Abstract Cores

If Aleister Crowley had acquainted himself with Carlos Castaneda's postulate of "intent," he would have defined "intent" as "will" or a certain fundamental direction of one's life, observed indirectly but quite clearly through its effects and consequences. AC once said that "it doesn't matter how many times a billiard ball strikes the table cushions after being struck by the cue; it doesn't matter how complex the ball's trajectories may be; the resulting trajectory will always be one and only one." Despite Schrödinger's axiom, we understand what he meant. The phenomenon described here is invisible, yet it exists, mobile and dynamic; it takes physical form through crystallization or complex manifestations. The ball's stopping point is determined at the very moment the cue strike creates the initial impulse. And perhaps, even earlier.

Any act of intellectual or artistic creation begins as an idea – and precedes the idea as an impulse from a place unknown to us. But what could be more ephemeral than an idea? And, on the other hand, what moves us more than an "understood" idea? Some thinkers have asserted that any book, painting, sonata, sculpture, machine, symphony, or tapestry already existed before its appearance in our physical world; that its "intent" was already present; that the "tendency" of that specific thing had entered into being.

Castaneda claimed to have seen his texts in Dreaming. I don't find this far-fetched. Moreover, there is nothing new or even unusual about it. Long before Castaneda, there was a notion that a certain series of events or stories (e.g., Greek mythology) could itself be a type of cyclically recurring wave of fundamental energy which, while remaining constant in its basic structure, endlessly unfolds variations of its themes in people's daily lives.

Using the myth of Oedipus, Freud showed that identical imprints (ingrained insertions) exist in people's psyches. He noted their similarity to developing organisms or stories that continue to be told. Jung extended this idea to the concept of "archetypes." He argued that the entire human psyche and all culture consist of a set of building blocks: universal core structures that manifest in specific images. Archetypes are inaccessible to direct consciousness. They are elements of the "unconscious." But they can take various forms in dreams; they can give us advice, hints, and signs; they can silently infuse thoughts, feelings, or actions – invisible and omnipresent abstract cores of being.

I heard Jung's story about a patient diagnosed with psychosis. One day she told him that "the sun has a tail." She saw this tail and said that when the sun's tail pointed east, the wind blew east, and when the tail pointed west, the wind accordingly blew west. Jung concluded that the woman had gone mad. A few years later, he was conversing with an African native and was surprised when the native told him: "Today the sun's tail points east." Jung asked: "Does the sun have a tail?" The native replied: "Of course. It controls the wind. The wind blows in the direction the tail points!" (I am quoting this from memory – I simply saw a 1950s film featuring an interview with C. Jung.)

Jung realized that certain psychic structures exist, for which the best epithets would be "mysterious" or "ethereal." Nevertheless, they objectively exist in our reality. The "mad" German woman saw the same thing as the African native. This means that the "sun's tail" was an archetype or an abstract core, folded into a special form – it was something very ancient, something infinitely repeating and familiar to each of us: and have you never been surprised by the accuracy of biblical prophecies? These prophecies arose from dreams and ecstatic visions – precisely the same material is received today by people we consider abnormal, drugged, or "primitive." Why are biblical predictions so accurate? What mechanism is at play here? Quantum mechanics postulates that our concept of time – as a continuous, unidirectional sequence – might be an illusion or a convention; a particular perspective on a truly existing multidimensional phenomenon. Can one part of time jump into another, like a spark on the electrodes of a Tesla coil? And are "stories" structures that precede being? A kind of initial impulse, awaiting embodiment in form – first in a dream, and then in concrete reality? I understand "intent" as the equivalent of the Chinese term "yang" (the primary impulse through which various manifestations occur). Its counter-pair, "yin," receives the seed of "yang" and gives birth to it in the material world.

Cabalists would attribute "intent" to the elements of "fire" and/or "spirit" and place it in the "emanative" world of Atziluth. The impulses of this world are received and transformed by the "formative" world of Briah, which then gives physical birth to what was once a dream or a vibration in the air.

A single sperm and a single egg, combined, are pure potential. We feel that we understand how the code or the process of fertilization works. However, for a long time, it was considered as magical and mysterious as, for example, a prophetic dream: We still don't know exactly how it works. People have gathered many disparate details about "life," but they have yet to understand what it truly is.

Sergey Izrigi

Mayk Kremer's reflections align well with the opinion of a certain Chinese sorcerer:

"Castaneda's Abstract Cores remind me of Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields. There, too, are nine invisible dimensions; the building blocks of the universe, classes of objects, and even concepts like habits, behavior, and instincts. Morphogenetic fields, in turn, resemble Plato's idea of forms – timeless, spaceless templates for objects of being. But, as a magician, I have always been astonished at what all this has to do with a piece of rice cake. How does the existence of these fields, forms, cores, intents, and karmas relate to my forty acres of land and an eternally hungry mule?"