of the Bodhisattva as distinct from the are half the our heart in Buddhist not only is the person who escapes from the wheel of birth and death the samsara he gets out of the game so he stands here the Bodhisattva is the our house tops is the our house we've done arm to find out that you can't get out of the games all so the Bodhisattvas found over here in other words he goes back into the cycle of reincarnation and that doesn't bother about escaping him so in just the same way as repentance leads to the understanding that you're a phony even in repenting resignation leads to the understanding that even in resigning you can't design it isn't as if someone were saying you must play this game and you felt yourself under some sort of compulsion it's rather discovering that the game is what there is and to if you got out of it would be to be nowhere you don't have to play this is the point I'm going to repeat this because this is crucial it isn't that you have to play because that would make you feel a victim of some process beyond yourself that is compelling it is that the playing is you and nobody is shoving you around because you and the universe which seems to constrain you are not two things if you play the game that you are only here then you'll feel pushed around but when through trying to resign from either pushing around or being pushed around you discover that it can't be done you then become very much aware there is no point getting away from it where is the way so it said a true Zen month has a mountain Hermitage in any place that is down so let's have an admission

Grant Morrison Surveys the Situation In “The Age of Horus”

Grant Morrison Surveys the Situation In “The Age of Horus”

Interview by Prop Anon

For those familiar with Mondo2000.com, Grant Morrison needs no introduction. Over the course of his long career, Morrison, and his generation of punk rock warlords, busted through the doors of the lagging comics industry — sorely in need of some power chord clarity and imaginative story lines — and proceeded to take readers on new paths of literary discovery. Morrison’s genius use of tropes, his subversions and inversion of same, are so much fun to read. It’s all there, the light and the dark.

Times are dark. Since the last time I interviewed Morrison, in 2017, Trump and his idiotic minions have rolled out the red carpet for the angel of death. Morrison knows what’s at stake. However, don’t ask him for specific details about the daily plays of politricks. There is little need. The ebullient Scotsman continues to trek the antipodes of the mind, dropping gems and jewels like Chester Copperpot (from The Goonies), educating readers how to vibe right and live like rock stars during a possible apocalypse.

In this interview we discuss his newest television show Brave New World which features an Artificial Intelligence, named Indra, that feeds on human brains to survive. Morrison also provides an update on the progress on his The Invisibles tv show, as well as his insights into Robert Anton Wilson, magick, the Aeon of Ma’at.

Enjoy!

Brave New World recently aired this past July on Peacock. The project involved you, Brian Taylor — your partner on Happy! and then David Weiner, correct?

GM: Yes, David came in at a time when the project had stalled a little and he was able to turn it around. Me and Brian started it with the original pitch. The network liked Happy! so they asked if we wanted to pitch for Brave New World, which they were trying to develop with Amblin. We won the gig out of a bunch of other potential writers, mainly because we insisted on treating the World State as a decent working model of utopia, rather than a classic dystopia in the mold of Elysium or Metropolis or 1984. We worked on a few iterations of the script, and then Brian got really busy on Happy! season 2. So, I kind of stayed with it when David Weiner came aboard as the showrunner on Brave New World. He totally revamped and overhauled it. He’s a very smart guy and came from a theatre background and he focused on the emotional stuff, the quirky relationships between the lead characters. My contributions are especially apparent in the high-concepts and the world-building — you know: how does the naming system work? How does the society run? Why isn’t it mechanized? Why isn’t it industrialized? Why are there no private cars and only public transport?

I worked out every detail of that, and then I worked with David on a new version of the pilot script. And he brought together a bunch of amazing writers to flesh the whole thing out. Of the eleven writers in the writer’s room, eight of them were women.

Lenina Crowne has a really hard time in the book, as she is always being slapped around by a sociopathic, Shakespeare-quoting, sex-negative John the Savage. So, the notion was — let’s do something more modern and radical. In terms of my magical practice, this ties Brave New World to my thoughts about the Aeon of Ma’at, the Goddess of Truth, Balance and Harmony.

In the book, Lenina is treated quiet badly and comes to a grim end, so I thought let’s make her the central character of this new version. The Savage Lands depicts a childlike level of society; John is tied to his mother and has very little agency. The World State has progressed to teenage; with its non-stop music and parties and strict social demarcation into easily-identifiable ‘tribes’. The idea was to have Lenina begin to work with the Indra to build a truly ‘adult’ utopia… which would lead us into season 2…

I’ve seen critics complain about the Brave New World sex scenes not being sexy but that was the point we were making! There’s even a major scene of intimacy between John and Lenina that deliberately exists in contrast to the shallow hedonism of the orgies. In this world, sex is more like a social duty, or it’s like sport. It doesn’t involve the guilt and the excitement, the transgression and the passion that we associate with sex at all.

