El sector de la cerveza en Israel

 pace and time. Have you ever stopped to wonder what theyare? Have you ever   peered deeply into your experience and considered what they are like?

They lend a fundamental structure to our experience, but in trying to grasp what time and space are we can easily overlook the equally interesting question of what use is being made of them.

Where space and time connect with human consciousness there arise the notions of place  and occasion. And what constitutes the content of our lives more than these? Our lives are a procession of places and occasions. As soon as we turn our attention to how experience takes this form, we start to realize how our lives are chopped up into  places and occasions of different types, within which different rules of behaviour are

applied.

It seems too obvious to be worth pointing out how we are expected to behave differently when driving on the motorway from how we behave when walking on a  pavement. It even seems absurd to argue that the contrast between our behaviour in a

school (say) and in a supermarket has any real significance. Surely, we simply have to educate our children and buy our food, so why wonder that society sets aside places and occasions for this? Yet, if we trouble ourselves to think about it, the institutions of  our culture have no other means of manifestation than the way they dictate our usage of  time and space. To question or challenge this usage is a powerful technique for  changing both culture and our experience of reality.

In a developed society, space and time are divided into a wide variety of places and occasions that may be bought, sold and traded. This constitutes the basis on which our social and economic relationships are built. The purchase and sale of places and occasions is made possible by abstracting our experience and then treating those ******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

abstractions as commodities. For example, we have invented dedicated occasions and  places for eating, sleeping, shopping, being entertained, relaxing, and exercising. It

hardly occurs to us that not one of these activities requires any kind of formal institution to make it happen. In fact, we do not need to devote space and time to any experience, because space and time are forms taken by  experience, not a necessary condition for having it. Developed societies convey an impression that experiences could not occur if we did not have restaurants, cinemas, televisions, gyms, and yoga classes to create them. But, in truth, it is purely our will that brings these activities into  being. Membership of the most exclusive gym does not guarantee fitness; and the most

complicated meal cooked by the most famous chef does not compare with the crudest food, if accompanied by our resolution to enjoy it to its fullest.

The privatization of space and time has become almost total. Home is a name for  a space purchased or leased from an institution, or from another person who probably does not live there. Work  is time sold to an employer or customer. Holiday is a bought escape from both work and home, but rarely from this ceaseless commerce of place and occasion. If we list the places and occasions we pass through in the course of a day and the economic relationships underpinning them, we see how little control we have over the settings of our daily experience. Nothing is more fundamentally ours than experience, yet culture is everywhere engaged in a process of abstracting and dividing our time and space (which is the closest that it can currently get to our experience itself), and then selling it back to us as commodities it fools us into believing we don’t already own.

The physical world is no longer considered big enough to satisfy the appetite of  this process. The internet seems as if it were purposely invented to supply a new, fresh level of abstraction.

But even so, archaic traces remain of a different attitude. This is vividly evoked in the discoveries of Paul Devereux, an archaeologist who has studied ancient sites  belonging to a category he calls “shamanic landscapes”.

Whether constructed from rows of standing stones, as on Dartmoor in England, or simply by removing topsoil, as near Nazca in Peru, mysterious lines have been left upon the earth by cultures of different epochs around the globe. The function of these lines and tracks, Devereux shows, was not the demarcation of territory, nor even an aid to transport. For instance, the so-called “ceremonial roads” built around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico were constructed by a people that had neither horses nor the wheel (1993: 24). Yet the prevalence of these trackways or lines suggests that some kind of  universal human need must have been their motive.

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Devereux bases his theory of what this was partly upon folklore and myths, which reflect a widespread belief that spirits travel in straight lines.

In Western Europe, straight tracks known as doodwegen  (Dutch for “death  paths”) or Geisterwege  (German for “ghost paths”) connect cemeteries to other 

landmarks. These appear to be a medieval continuation of much older beliefs that the spirits of the dead can be marshalled along straight lines. In Britain, so-called “ley lines” appear to have a similar origin (Devereux, 1993: 27–28). However, in the Americas it was the spirits of the living that were more at issue. Petroglyphs (images carved into rocks) have been discovered at sacred sites in the Americas that appear to depict the soul leaving the body of the tribal shaman (Devereux, 2009). Devereux argues that these images are the earliest depiction of the motivation behind lines on the landscape: the out-of-body experience (OOBE).

Shamanic cultures devised a variety of practices giving rise to states of trance that liberate the soul of the shaman from the body, setting it free to travel the spirit world. These practices involve psychoactive plants, or self-generated ecstasies caused  by over-breathing, over-exercising, flashing sunlight into the eyes from a knife-blade, and so on. In each case the aim is the same: to experience the spirit world. And in each case the experience assumes a common form: the soul rises above or flies outside the  body.

