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techstepgenr8tion
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01 Jan 2017, 2:41 pm

smudge wrote:
Whether Satanic or whatever you want to call it, it just makes me very curious as to why they're so invested in whatever their religion is. It must be a religion or cult of some sort. I didn't even mention the Devil handsigns that a bunch of politicians use too, as well as big rap stars.


They're not. It's a publicity game.

On one hand people like Jay-Z and Beyonce have attended and gained some vague affiliation with OTO and rather than just find it interesting or chew on it they wove it into videos and Jay somehow thinks its a sign that he's discovered the Illuminati and hey - they're alright and it's cool stuff!...well, OTO's far from being a 'secret' society and it's got nothing to do with anything one would attribute to the postulated 'Illuminati' - he's just a celebrity doing what celebrities do. Movie and music stars will dabble with occultism, some like Jimmy Page actually got very serious about it. These days though it's mostly clap-trap, the most watered-down and commercialized versions of Kabbalah, love spell and sex magic books by Ke$ha, etc.. You can think of this as the pop new age of the 1970's and 80's gone Hermetic.

Occultism, or at least the pop vision of it, is taboo and sexy, sex sells, so exploit-exploit-exploit.


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01 Jan 2017, 8:45 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
He did give the world the British Empire, by his other efforts, so I'd say that his Enochian is no more embarassing than Newton's alchemy.

No, Dee most certainly did not give the world the British Empire. He was one of many who advocated for expansion into the new world, but that project was hardly the whole of the Empire which was built over centuries by many.

Even if he had singly handedly carved out the empire for the British throne, this is a paltry achievement compared to the torrents of knowledge Newton released in the Principia and other works. There is just no contest between the two, and gaining that kind of knowledge was Dee's primary motivation in seeking contact with Angels and Demons.

His efforts to reveal the deeper truths of the universe, informed by deep reading in the Hermetic tradition and the latest ideas in Neo-Platonism from the continent, were abject failures.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
In talking about Crowley's Vision and the Voice though that's a retold experience of his encounter with the 30 aethyrs, which is exactly that system - Enochian. Reading Nick Farrell, Benjamin Rowe, and Peregrin Wildoak on it (despite the name Peregrin's a pretty stoic analyst of mystic process in the Golden Dawn System), and listening to some of Pat Zalewski's interviews with Martin Thibault - it's a valid system of ingress. The four elements are a behaviorism of matter and the subjective experience works more with behavior than analysis of substance, hence the clusters on the tablets relating to fire, air, water, earth, and 'aethyr' being considered either the balancing point of them or their supernal/undifferentiated source.

I'd have to add that the late 20th and early 21st century have been a great time for the clarification of these concepts as more people are able to dive into these systems, experience the visions or sensations, and explain to other advanced and beginning practitioners what they consider to be the deliverables of these systems or the best angles of engagement.


Whatever. Still waiting to see one of these masters of deep mysteries reveal a single deep thing about the cosmos that isn't self-referential wankery.

If they said "this is a made up system that can nevertheless serve as window into states of consciousness" and then showed all the useful insight into the workings of consciousness, the unconscious or whatever, I would be impressed. But they don't. They say this is a system that uses symbolic stuff that isn't always literally true to reveal deeper things that can't then be shared and the beings we contact are real and external to our minds..."

And having seen not a shred of evidence to support that, I tend to think they are full of it.

That some believe their own hype doesn't make it less false.

Where did all their working and practical magick get Crowley or his followers? Drug addiction? Penury. Disease. Madness. Maybe it's just me, but I would expect something a little more positive from unlocking ultimate power and the secrets of the ages.

In the most generous view possible, the forces he unleashed were directly responsible for the World Wars, Concentration Camps, nuclear chemical and biological weapons, the cold war and ascendancy of the surveillance state, as well as the success of Scientology and Nasa (JPL in particular!)... If you accepted that his working really did contribute something to all that, what in it would make you say, "hey that's something I want to be part of! All that stuff is so great!"