So, I think all of that stuff that I really like in it is asking how does this world work? How and why? And what do they get from it and how different does it feel from our world. At the same time, David was asking how to do human beings as we understand them as they live and interact in a world with these limitations or parameters and how do we show that in a way that Huxley didn’t. So, I think the combination of everyone who worked on it made the project really rich and interesting. It’s not like the comics where it’s just me and an artist, or a letterer and colorist as the equivalent of a pop group. This was like being on a football team. It was a big team. A lot of the writing that reaches the screen is not what you put on the page necessarily. It’s what passes through the team filter and the show runner’s re-drafts that makes it onto the screen. So, it’s much more like you are on a team, which I really enjoyed.

That’s cool man. I just watched the pilot and noticed a running image of your work: The human centipede.

GM: (laughing) You know I haven’t seen Human Centipede. I can’t watch horror movies.

LOL. Well my guess is that those forms of one long continuous being, which looks like a centipede, is your visual description of a self, moving through time, which you said you learned in Kathmandu in 1994 as how things actually are. How does this experience still interact with your life?

GM: We can’t see any direction in time. We can’t see back, and we can’t see forward. We can remember back and imagine forward, but that’s it. We’re trained to feel like ‘individuals’ so we don’t actually see ourselves as the extended processes that we are, shapeshifters who transform through decades from small, plump baby things to large and horny muscular teenagers, to hard-working, middle age adults, and finally desiccated seniors dying on beds. If we sped that up and showed one human life over ten minutes, it would be a body horror werewolf transformation more outrageous and horrifying than any seen onscreen.

But to me it’s like the color of the sky, it’s so self-evident that to see a bird fly past the window is to imagine its skipping solid trail through the medium of time.  In time we are all connected, there’s just no denying that. There’s nothing mystical about any of this. I’m talking about stuff that is simply real.

Imagination can give you the ability to look backwards and forward. So, when you run it backwards, think how your grown-up mature body was once smaller, less massive, less capable of interacting with the environment – that’s real. Run it back to the beginnings of life on earth ad it’s clear that we all are one thing. A singular organism made of many parts, just like a human body with its billions of individual skin cells – which die and fall from the body every day.

So, what does that mean? If people learned this in school, if we understood and accepted, we were all the same fucking thing(!) it might help prevent the collapse into mad division that’s occurring, just now. It’s just a matter of perspective that could change everything.

But the organism we’re part of might be sick, who knows? When cells in a body turn against one another and the system that supports them starts breaking down, it’s cancer…

You had the gnostic experience. To just hear it or read it is one thing but when you have the experience that seems to be the most convincing thing.

GM: Well, it seems to become self-evident. It’s really like someone turns your head around in Plato’s cave and you realize that there’s a light and someone’s doing shadow figures with their fingers. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. And it’s ‘Oh, of course’! Of course! There’s no denying it. But I guess to have that experience is its own confirmation. It’s like living by the sea all your life, then having to explain that to someone living inland who’s never seen the ocean and doesn’t believe an ocean could exist because they’ve never seen one.

To me it can be confirmed intellectually by just thinking about time and how you are embedded in time. You know you had to be six years old to be here. So, where the hell is ‘being six’? Well, being six exists in a time direction that you can’t see or point to, but it’s still there. To misunderstand that is equivalent to flying from Los Angeles to London then, after touching down at Heathrow, insisting that Los Angeles no longer exists!

And once you’re truly aware of time as the medium through which we transmit our physical signal, then there is no denying that your personal track winds its way back into your mum and she goes back to her mum and it all goes back to that single dividing cell 3 and a half billion years ago. To me, that’s just basic mechanical shit. That’s not mysticism. I’m not interested in ghosts and spirit worlds. If I’m going to have transcendence, I want to be able to touch it.

Swervin’ back to Brave New World. One other thing I liked about that show was the AI system called Indra which must be a reference to the concept of Indra’s Net.

GM: And as you know the drug in the show is Soma, which is Huxley’s creation. I just figured if Huxley named the drug Soma… if he had predicted AI, which is one thing he didn’t predict, I think he would have stuck with the Sanskrit and called it Indra.

