The Psychic Sensor / Censor

In chaos magic, the psychic sensor / censor is the psychological and evolutionary “gatekeeper” of the conscious mind. It is the internal editor that constantly filters, deletes, and rationalizes our reality to keep us sane, grounded, and aligned with consensus reality. In modern circles, it often mistakenly called the psychic sensor, as in it senses and irradicates the illogical from the deep mind, but it’s original spelling was censor, as in editor who censors material from being published.

While the theoretical psychic censor is conceptually necessary for daily survival—preventing us from being overwhelmed by the mass sensory data and bizarre subconscious thoughts received by the brain—it supposedly acts as a barrier to magical acts. Magic defies logic so the psychic censor will doubt and block away any magical intent before it can reach the deep mind where theoretically real change is initiated.

To understand how chaos magicians view and bypass this mechanism, we have to look at the foundations laid by the two main founders of the 1980’s chaos magic movement: Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine.

Peter J. Carroll

I might be wrong by although my introduction to Chaos Magic was through Phil Hine and I read his comments on the Psychic Censor / Sensor, I have a feeling it was originally Peter J. Carroll who introduced the concept. Likely in Liber Null in the early 80s. It is always pointed out that he was influenced by the sigil magic of Austin Osman Spare and psychological concepts which would have inspired the concept and its use in magic. For Carroll magic was often about getting the symbols similar to Spare’s sigils into the subconscious mind, which was the powerful part that could perform the magic. Carroll described the psychic censor as a strict firewall between the conscious and subconscious minds.

According to Carroll, the censor cannot be reasoned with or asked politely to step aside. To slip a magical intent (like a sigil) past it, the magician must temporarily “paralyze” or blindside the censor or obfuscate the intention in a consciously forgotten sigil (remembered by the subconscious). Carroll pioneered the use of the term gnosis (likely just his alternative term for trance) to achieve this. He divided gnosis into two primary tactical approaches:

• Inhibitory Gnosis: Silencing the censor through prolonged quiet of mind, such as deep meditation, sensory deprivation, even sleeplessness and fasting, until the internal dialogue completely stops and the psychic censor with it.
• Ecstatic Gnosis: Overwhelming the censor through extreme physical stimulation, emotional arousal, frantic dancing, chanting, hyperventilation, sexual climax, or fear of death causing the conscious mind to briefly “blink” or short-circuit allowing intention to slip through.

In that exact moment of one-pointed focus or cognitive overload, the psychic censor drops its guard, allowing the magical desire to be planted directly into the subconscious.

Phil Hine

In Condensed Chaos, Phil Hine took Carroll’s heavily technical framework and made it more accessible and more psychologically focused. Hine describes the psychic sensor / censor less like an aggressive firewall and more like a Code style for the brain. It is the voice that says, “That’s impossible, you’re just imagining things.”

While Hine agrees with Carroll on the importance of gnosis / trance work / altered states, he emphasizes a third, more subtle state often called “indifferent vacuity”. Hine suggests that you don’t always need intense exhaustion or ecstatic frenzy to fool the censor; you can also bypass it through sheer boredom, playfulness, or casual distraction as well!

Hine’s perspective focuses heavily on belief as a tool. He argues that by consciously shifting your belief systems (or “paradigms”), you can actually retrain your psychic censor / sensor over time. If you dynamically change what your censor considers “allowable” reality, it stops blocking magical perceptions and results quite as aggressively.

Summary

The Censor blocks most of the noise and illogical things. A bit like Live people in Beetlejuice.

The issue: Theoretically, it also prevents the illogical side of magic from working, by filtering things just like the strange and unusual.

The Solution: Trance states. Either by excitement or extreme quiet. Or according to Phil Hine slipping into a paradigm which allows the illogical to occur.

Ultimately, chaos magic treats the psychic censor not as an enemy to be destroyed, but as a deeply ingrained psychological habit to be temporarily skated at useful times, but maintained most of the rest of the time. The goal of the chaos magician is simply to learn how to turn the censor off TEMPORARILY at will, long enough to let magic happen and returned to protect the brain.