Frontiers 6 - Precognition

Can we see the future? Is there any way that we can rely on our perception to predict certainly rather than our reason to extrapolate uncertainly what will happen in the future? Since reasoning has a very poor track record on prediction in practice (observe The Economist on the 2008 Crash) and often the best personal predictions are those made on instinct, it is not axiomatic that analysing the future should follow the same patterns of thought as analysing the past, especially as the data that we require is simply not there. The past has things and events in it which we might possibly know and any failures of analysis come down to our imperfect knowledge of those things and events. The future, of course, has no events or things about which we can reason except as extrapolations from the past and the present - and, as any fool investor knows, past performance is no predictor of certain future success.

The problem is that, notwithstanding the research and ideas of J.W Dunne in the 1930s and others since, we have no hard scientific evidence of our being able to know future events and things although that only means that we have no evidence of precognition and not that precognition does not and cannot exist.The most obvious challenge to precognition is that our experience of the world says that no effect can exist before its cause. Cognitive biases are also well attested that give cause to be suspicious of many claims of precognition. Yet what is puzzling perhaps - given the widespread fascination with the alleged phenomenon - is why no independent and open-minded scientist without a prejudice in either direction has yet conducted a series of experiments that can fully stand up to peer scrutiny in order to decide the matter one way or the other - either finally to quash this last bastion of irrationality or, alternatively, show some interesting effect that needs material explanation. Those experiments that come nearest to the necessary scientific criteria tend to show that there is no such phenomenon but not decisively.

Perhaps the only suggestive finding that one would think would be explored further, if only to eliminate it from the enquiry, is the possibility that precognitive effects exist for some persons in a heightened state of erotic or other arousal. This is intuitively interesting because, inconveniently for scientific minds, if shown to be true, it offers the hint of proof for the practice of sex magick and the claims of Alastair Crowley, altered states and magick and Austin Osman Spare. Of course, it has not been shown to be true, merely a possibility to be investigated further.

The argument that no effect can exist before its cause is not an absolute truth that can be demonstrated philosophically. It is true enough about the world in which we live and in which we experiment but it is not necessarily true. The best that can be said is that it is pragmatically true for a species whose existence arises from a series of causes and effects, whose relationship to the world is one of cause and effect and whose observations have always been made under conditions where time always flows in one direction and where no effect can exist before its cause.

Unfortunately, this also means that, though philosophically it might be possible to conceive of an effect existing before its cause (that time can flow backwards), scientifically and pragmatically we are 'stuck' in a world of forward moving time. Those physicists, psychologists and neuroscientists who poo-poo the possibility of parapsychology are probably to all intents and purposes correct - within their observable world. However, the assumptions of selective bias, unconscious perception, self-fulfilling prophecy, the 'law of large numbers' and memory biases may equally be presumptions since no psychologist can possibly know what is happening in another person's mind at any one time. That cognitive biases are possible or even probable is a reasonable working assumption but that they are certain is not something that any scientist can or, if they are honest, would claim.

Perhaps we should simply accept that 'to all intents and purposes' precognition is not possible from the perspective of not only rational science but also usefulness and probability but also that it is not proven that it does not exist simply because such a claim is impossible to prove. Just one precognition that is true by one person amongst the human billions taking place at just one moment in the long history of the species would mean that ... precognition is possible. And there are philosophical reasons for not entirely closing the door on the possibility because of a healthy scepticism about any scientist who makes absolute claims to knowledge (which no good scientist will do). But the 'to all intents and purposes' is sufficient to make precognition a non-issue for social and cultural investment. As we suggest below, the lack of interest in research may owe more to psychological barriers in dealing with the implications of a definitive answer far more than it does to rational engagement with the utility of such research. After all, the horrible discovery that sex magick might work might seriously frighten the horses.

In an excellent overview of the state of play in research as at May 2014, Schwarzkopf tell us what is at stake:

Such findings of “psi” effects fuel the imagination and most people probably agree that there are things that current scientific knowledge cannot explain. However, the seismic nature of these claims cannot be overstated: future events influencing the past breaks the second law of thermodynamics. If one accepts these claims to be true, one should also be prepared to accept the existence of perpetual motion and time travel. It also completely undermines over a century of experimental research based on the assumption that causes precede effects. Differences in pre-stimulus activity would invalidate baseline correction procedures fundamental to many different types of data analysis.

Which is precisely why precognition is recognised in our series as a Frontier. It is not only the implications for science and religion if a scientifically validated discovery of precognition is presented to the public that matter here but equally the implications for human culture of a major unquestionable test of the claim that appears to prove or disprove beyond any reasonable doubt (and in a replicable form) that precognition exists. At the moment, the fact that psi has not been discovered to be true is not taken (by any reasonable scientist who has not turned his appropriate scepticism into a rationalist cult) to mean that it is not existent but only that it cannot be demonstrated to exist and so only 'to all intents and purposes' does not exist. The door is open at all times to a genuinely fool-proof replicable experiment by open-minded scientists that demonstrates its probability. This must then raise questions of the sort raised by Schwarzkopf.