Indra was my notion for explaining a lot of stuff that didn’t make sense in Huxley’s book. Why are there Epsilons? Why does the World State need a labor force? The book is about the consequences of capitalist mass production, mass consumption, mass destruction, because Huxley had moved to Hollywood and he’d seen the consumer society in full flood and witnessed the world of glamorous unreality — the talkies — which was happening. The whole thing is his attempt to deal with the impact of Ford and Hollywood. As I said, the one thing he didn’t think of was AI. So, the question became how could you make sense of a lot of the things he didn’t make sense of? 

And the idea came up of having a computer network that ran on human brains. We have all those neurons and all that capacity there. So instead of having a central server, the computer is a distributed network that runs on the brains of everyone in the World State. That was designed to solve the problem created by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking who were both terrified that AI was going to rise up and take over, steal our jobs, and occupy our homes in a kind of immigration nightmare gone sci-fi.

So, I thought, what if you made a computer network that required human brains to run on? It wouldn’t make sense to kill us. It wouldn’t want to kill us. But what it might do is organize us more efficiently. So that might explain a lot of the stuff Huxley didn’t bother to deal with.

The network starts to self-organize and it creates this homeostatic caste system, like a hive. It stratifies people and what it gives them in return is happiness. In Brave New World, the ultimate commodity is happiness. There’s no love, no money, but if you could make everyone happy even if they’re up to their necks in shit, then you’ve won. That was the idea. To create a computer network that doesn’t want to kill people. So, the reason why there are Epsilons — the reason people do jobs and manual labor, is because the computer needs its components to be fit and healthy. Rather than mechanize them, with everyone just slobbing out, it needs citizens to be super fit. So, they are always having sex, they are always playing sport, they are always working. They have pointless jobs that encourage them to be fit and healthy. That was the idea. The Indra network solved a lot of problems and I think it was one of the elegant additions to Huxley’s original.

Then who created the network in the story? Who gave birth to the AI?

GM:  Well, that was the original ten Controllers who started the World State. In Huxley’s book, there’s an anthrax pandemic that kills 2/3 of the world population and there’s only a couple of billion or whatever left. And everyone else gets together and forms a world scientific, anti-religious state because the killer plague was largely caused by political and religious conflict. So suddenly the World State arises to ensure that people won’t screw up so badly ever again. In our version, America is the only country that secedes from the World State. In Huxley, the Savage lands is just a Santa Fe reservation, a pueblo culture. In this version, the Savage Lands is all of North America. The idea was to imagine America 300 hundred years after the fall. People are sick, and the environment is fucked and there’s been six presidents in the last five months, and it costs three thousand dollars to buy a Mars Bar! America’s decision not to join the World State has brought the country to the brink of ecological, economical, and societal collapse. In this version, I think we got a richer background than even the original.

 

 

Let’s talk about The Invisibles tv show. Do you want to be the show runner? How much of a say are you going to have over the final product of The Invisibles?

GM: Honestly, as much as I can, but I would never want to be a showrunner. I just don’t want to do that job. You have to dedicate your entire life to the show. I’m kind of too old and I do too many other things to want to concentrate on one idea for the years it can take to make a TV show. So, I’m always going to have to work with someone. It worked so far with Happy! where Patrick MacManus and Brian Taylor did the heavy-lifting production-wise, and with Brave New World, David Weiner was a great collaborator.

With The Invisibles, it’s closer to home for me and I’m trying to keep as much of a grip on the material until that moment of having to hand it over to someone else and accepting that it will change. I think because it’s so unique to me and some of the ideas in it haven’t appeared anywhere else, there is a little bit more control. But yeah man, I’m three drafts in on the script and I like to think it’s getting better all the time. I still can’t talk about who it’s with now. It’s not with UCP, which it was at one point. Beyond that, it’s going well. It’s been fun. I’ve just been enjoying learning how to write in a different way. I love doing this now. Imagining an actor saying the lines and what it might look like. It’s giving me a completely different buzz from the comic stuff.

Would you ever consider directing?

GM: Nah, again. I don’t want to. Although having said that, I do have one short film to my name – I was asked to write and direct a short film as part of the 42 One Dream Rush project in 2010. The brief was that it had to be just 42 seconds long and based on a dream. David Lynch did one; Kenneth Anger, Asia Argento, and a bunch of other genuine directors and alternative artists, so I was in decent company. My film is an end-of-the-world epic called ‘The 42-Second Minute’ which is just a close-up on a clock! That’s my entire directorial resume right there. That’s enough for me on IMDB.

