In the first half of this interview, Philip Farber and I talked about how he got to where he is now, about what NLP is, how he came to be a hypnotist, and the impact of NLP and hypnosis on the growth of the internet. Now in the second half, we’ll be talking a bit more in depth about the books he’s written and the seminars and events he has coming up throughout the rest of the year. Philip Farber has taught alongside Robert Anton Wilson, and is a instructor at Maybe Logic Academy, in addition to his private practice as an NLP trainer and hypnotist. He is author of the upcoming book Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem, which will be published by Weiser near the end of the year.
Wes Unruh:
Now I know in your writing you’ve been cutting along an edge which.. to me, I see how NLP could be what we used to think of magic, if you think of magic in Renaissance times and even earlier, as a set of disciplines that were all lumped together. NLP seems to be one of the things that was teased out of that, and kind of isolated. And it seems like with your writing you’re kind of bring it all back together somewhat. NLP, hypnosis, and sort of ritual magick. Could you explain a little bit about the book you have coming up?
Philip Farber:
Sure, I think the connection between ritual magick and language has always been a deep and fascinating one. I mean the Kabbalah is based on the Hebrew alphabet and the way that the letters combine into words on just a real, fundamental basic level. I think at some point though there was a kind of disconnect from the occult and ritual magick from the actual ability to start where you are, start with the language you have in front of you and really see what you’re doing. One of my pet peeves recently has been on TV and movies, Harry Potter movies or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whenever there’s magic it’s got to be in a dead language, they’ve got to speak Latin.
You know, why can’t we do magick with English? Because English is certainly as rich if not richer than Latin, it has different structures, different things going on in it. But it has probably a longer history of actual fidelity now than Latin.
WU:
Well, it certainly has more roots.
PF:
Yeah, and there’s something there. Our language is how we create our reality to a large extent and that’s a somewhat fundamental piece of magick. I have a friend, A. J. Rose, who coined the phrase “Thoughts Determine Experience.” and he usually puts a little trademark right after that. But our thought is essentially .. it’s language and paralinguistics, it’s our words and the way we create images and sounds and feelings and integrate them with these words. And that by taking at least part of that which is our language, and changing it and working with it, and manipulating it we in turn change our experience.
As soon as I really started learning about NLP, it was around the time I really started getting into magick as well, it was the early 80′s. My thought right away was that, first of all people like Aleister Crowley or.. I was very much into George Gurdjieff at the time, they were sort of masters of language. They had some of these skills already and if you look at the way they wrote and the things that they said, they were using language patterns that we’d identify now as ‘like NLP’ and even Gurdjieff’s writings, like “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson”, has fantastic layers and layers of trance inductions. And more trance inductions embedded in trance inductions. It’s incredible that way. So my thought immediately was that if we have the things that we learn about language and about the way we communicate in NLP and we combine them with these traditional things that we have in magick, rituals, and experiences, that we come out with something that was much more powerful.
At the time I would say this to people and I would get either a blank stare or like ‘No, you can’t do that!’ Now it’s fairly well-accepted that NLP can be a part of ritual magic. I wrote Futureritual originally around 1990, it didn’t get published until ’95, and I was exploring some of the superficial ways that NLP could interact with magic, things like using anchoring in rituals, being able to phrase your rituals in ways that would allow your unconscious mind a little more access to the meanings. Things like that.
WU:
That certainly seemed to be a part of the major paradigm shift in the nineties, that acceptance of integrating the disciplines, and the next generation seems much more adapted to that approach.
PF:
Yeah I think so, and even our chaos magick progenitors Peter Carroll and Phil Hine have sort of looked into NLP a little bit, along with Jan Fries and Dave Lee… and Jason Newcomb in the United States. I immediately started teaching NLP stuff along with magick when I was teaching magick workshops way back when. I think it was 1990 or 91, was when we were teaching the FutureRitual Workshops and that was Robert Anton Wilson and myself, and two guys, Nicholas Ross and Stephen Barry, who were building and making light and sound brain machines. Basically we demonstrated how you incorporate all this stuff together. We were building kind of interesting self-created rituals using magick and NLP techniques and working the brain machines into it. That was really kind of the germ of the book FutureRitual as well. Back when I wrote FutureRitual I wasn’t so much into the idea of evocation, but that has more recently become a major component of what I do.