This is where it gets interesting because the recurring problem in parapsychological research is poor methodology and blatant distrust between the scientists involved. It should not, however, be impossible - though one suspects rationalist and believing partisans are both reluctant subconsciously to put the matter to the test, given what is at stake culturally, lest the experiment comes up with the 'wrong answer' - to construct a devastatingly simple large-scale controlled psi investigative experiment using artificial intelligence within a few years as the objective assessor of the statistics involved, including such variables as sexual or erotic or other emotional excitation. This is the Frontier to be broken - a decisive experiment that sends our culture in one clear direction or the other.

There are probably no better clues to the problems presented by psychical phenomena than those provided by Professor Broad, a serious mid-twentieth century Cambridge analytical philosopher but also twice President of the Society for Psychical Research. Psychic phenomena, in his view, would challenge five basic limiting principles of philosophy (he proposed nine basic limiting factors in philosophy but it is these five that 'stick' in this case). He is not saying that these limiting principles actually are limits but that they are only unquestioned principles that underpin our view of the world and are hard to refute in terms of experience, habit and experiment. Here, I update the five limiting principles to take account of some beliefs and theories about quantum mechanical processes that have emerged as classical physics has not so much been superceded as added to. Part of the problem of 'psi' is that it does not fit into a materialist view of the world based on classical physics but that quantum physics has introduced concepts that seem to permit the theoretical possibility of something materialist permitting, in turn, something approximating psi effects. It is quite possible that one, some or all of the limiting principles could be shown to be philosophically unsound or not quite as sound as they appear at first sight though, as humans living in a human-centred material world, the struggle to do so and be credible is immense. However, accepting that the limiting principles as not necessarily absolutely true philosophically gives us an argument similar to that which notes how 'common sense' is frequently overturned by science: in short, current science may be being faced with subversion by the possibility that it is the common sense now to be overturned by itself.

• Backward causation - that effects can precede causes is the most evident limiting principle although at the quantum level, it is clear that there is plausible theory that posits something like this actually occurring though not in ways that affect the world which we experience. Quantum backward causation is the straw which those determined to see psychic phenomena as really existing will clutch at without any proven basis for any link between quantum physics and psychic experience other than belief. However, if a 'psi' phenomenon is proven, the scientists have nowhere else to go but here to describe what is happening without having to abandon a materialist conception of the universe. Cause and effect will not be abandoned, just redefined in the context of new thinking about time and matter.
• An argument is that, if minds are non-physical and the world is physical, there is no means by which non-physical things can act on the world without actually being physical. Psychokinesis would seem to demonstrate that dualism is wrong (a major event in philosophy) and that monist materialism is correct, raising only the issue of the physical process by which minds can move matter - which brings us back to the current fantasies but theoretical realities of quantum level events in the mind having physical effects.
• If minds can actually communicate with each other (as in 'mind-reading') then the notion of minds being of a separate substance from the physical might start to fall apart (although, of course, it is possible, that insubstantial entities might be able to communicate on equal terms even if that stil begs the question of how insubstantiality communicates with substantiality in order to crerate effects). Skepticism about the non-interaction of apparently non-physical things becomes dubious. The cat is set amongst the pigeons because scientists, again, either have to accept some mystical spiritual explanation or seek a material mechanism by which information can flow over distances between minds. This, again, might be resolved by minds being material and being connected at another level of materiality - which brings us back again to quantum physical effects as the only current road to go down (or to postulate some materiality undiscovered).
• The ability to perceive events in other places than those available to the senses in one body located in one particular place not only offends human reason but offends our assumptions about perception, that perception is limited to five senses plus prioperception (our groundedness in the world), in order to add a sixth sense or set of senses. This is the key claim of those who champion a strong view of parapsychology and the subject of the experimentation by these scientists (for scientists at their best, they are) though not yet proven. If they do prove the existence of a sixth sense, then the offense to reason begins to place reason itself in doubt insofar as reasoning in the human being is calculated on the evaluation of sensory inputs combined with logic. Mental reasoning finds itself having to take account of intuitions that may be pulling data private to the individual from other sources that cannot be evaluated by an outsider ... such 'romanticism' becomes 'true' if science finds that the mind's perception of things outside immediate sense-data observable by others is true. Psychology and the social sciences become far more problematic as alleged sciences on the uncovering of such a 'sixth sense'. Power shifts a little from the expert to the 'volk'.
• A final limiting principle is that persons cannot live without their bodies. The denial of this belief represents the very heart of the transition from folk culture to modern rational and scientific culture. It offends or puzzles many folk with strong beliefs in spiritual matters but educated and rational man can see no means by which persons can live without their bodies. Elaborate schema have been proposed by such religiously-minded scientists as Tipler to give persons their bodies back at the resurrection of the dead but few are persuaded according to the dictates of reason. The idea that persons can live without their bodies is a matter of mere belief while speculative transhumanist science still presupposes that persons as information can only survive if embodied elsewhere - in machines as emulations. Although the least likely of all parapsychological phenomena to be true (because of the complexity of the claim compared to simple experiences of sensory psi), if ghosts (for example) were shown to be 'true', then the idea of insubstantial immateriality as capable of existence in the world as (say) pure thought or experience shatters the rational materiality of the age or at least forces the scientific community to reconsider the material underpinning of reality, It might lead to a sceptical belief that we cannot know our own deep materiality: the uncertainty in itself will shift power a little back from the expert to the volk.