Yes, I am not taking it seriously, because my BS meter is pegged at the high end of the scale whenever I come near this stuff, but if, despite all evidence to the contrary, it turned out to be true, would it be something you would want to invite in? I don't get that.


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techstepgenr8tion
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01 Jan 2017, 11:54 pm

Adamantium wrote:
No, Dee most certainly did not give the world the British Empire. He was one of many who advocated for expansion into the new world, but that project was hardly the whole of the Empire which was built over centuries by many.

Even if he had singly handedly carved out the empire for the British throne, this is a paltry achievement compared to the torrents of knowledge Newton released in the Principia and other works. There is just no contest between the two, and gaining that kind of knowledge was Dee's primary motivation in seeking contact with Angels and Demons.

His efforts to reveal the deeper truths of the universe, informed by deep reading in the Hermetic tradition and the latest ideas in Neo-Platonism from the continent, were abject failures.

Newton lucked out in that alchemy housed richer material for technological advancement. Dee was using the wrong set tools for that particular kind of result, and had Dee been sent a book by a late 20th or early 21st century Golden Dawn diaspora author he'd realize it was a dead end and jumped over to alchemy himself. It might have chagrined groups like the Golden Dawn not to have an Enochian system to work with but they'd still have plenty of kabbalah, alchemy, and various other visual-mnemonic devices to keep them busy. All of this doesn't make Dee a worse or lazier person, he just picked a less scientifically fortunate venture.

Another bit that I think Newton had over Dee - he was doing most of his work almost 100 years later and would have had an easier starting point to plan his efforts from.

If you do consider this a powerful modern morality tale though I'd hate to hear the slating you'd give to the 19th century scientists who subscribed to ether theory of light when comparing them to Einstein.

Adamantium wrote:
Whatever. Still waiting to see one of these masters of deep mysteries reveal a single deep thing about the cosmos that isn't self-referential wankery.

Here's something to chew on. Western culture is committing suicide. It's splitting to pieces as each generation has a greater debt of chronologically adult babies. A lot of the people who are deeply dissatisfied with how their lives are working out or aren't working out are getting obsessed with interesectional politics, playing victim games, and as of lately trying to leverage the world around them for power through legislation and intimidation with hefty fines. It's a psychosis that would have been laughed in a culture that had more cohesion and stabilizing structures but that's not where we're at and the people crafting the legislation have almost as muddied a grip on reality themselves.

It's all getting washed along by post-modern philosophy of a variety that suggests that there's no such thing as 'truth' - there's one group's truth vs. another group's truth, all discussions or tries at triangulating one central truth are just cynical attempts of one group to wrest power from the next, and that logic is just another tool used by the patriarchy to take things away from people who aren't as equipped to use that particular tool against them. If that gets too much farther we'll be crushing our economic engine, treating our best producers and thinkers almost like kulaks, and we'll be going the way of Rome. The snowflakes seem to have enough self-loathing that I think they're almost wishing a stronger, more ancient, more old-testament type of person would take their freedom away from them and dictate truth - I remember Jonathan Haidt saying something about the femininity of the mob and I think he was on onto something with that.

The core of it seems to be that people can't stand a minute alone with themselves and they're constantly looking outward to be entertained, to be served, or for the causes of their problems - it's a complete disconnect from reality, particularly internal messages from subconscious levels that are less malleable to convenience, and as a result we've got a bumper crop of self-loathing and reality-loathing special snowflakes. Mental illness is slowly becoming the new norm and setting the popular rules on how to think.

We might have been able to survive some degree of this sort of churlishness when we didn't have the means to blow ourselves up several times over but we're in that world now and we'll only survive if we can cultivate a heck of a lot more integrity than we'd had in the past. For as much as technology does a great job at leveraging the human capacity to get things done it does little or nothing spectacular at making people less crazy. The paths people have for self-development through formalized Neoplatonist and Hermetic initiatic systems do focus on that, most observably in the foundations of Freemasonry, and those means for people to face themselves, gain firmer foundations in themselves, and be better integrated members of society is much more important than any of the so-called 'magick' that's getting bemoaned and it's much more important than any of these questions about what gods, goddesses, angels, demons, etc.. are. You can't just have this going on in private meetings with a therapist where sanity might be shared between two people if you're lucky; you need it on the broader public scale.

