Feral Faun: Thoughts on Experimentation
“Would it not be… an anachronism to cultivate the taste for harbors, certitudes, systems?” – Gaston Bachelard
I consider the past ten years of my life to be a conscious process of experimentation – but not in the scientific sense. The scientific method is not merely to come up with an idea, test it and record the results; it is also creating a closed system in which to test the idea. This is necessary to test the certitude. In an open system certitude isn’t possible since you cannot know all the factors involved. Although I did do some experimentation of a more scientific method (dream work and magical studies), in general I have avoided this.
My avoidance of scientific method in my experimentation is due largely to the fact that my life experiment is aimed at a breaking out of character armor and social conditioning, to increasingly become my passions and desires – which is to say to become the marvelous breaking forth in the world. This process is a process of opening up and so I cannot help but outgrow a closed system.
Among specific aspects of exploration that I have done, I have attempted, with some success, to increase my sensual awareness, to truly experience consciously what I was seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling. I did this while living in an urban environment. My method was simple – to note every experience mentally and let myself fully feel what it made me feel.
Unfortunately, the very success of this experiment was disastrous, because it left me feeling very depressed and under constant sensory attack. I finally had to leave San Francisco for a less hectic place and recuperate.
It was about a year later that I began my experiments in dream work. These were truly scientific in method in that I was working through a specific system (one which combined Senoi dream work and modern psychological methods) and recording the details, using specific questions aimed toward making the dreams useful and giving the dreamer dream control. I had always been a fairly active, intense dreamer so this was not a difficult project for me. I tended, while conducting the experiment, to remember four to six dreams a night. Over the course of the experiment (which lasted about a month) two things happened to my dreams. First, I began to have more control, until I was able to always determine the outcome of the dream in my favor; and second, my dreams became increasingly mundane, reflecting fairly accurately problems I was dealing with in the immediate present. So this experiment was successful in terms of what it was supposed to do – it made my dreams useful and gave me control. But in the process, it took the adventure, excitement and wonder out of my dreams. So l stopped the experiment, eventually even ceasing to write down my dreams.
I still tend to have some control in my dreams, and an awareness that I am dreaming, but fortunately my dreams have largely lost their usefulness and the sense of wonder and adventure have increased. The most important lesson I feel I’ve learned (though only gradually) from this experiment is the very real opposition between utility and the marvelous.
My other major “scientific” experiment was my exploration into ritual magick. I had become involved in a relationship that was very unhealthy for me, and much of the headway I have made in throwing off character armor and conditioning seemed to have been lost. In my frustration, I turned to a system. Combining aspects of A. O. Spare, Crowley and some modern chaos magick, and using tarot and a few other tools – as well as a lot of my own imagination – I created my own version of chaos magick. My purpose was to call forth energy of chaos within me in order to break down my conditioning. Although in the midst of some rituals I would feel ecstatic and my one act of practical magick seemed to work, all in all, this experiment was a failure. I did not become more loose, more free or more happy. I was not more capable of living my desires. In general, the opposite happened. And I think this was inevitable. The ritual form is a closed system and a closed system ultimately becomes a prison. Ritual could only close me in more. A few years earlier, I had been involved with a series of group “rituals” which were, in act, not rituals at all but ecstatic free play encompassing improvisational music, dancing, howling and just plain fun. These free-form play times, which always ended in a feast, were where I truly experienced wonder and ecstasy and the energy of my wildness. During these play times, I experienced flight, lycanthropic changes and similar truly marvelous events. So it is clear to me now that open, free play, not closed systematic ritual, is the way to break down conditioning and open to the marvelous.
As to the act of practical magick that seemed to work, as I will show it manifests more the failure of my attempt at practical magick than its success. I was becoming increasingly aware that I was involved in an unhealthy relationship. Had my rituals been breaking down character armor as I wished, I would have easily been able to break off this relationship as a simple, direct act of will. But I wasn’t able to do this, so instead I did a ritual to an end. Within a month the relationship shattered with a vehemence that was truly shocking. Strangely enough, that split did more good for me than the rituals I had been doing.
I am still recovering from the steps backwards brought on by my unhealthy relationship and my failed experiment in ritual magick, but I continue to experiment non-scientifically. I have spent the last year wandering, seeking to break with attitudes that can develop when one gets too settled into a “normal” social existence. I am seeking to relate more freely – as a desiring, passionate being, a fluid, constantly changing being – rather than as a static set of social roles and habits. It’s hard, but I’ve learned that it doesn’t free me to replace one set of conditioning with another. So for me, no more scientific experiments, whose closed systems could never reflect real life, but rather the open experimentation aimed at the breaking down of all systems. No doubt it can lead to madness – I’ve felt close to that many times – but, to paraphrase Bachelard, “If, in any experiment, one does not risk one’s reason, that experiment is not worthwhile attempting.”
(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)
