The Editorial By Scot Rhoads Errata The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram article in NMR 9:2 reversed the order of two sections: The Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram should preceed the Middle Pillar Technique. Also, the leading foot in the Enterer gesture should be the left foot, not the right as in the (unfortunately mirrored) illustration. These are correct in the text accompanying the tape. New Moon Rising Up for Sale? Yes, the rumors (which I started) are true. We are offering this magazine for sale. It's more a hobby than a career (at this stage), so it's not expensive, but it is running a profit, so it ain't free! Write to the above address or e-mail us at nmrWhy? We started New Moon Rising almost ten years ago with the hope of it providing an income to enable our dream of building a Coven Stead out in the country, a place of spiritual renewal and exploration. Initial response was very promising so we kept at it. But to grow to the point that it could support us without our also needing real jobs demanded more time and energy than we could spare, thanks to our real jobs! For almost ten years we have been trying to sort out our lives enough to allow us to make that breakthrough, and have had to settle for getting by on each issue instead of doing the kind of job we aspire to. We have made progress, especially recently, but it has been slow and now things have changed. New Moon Rising has been a joy on many levels, mostly intellectual. In a way, it is an expression of my desire to know and understand as much as I can about Wicca, Paganism, magick and all the other topics we have included. Ten years later, though there is still so much left to learn, I am comfortable with the intellectual side. I am ready to take on something more, now. I am ready and anxious to explore much more of the experiential side, which has always been a bigger challenge in my life. Much as I would like to do that while continuing the magazine, the additional burden of a full time job makes it too difficult. I see where I want to be and can go there with the magazine if I wait, or go now if I am without the magazine. I am no longer willing to wait. Once we sell NMR, I will probably maintain a bit of a presence on the web perhaps, and I have a few ideas for articles that I haven't had time to write, but my drive right now is mostly artistic. With luck, that is how I will be making most of my contribution in the near future. It will probably not be under this name. I've never liked it much and I came that close to using a pseudonym when we started NMR. It seems appropriate to take a new name for a new life, but that remains to be seen. One of the biggest thrills of editing the magazine has been the opportunity to share my thoughts. I am constantly boggled at the heroic efforts our species invests in making the world and life unpleasant with efforts richly rewarded. So many of our problems could be solved or at least addressed by simple changes in our ways of thinking. Even if we don't know what those ways are yet, it seems clear that we could be looking rather than clinging to those that have proven themselves deficient. I have felt that the magazine offered me a platform to make suggestions that could help people live better lives. It is that thought which has offered the most joy and satisfaction in this job. Perhaps it sounds conceited, but I have tried to approach it from a humble perspective. After all, I have been advising myself more than anyone. I have also had the feeling, though, that I've been preaching to the choir. [Perhaps that feeling also comes from my finally beginning to take my own advice to heart.] I have gotten many encouraging responses from NMR readers and almost universally hostile responses when talking about the same ideas with those outside the metaphysical community. It leaves me with the sense that those most exposed to my text are the one who stand to benefit least. Sure it's great fun to get a Blessed Be! From the choir, but not entirely satisfying when the critical work remains mostly unaddressed. Thanks to my experience with outsiders I have nearly given up on text as a way to express any thought that is not already incipient in the reader's consciousness. Ideas get distorted in communication, and those ideas that are not already thoroughly comprehensible are nearly guaranteed to be distorted into uselessness. Ideas that are in any way threatening, are even more likely to be interpreted hostilely. My attitude used to be, I don't care if people agree, I just want to be understood. Now it has become, I don't care if I'm understood; I just want to have a positive influence. (Admittedly, that's misleading, I still want to be understood and agreed with, but this is the attitude I cultivate.) This attitude channels me toward an interest that has been steadily growing for over twenty years: art. I have focused on an art career because it would afford the opportunity to influence people directly, bypassing the intellectual level, so I can potentially reach people who don't already understand what I'm trying to say; through art I can get more of the experience of the metaphysical things we've been offering on an intellectual level in our magazine; and I hope to get decent paying work that could yet help bring our dream of Coven Stead. Perhaps this is optimistic, but no more so than relying on the alternatives. Though this is not the whole story, it is probably a lot more personal information than most want to know about this decision; but New Moon Rising has been such a big part of my life for so many years that it and all its readers are like family. Though I am comfortable with this decision, I am not happy about it, so I need to convince everyone (myself included) that it is for the best. I don't know how long it will take to sell the magazine. Perhaps a year or more, so this is not yet a goodbye. Even if NMR has new owners by the next issue, my farewell is yet to come. And we are still engaged in expanding the magazine, so possibly it will grow enough to meet our needs before it sells. Then perhaps I can continue as editor indefinitely, as I'd originally envisioned. But this is an announcement that New Moon Rising is available for sale, and an explanation. Metaparadigms I have abandoned my search for truth