Really first and foremost I'd like to see us get some kind of cohesive culture together again rather than take a huge leap backward all because science and technology alone weren't enough to brace a culture.

Adamantium wrote:
If they said "this is a made up system that can nevertheless serve as window into states of consciousness" and then showed all the useful insight into the workings of consciousness, the unconscious or whatever, I would be impressed. But they don't. They say this is a system that uses symbolic stuff that isn't always literally true to reveal deeper things that can't then be shared and the beings we contact are real and external to our minds..."

Most of history occurred before Freud and Jung were around - including this. Meditation would be BS by this logic because it came about before meditators could be put in MRI's and have the effects on their brains tested. They didn't know that it was reshaping their brains, as far as I know were by and large using new-agey parlance to explain the process, and wouldn't have often thought of it in terms of neuroscience because because a modern neurologist hadn't handed that off to them yet.

Adamantium wrote:
Where did all their working and practical magick get Crowley or his followers? Drug addiction? Penury. Disease. Madness. Maybe it's just me, but I would expect something a little more positive from unlocking ultimate power and the secrets of the ages.

Is that what you'd expect to be surrounded by today if you walked into an OTO EGC Gnostic Mass?

I'll admit that what you'll find there by and large are a lot of people who had difficulties in their lives up-front. Typically people who don't have enough difficulties up front in their lives will do almost anything to conform as perfectly as they can to the presiding cultural norms rather than touch anything remotely taboo.

OTO these days has cracked down completely on drug use from the grand lodge level. You might have a little bit of wine with your wafer, or water if you have problems with alcohol - that's it. What I've noticed about the people I just mentioned earlier who do attend; they're making their lives better by taking what would have often been unbearably difficult or complex life situations in one way or another and making up the difference by building internal resource with what they can glean from ideas in the MMM and EGC systems. They're strategically making peace with their lives even without the $300-400k brick facade, an Audi or Lexus in the driveway, or bragging rights as to what ivy league school their kids are graduating from.

Adamantium wrote:
In the most generous view possible, the forces he unleashed were directly responsible for the World Wars, Concentration Camps, nuclear chemical and biological weapons, the cold war and ascendancy of the surveillance state, as well as the success of Scientology and Nasa (JPL in particular!)... If you accepted that his working really did contribute something to all that, what in it would make you say, "hey that's something I want to be part of! All that stuff is so great!"

I don't think he unleashed a thing and while there might be true believer or two out there I don't think most people in the OTO, AA, and especially the broader magic community at large take him particularly serious on this point. When he wrote his notes on Book of the Law he suggested the possibility that as he'd been following his Buddhist practices that he'd developed a bit of antipathy for them somewhere deep down and that Nuit, Hadit, and Ra Hoor Kuit found him based on things he was repressing.

Far more likely story of Book of the Law than any sort of new aeon - people can know things without knowing how they know them based on how our minds aggregate data. When there's a significant difference between what you know subconsciously vs. what you know or what you think you know consciously you're in a prime zone for eruptions and visions. Knowing that the isht was going to hit the fan in Europe back in 1904 may or may not have been a genius level prediction but it was a bit down the tracks and it probably wouldn't have been something he'd have had directly on his mind.

Adamantium wrote:
Yes, I am not taking it seriously, because my BS meter is pegged at the high end of the scale whenever I come near this stuff, but if, despite all evidence to the contrary, it turned out to be true, would it be something you would want to invite in? I don't get that.

This is where we're talking past each other and may be for a long time.

One of the most absurd things Crowley ever said was something to the effect that God once washed the world away with water (ie. Great Flood), the baptism of the world with fire was his contact with Aiwass in Cairo Egypt, 1904. I mentioned above very few people believe that and most of those who do are usually in some splinter Thelemic group or another. That worldview isn't central to magical practice, it's only central to people who would take Crowley that seriously or make the mistake of interpreting him as somehow infallible. It'd be the same kind of person we have these days in the midwest who can't bring any objectivity to the table when reading the bible. Thankfully OTO, at least the lodge I've been attending, has relatively few if any of those sorts of people.