So where we are left is in a state where any form of proven psi (not only precognition) might unravel the materialist assumptions of our time (and so the ultimate reliability of science) if science cannot reasonably quickly and certainly come up with an alternative material theory that can be tested through experiment. It is one things to prove that 'psi' exists. It is entirely another to demonstrate how it works if it exists. The 'mystery' left by scientific inability to prove rather than surmise the processes involved leaves sufficient gap for folkish spirituality to slip through the gaps. There is no philosophical reason why any of these unravellings of accepted reality could not be theoretically possible even if they cannot currently be reasonably argued for. All it takes is one piece of super-verified, fully tested, replicable proof that backward causation exists beyond the quantum level, that quantum effects have material effects on higher levels of matter, that psychokinesis happens, that the 'sixth sense' exists or that a ghost exists (the least likely of all) and a lot of rethinking has to be done about the nature of matter (though not necessarily about materialism) and of reality. Perhaps Cramer's ideas on testing retrocausality based on the quantum entanglement of photons (which might have important communications benefits) will get the funding and interest it requires. If it does and it proves retrocausality at the quantum level, then the first tiny crack may have appeared in our current cultural paradigm. A lot is at stake and scientists and funders seem to be steering clear of the psi area not only because of the unlikelihood of results given current understanding but also because the implications might be beyond what they can cope with in terms of career or mental models. It might be left to a major trading house or the Mars Programme to follow through on retrocausality but that still won't tell us anything about human precognition.

On the one hand, a decisive probability for precognition (even if highly specialised and rare), to take our main example, will raise questions about the second law of thermodynamics and so about the inherent nature of the cosmos that will overnight thrust our cosmology and physics from near-certainty into the more pragmatic realms of 'to all intents and purposes' true for nearly all available situations but yet not all. The gap created may encourage all sorts of spiritual nuts and loons to project their fantasies on to the results but that particular effect does not necessarily follow on from that cause. More likely, the discovery would have a lot of immensely clever mathematical minds considering how, why and when such things might be - assuming every aspect of the experiment had been passed as viable and replicable. It would be a revolutionary event if only because of its effects on the presumption of man in his claims to knowledge if no mathematician or physicist can come up with a viable explanation or an explanations that are not demonstrable except as dodgy but entertaining thought experiments ('speculative science').

On the other hand, a decisive and relicable proof that there really is no replicable scientific basis for precognition (and the psychologists have a slew of alternative explanations for most claimed phenomena) and the matter can be passed finally to the realm of private folk belief and left for its expansion into public life to the fraudster and aforesaid spiritual nuts and loons. Outside these areas, the elimination of precognition as last hope (for many) of the mystery of existence that underpins much private spiritual belief will be an important final cultural nail in the anti-materialist vision of our condition. Not enough to destroy it for all the reasons that make precognition still a viable subject for research today (no proof to date does not equate to non-existence of a phenomenon) but enough to make it an even stronger signifier of difference between the educated (and so culturally 'intelligent') and the uneducated (or culturally 'stupid').

So much is at stake and yet the lack of interest in this field - given the extent of folk belief in it - is curious from this perspective. It is as if no one actually wants to have to deal with the answer to the question. The risks of being proven wrong are far too great for the world-views of the competing radical spiritualist and radical materialist camps. Perhaps that final decisive set of experiments is held back because it is a weapon in the cultural equivalent of a nuclear exchange and some instinct - some sixth sense - stops the species from taking any decisive move that would force humanity to choose one or other fork in the road towards either absolute materialism or renewed uncertainty.

