Top 40 Quotes & Sayings by Peter J. Carroll

That which is denied gains power, and seeks strange and unexpected forms of manifestation.

Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don’t. Feelings of revelation and ecstasies usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness.

Junk food, junk religion, and junk products just leads to excessive numbers of junk people living junk lifestyles.

Matter can be conveniently divided for descriptive purposes into space , time , mass, and energy . However we can only describe any one of these phenomena in terms of the other three. Any definitions we care to make about matter are thus tautological .

The only clear view is from atop the mountain of your dead selves.

Always consider the qualifications of anyone who assumes or professes authority, what do they really know? Authorities on spirituality can rarely give a half coherent explanation of what they persuade us to believe they know. They achieve authority by stage management and then exploit audience suggestibility. Same old trick they have pulled for thousands of years.

All Philosophy is Biography

Can we find "The Universe in a grain of sand"? Well perhaps, but a stone seems easier to visualize.

Magic doesn't suit everyone. Only those prepared to take full responsibility for themselves should apply.

Ideas about a person's place in society, his role, lifestyle, and ego qualities will lose their hold as the cohesive forces in society disintegrate. Subculture values will proliferate to such a bewildering extent that a whole new class of professionals will arise to control them. Such a Transmutation Technology will deal in fashions, in ways of being. Lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilizations. They will be the new magicians.

So many people seem to spend their lives trying to appear normal, predictable and consistent to themselves and those that surround them. They just end up bored with themselves, bereft of any depth of inner resources, suffocated by the inhibitions that defend their own monolithic identities.

The conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires, and doubts; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this, then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot.

In Chaos Magic, beliefs are not seen as ends in themselves, but as tools for creating desired effects.

In Chaos Magic , beliefs are not seen as ends in themselves, but as tools for creating desired effects. To fully realize this is to face a terrible freedom in which nothing is true and everything is permitted, which is to say that everything is possible, there are no certainties , and the consequences can be ghastly.

We can only escape the bloody and ignorant nightmare of history by exploring alternatives which today look frighteningly weird.

If someone claims to have free will, ask them, free from precisely what?

An old joke puts its thus, "when a man speaks to a god its prayer , when a god speaks to a man its schizophrenia"... Many people hear voices without suffering any of the debilitating and dysfunctional effects associated with schizophrenia, some treat these as sources of inspiration of develop religious ideas around them, others become mediums or occultists.

Physical processes alone will never completely explain the existence of the universe , life , and consciousness . Religious answers are just wishful thinking and wanton fabrication cast over a bottomless pit of ignorance . To explain their occult and mystical experiences , magicians are forced to develop models beyond the scope of materialistic or religious systems .

Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played on itself.

Enforcing equality to compensate for the monstrous unfairness of nature destroys liberty. But total liberty leads to various forms of "aristocracy" and decay. Yet total equality leads to oppressive statism and decay. However, equality of opportunity leads to a vibrantly chaotic and creative meritocracy.

Chaos, the life force of the universe, is not human-hearted. Therefore the wizard cannot be human-hearted when he seeks to tap the force of the universe. He performs monstrous and arbitrary acts to loosen the hold of human limitations upon himself.

Some have sought to avoid suffering by avoiding desire. Thus they have only small desires and small sufferings, poor fools.

Indeed, linear extrapolations make no large-scale sense in a universe that has spatial and temporal curvature.

Every new form of liberation is destined to eventually become another form of enslavement for most of its adherents.

No left wing parties have any respect for liberal economic values; and most centre and right wing parties merely promote a paternalistic stateism. Does it thus fall to the self-reliant students of the ruggedly individualist philosophy of magick to champion a certain measured libertarianism?

Space , time , mass, and energy originate from Chaos , have their being in Chaos, and through th agency of the aether are moved by Chaos into the multiple forms of existence.

It has taken us two million years to elevate politics from the level of a monkey squabble, to a level comprehensible to a six year old child.

Careful observation will confirm that virtually all spontaneous parapsychological events occur through some form of sleight of mind. It is invariably something hovering just below the threshold of awareness that initiated an unusual event or gave one a curious half sensed feeling that something was about to happen just before it did. The magician seeks to exploid this effect deliberately, but in doing so he must avoid doing it deliberately as it were. Conscious lust of result destroys magical effect, so trickery must be employed to annul it and to activate the subconscious.

If only one fifth of your spells work you have real power. If only one fifth of your divinations work you have a serious disability.

As a great master once observed: "There are two methods of becoming god, the upright or the averse." Let the mind become as a flame or a pool of still water.

Space, time, mass, and energy originate from Chaos, have their being in Chaos, and through the agency of the aether are moved by Chaos into the multiple forms of existence. Some of the various densities of the aether have only a partial or probablistic differentiation into existence, and are somewhat indeterminate in space and time. In the same way that mass exists as a curvature in space-time, extending with a gradually diminishing force to infinity that we recognize as gravity, so do all events, particularly events involving the human mind, send ripples through all creation.

Science has brought us power and ideas but not the wisdom or responsibility to handle them.

We doubt that any facts actually exist. We only have observations and interpretations. Most of the interpretations remain questionable.

Only through absolute loyalty to each other can the few control the many.

I regard physics as that subset of magic that works fairly reliably. I regard magick, in the traditional sense, as a kind of physics that we strive to understand and render more reliable. So it all comes down to the same thing, a quest to understand and manipulate the world with a self-consistent and coherent theory .

In a stagnant environment the body-mind creates its own adversity – disease and fantasy.

Flat Earth theory serves well enough for a trip from the cave to the water hole and back, and a third dimension going up into the sky and down underground serves to accommodate gods and devils A lot of people still think like that, believe it or not.

The pseudoscience of astrology has no place in magick. Astrology has already died twice: once with the classical gods, and a second time after the Enlightenment. The complete failure of contemporary psychology to create anything other than a vocabulary of intellectual rubbish has encouraged astrology to resurface.

In certain tantric rituals the candidate is first beaten by his guru, hashish forced down him, and he is taken at midnight to a dark cemetery for sacred sexual intercourse. Thus he achieves union with his god.

He who is doing his true will is assisted by the momentum of the universe.