The forthcoming book which is Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem, that’ll be out on Weiser books either later this year or beginning of ’08, hopefully sooner.
WU:
Publishing is kind of a long and arcane process.
PF:
It’s sort of anachronistically slow, relative to our other media these days.
WU:
Yes, to go from making your own floppy disks to having a respected publisher publish your books must have been quite a journey I would imagine.
PF:
Yeah, it’s a different sort of thing. I like self-publishing, and to tell you the truth you can make more money self-publishing a book, than having a book published by a publisher. The advantage of having a major publisher publish a book is purely the distribution aspect. If these are the ideas you want to get out, an established publisher, a respected publisher will get your books into bookstores around the world. Whereas if you self-publish, your audience becomes more limited and you sell to a smaller niche market who’s there because they are looking for what you have. However you get to keep all the money. So it’s kind of a toss-up. If you want the information out there, go with a publisher. If you want to make money on it, then self-publish. I did a little bit of both on The Book of Atem. I started out self-publishing it and selling comb-bound copies on the website until the publisher finally got the contract together. I definitely made more money self-publishing it prior to my contract kicking in than I’ve ever heard of anyone being offered as an advance on an occult book. Suffice it to say that I’m damn glad that Weiser is publishing this book, because if you’ve been in occult traditions for however many years, it’s kind of a nice thing to have one of the long-time respected publishers of occult books pick up your book.
WU:
Absolutely, and they’re one of the iconic ones, that’s for sure. Now I know that you were an instructor for Maybe Logic Academy, what were some of the things you covered in the course of your teaching?
PF:
I’ve done two courses with them so far, the first was an introduction to NLP, which was an interesting challenge because usually you teach NLP in a live, face-to-face situation. However, a lot of our communication these days takes place through other media, we aren’t necessarily communicating with people all the time face to face. Some years back Richard Zarro and Peter Blum wrote a book called The Phone Book: Breakthrough Neurolinguistic Phone Skills, which is about doing NLP over the phone. And I believe it’s still in print, and it’s highly recommended, but at the time people were going like, ‘Do NLP over the phone? You can’t do that’ but they certainly outlined doing that. And you certainly can do NLP over the phone. But nowadays we’re communicating online. And online communication is just as rich, the language and the choices of media that people use, and the way that they phrase their language, down to like, you know, do they capitalize their words, do they use abbreviations.. all these things tell you something about their communication. You are paying attention more to different aspects of communication but it’s all there and it’s just as rich as face to face.
What I’m working on for them now is a self-directed course of Meta-Magick. Last year I also did a Meta-Magick course which is the NLP, hypnosis, magick combination. Meta-magic has more in it than NLP and magic, but that’s kind of an easy way to categorize it. And again that was a similar challenge as the NLP one, because usually these are things I teach in workshops where we can get people up and moving, and have them do rituals right there, and practice different techniques. The difference being online that of course I can’t monitor that everyone’s practicing exercises, but the course went very well, a lot of people got very interested in it. And some people did some really cool work during the course. So what I’m doing now is working to turn that into a self-directed course for them.
The website will have the media up there, and the media that’s involved is some video that is up there, and some audio files, and some written material, a lot of which is from The Book of Atem. The self-directed course would allow them to go through different modules, and practice some of the written rituals and techniques and I’m hoping they’re going to work a little forum so they can get feedback from other people who are practicing, and I’ll check in from time to time.
And the next live course that I’m going to teach, the difference with the live course is that I’m there full-time to answer people’s questions and to give people feedback, and also for the NLP course we did some live chats, which was fun for the people who could make it but of course there’s people involved in Maybe Logic Academy from all over the world so scheduling times was kind of tricky, to say the least. The next live course there is going to be called “Altered States: Ecstasy and Invocation” which is sort of my theme for the year. I’m doing a number of live talks on that subject as well. And again that’s going to involve some NLP skills, and some ritual magick skills, to explore how our consciousness shifts into different kinds of trance states and how things like state-dependent memory affects our daily lives and how we can use some of these techniques to make changes to our lives and our world. And to contrive our lives, the elements of our lives, to make us who we want to be. So again the self-directed course should be up and I’m finishing up the material now, so hopefully in the next month or so that should be up. The next live course will be at the end of the year, I think it will be at the beginning of December. If you go to Maybe Logic there’s already info about the live course up there, and the self-directed course will be up there as well.