The Flaw in Pascal Beverley Randolph

In any history of the association of modern magickal thinking and sexuality, one of the ur-texts is the 'Magia Sexualis' of Pascal Beverley Randolph ['PBR'], a mid-nineteenth century American, but part of a broader body of work that was, in turn, part of the American transcendentalist approach to occultism. Randolph had a second round of influence, through the translation and interpretation of the work by Marie de Naglowska, in France but the historical importance of Randolph is not our primary concern here. What we want to do is critique his work from a modern perspective and see where this leads.

The flaw in P. B. Randolph's work is one very familiar to contemporary thinkers and not just those who set their stall on 'queer theory'. It is the very notion of polarity between male and female. Indeed, the flaw in all simple thought, one of the themes of our postings in general, is polarity - yin/yang, good/bad, male/female, love/hate and so on. It is convenient and it can be creative but it is not 'true'.

As regular readers will know (taking the last as one of many), I recognise the fundamental opportunity for difference between categories taken in the round - so that there is male and there is female - but there is no value judgement to be ascribed to either, certainly not in relation to each other. Human variation means that there is no exemplar of a 'type' and the Bell Curves of normality shade and overlap in complex and fascinating ways.

We have asserted elsewhere that the differences between the genders are real 'in the round' but are so highly specific and functional that attempts to extend the category that includes some specific attributes in order to represent some absolute, any absolute, is absurd. There are specific partial functions of feminity and masculinity with some public policy implications (and cultural codings overlaying these based on a reading of the functions for their use value in struggles for power or social cohesion) but there is no absolute quality of feminity or masculinity.

The terms of categorisation are always approximations, based on an averaging out of common attributes so that, as several friends have pointed out, a highly feminised male can still be a man, a highly masculinised female a woman and many entities between the two can be properly regarded as something else entirely.

In other words, the sexual relationship between persons can be ideologically 'genderised' as some sort of meeting of opposites or (in gay relations) of 'sames' but the actual practice of sexuality is far more interesting and complex than this, a matter of the 'magic' of personal rather than gender relations. To build a system around (say) a positive female pole and negative male pole, as PBR does, as if the earth's polarity and magnetism automatically applied to people, because of a primitive insistence on a debased form of microcosm reflecting macrocosm, is, to say the least, sloppy thinking.

As solipsistic poetic allegory, it may work but poetry is a perception of existence and not existence itself. This is not to argue that gender playfulness cannot incorporate such absurdities but only that, once understood to be absurd, we must, perforce, move on. Randolph, for example, writes that 'as in nature' the female attracts the male but, in fact, this was not a matter of 'nature' but one of culture, or rather his culture (a culture that determinedly persecuted him).

In another culture, the male attracts the female and the male attracts the male and the female the female and so on - his culture was the rigid culture of the dominant patriarchal male (much as I loathe the loaded feminist term 'patriarchy' as propagandistic distortion today, it does apply to gender relations in mid-nineteenth century church-going middle class Anglo-Saxon society) and his equally disturbed and disturbing fixed matriarchal counterpart.

But having excoriated PBR for writing nonsense at a strategic level, we can dig deeper into his poetic allegory and try to uncover what tactically exists of value in the false metaphor and a cod-scientific approach involving the volts and magnetism of a mid-nineteenth century American autodidact and fantasist. For, the essence of PBR's system is vitalism. Vitalism is not much liked scientifically or philosophically today but, taken as allegory rather than as 'truth', it represents the personal perception of the flow of biochemical change in a person and is a way of explaining what is not yet fully understood by science - the instincts of attraction and repulsion.

Some people are undoubtedly more 'vital' than others (which is not a value judgement about worth but merely an observation). Some have experienced unexplained attractions and repulsions whereas others go through life with no consciousness of their own connectedness to unexplained phenomena. PBR is making an honourable attempt to deal with and make use of a reality that will not bend itself easily to scientific investigation and, although his own system may be nonsense in relation to reality, his awareness of the phenomenon is generations ahead of his own culture.

Instead of repressing this vitalism, expressed most profoundly in sexual terms, he at least makes an honourable attempt to bring it into the open on terms that his generation might just understand - scientific materialism. He gets it wrong but then so did Karl Marx. Both, I contend, moved us forwards (as did Freud and Reich) without being 'right' and subsequent problems arise not from the authors of radical new ideas but from the dumb acceptance of them without critical thought after the event.

PBR, in linking sexual vitalism to another fascinating absurdity, magic, manages to bring in yet another aspect of the matter - the fact that for some persons in some situations sexual vitalism, as a practice rather than a theory, can lead to shifts in consciousness similar to those of some drugs. To extend this to magical purpose in the sense that sexual vitalism will lead to changes in the material world may pile on yet another absurdity in the eyes of many - until we start to consider that (as we have argued elsewhere) much of our reality is social.