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techstepgenr8tion
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02 Jan 2017, 12:05 am

One thing that I'll admit to be really difficult with this conversation is context switching.

There are psychological components of occultism, which I think stand on their own and are invaluable. There are unusual, perhaps woo-ish components that might stretch modern convention a bit but which I think stand on solid ground such as using symbol to communicate back to your subconscious mind in it's own currency (which we may not have a firm grasp, formally, on how elastic communication in that area is or isn't). There are still other aspects, like people claiming to have experiences not only in navigating some distant or internal realm but proof that they were seeing something outside their room or at a distance - that's also a specific kind of claim that's in its own category.

We'll probably have a more fruitful discussion, or debate, if we can pick apart which layer we're discussing at any moment or what layer we're speaking to in our criticisms. The layers aren't there for the sake of obfuscation, this is just that broad a topic and for it's broader disinterest and neglect over the past couple hundred years you have a lot of pieces in the same general bucket whereas they probably should be only considered as potentially interrelated.


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02 Jan 2017, 2:42 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Far more likely story of Book of the Law than any sort of new aeon - people can know things without knowing how they know them based on how our minds aggregate data. When there's a significant difference between what you know subconsciously vs. what you know or what you think you know consciously you're in a prime zone for eruptions and visions. Knowing that the isht was going to hit the fan in Europe back in 1904 may or may not have been a genius level prediction but it was a bit down the tracks and it probably wouldn't have been something he'd have had directly on his mind.

I just realized I threw this out there without qualifying it as well as I could have.

People have discussed his Book of Lies where one of the chapters potentially had some double-entente for concerns over a cultural blowout (eg. 23 Skidoo). As I look back the source of that info is a particular commentator who I tried listening to on other issues but he's increasingly lost my interest.

What I can say for certain about Book of the Law is it's a massive puzzle of kabbalisms and acrostics. One of the first things I noticed about it was his treatment of Nuit, Hadit, and Ra Hoor Kuit as something like archetypal water, fire, and air respectively. Chapters 1 and 2 were a bit cosmology-laden, book 3 seems heavily aimed at the war of ideologies and attempts to clear the playing field of ideas that were on their way out. All of these chapters of course have more specific bits of content and extended interpretations, just that the crux of it seemed to be pointing out the core idea that consciousness existence was a dipole reality between the infinitely large and small (like the old kabbalistic adage of the circle who's center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere) that come from nothing and erase one another at merger, ie. 0 = 2 = 0.


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02 Jan 2017, 11:27 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Here's something to chew on. Western culture is committing suicide. It's splitting to pieces as each generation has a greater debt of chronologically adult babies. A lot of the people who are deeply dissatisfied with how their lives are working out or aren't working out are getting obsessed with interesectional politics, playing victim games, and as of lately trying to leverage the world around them for power through legislation and intimidation with hefty fines. It's a psychosis that would have been laughed in a culture that had more cohesion and stabilizing structures but that's not where we're at and the people crafting the legislation have almost as muddied a grip on reality themselves.

It's all getting washed along by post-modern philosophy of a variety that suggests that there's no such thing as 'truth' - there's one group's truth vs. another group's truth, all discussions or tries at triangulating one central truth are just cynical attempts of one group to wrest power from the next, and that logic is just another tool used by the patriarchy to take things away from people who aren't as equipped to use that particular tool against them. If that gets too much farther we'll be crushing our economic engine, treating our best producers and thinkers almost like kulaks, and we'll be going the way of Rome. The snowflakes seem to have enough self-loathing that I think they're almost wishing a stronger, more ancient, more old-testament type of person would take their freedom away from them and dictate truth - I remember Jonathan Haidt saying something about the femininity of the mob and I think he was on onto something with that.

