Oh, I’m sorry. Did I break your concentration? I didn’t mean to do that. Please, continue! You were saying something about “best intentions”? What’s the matter? Oh, you were finished? Well, allow me to retort!

The way I parsed my prior arguments for an energy related die-off probably threw some people into a bit of tailspin, especially if you’ve read a lot of my other stuff and can’t quite figure out how to reconcile that material with the idea of a loss of a sizable section of the human population.

Let me say again, in case it wasn’t obvious enough: I do not claim to have any special knowledge, and I do not claim to have the only answer. That is why it was so upsetting for me to solicit some alternate interpretations of what I was looking at and find nothing but shallow grasp of the facts and good intentions.

The ‘good intentions’ aspect of this is probably the most troubling. I can deal with people who don’t have time to do research and don’t have the figures at their disposal, who haven’t got time to listen to hundreds of hours of lectures and commentary, and hear all the arguments and counter arguments. That’s cool.

What’s frustrating for me is when people want to open this up into the occult dimension, and even worse so, when they want to parrot my own work back to me as if that exposes some contradiction in my thinking, or some fundamental inauthenticity in my work.

Because, after all, don’t I go on and on about the psychoplastic nature of reality, about not getting snared in negative reality tunnels, or malignant conspiracies to control your views? And it’s true; I absolutely have.

But here’s the thing: when people get turned onto this stuff for the first time, it’s like a lot of profound experiences in life; because the world and the people around you never talked about it, and show little evidence of understanding any of it, you almost feel like you’re the first person to ever see the world that way. You could almost feel like you got there first, and everyone is just going to have to catch up with you.

With things like magick, or whatever brand of new age ‘new paradigm’ piffle they’re shilling these days, the natural instinct for people like this is to imagine that we can transfigure the whole world with magick and positive intentions, that all you have to do is jack off over sigils scribbled in the margins of the dancing wu li masters and that quantum physics and probability waves will make it all better.

But here’s the false bottom in that little fantasy world, and the key to the naive arrogance in that thinking: You want to change the world as it appears to be, into the product of a magickal act? Well guess what: The world as it currently appears is already the product of magickal acts.

Long before you got up this morning and tried to change reality with your happy thoughts, long before you were even born, there were adepts doing that very thing, and doing it better than you ever will. Except their thoughts might not always qualify as ‘happy’ in your books.

Tell me, what’s the difference between Eckhart Toole fulminating about ‘a new earth’ to squadrons of gape-mouthed well wishers who read the law of attraction, and George H.W. Bush professing a New World Order to the planet? Here’s a hint: old eckhart didn’t have the CIA, the drug cartels, the IMF and the united states military working for his vision.

It is, alas, as the late Robert Anton Wilson used to say; “The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill”. And I’m sorry guys, but if you really think you’re running with the toughest gang of shamans, I’m flattered, but you need to give your fucking head a shake.

A lot of what I’ve done here is precisely to bring up the quality of ‘our’ ( whatever ‘our’ means…) gang of shamans, and while in some ways the result has been encouraging, in other ways, not so much.

As I’ve said at least a couple times now, peak oil was one of the formative influences on my work here, starting in 2005, and I had been researching it for a couple years before that. Part of the reason I am even here is that I saw a window, a slice of time where things were still plastic enough to be changed, when the magickal zeitgeist was still being formed, when the gang fight could go in either direction.

What I’m trying to say here, at least in regards to certain aspects of the peak oil question, is that that window has clearly begun to close, if not closed entirely. The front line of the war has rolled over us, and pretending that it hasn’t is just foolish. If you didn’t have the chops to prevent it, you certainly don’t have the chops to reverse it, or mitigate it to any significant degree.

Your ‘probability waves’, or sigils, or reality tunnel shifting, or good intentions are not going to change what has cemented into a consensus reality by now. You will not be changing the amount of oil in the ground, you will not be changing the energy infrastructure by snapping your fingers. You will not be making food out of thin air. The best you can do is to command your own private sphere and work to redraw your part of the playing field in some useful way.

But don’t kid yourself that you’re going to out-magick the reality priesthood. Not about this. You needed to get up a lot earlier in the morning for that. An awful lot of really holy, really spiritual, really positive people have suffered gruesome fates over the centuries, and a lot of them understood this stuff much better than you or I ever will. The reason you don’t hear all their stories, is because they’re dead. Just because a few optimists lived to write theirs, doesn’t change the truth of that.

You don’t get to wish away the physical world and it’s momentum just because you had a couple interesting insights. You don’t get to ignore hard facts by thinking happy thoughts. If you keep thinking that, the wave will crash right down on your head, and you’ll be another optimist who doesn’t get to write an uplifting biography.

This shit is chess, not checkers.