Consciousness changes can shift our own viewpoint in regard to that social reality. Therefore, while the magician who thinks that will and magic will cause him to fly in the air is an utter fool, the 'magician' who believes he or she can use sexual vitalism to transform their personal nature and social presence is decidedly not.

However, the most effective argument against magical practice is generally that magical practitioners are not great advertisements for their own method. Their practices seem to be constantly associated with failure and social exclusion, with marginalisation and even with neurosis. To be successful appears to require that you embed yourself wholly in the reality presented by society and, although there is room for singular creativity in one line of endeavour (the way of the 'genius'), any attempt to question the broader grounds of false mass perception is to have one consigned to the mad house, the prison, the execution block or a troubled isolation (the modern solution). But this is deceptive on two grounds.

The first is that the marginalised and isolated are, in the first instance, drawn to desperate measures in order to integrate themselves into the social and yet to individuate. They are drawn to the fantastic and to the magical. The more marginalised they are (as was PBR as a mixed race petit-bourgeois in a racist aspirant and fast-growing society) then the more drawn they are towards such radical metaphors to explain their position. The history of voodoo in Haiti might be an exemplar of this relationship.

The second is that radical thinkers take enormous risks with their reputation to transform themselves and society. The massive dead weight of conventionalism with strike down the pioneer even if, in the long run of history, the flawed insights of that pioneer might prove themselves correct - Nietzsche, PBR, Crowley: all failures of a sort and yet ...

Any 'sensible' person would never think radically but would seek out the conventional, especially if they have a family to feed. Most do. Some simply give into necessity. Others are philosophical zombies, creatures of the social rather than individuals operating within the social. Things are probably better in this respect today compared to almost any previous age but there is still a price, even today, to be paid for not being a zombie and, living amongst zombies, many of us have to have dress in the stench of their kind so as not to be eaten alive.

As for PBR, his approach to sex magic is perhaps still worth reading but only in order to establish just how much he was embedded in the Christian culture of his day. His rules are filled with religiosity, involve complicated and ascetic limitations on behaviour that imply a sexual union that is over a month in preparation and has no serious understanding of sexual differences in orgasm.

Indeed, by the end of them, one's conclusion is that PBR is more concerned to make his congress moral and respectable than to encourage the sort of sexual energy that might transform consciousness. When he gets around to sexual positions, he seems open-minded and no doubt much fun was had but it is a sexuality surrounded by anxiety and magical protection and always conscious that respectability requires that the act be contained within a 'sacred' box.

PBR has nothing to teach us now about sexuality or consciousness except negatively - that is, he tells us that 150 years ago, the power of the conventional fear of sexuality was such that a person with a sense of sexual vitalism had to cloak his nature in the language of the 'enemy': ascetic, 'spiritual', theistic ... and that even a person whose 'passion' for the 'vital' forced him into the role of cultural maverick was forced to bend the knee to social convention if he was to be able to talk in any way about mutual male/female sexual love.

Of course his contemporaries were rutting around like crazy as all generations do but the language of the time meant that men and women had to inhabit separate linguistic environments - that of the prostitute and that of the home. PBR, to his credit, made a serious attempt to include women in a sexual dialogue and he compromised by bringing that dialogue into the Victorian hearth and this is what makes him a progressive force who was not without courage.

Unfortunately, the very act of speaking about the sexual in such a shared discourse proved shocking to Christian sensibilities and so this very mild-mannered and rather dull and exhausting sexual magic became demonised. An attempt to escape from zombie status and communicate sexual love was doomed in that culture at that time. Worse, those who went underground with it brought the compromising language of PBR into their 'spiritual' determinations of what sexuality was and should be and so the mastering ideology infected even the potential for resistance.

However, his existence as an underground figure, rarely actually read, helped to open the door to sexuality as something that could be spoken of between men and women. He was succeeded by equally brave women like Woodhull and Craddock who began a process of transformation that has led to today's freedom and openness. Even today, the American Evangelical Right would drag America and the world back to those neurotic and disturbed days when zombies ruled if they possibly could.

So, although PBR's system was scientific nonsense and his magic onerous and excessively essentialist, he should be lauded today for his eccentric courage and his preparedness to (at least) attempt to bring women into equal status, as sexual partners, with men. In this last he failed to take the final step and he remained 'the priest' but his determination to offer women rights to sexual pleasure (albeit in a weirdly religious framework) should make him a hero to all free persons. The right tribute would be to free his departed soul from the trammels of the religiosity that he felt it necessary to make part of himself to justify what really did not need to be justified at all - human freedom.

Traditionalism & Sexual Magick

Please note that this essay contains verbal material that is sexually explicit and those of an anxious or mildly neurotic disposition or who have an aesthetic distaste for such matters should not read on.

The problem with sexual magic or magick is its history - its practice has derived from the eclectic acquisition of many traditions under conditions where nothing might be said or broadcast to the world for fear of shame or, in certain societies, persecution.