and am now looking for a good fantasy. Ashleigh Brilliant What are these thoughts that compel me to seek another means of expression? They are mostly things I've brought up in these pages. The theme that encompasses most is finding better ways to think and live; ways that make people happier make the world happier. Pretty simple, though stunningly neglected. I've found that most of the original ideas I've had turn out to have been expressed more eloquently by others in the past, but I am happy to add my voice. I have settled on one particular expression here out of the many possibilities because it is representative and is one of the few ideas I've had that still seems mostly original, at least in this particular conformation: metaparadigms (which I mentioned in an editorial in NMR 6:6). Paradigm means example or pattern, especially a particularly clear example of an archetype; but as it's used today it refers to a fundamental level of thought. These paradigms are still patterns, but they are the patterns of the fundamental rules, models, assumptions that we use to make sense of our world. They are not only basic to cultures and individual beings; some are even intrinsic to our anatomy. Paradigms are rarely questioned. We are evolved not to do so. In a world where awareness extends to a life of three decades, direct communication extends to a community of two to three hundred, and change is glacial, people don't have much perspective to assess their paradigms; nor do they have the luxury. The paradigms evolved on a supersocial level spanning many generations, encompassing a broader sample of environmental conditions than an individual's conscious can experience, without the benefit of tools like writing. Writing, with our other modern means of communication and information gathering and analysis, gives us a perspective that allows us to assess our paradigms. Further, we can now more easily afford the luxury we can afford to experiment more in a world where we are not a single drought away from starvation. More ominously, the increase in population, communication and interaction is forcing us to face the shortcomings of our present systems, and our present paradigms. An example of a paradigm is objectivism, the philosophy that there is an objective reality distinct from (and usually more real than) subjective experience. This graduates from philosophy to paradigm when it is the system that provides the framework for making sense of our world and planning our actions and is usually unexamined, exclusive and unconscious. Paradigms, like anything, have their advantages and disadvantages depending on context. Different paradigms work better for different people in different circumstances. Objectivism can provide security and a foundation for unity when it allows us not to fret about how our world is, and offers us a common ground in which we can all cooperate. Or it can be ossifying and a basis of division when we think it tells us how our world has to be, thus putting us at odds with those who won't share our model. While we each may have our own struggles with our paradigms as they outlive their usefulness in our lives, more distressing is the conflict on the social level. There are plenty of tolerant people, but too many are intolerant. There are plenty of tolerant paradigms, but too many are otherwise. Unfortunately, intolerant people and intolerant paradigms encourage one another. It's as if paradigms are afraid to face their mortality. They cannot tolerate any alternatives either outside or within the individual. Thou shalt have no other paradigm before Me. The mere existence of other ways of thinking admit the possibility of replacement or transformation. This seems to be another, more pernicious manifestation of the psychosocial inertia that kept our ancestors from being too self-destructively experimental. But now that our modern world forces paradigms into such proximity, their xenophobia is proving yet another fatal shortcoming. The temptation is to try to replace or at least fix these destructive paradigms. This would be to pursue the kind of dominating behavior that has already created so much of our problem. In that light, it seems ill advised. What I hope metaparadigms can offer is a framework for allowing paradigms to coexist, and even cooperate, with as little disturbance (thus threat) as possible. Unfortunately, merely allowing other views to remain unmolested is a challenge in some paradigms, but some challenges seem inevitable. The goal is to keep them to a minimum, through quantity of rules and quality. Minimal quantity is intuitively obvious. Don't make any unnecessary codes. Quality means choosing rules that are the easiest to agree upon. The latter is the biggest challenge, but we don't have to succeed for it to work. We need not agree on these rules and be finished with them. We need only be dedicated to discovering or creating them and applying them as we can. Most of these rules would offer few problems stealing bad, lying bad, murder bad, slavery bad, love good, security good, generosity good. We can turn to the perennial wisdom and empirics for enough answers to make a start. Thus we can lay the ground rules for mutually beneficial coexistence on the socio-paradigmatic level that governments and societies offer (with varying success) on an individual level. One of the first surprises is that we can dispense with Truth. Truth seems to be a goal of most paradigms (though meaning would be a more accurate word for it). But a metaparadigm does not need Truth. It serves no function. The goal of a metaparadigm is to harmonize paradigms allowing disparate paradigms to peacefully coexist. It does so, or fails to do so, independent of the Truths embodied in the paradigms. It is empirical. But it's hard to agree on something as vague as harmony and hard to base anything empirical on such an abstraction. A metaparadigm has to be rooted in the most concrete universals possible. There is a tendency to think that this is embodied in whatever paradigm dominates. For instance, the very word empirical in our society conjures objectivism, logical positivism (a.k.a. logical empiricism) and even Scientism; but much more immediate, tangible, inescapable than such Truths are feelings. A metaparadigm should be focused on encouraging (or at least allowing) the most happiness in everyone, a kind of emotional empiricism. We may not be able to readily digitize happiness data, but as general guide it is accessible to everyone. There is considerable disagreement over what will make people happy, both in the short and long term. But again, there is enough agreement (on things like murder and love) for a good start. In rediscovering the shared aspirations of our species (including, one hopes, the aspiration to rediscover these aspirations) and focusing on them on a global scale, we can reestablish the social bonds lost in the chaos of competing paradigms; and we can do so on the global scale we need to survive and thrive. As I said, these are not new ideas, but perhaps a novel format. And our needs are urgent enough to warrant this kind of experimentation. Magick and Wicca played a large role in bringing these ideas to my consciousness. An it harm none, do what thou wilt. Love is the law, love under will. Know thyself. All acts of love and happiness are My rites. These express the wisdom that shaped my ideals. And the principles of metaphysics, that we create our own reality, inspire my dedication to fulfill them despite common sense cynicism. I hope New Moon Rising under my editorship has helped move things in that direction and that it will always do so. I hope I can do so even more in my new pursuits. In any case, it has been a blast. Blessed Be! SR | 