WU:
Okay, great.
PF:
And I’ve got this thing coming up in Albany, NY on the 28th of April. The one in Albany that will be a live afternoon version of “Altered States: Ecstasy and Invocation” and in the three-hour thing I can kind of get people a sampling of what we do and a few nice techniques that they can practice and really notice some changes happen right there, and some things they can take home and do on their own. In June I’ll be doing a three-day version of that in Seattle which will really get into that, and then in August here in Kingston, NY we’re going to do a week-long version. So that will be a week long version of the Meta-Magick event.
WU:
Wow, that sounds kind of intense.
PF:
It is pretty intense. I’m sort of working along the model of the two week-long NLP trainings I teach every year, we do practitioner training and master practitioner training, and those are a lot of work, but I absolutely love doing it. It’s some of the most fun I ever have, getting a group of people and just being able to take them through this stuff that intensely for that amount of time. It’s a blast, and I’m looking forward to doing that with the meta-magick as well.
WU:
Well, thanks, Phil, this was awesome.
For more, check out the courses being offered. And have fun.
Meta-Magick.com
Maybe Logic Academy
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
WU,
Thanks again for sharing the interview with Phil.
The image by the Renaissance artist Raphael on his website at Magic Logic Academy is of Plato and Aristotle, of course, from his famous “School of Athens” fresco.
Ironically, Mark and I’d considered this very same image for our new WordPress site.
In the detail can be seen Plato, pointing upwards toward the heavens with his right hand, and Aristotle, motioning with his right palm parallel toward the ground.
Both are carrying books in their other hands.
Plato “drew a sharp distinction between the world of the senses and the world of the intellect”, so one could “have opinions” about the senses but “have knowledge about justified true belief”… only in the intellect.
Therefore, the sensible world is but provisionally real; while “the intelligible world is the real world”.
Aristotle, Plato’s student – on the other hand – was more philosophically grounded in biology (than Plato’s idealized geometry), and thus derived much more realism from the sensible world.
The debate is depicted in the image as between realism (Plato) which denies the full reality of the material world, and a realism (Aristotle) which finds more intelligible order in what Man “senses” in the sensible world.
All this grew from the debate about so-called “universals”, or timeless ideas… which grew from the view of nominalism: Essentially, these universals, or timeless ideas, are “but arbitrary names imposed upon the [impermanent] sensory flux… existing only within those conventions which accept them.”
From the teachings of the Buddha, prior to these debates, we learn there is no problem with universals (timeless ideas) because they are all illusory, and false as compared to empirical observation by the senses.
Furthermore, “the absolute, as opposed to merely conventional, truth or reality” is knowledge which is unknowable – or beyond our sensory perception.
But to know of a boundary from what our senses can actually perceive – and what lies beyond it – is to have already transcended it.
[From "Theory of Forms", in Wikipedia. See also "The Transcendent Absolute and Phenomena"]
It was good to revisit these thoughts and ideas in order to place more value in my perusal of Phil’s sites you linked us to.
First, because I’ve come to trust your instincts for what you deem is reliably valuable; and second, I wanted to get as firm a grasp as possible on the wealth of knowledge he so freely shares at his sites.
It’s so easy for me – like for a lot of us – to get “tangled up” in a bunch of words…
… Which is why, needless to say, Phil’s co-mingling of pleasurable cutting-edge material – culled from several interdisciplinary sources – really is fun stuff.
And I’m happy to have taken the time to explore it!
Lark
[P.S. - It's interesting to note too that Raphael was born and died, just 37 years apart, on the same date. And he died on a Good Friday, April 6, 1520, after a night of prolonged sexual activity with his beloved Margherita - the beautiful daughter of a baker - caused him to develop a fever the next day. Because he didn't divulge to his doctors the reason for his run-down state, he was given the wrong "cure", and this is what killed him. Somehow there must be a connection here, don't you think, between this comment and my previous one?
]
[Oops... "Maybe Logic Academy"
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