In December 2019, Deadline announced that your partner on Happy! Brian Taylor was going to be the showrunner for Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’ Illuminatus! as a TV show.

There seem to all these great stories of my youth now being made into television shows

GM: I think there’s a bunch of challenging stuff coming out and these shows add to that. I think people are looking for new myths to help us make sense of the curious times we’re in. I think you need those kinds of stories and works that are coming at our problems from all angles. Think of the opening of Illuminatus! and it’s though the eyes of a squirrel and through George Dorn and a bunch of other characters. There’s a multi-prismatic viewpoint of the world. And I think the minute they can start capturing that sort of thing in TV, showing it through the eyes of all kinds of different characters with different viewpoints and different world view and reality tunnels, it will be pretty interesting.

It’s the fractalization of the media — that’s what made it all possible. There was a time you just couldn’t get away with any of this. I remember a time I was pitching Doom Patrol to Warner’s and their response was that this is ‘wackadoodle’ and now it’s one of their best and most successful shows. And it’s totally based off the stuff that me and Richard Case did with that comic 30 years ago. Stuff people told me would never be adapted, could never be adapted. I think that the success of things like Doom Patrol, or Umbrella Academy or The Boys shows the way that people’s imaginations have been expanded by more fantastic or quirky shows, opening the doors to wilder and more personal stuff.

Speaking of this new myth and ethos, for a few years now you have been speaking about the Aeon of Ma’at. Is this the strongest current you see in humanity these days?

GM: It’s still a subcurrent at the moment, as the patriarchal Aeon of Osiris bows out kicking and screaming but I think it’s the only one that gives us any chance of survival right now. It’s not like this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. For me these ideas are interesting metaphors; they’re filters, and I find that if I apply this particular filter suggested by Kenneth Grant and Crowley it allows me to see things in a different relationship, which is very creatively rewarding if nothing else.  Viewing the world through the filter of these Thelemic notions, what’s happening right now all around us suddenly becomes not only obvious but almost predictable.  

It’s important to emphasize that this is not something to ‘believe’ in. This is a metaphor and not a belief system. But new metaphors can change whole cultures as we know from our history.

Crowley said that the general tenor of the last six thousand years of human civilization could be summed up by the personalities of a family of Egyptian gods. And the first two thousand years up to the birth of Christ, this was the Age of Isis, the Mother Goddess, where people were hunter/gatherers or early agrarians living off the land, relying on ‘Mother Earth’, the seasons and the tides. 

So, the next Aeon from Christ onward is the Aeon of Osiris, The Dying and Resurrected God. Osiris is also The Law Giver and He brings with Him The Written Word, so now Ideas can be enshrined in Books and Books can outlast Generations and they take on The Aura of Gods Themselves.

God Himself is present in the works of The Bible. God Himself is present in The Quran. So certainly, there’s this programming code language, the instructional Dad language, which can take people over just from reading a book and turn them into agents of The Dad God’s Expansionist, Controlling Agenda. This is when Nature goes from Provider to something that exists to be Tamed and Exploited. That’s The Aeon of Osiris.

Following Osiris, comes this fiery breakdown, the child Horus is the son of Osiris and he’s every jihadi, every warrior, every rock star reformer, every young man who sees as his sacred mission the tearing down of structures, the questioning of rules. It’s punk rock, “I gotta tear it all down.” But running in tandem with that, according to Kenneth Grant, is the shadow Aeon of Ma’at, Horus’ sister and she’s the goddess of truth and balance and harmony and all that Wonder Woman stuff.

For me, having gone through the Abyss of Daath in the Thelema structure of initiation — having undergone that in a really experiential and exhausting way, I found myself in the Qabbalistic sphere of Binah, and the entire world suddenly looked very different and made sense in different configurations which re-energized the work I’d been doing.  

So, I decided to accept that the Aeon of Ma’at was coming down fast and I tried to align all my thinking with that, which provided me with a new bunch of metaphors and ways of framing the world. Imagine all this division and deconstruction was just a corridor we’re passing through. All the fractioning and separation —that’s typical of Horus. We can see the hand of Horus in the modern-day tearing down of monuments and statues. He’s kicking the fuck out of formerly stable systems all around the world. That’s exactly what you would expect of this spirit that Crowley said manifested first in 1913. But for me, I think he made his presence felt quite clearly on 9/11.