But perhaps a future shift in Western consciousness about sexual autonomy (only one element in the debate about autonomy) does not lie in the appropriation of these traditions or the maintenance of the idea that, somehow, sexuality is so different and dangerous that it has to be surrounded by ritual and performance.

Perhaps sexuality is far more 'normal' than we think even if it contains risks that must be accounted for.

Doubts About Traditionalism

Take the tradition of the retention of semen. This is a Taoist convention apparently linked to longevity but it also emerges as karezza, almost certainly independently, in the modern West.

It links to 'coitus reservatus' (the standard use of Latin is often a clue to a neurotic refusal to face up to what is going on as 'normal') and there are Tantric equivalents.

Magical import has been placed on this practice with an elaborate ritualistic language of spirituality despite it largely being a) an attempt to accommodate high sexual energy with poor contraceptive methods and b) often emphasises the ability to extend male pleasure to a level believed to be spiritual without real regard for the 'vessel' (the woman).

Modern technology can now largely sweep away the fear of pregnancy (with a bit of common sense) even if, ironically, fear of disease now returns us to the condom quite quickly, so the central issue is b) - do such techniques really improve matters or are they based on 'false consciousness'.

We are reminded here that our Taoist friends were not scientifically well informed and, indeed, that they poisoned themselves with mercury intake. Their insights were 'a priori'.

Science seems to be telling us much that casts doubt on the Taoist model - orgasm is in itself a 'good' in terms of health and welfare and we do not now have to rely on Wilhelm Reich for some understanding that it also has positive socio-psychological effects.

For a great deal of humanity, joyful sexual engagement is a major factor in relieving stress and tension but I will leave you to study the links and come to a view, assuming God has not told you not to do so.

Keeping the Baby, Throwing Out the Bath Water

The spiritualisation of the orgasm (incomprehensible to many people but a fact of the matter to others) is merely the extension of the orgasm from 'coping' with reality to a process that, insofar as reality is constructed by perception, radically transforms reality through transforming a person's perception of reality.

The struggle between a given and socially constructed reality and the inner reality of a person, which is at the heart of a great deal of human misery, is not necessarily a sexual matter by any means but sexual repression and transformation through sexual engagement provides a resolution of that struggle for many people.

From this perspective, the effect on longevity (the Taoists' main purpose) of failing to orgasm is not merely unproven but looks to be as precisely as wrong as the imbibing of mercury while the length of the act may indeed have excellent effects on the self-trained male but requires a level of tolerance from most women beyond reason.

Of course both Taoism and and Tantra were quite blunt about the receptacle and submissive nature of the woman. Sincere devotees of their techniques have had to do a fair number of somersaults in the last century to introduce some notion of gender equality and take account of homosexual and 'third sex' aspirations.

But there is no point in throwing out the baby with the traditional bath water because of the 'false' aspects of traditionalism, corrected both by science and by a legitimate modern ethic - not so much one of equality as one of regard for the 'other' as person of value in their own right.

The key issues here are the recognition that sacral sex is a personal development strategy and not couple therapy (as in neo-tantra) and the insight that sacral-sexual techniques mobilise the chemical interplay behind mind and body to create transformative states that can be legitimately interpreted as 'divine' (even if there is no divine objectively speaking).

Honesty & Difference

The obvious problem is that male and female body chemistries have requirements that are so different that the transformative techniques are not likely to be identical.

One school of thought is blunt about what this may mean - the 'other' is abstracted as a vessel and receptacle, albeit one that is treated with respect. There is a whole ethical debate that is inconclusive about whether a 'magical practitioner' actually informs their partner about what they are up to in this respect.

Some of this debate descends into a matter of angels dancing on the head of a pin because all sexual activity involves both a deep inwardness (including unshared fantasy) and a sense of bonding that, at its best, is felt as a merging of persons.  Our Tantra series will explore this further at a much later date.

It is only convention that has Westerners speaking of the bonding in romantic terms without recognising the existence of the former self-absorbed inwardness.

It is not just that the inwardness is often transgressional or incommunicable but the other party is, bluntly, probably not interested in yours because it cuts across their own experience and their transgressive thoughts.

Part of the sheer pleasure of a loving sexual relationship is the right to be yourself in your own head and that is not in the slightest bit incompatible with radical differences in actual experiences (inevitable anyway given male and female body chemistry in any serious heterosexual play) and of different fantasy imagery.

The Mind-Body Relationship in Sacral Sexuality

The baby that we might wish to save in the traditions, alongside a pragmatic approach to technique, is the 'allegorical' role of their modelling of how the body works as perceived by the mind rather than as described objectively by scientists. In essence, we are speaking of different truths for different purposes.