There are competing theories as to what causes an OOBE. The assumption that i is the “soul” flying out of the body is perhaps the least psychologically sophisticated,  but it has the advantage of fitting the manifest appearance. Whether these episodes

were shamanically induced, or caused by other types of trance, or even perhaps by disease, when people told stories about their experiences these accounts might well have bolstered the idea that the spirit was separable from the body and capable of  unconstrained flight—in other words, of travelling unhindered in a straight line.

Ancient peoples clearly believed in the reality of spirit flight, and that belief has left its imprint as straight line and effigy markings on what can only be called shamanic landscapes. These lines varied from culture to culture and age to age in their form and meaning, but their underlying source was the common canvas of the human mind in metachoric trance conditions (Devereux, 1993: 35).

The impulse to use the landscape, our environment, our space as a means to access the dimension of spirit seems a world away from where we find ourselves today.

In modern times the environment is demarcated by lines so that it can be “commodified”. It fills us with wonder to think of ancient landscape markings, such as the famous Nazca lines in Peru, that reveal their meaning only when seen from the air, and yet they were made at a time when no human eyes had access to this viewpoint. ******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Received wisdom suggests that these works were intended to be seen only by God, or (in shamanic cultures) by the soul of the shaman after he or she had left their   body.

Sometimes, during an OOBE, the “traveller” may indeed be confronted with impressions that closely resemble the actual, physical world, but just as often the traveller encounters an unfamiliar environment or one that contains odd and dreamlike “discrepancies”.1  Yet imagine for a moment that we knew  there was (say) a giant hummingbird carved into the top of the hill outside our village, visible only from above. Would we not now be more inclined  to see it during our OOBE? In fact, would the case that an OOBE is the only possible occasion on which we had a hope of seeing it not dispose us to experiencing OOBEs more often?

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to draw on Devereux’s findings and suppose the motivation behind these landscape markings might have been to cause the type of  experiences required to view them. I’d even suggest the markings probably succeeded in giving OOBEs to many people who would never otherwise have had them and would not have seen the hummingbird had they not known it was etched in reality onto the hill. We might argue that these people had not therefore had a “genuine” OOBE at all, but had simply dreamt   about a hummingbird, yet this would not necessarily be what the experience meant to the dreamer. Etching a design onto a hill may have been a means of focusing the dreams of a people around a specific image, in which case a dream concerning that image would have been a significant spiritual experience.

Once again, it is difficult to imagine our own society investing so much time and energy into a project for enriching the nation’s dreams, yet it is not correct to claim we are no longer interested at all in projecting the contents of our minds onto physical space. Rather, what seems to have changed is what finds expression. We have shifted from the meaningful and qualitative towards the utilitarian and quantitative. The land is required to sustain a far larger population these days, so this might seem a necessary development, but did we really have to deny our imagination access to external space to quite the current extent?

Art is still allowed some restricted access, in officially sanctioned locations, but the shamanic landscapes were not art. They were not aimed at an audience but were instead utilities, facilitating environments, where people came specifically to interact with and have direct experience of the divine.

The impulse to project qualitative ideas onto space has not died. In certain contexts it is still thriving, but not without injury from the cultural shift that drove the imagination from external space into the private consciousness of the individual. In the ******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

eyes of our culture, soul and spirit are concepts too divisive and primitive to be allowed officially sanctioned external space, although occasionally they are given a suitably indirect artistic or religious expression.2  Our modern-day version of the shaman is usually an artist, but occultists and magicians also play a lower-profile role. The shamanic world-view seems to have survived by renaming itself   psychogeography,  a non-specific label for what has become partly an artistic and

literary genre, partly an amorphous set of political and philosophical concepts.

Psychogeographers are not often concerned with writing physical representations of experience onto the landscape, but with investing their external environment with meaning. This is often abstract and usually personal, but it is undoubtedly qualitative rather than quantitative. Because this goes against dominant trends, the psychogeographer is often forced into confrontation with the values of the age, unlike the tribal shaman, who occupied a more esteemed position. Frequently,  psy-chogeographical practice involves changes made only to the psychogeographer’s  perception of his or her surroundings, so that the effects are apparent only to the  practitioner. This perhaps explains why psychogeography has become mainly a literary

movement.