You can easily organize the evidence to suggest that there is an Aeon of Horus occurring now. Where systems are being taken down, where everything’s being questioned and audited, and the past is subject to major revision. So, there’s also some fun to be had in thinking “Ok, if this is actually playing out in some symbolic fashion, then what might the Aeon of Ma’at look like, artistically?’

And to me it looks like the rise of marginalized voices, it looks like more women coming into the discourse. It looks like trans people coming into the discourse. It looks like all the opportunities for groups who were disempowered by the Patriarchy, who couldn’t speak before to have their say.

Ma’at – what would her signature disease be? Well it might be a distributed network, a viral malady that could attack all of humanity. What would happen if she emptied the houses of the old gods as a show of possibility? You remember at the height of the first lockdown, all the churches were empty, all the sports stadiums were empty, all the mosques were empty, all the temples were empty. So, the Dad God had nowhere to go.

In Britain, I know, and I’m sure in America, there was a strange uprising of praise for care workers. People would go out every Thursday here and bang on pots and pans and basically thank the nurturing spirt, this caring spirit, for its very existence. It was a very religious, ritualistic thing that we were all doing. That’s Ma’at right there. Then there’s mother nature with hurricanes tearing down borders, storms ravaging everyone’s homes. 

It all suddenly makes sense in a new context if you use the filter of Ma’at to look at the world. For me, I’ve found some creative applications for it, like in Brave New World and the Wonder Woman comic that I’ve done.

Let’s talk about Magick. How does one get better at it?

GM: By doing it on a regular basis! 

It’s like a martial art or a musical talent. 

If you dedicate yourself to learning and practice, if you read other magician’s accounts, if you pay attention, then you start to notice details that the less-engaged will miss and this allows you to Do Things that other people may regard as magical or even supernatural. 

Just like a stage conjurer, or a great guitarist, or a gifted actor or artist can do. 

It’s just about 

Really Paying Attention 

and 

Doing The Work 

to 

See What Happens. 

It’s just a way of looking at things in a fresh light and then working with this augmented version of reality in ways that can appear supernatural. 

One of magic’s main attractions involves Bringing Things into Being, from The Conception or Thought all the way to solid materiality. 

Making The Insubstantial Tangible.

But there’s also a whole other thing. Magic is about DELIBERATELY inducing Unusual States of Consciousness. 

Some of these States of Consciousness have been called Gods because they feel Super-Organized and Positive, and some of them can be called Demons because they feel Chaotic, Violent, Hateful and Perverted or Whatever. 

That’s Part of Magic. It’s as simple as 

'HOW Can You Create 

Different States of Consciousness'? 

Magic uses Spells or Rituals, some developed over many centuries, to stimulate Specific Focused States of Consciousness, whether Demonic or Angelic or God-like. 

Psychedelics and hallucinogens have been used by Shamans for the same Purpose.

And 

The Written Word 

along with 

The Expression of it 

are 

ALL Magic. 

In the sense that Words THEMSELVES hold such Tremendous Power.

GM: If you can limit The Language you can reduce The Scope of a Conjuror. George Orwell warns us about that in the appendices to 1984. 

If you restrict The Language, if you make it impossible to express Abstract Ideas, then you put boundaries on people’s Ability to Think Creatively or Communicate Certain Concepts. It DOES Work. 

Words shouldn’t have the kind of Power and Meaning that we attribute to them but most of Us grew up in The Aeon of Osiris, where words have been really important and fundamental to Human Progress. 

Words mean The Law, Words mean The Bible, or The Constitution, Words define The Divine Rules by which We Abide. The 10 Commandments.

As any Writer can tell you; 

Words are just things that 

DANCE AROUND 

when you Play with Them. 

They can mean all kinds of different things. 

They bring with them the distortions of interpretation where The Words of Christ – ‘Love Your Enemies’ – can be twisted to motivate bloody genocidal Crusades. 

I think Wilson was trying 

to undermine people’s fear of 

The PERCEIVED Authority 

and 

Power of Words 

as Things in Themselves.

For sure. There are some big words that have been added to the dictionary over the last 20 years, specifically Beyonce’s ‘bootylicious.’

GM: Well exactly, there you go man. But still I don’t exactly know what it’s describing, but I can almost taste it!

