Enlightenment (satori) does not signify 'rapture' or any unusual 'ecstatic' condition in which one likes oneself. Rather, it is an awakening to what is common. You are awoken not an extraordinary There but to an age-old Here, to a deep immanence . (p18)

I emphasize the twisting immanence of the weird here because, though we will be meeting some wild visions ahead, including gnostic downloads and alien beings, I want to understand these extraordinary experiences not as signs of a “separate reality” but as manifestations or mutations of this one.

Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence , a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal.

Deleuze proposes an alternative metaphysics that eschews any transcendence in favor of what he terms a ‘transcendental empiricism’; a metaphysics of immanence .

As it surpasses the notion of transcendence, so Magic also surpasses that of immanence . Its world is at the same time a world and no world at all, it is both language and silence, unmeasurable existence and limited presence, indistinctness and essence. It is unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity, where the two terms are simultaneously fused and irreducible to each other. In other words, it is reality in the form of a paradox.

Such para-scientific theories can be loosely assembled under the category of theories of immanence , or of post- or nonhuman studies, and include such formations as ecofeminisms, “new” materialisms, new animisms, animal studies, vegetal studies, assemblage and actor-network theories, speculative realism, complexity theory, and nonlinear science studies. In their loosely collective, “strung-along” effort to decenter “the human,” these modes of immanent analysis open the possibility of something like a pluralist pantheism—or, to mobilize the plurality, “pantheologies.” They do so, first, by dislodging agency and creativity from humanity (theism’s perennial “image of God”) and second, by locating agency and creativity in matter itself. Viewed through the manifold lenses of such studies, the “world” with which the pantheist would identify God is neither inert and passive, as classical theism would have it, nor total and unchanging, as the monist would have it. Rather, “world” names an open, relational, and self-exceeding concatenation of systems that are themselves open, relational, and self-exceeding. (p24, emph added)