doppelganger

The Role of Doubling in a Re-Enchanted Reality

I. DOUBLED IN STRANGENESS

Welcome back to Xagick.

It is a strange word for an even stranger thing. But in what way is it strange? Certainly not because it lacks any precedent. Our work integrating Western occultism, contemporary science, integrative metatheory, psychoanalysis & anthropology is, in many ways, simply a reconstruction. A “rediscovery” of the underlying sensemaking patterns that archaic esoteric adepts explored within the standard psychic infrastructure of the primal intersubjective human tribes.

To an ancient thing based on the basic structures of our shared evolution is not so strange. The weird part is something else. It is intrinsic to the field of occultism.

The occult works with the embodied, imaginal, symbolic, and etheric wisdom of the cultivated subconscious mind. Such a mind does not know itself. At least not in the way that a “rational God-given individual ego” is imagined to knowingly reflect upon itself. Our hidden intelligence is self-estranged, self-hidden, occulted for itself.

Even the regular occult interests that we explore in Xagick (such as developing intentionality, force of being, transfiguring desire, communicating with a Higher or Deeper Self, and learning the flavor of our hyper-personal subtle signature, etc.) are ultimately subordinate to a Self/No-Self fusion in which we are/n’t ourselves. And in which we must learn to successfully not know what we are doing.

This is an existential doubling of our existential condition. We both are & are not experiencers, knowers, agents, self-reflective entities, etc.

Strange.

II. DOUBLING AS ONTOLOGICAL DISPLACEMENT

As part of the online course on Sex, Death & the Occult (now becoming a book from Parallax) I gave a personal example of a “magical object.” A magical object is a formal term used by folks like Sean Esbjorn-Haargens and Jeffrey Kripal to denote an object that is not where it is supposed to be — and whose unusual presence challenges the normal ways we establish a boundary between subjective & objective.

The theories of these integral multidimensionalists (Sean and Jeff) are highly pertinent to my argument that the occult deals specifically with trans-ontological forms of “change in conformity with intention.” When Causality, Desire, and Will traverse across interior and exterior, subtle and physical, or singular and plural, then the normal repatterning of the world starts to exhibit the flavor of magical transformation.

The personal example I gave during the course was an event that took place in the 5th grade (when I lived on a small island in the Pacific Northwest). I had been playing soccer during the lunch break. It was Friday afternoon. Just as I was leaving the soccer field, my friend C. was arriving. He was carrying a knife in his pocket and he worried that it might cause problems while running, kicking, or getting illegally tackled. Would I look after it for him until after? Sure.

By the end of the school day, we have both forgotten about it. Unbeknownst (a good word for occult studies) to me, the bladed tool remained in the pocket of my blue jeans. The next morning, a couple of friends arrived at my rural home eager to participate in one of my periodic wild explorations through the vast forests and ravines behind our farm.

Several hours later (debatably lost) we saw an unusual object stuck at head level into the trunk of a tall cedar tree. It was the knife! I suddenly recalled that I had forgotten it. Was it in the tree or in my pocket? I produced the original, much to the astonishment of the other boys, and we marveled at the fact that these two knives were exact duplicates.

I kept the second one for myself and gave the original back on Monday morning.

The knife was a “magical object” in the formal sense. It was oddly located in such a way as to temporarily blur the boundary between my private experience and the objective facts. A specific kind of randomness resulted in a coincidence that rendered myself (and my friends) momentarily unable to discern the difference between Mind and Matter or between Knowledge and World.

Yet it was more than just a magical object. It was also an example of how trans-ontological feelings are generated via the principle of doubling.