Adding on the to the notion of Words and symbols being charged with magic, they have also been charged through the increasing amounts of propaganda over the course of the 20th Century and into today. 

Isn’t that something that RAW is constantly reminding readers, that propaganda is real, and lots of it feeds off your base emotions, like anger and fear. Most people don’t recognize that cuz they haven’t seen the FNORDS!

GM: It’s more like people’s sense of the immense energy compressed into certain words. It’s not the word itself – as Wilson reminds us ‘fuck’ is a ‘bad’ word but it doesn’t sound much different from ‘folk’, a ‘good’ word, and it means the same as ‘coitus’, another ‘good’ word. So where exactly does the wickedness and dirtiness of ‘fuck’ reside?

Words become fetishized for reasons good or bad and the more fetishized they are, the more taboo they become, which confers an aura of outlaw sexiness that attracts some people to them.

Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bob Wilson himself, all made a point of saying that words should not be given this kind of power because once they have this power, they can become fetishized and weaponized. If you de-power a word then it can’t be used to trigger other people in the same reliable way, but we’re just not in that phase, with the dislocated politics of culture right now. I think people got it right to take down some of these structures right now and perhaps it’s okay to retire certain radioactive, abusive terms as long as we make sure we’re creating new words in other areas.

As a for instance, when I was a kid there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience. I’ve been non-binary, cross-dressing, ‘gender queer’ since I was 10 years old, but the available terms for what I was doing and how I felt were few and far between. We had ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ both of which sounded like DSM classifications rather than lifestyle choices! I didn’t want to be labelled as medical aberration because that’s not how it felt, nor was it something cut-and-dried and done. I didn’t want to ‘transition’ or embody my ‘female’ side exclusively, so I had no idea where I fit in.

Terms like ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary’ only came into vogue in the mid-90s. So kids like me had very limited ways of describing our attraction to drag and sexual ambiguity. Nowadays there’s this whole new vocabulary, allowing kids to figure out exactly where they sit on the ‘color wheel’ of gender and sexuality, so I think it’s OK to lose a few contentious words when you are creating new ones that offer a more finely-grained approach to experience.

When we make the jump to a non-Roman-alphabet-based emoji language for purposes of radio telepathic communication, things will change once more.

This conversation of neutralizing the charge from taboo words is also a premise of RAW’s Ishtar Rising, which you wrote the introduction of the newest reprinting of the book by Hilaritas Press. 

Also, in that book, Wilson explores the mythical trope of the underground journey, something explored and unpacked in nearly all his books.

Joseph Campbell has some cool stuff to say about the Underground Journey, mainly that in all his studies of world myths he had observed two types of Underground Journey stories. 

One type was when the underground swallows up a poor soul like the whale did to Jonah. 

When this happens, the sole purpose of The Seeker is to just Survive The Ordeal and Return to The Surface in one piece. 

The second type of journey through the underground occurs when the hero or heroine must descend into The Depths and Kill a Monster. 

Campbell mentions one myth where The Hero must Slay A Dragon then Drink its Blood to gain its Power and move on and continue their Quest. 

Campbell associates this Killing of The Dragon and Drinking its Blood as an integration of our Shadows into our psyches. 

By integrating these elements of ourselves we then gain the sort of Personal Power needed to live a joyful and energetically engaged life.

GM: Yeah, and the story of The Underground Journey in Britain often involves someone finding A Cave where he sees all of King Arthur’s knights asleep just waiting for the time of England’s greatest need when they will have to rise up and fight The Final Battle against Evil. 

So that’s a more passive version of The Story. 

Someone goes in and finds these Sleeping Warriors. 

That’s The Personal Power, that’s The Higher Self that will arise when you need it most.

Wilson has a Dark Side Version of this exact legend at the end of Illuminatus with the undead Nazi battalions awaiting their orders to rise from Lake Totenkopf and reclaim The World!

What advice do you have for the magicians out there who have A Story to Tell and want to storm The Reality Studio?

GM: Tell a Different Story. Tell A Fresh Story that speaks to its times and the people around you. A Story that offers Possibilities, Exit Strategies, rather than Apocalypse and Ruin. I can’t see that there’s anything else…

In the Wonder Woman book I’m doing, for instance, I’ve actively avoided writing The Boy Hero Story that’s so ubiquitous as to seem inescapable —  the familiar story of The One, The Champion, the Joseph Campbell monomyth thing that drives so many Hollywood movies and YA stories. 