The core of it seems to be that people can't stand a minute alone with themselves and they're constantly looking outward to be entertained, to be served, or for the causes of their problems - it's a complete disconnect from reality, particularly internal messages from subconscious levels that are less malleable to convenience, and as a result we've got a bumper crop of self-loathing and reality-loathing special snowflakes. Mental illness is slowly becoming the new norm and setting the popular rules on how to think.

Speaking to that even more passionately than usual:


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02 Jan 2017, 4:21 pm

smudge wrote:
Whether Satanic or whatever you want to call it, it just makes me very curious as to why they're so invested in whatever their religion is. It must be a religion or cult of some sort.


There are logical fallacies and superstitions, in materialism, or, surely, you might all agree with one another, every time.

An indifferent way of seeing religions is as a theory, worldview, or mental model of the universe.

Is there a moral duty, to convert the disinterested, from one to the other.

Or, do you tend to leave people to themselves, agree to disagree, when they are mostly-harmless.

Our senses are limited, even according to the admissions of materialists.

Everything you imagine, to fill in that mental blank, is a sort of flying spaghetti monster.

But, you are vehement as missionaries.



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02 Jan 2017, 4:25 pm

(Pardon my typing. High time for a break.)



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02 Jan 2017, 4:56 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:
smudge wrote:
Whether Satanic or whatever you want to call it, it just makes me very curious as to why they're so invested in whatever their religion is. It must be a religion or cult of some sort.


There are logical fallacies and superstitions, in materialism, or, surely, you might all agree with one another, every time.

An indifferent way of seeing religions is as a theory, worldview, or mental model of the universe.

Is there a moral duty, to convert the disinterested, from one to the other.

Or, do you tend to leave people to themselves, agree to disagree, when they are mostly-harmless.

Our senses are limited, even according to the admissions of materialists.

Everything you imagine, to fill in that mental blank, is a sort of flying spaghetti monster.

But, you are vehement as missionaries.


:| I think that's pretty unfair. Some people seem to assume that I'm close-minded on this topic.

I realise unless I know those celebrities personally and get in with their obsession (yes, obsession, to the point of tattoos), then I'll never know what it all means. Of course being laden with Egyptian symbols, I'm going to assume it's something mystical or religious. I like these artists so it's easier for me to notice all of the symbols, and I mean actual pictures, music videos and concerts, not me forming some meaning from a number.

techstep's input was interesting. I might get around to questioning one of the links in the site to do with the eye.


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02 Jan 2017, 5:21 pm

Most scientific truisms have been subsidized at gunpoint and later disproven.

How should that be regarded by an indifferent person.

How is proving a theory substantially different from the self-reinforcing delusion, which religious observance is supposed to be.

Particularly, assuming, that I will leave you to believe anything you want.

I keep my hands to myself, in academic discussions, without speculating as to whether disinterested people need to be caged.



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02 Jan 2017, 5:39 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:
Most scientific truisms have been subsidized at gunpoint and later disproven.

??

I think the peer review process works about as well as anything, just that publishers can still get in trouble at times - from other contributors - if they post an article that's perceived to be 'soft' on woo or anything that looks or smells like woo. I think dogmatism has been around since the dawn of man, it has something to do with the necessity of operating in the world without complete information and clearly far less than ideal timescales to work out concepts that seem ephemeral in most cases.

friedmacguffins wrote:
How is proving a theory substantially different from the self-reinforcing delusion, which religious observance is supposed to be.

It's only delusional if and when broader assumptions are made than what the piece of information yields or when that theory is still doggedly adhered to after further discovery shows that the assumptions were contextually incorrect.


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02 Jan 2017, 6:33 pm

It's peer reviewed.



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03 Jan 2017, 10:13 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
friedmacguffins wrote:
Most scientific truisms have been subsidized at gunpoint and later disproven.

??

I think the peer review process works about as well as anything, just that publishers can still get in trouble at times - from other contributors - if they post an article that's perceived to be 'soft' on woo or anything that looks or smells like woo. I think dogmatism has been around since the dawn of man, it has something to do with the necessity of operating in the world without complete information and clearly far less than ideal timescales to work out concepts that seem ephemeral in most cases.


