An introduction presents itself:
This course is not a manual for mystical initiation. Only for a tiny minority is that achievable in a single lifetime, or even a good idea. This course is not a self-help manual to help you manage your life better. There is already a truckload of material on that theme, of varying levels of quality. This course is also not a rigorous academic presentation of mass media theory, memetics, or the Marxist theory of ideology. However, it does offer a basic introduction to all of the above, boiled down to what we think will be useful for our target audience.
This course will teach you to do magick, of a sort - in the sense of Aleister Crowley's definition of "changing consciousness in accordance with will". It goes beyond most of the material on this matter however, in that it is written for a social movement seeking to change the consciousness of a whole society, or even a whole species.
This course is actually not for individuals at all. Our basic idea is that the "individual consciousness" or "spirit" is only a meaningful concept in the context of our whole species-being, much like the wind only has meaning in the consciousness of a planetary atmosphere. This course is for social movements aiming at a new and better way of being human together, and the members of such movements.
It suggests ways of being able to be more human together, of overcoming separation and alienation in our networks of struggle - and thus, necessarily, perhaps the tiniest glimpse but still real, of what a new, truly human world might look like. In this sense the only book like it we are aware of is Starhawk's Truth or Dare (1987), which you really should read as well.
This book is only the first volume of a useful open-ended approach. If you are reading this more than ten years after its publication, and there was never a second volume, containing experimental results and refinements of the theory, then it was obviously a dead end and you should throw this book away now.