We’ve seen it. The Lion King. The callow youth loses Mom or Dad, or his Comfortable Place in The Tribe, and he has to fight his way back to save the kingdom from its corrupt old leader, before claiming the captive Princess and becoming The New King and… ad infinitum. 

The Circle of Life if it only applied to boys. 

I thought, "Where is The Mythic Heroine’s Story?" 

In Ishtar Rising, Wilson talks about the myth of Inanna, and how she goes down into Hell and has to give up everything of herself to gain the Wisdom and Experience she can Bring Back to Her Tribe. 

[ Which is The Story of Alice in Wonderland, actually. And, of  Star Trek : Discovery ] 

Privileging The Network rather than The Sovereign Individual.

And so, as I thought about the differences between The Hero’s and The Heroine’s Journey, it gave me a bunch of different modes to work in. 

Finding ways to avoid telling The Boy Hero story again was quite liberating. 

It just gave me a bunch of new ideas, an interesting new way of telling stories that didn’t rely on the framework of The Hero’s Journey that Campbell talks about.

Playing the devil’s advocate here. Today there is a lot of fervor around Identity, and there is one strong of thought that people can never truly understand what it is like walking in the shoes of Others. 

Some may ask why a white man would seek to tell the story of a woman, from her perspective, instead of just sticking to What He Knows, Being a Man. 

How authentically Real is that Character or Story, etc.?

GM: It’s important to air These Feelings for debate. I must admit, with all respect, that I COMPLETELY disagree with The Idea That We Cannot Understand One Another.

Firstly, there’s a major obvious problem about coming at things from this perspective — if fundamentally, we cannot TRULY Know or have any Meaningful Opinion on What it Feels Like to be X, then we may as well STOP LISTENING to ANYTHING Anyone Else has to Say about Their Personal Experience, on The Basis That it can only be IRRELEVANT to Our SPECIFIC Lives!

If I can never TRULY Understand You without Walking in Your Shoes and vice versa, WHAT'S THE POINT of Listening or Talking to ANYONE about Our experience? What’s The POINT of Writing Stories, or Protesting, or Making Art if experience cannot by its nature be communicated and understood by ANYONE who has not shared The Experience of The Artist, or The Writer?

I think we all know it doesn’t really work that way in The Real World. We don’t need to BE a thing to have some Understanding of How it Operates. 

People can be great Veterinarians without personally experiencing the day-to-day Inner Lives of Dogs and Cats. 

I can read Solzhenitsyn and shed empathic tears for The Inmates of the Gulag without having to REPRISE their EXACY experience.

To think otherwise might be, I suspect, a Symptom of Narcissism painted into its inevitable corner, its Private Echo Chamber – destructive, divided, atomized, individualistic to the point of self-abnegation – and indicative of Late stage Osiris pathology.

And you know, We actually DO Understand one another in so many ways. 

We can imagine what it’s like to live someone else’s life –— or we can have our imaginations enflamed by well-told tales of other people’s lives and thrill to the ways they resonate exactly with our own lived experience. 

As a Writer, I KNOW This to Be True.

We’ve been observing one another’s behavior and drawing conclusions since The Dawn of Humanity. 

People AREN'T so complicated or new that the basic functions remain a mystery. 

All our plays, poems, songs and stories are a record of our attempts to understand ourselves and one another. 

The fact that Greek drama or Shakespeare still speaks to us is evidence that basic human nature has remained fairly consistent for thousands of years.

We figured one another out a long, long time ago.

And ultimately, I’ll say again, we are all the same organism. What we’re seeing is ring fingers fighting with thumbs, eyelashes screaming that eyebrows can never understand them! 

To point that out is probably an anathema in this current time of Narcissistic Inflation but it will be understood as a Fact of Nature in The End.

Maybe I’m wrong and we’re all fucked because humans are a kind of cancer-creature and our only purpose is to destroy each other and all other lifeforms on our planet… there’s still time for Agent Smith to be proved right!

I think everyone should have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We can all learn from one other but that means communicating; that means starting with the assumption we do have a common basis for genuine understanding even if our specific circumstances can never be repeated or totally understood by anyone other than ourselves. We all hurt, we all feel joy, we all get turned on, or scared. We all experience loss, and lack of self-worth and feel badly treated by the world at times.

And I understand why everyone should talk and tell stories from their own position you know but it’s also very useful – and a major human talent –  to imagine how other people feel and consider how the world might look through their eyes.  