As our biochemistry shifts in response to sensory stimulation, we 'sense' changes in our body that are not the same as emotions. They are physical concomitants of emotions - such as a fluttering in the chest or a dullness in the forehead - and much of the art of 'magic' directed at the body is about the mastery of these sensations and their redirection.

The entire infrastructure of the chakhras, like the circulation of energies in Taoist thought, is a pre-scientific but perfectly realistic attempt to describe actual phenomena that exhibit themselves in different ways in different persons.

Some of these sensations will never be present in some people. In others, they can be awakened.

If these sensations are observed and cultivated, they match the felt sense of an energy that can be guided in a way that appears to be observable in terms of cause and effect through the body until something takes place that can easily be interpreted as of the highest spiritual nature, a transformative moment of devastating effect.

Such descriptions are pre-scientific but science has still not be able to produce its own adequate description of the 'felt' management of the body by the mind, in part because the experience is unique to the individual and incommunicable. The framework for its description is more poetic and analogical than anything science can cope with.

Given that pre-scientific traditional thinking identified some real felt phenomena, we can draw a distinction between the analysis of meaning and working (which resulted in errors over mercury and semen retention) and the actual skill and success of the techniques in making a cause have an effect that could lead to an explosion of new meanings.

In other words, if we can identify the phenomena in ourselves and assuming we will ourselves to a meaning and do not decide, rather than have decided for us, that we would prefer a socialised to an individuated meaning, then these techniques can be learned and improved upon, the better (I contend) if they are stripped of the cultural accretions of the past.

The Ethics of Sex

One of these techniques is the managed use of sexual stimulation ... and, the modern would add, the full body or extended orgasm (of special value to the female who can reach heights in this respect undreamt of by any male tantrik adept or taoist priest).

Ethically, one person could reasonably use another as a magical vessel so long as the process was not a betrayal of private trust in regard to bonding (or involved a conscious decision not to bond on both sides which is perfectly possible) and showed a balance of respect over time.

What do I mean by balance of respect over time? This is that, assuming a bonding beyond one event, and unlike the use of the deliberate use of a 'lower caste' vessel in Tantric or, implicitly, some Taoist lore, a sort of unspoken magical balance is provided between the needs of the partners, with no prejudice intended here against polyamory.

In this context, inwardness is best served by a degree of communication not as to detail but as to attitude, an openness about preferred technique and fantasy, no matter how radical in content, that permits the one to give to the other in Situation A in order that they may be given in Situation B.

This deals with the problem of equality because, at Situation A, the female (we stick to the heterosexual for the argument here) permits the male to lose themselves in adapted techniques for his biochemistry but, in Situation B, the male responds to her biochemical needs in order to get the appropriate level of orgasmic energy for her.

It has to be said immediately that all human beings are on a massively variable continuum of libidinous energy and that this waxes and wanes with perception and with external conditions so there are no laws as such to love-making. Each moment is its own moment so we are left with an attitude, a form of will or a sense of an individuated self.

A Caveat to Criticism

Before we leave the subject, we should not be too negative about the 'retention of semen' model because it does represent a very specific technique that does have its particular use.

There is a biochemical kick-back from certain techniques that halt male orgasm at the very moment before fulfilment. These clearly do have effects that are dramatic.

The mental modelling is based on the idea (that somehow feels right even if it is not right) that the fluids in our body are all closely connected - this idea is very much at the root of the Taoist and alchemical concepts of a furnace in the bowels circulating fluids so that mental and physical acts can purify and drive these fluids towards 'gnosis'.

Not to expend a fluid but to kick it back at the moment of highest felt pressure into the body reverses the orgasmic sensation as a shudder that shifts perception of the body in radical ways - and, with body integrated to mind, changes the mind from one state of excitation to another state altogether.

So, while I have been critical of the Taoist approach or that of Karezza at the macro-sexual level, at the micro-sexual level, it is something that 'works' as a technique. To run one's sexuality on it as a law strikes me as inappropriate but to experience the situation with a willing partner may have individual benefits.

Taking Things Forward

Tradition and past 'teachers' can get in the way of something much more normal that our society allows. It is not just that we have to cope with an historic Judaeo-Christian mythos of repression but also with a trivial public presentation of sexuality for commercial reasons which masquerades as liberation.

Our culture has developed an increasingly untenable situation where we live in a huge shopping window of theoretical sexual possibilities at which we stare like podgy armchair viewers of sporting events, observers and not participants.

Meanwhile, no one dare discuss such matters because the shame culture still subsists at the provincial and daily level, in the home and in the work-place. Desire is massively displaced into an inactive voyeurism - impotence being the equivalent of the sports fan's obesity.