If someone came up with a type of woo that was measurable, reproducible and not wholly subjective, it would become science. As I mentioned before, the parts of alchemy that fit the bill became chemistry. The parts of astrology that fit the bill became Astronomy. Other parts of the magical traditions became medicine and biology.

When people propose "woo" explanations that aren't measurable, can't be reproduced and are wholly subjective, then they are not going to find a welcome in scientific journals. This isn't groundless prejudice, it's the scientific method and it has proven to be be an extremely reliable technique for separating dross from gold in as the scientific community transmutes concepts flowing freely from the unbridled imaginations of inquisitive people into the crystal clarity of developed, tested theory.

You can see the trouble in the liminal areas of this process when you look into the string theoreticians. Unless they can come up with some kind of metrics and tests for their theories, they remain woo, albeit very interesting and suggestive woo, in the minds of many.

It seems you are a practicing magician.
I would be curious to hear your subjective views on what that has been like, how it has worked for you in the past and what you hope to gain from it in the future.


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03 Jan 2017, 6:12 pm

Adamantium wrote:
If someone came up with a type of woo that was measurable, reproducible and not wholly subjective, it would become science.


I was listening to this earlier today. Dean explains at least a couple different experiments he did, the way the experiments were built, and the ways the results were strained to remove as many extraneous variables as possible. One of these tests deals with thought transference, the other with neurological precognition. The results seem to be a somewhat weak but statistically quite significant result with both. What I mean by that last part is that he's avoided the massive performance part, like what James Randi was testing for the $1 million dollar challenge, and trying to see if there was anything happening with more hypnogogic activity and the answers seem to come through in the affirmative.

Also be fair with respect to James Randi he was busting people who made claims to be public psychics, spoon-benders, mediums, and one of the more insidious things he busted (which I think a lot of people in the UK owe him a debt of gratitude for) was a growing trend somewhere in the 80's or 90's to use graphology, ie. hand-writing analysis, to qualify or disqualify job candidates. What he was doing however, ie. testing claims of spectacular abilities, is in a different range than what Dean Radin and those who've replicated his studies (some of these as many as 90 times) are researching which is whether there's anything there at all.


In case the youtube player is broken on WP now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NpAJ6Zg9Xs

Adamantium wrote:
As I mentioned before, the parts of alchemy that fit the bill became chemistry. The parts of astrology that fit the bill became Astronomy. Other parts of the magical traditions became medicine and biology.

Out of all of those you just mentioned I have the hardest time accepting astrology, and intutively it seems to me like a load of bunk. John Anthony West did write an interesting book though - ie. The Case For Astrology - back in 1991. He might be woo but he's reasonably left-brained and I think I could find his work readable. My biggest problem with astrology is I haven't seen people make any sort of credible case, it's always been transactional impressions which is - as a lot of people suggest - highly prone to the effectiveness of interlocking Barnum statements.


Adamantium wrote:
When people propose "woo" explanations that aren't measurable, can't be reproduced and are wholly subjective, then they are not going to find a welcome in scientific journals.

Nor should they expect to have any papers in scientific journals until they're able to figure out ways to devise proper scientific experiments around what they're doing and - what would probably help also - finding a tenured university professor in the right department whose not opposed to assisting with the design and walking the thing out to see what the results are.
That's part of why I'm at least thankful that there are Dean Radins and people like him who are doing just that. I haven't looked in a while to see what other studies have been done, quite a few as I remember but I still hear people hemming and hawing about them - like the random flip generators on 9/11 and all that - and I haven't followed up to see whether they ever found proper closure and whether the accusations against the experimental designs were just spurious and based on the controversiality of the findings or whether they had actual substance to them.


Adamantium wrote:
This isn't groundless prejudice, it's the scientific method and it has proven to be be an extremely reliable technique for separating dross from gold in as the scientific community transmutes concepts flowing freely from the unbridled imaginations of inquisitive people into the crystal clarity of developed, tested theory.