And you do that by staying informed, listening to voices even when you disagree with them –—and by employing empathy and imagination to put yourself in their place as best as you’re able.

These are difficult times. I’m not a guru. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. There’s seven in a half billion people and it often seems they all fucking hate each other! Yet they all want everyone else to agree with their tiny, restricted, localized points of view. And they’ve all got a piece of ground to defend against perceived foes. I get it, but ultimately, we’re all one thing, one massive organism that’s going through difficult growing pains at the moment, so maybe we need to start thinking about what makes us alike, rather than different.

I hope so

GM: Well, this is part of the boiling process. Capitalist Consumer Culture has clearly reached its LIMITS and we either Advance to a More Efficient, Stable, Less-Suicidal and Aggressive Engagement with other people and our environment or we go extinct as a species, taking all the whales and tigers and gorillas with us, before we even figured out how to talk to them and hear their stories! There are few options remaining.

The current questioning, the judgmental audit of where we are and how we got here, is a Horus thing. We can only hope we sublimate from here via Ma’at into something more nurturing and sustainable.

It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.

GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. 

The Echoes of The Inquisition, accusations of ‘WrongThink’, The Return of Original Sin, The Demonic GLEE taken in any stumble or falter from The Approved Path seems almost mediaeval. 

It’s terrifying. 

The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by Rules That Grow ever more Authoritarian and Specific every day. 

Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading Power by The Osiris Energy of The Last 2000 years, now gone Rotten and Unsustainable but trying HARDER to Keep Everything and Everybody under Increasingly Deranged levels of Control in every area of our lives.

Writers and artists can find more reasons to stop their expression than ever before it seems. The voice of Criticism and Judgement is easier to find these days, just doom scroll through various social media sites and it’s all over the place.

GM: I regard it all as new input. As tough as it is, there’s an excitement. It’s Making Me Think, it’s making me question myself and my assumptions, it’s making me write different things. I love ideas that Challenge My Thinking — even if I don’t AGREE with them in The End.

 

What are your thoughts on Simulation Theory these days?

GM: I was reading New Scientist recently and one of the correspondents on the letters page threw out this random idea that really resonated with me.  The writer was saying that if we live in a simulation then perhaps the world in the past was not as detailed or as high fidelity as it we experience it now! There have been upgrades, developments. In computer game terms, think of the difference between Space Invaders and Red Dead Redemption 2!

And I thought, wow, wouldn’t that be funny if, you know, those medieval painters with the flat landscapes and no perspective, what if they were accurately representing an earlier, more simplistic iteration of our simulated reality? What if they were simply portraying what the world actually looked like in the early stages of the simulation! What if these artists were recording what they saw and that’s how it looked?

Suddenly I saw the history of art in a whole new light! I thought how cool it would be if the cave paintings at Lascaux represented caveman reality perfectly – that’s how the simulated world really looked in an early development of the simulation when we were all just stick figures with antlers and the animals were sketchy semi-abstracts…

I love that idea; that the simulation is becoming more complex and well-rendered as it goes along – and we can see where it’s been.

It almost seems like it will become harder to break the Matrix as it becomes more refined, nuanced and easier to mistake for reality. It is interesting looking at the Simulation theory with the idea of calling it a metaphor for the same thing that the Gnostics came up with.

GM: Yeah, the idea that the universe is a counterfeit created not by god but by some sort of underling of god… that was the gnostic idea. It’s not so much about breaking the Matrix, I feel it’s more about learning to work with it. In the movie, once Neo figures out how it works, he becomes a magician, a superhero. The counterfeit world in the movie seems much more fun than the real one.

 Can magic be a useful tool for navigating VR and AR in IRL?

GM: Yeah, because magic is just about adding meaning or enchantment to the environment and to your life. Magic spices up everything; it’s like hot sauce! Once you add magic, the universe comes to life and starts to dance with you. If you choose to be an exploiter, a black magician, it’s more like a lap dance but otherwise it’s a tango! As I’ve said before, it’s easy to add magic to things. If you decide a certain stone could use some magic power, then carry it with you long enough and it will become first a good luck talisman and will finally accrue the significance and meaning of a Holy Grail if it’s given enough time and attention. So, the more meaning you can add to experience, the more magical it will seem. It’s not difficult or ‘occult’ at all. Magic makes everything more exciting, rich and alive and that’s its job. The more magic you can create around something the more special your interaction with it will feel.