Most of the developed world lives in cities, so it is the urban environment in which the psychogeographer usually works. Modern town planning strategies and the urban redevelop-ments that followed in their wake have spurred the growth of   psychogeographical practice. A well-known instance was the redevelopment of Paris

in the 1860s that swept away the clutter and chaos of unregulated streets in favour of  wide, radiating boulevards (Coverley, 2006: 57f). These could be more easily policed and were utilized more easily by government forces against would-be revolutionaries. At the same time, covered glass arcades were introduced into urban areas, encouraging the bourgeoisie to flaunt their wealth in public and stimulate economic growth. This gave rise to the figure of the wandering urban stroller, the so-called  flâneur , a 19th century prototype of the psychogeographer first described by Baudelaire in an essay of  1863. By the 1920s, the covered arcades were themselves vanishing under new waves of redevelopment, prompting the social critic Walter Benjamin to begin collecting material for his The Arcades Project , a seminal psychogeographical text. This work  had a major influence upon Guy Debord, founder of Situationism and inventor of the term “psychogeography”.

The psychogeographical impulse to rescue meaning and quality from external space receives a fresh stimulus from each new wave of commodification. Usually this has taken the form of an artistic or political response but, as we have noted, the aim of  the shamanic landscape was not art. It performed a function, and the community relied ******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

upon it and the skill of their shamans to execute that function. The shamanic landscape was, to the modern mind, something more akin to a church than an art installation, but it was the church of a religion that did not seek merely belief. Instead it offered everyone a role in its ceremonies.

The shamanic landscape facilitated a magical act that enabled people to experience a truth. Whether that truth concerned communication with gods or other  entities, or released the soul to explore other worlds, the shamanic landscape was the means to make that actually happen for the persons concerned. Art, in contrast, is expressive rather than functional. It sets up a hypothetical arena through the medium of  symbols or ideas into which an audience enters, but from which the audience is free to disengage. The magical act, in contrast, collapses the distinction between symbols and reality. Its truth is not hypothetical or symbolic but self-evident, because it is conveyed through immediate experience. There are no spectators to a magical act; everyone  participates. Where magick fails the result is art; the “suspension of disbelief” that

occurs in art is a weak echo of the magical experience of truth.

Magick stands in a similar relation to politics as it does to art. Magick is functional rather than hypothetical, an end rather than the advocation of any particular  means. Marx’s famous thesis that the point of philosophy is not to interpret the world  but to change it has been used to highlight a supposed affinity between magick and

Marxism. But unlike left-wing politics magick does not operate through conflict or  opposition. It can manifest truth from reality whenever and howsoever it wishes. In our  earlier example, we considered how the magical act of etching a hummingbird onto a hill might stimulate an experience of flying outside the body for the persons concerned. Magic does not “struggle” with anything because it is not fussy about how it changes the world; the means is not important to the end. Magic does not “do” dialectics,  because it is concerned with experiences, not ideas. There are magicians who portray

themselves as politically radical and view the use of magick as a subversive act, but this is to mistake the aim of their magick for the nature of magick itself. Mainstream society constantly employs magical techniques to evoke into reality fantastical entities such as consumer goods, celebrities, and other commodities that are as intangible as they are expensive. It is not simply the fact that a magician uses magick that makes him or her subversive.

Just as shifts in culture have forced psychogeography to operate in the realm of  symbols rather than the physical environment, so too its practice has been diluted. It has lost sight of the original affinity of its core ideas with magick and has yoked itself  onto art and politics. But even so, work in this field3  continues to demonstrate that unorthodox explorations of place and occasion, even in an abstract form, retain a ******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 power to transform deeply our perception of reality.

I decided to explore what could be gained from mixing pyschogeographical techniques with contemporary magick. Like many others in 2008, I found myself  wondering where the meltdown of capitalism that we were living through might lead, so I decided to examine the city where I lived for signs to instruct me.

A standard psychogeographical technique is “drift walking”, which involves taking an unplanned stroll with no fixed destination and simply paying attention to whatever experiences arise. I decided I would depart from this slightly. In the interests of keeping fit and maybe generating some kind of semi-shamanic trance through exertion, I decided to run instead. So I put on my shorts and running shoes, stuffed a digital camera and voice recorder into my pocket, and took to the streets of Brighton and Hove.

First, I went to the crossroads nearest my home and made an offering to the spirits for help with my quest. Then I set off in the direction it seemed was indicated.

During the run I encountered images, signs, and situations, and had several conversations with people, all of which I interpreted as direct answers to the question I had posed: Where is the current world crisis taking us?  I was obeying Aleister  Crowley’s injunction, that the magician must interpret everything that happens as a direct message to his soul from God (1989: Chapter 81). It is this attitude that can lift  psycho-geographical work out of art and into magick. In art, it is not God but the artist who is the source of the message. In magick, that message is not merely entertained as an interpretative possibility but accepted as the truth.

 Not far from the crossroads I noticed a fat spider hanging in its web, an obvious analogy for the current financial system. Indeed, the next day I found myself reading an article arguing that the nationalization of financial institutions around the world had