If we shift our perceptions dramatically back to ourselves as individuals who sit at a natural place in the continuum of libidinal energies where it is good for ourselves (including the choice of a-sexuality as well as hyper-sexuality), we can negotiate and calibrate our attitude to sexuality more precisely, ideally making it less an obsessive interest and more a tool for self development and long-lasting relationships.

On Magic as Techne ...

"While the black magician at the time of signing his pact with the elemental demon may be fully convinced that he is strong enough to control indefinitely the powers placed at his disposal, he is speedily undeceived. Before many years elapse he must turn all his energies to the problem of self-preservation. A world of horrors to which he has attuned himself by his own covetousness looms nearer every day, until he exists upon the edge of a seething maelstrom, expecting momentarily to to be sucked down into its turbid depths. Afraid to die -- because he will become the servant of his own demon -- the magician commits crime after crime to prolong his wretched earthly existence. Realizing that life is maintained by the aid of a mysterious universal life force which is the common property of all creatures, the black magician often becomes an occult vampire, stealing this energy from others. According to mediaeval superstition, black magicians turned themselves into werewolves and roamed the earth at night, attacking defenseless victims for the life force contained in their blood." (Quoted by Manly P. Hall, 1928)

The matter of magic (not conjuring but something more complex) requires some questions to be laid out before the sceptic (the mind that sees nothing before it but incomplete fact without possibility) and the small believer or dabbler (the mind that thinks that mastering codes, words, numbers, habits, lineages, transmissions or initiations are sufficient to be a magical scientist):-

1. Is it possible that the discoveries of physics indicate dimensions which have properties of mind, either intrinsic or in the form of 'inhabitants'?

2. Is it possible that, if such mental dimensions or inhabitants of such dimensions exist (and these are two very different concepts), human beings can make contact or use of them?

3. Is it possible, if such contact can be made, that human will can master such forces or would such forces master human will?

4. If human will can master such forces, how are such forces to be used responsibly?

In short, we are speaking, if magic exists as more than fantasy of which we are still doubtful, of the complexity of magical thought and its many barriers to safe and responsible use as technique.

To be 'real' to us, it must be known in scientific terms. Its origins must be contactable or its methods usable - either as as a relationship with alien forces or as a technology.

It must also be used or contacted on human terms if it is not to be either an expression of the death instinct in us or a mere animal acquisition of power in the short term that is destructive in the long term - that which may turn a man into a vampiric werewolf and a woman into a lamia.

Magic is just undiscovered science and, as we know, science in the wrong hands is destructive of soul, body, society and even the ability to exist as a species.

It might, therefore, be advisable to know before using ... and to know yourself before knowing anything else. But what is it that we have to guard against?

• The use of technique to command the minds of others. The use of technique by others to command our minds.
• The dragging up of the mores of the dead, of custom and of habit to drag down the living.
• The sucking of the life force of one person to sustain some vampiric other.
• The willing of power to harm others.
• The binding of others to you. You being bound to others without choice.
• The re-creation of yourself to suit society or another and not yourself. Complicity in the social construction of others
• The loss of self into technique normalising or socialising demands by others.
• Selling what people do not need or want. Having sold to oneself what one does not need or want.

Yes, these contain choices for conventional good and evil. Magic in this sense of the fantastic exertion of alien powers on our own being is real and all around us. The alien or the demon is not in another dimension but in the most alien of worlds, the social.

It is the social against which we are alienated and it is only by mastering the social, the core of the magical, of the claimed and the fantastic, that we can hope to master our alienation.

Where unknown dimensions are most likely to come into contact with us as humans (without stating finally and incontrovertibly that such dimensions cannot exist in the world independently of the social) is where our mind, embedded in matter, meets other dimensions of matter.

This is within our complex brains, dimensions that may or may not extend beyond us in space and in time, zones of the unknown that might be dark or light or dawn or twilight. Our mental representations of others, of the social, are the sources of both the angelic and the demonic.

Magical technique, extended from this unknown sub-conscious, exists wherever one mind uses the past or personality to crush the soul of another and where the social construction of reality crushes the spirit of the one person in favour of the habits and prejudices of the many or another.

Politics and ideology are always prone to magical technique. Somewhere in minds are dimensions of instinct involving power and desire, fear and hate, which are scientifically ill-understood but whose laws permit mastery by some at the expense of others and so techniques of oppression and control.

Whether sub-conscious dimensions exist as aspects of being human or of being-in-the-world or the dimensions speak as inhabiting gods, or whether these are all just our fantastic attempts to explain the phenomena, it takes a 'true will' to choose to understand them and wisdom to remain their master.

Only the greatest magicians can do this and the choice of good or evil then becomes something beyond good and evil at the moment of mastery. The choice is beyond the technique, the magic, the technique, a mere tool for the good or the evil that comes from the will behind the choice.