Why We Disconnect

In the last section, I will offer some ideas and advice for getting going with Disconnection. This practice is the most difficult and most likely to cause trouble in my inbox. Really understanding it is important - because you may not be able (or not want to) do it in the way I have, or you may find what works for me does not work for you. In those cases, it's your task to devise something equivalent.

Here's a recap:

• The true equivalents of the Stellar in other religious traditions include: use of ritual drugs, extremes of pain and silence, profound isolation, danger in the natural world, and spiritual commitments so intense you become strange and set apart from other people; living in the woods alone, near-death experiences, doing peculiar things with your sleep, mountaineering scuba and spacefaring, travel to the underworld, and so-forth. Disconnection is designed to approximate some of these experiences in a low-risk and controlled way.
• Connect with ancient religions better by exeriencing pre-modern perspectives and problems
• Cultivating a sense of awe and terror towards the infinite and the wild, as this is an essential part of Fencraft's flavour (in comparison with other religions and neoPaganisms)
• Provoke fractures in space, time or your sensory experience, to invite altered states
• Experience time travel, as disjointed time and hauntings and loops in the landscape are a key focus for our way of experiencing the otherworldly
• To be challenging in interesting ways; to have a component of religious life which is not a leisure hobby. To experience different emotions in faith - hardship, difficulty, want - to better endure crises of faith in dark times when the gods are not present in your need
• Clear space in your week and your mental plate to do religious time, so that your dreams and seeking and work are the richer and more vivid
• Ensure you're spending more time in conversation with the infinite than with the mortal trivia of digital pagan communities. To avoid armchair paganism - that is, getting stuck at the endless researching, consuming and discussing stage, rather than the doing.
• Prompt a radical hereness - to hear a forest means an intensity of noticing, becoming more like the forest, turning your attention towards it. To become strange.
• Copy the kinds of activities and ways of life within the lore, to see if it leads us in the same directions
• Akin to meditation, develop more control over your will and your ability to enter and exit altered states, and notice when you are under influence
• Personal wellbeing - to do more works of art, friendship, exercise, physicality visiting, adventuring in our brief time here; and reject time-sink and exposure to stress and chaos
• Tools restructure the way we experience ourself and the world. Deep magic and deep religion require us to deliberately structure our perceptions around certain kinds of sensing. Disconnection is a way to practice designing our world around what you seek - discarding tool-patterns which are in conflict with transcendent experiences, and discovering ones which enhance them.

The purpose of a daily practice is to build up a muscle so it is effortless when you need it - it's pre-preparation. What does this practice prepare you for?

Pursuing self-loss and metamorphosis demands the ability to be present in an experience, have control over your experiences, know what is you and is not you, and find the way back. A very typical Stellar goal might be to gradually become a wilderness hermit, only hearing the land or the gods - or at the least, be able to sit in the hills and watch a storm come in and roll away again.

Disconnection is unendurably difficult when you begin. Practicing leaving your phone when you nip to the shops, or noticing and resisting the number of little urges you have in the day to just take a quick peak at your notifications, is a long journey. If you want those transcendent experiences in nature, you need to begin working on that scratching at your psyche far ahead of time.

There's a practical component too: choosing not to use the internet typically means learning a new way of doing things. All those old ways are still out there, but it can take a bit of extra thought and effort when you begin. Learning how to navigate without a map app or how to pass twenty idle empty minutes prepare you for the significant acts of Disconnection.

I'm going to round this one off by saying some nice things about the internet. I value my internet friends beyond measure. Access to books, films and music is the light of my life - I couldn't live without the wealth of 70s pulp trash the web brings me so effortlessly. I prefer my e-reader and film downloads to the space taken up by those things as objects. Learning skills and languages online keeps me alive. I love website design as a hobby, and the way I can be more expressive through my religious website than I could through a book or conversation.

Unlike many people, I feel the internet's impact on political discourse can be good: I like when an idea is taken up by Twitter, and evaluated from all sides across a day. I think that's better than discourse being led by those who are lucky enough to be authors, academics or journalists, and in a complex world, few serious things have a single angle - I like forming my impression of an idea from disagreeing parts.

I'm so extra about the internet because it is inherently a good; but its mainstream is designed to be as hostile to its users as possible, so keen to hijack our minds and to monopolise the essential parts of humanity behind a corporate interface. A well-designed tool should not need the level of effort I must exhert to remain under my own control, to remain useful to me but without downsides. And like most technology, we cannot meaningfully opt-out - like motorways imposed like scars across a hill, like poison in the air, like entities in the dark.

Time to Disconnect

In the last section, I will offer a large selection of hints for getting started.