TBH my response to friedmacguffins was more from not being able to understand what he was saying. It seemed like he was saying some random things about the scientific method being delivered at gunpoint and I had to disagree.

Adamantium wrote:
You can see the trouble in the liminal areas of this process when you look into the string theoreticians. Unless they can come up with some kind of metrics and tests for their theories, they remain woo, albeit very interesting and suggestive woo, in the minds of many.

it's also money and public perception. The idea of woo and pseudoscience are enough to hang a 'no-go' box over a lot of this stuff and I remember the P.E.A.R. team saying a lot about just getting slated for their results. They may have deserved it, they may not have, if there were massive holes in their experimental structure or isolation of variables the problem is one of communication - ie. the people who come down on these studies come down on them, and almost anything they consider woo, with a storm of sound and fury and almost never bringing actual bullets. Even outside of that sounding like "How DARE you challenge my career and authority!" it fails to bring any closer to bad science, if and when it is bad science, because they never isolate the area that the experimenter's common sense failed or where the fraud occurred if there was any. If they're going to treat the lay reader like they're too uneducated and far removed from academia to understand any of it they really bring their own problems down on themselves and they lionize pseudoscience in the process. Right in with real pseudoscience and snake oil sales they also try to bury any research that has results disagreeing with the modern convention, possibly because these areas have such a rich history for fraud and partly - as Dean brought up in one of his lectures - some of these magazines have contributors who'll call the editor and ream them out and even offer to never submit articles to their magazine if they believe that journal has posted an article, even if peer reviewed and cleared, that seems to be supportive of 'woo'.

That last part reminds me of how Richard Feynman and a collegue who showed up to meet with a group of older physicists jeered him and his college just about out of the building for their theories. Apparently peer review of new ideas isn't the only part of the tradition - so is hazing, roasting, and heavy-handed brow-beatings even toward men and women who actually are doing real science. From that standpoint I can hardly imagine how much it must suck to be the scientist whose done studies in support of psy or how many scientists would run like hell from it because, unless they're fearless, masochistic, or had some kind of NDE or angelic experience, it's quite a bit of misery to bring down on yourself - especially if you have a family and you're going to make laughing stocks of the wife, kids, etc..


Adamantium wrote:
It seems you are a practicing magician.
I would be curious to hear your subjective views on what that has been like, how it has worked for you in the past and what you hope to gain from it in the future.

I'd have to say I'm more of a practicing mystic first and foremost, just that magic and mysticism aren't mutually exclusive and magic has particularly powerful uses toward the ends one finds in mysticism.

With mysticism it's chasing down the big questions like "Why am I here?", "What's the good life?", "If the universe is in any way sentient - what are its real demands on me in this life? Are the popular claims only dogmatic or speculative/theorhetical?", or really a shorter more powerful version of that last point: "What's my responsibility to the universe?".

For me it's also an attempt to try and sort out a lot of really hideous paradoxes that come up when one becomes an idealist or takes on a belief in a conscious universe or reincarnation again - questions having to do with the sadism that goes into the evolutionary process and the conditions of life in general, various crimes of mankind against its own whether it's how the Mongols treated the Chinese or whether it's asking questions like why on earth a sentient universe - especially if it's as much love and light as most new age mediums would suggest - allowed Nazi Germany and Dr Mengele to happen, or the Japanese version in China - Unit 731, allowed the unspeakable horrors that were Leninism and Stalinism in Russia and it's satellite states, and the yet largely untold history of torture and barbarism under Mao.

With all of what I must mentioned above, I'd say there are scores and scores of great reasons - just looking at life and the universe from a moral standpoint - to be an atheist. I realize that on one hand my atheism has been revoked, I've had too many experiences now contrary to it, and similarly I had a lot of things going quite badly in my life and I needed to gain as many insights as I could in to how and why that was happening and what I needed to do in order to get myself right with the flow of life. So that's really what I've been trying to do with both mysticsm and magic - ie. to get a better understanding of action and consequence on a deeper level (or at least verifying whether there is one in the way I might think), to try and get a feel for the moral flavor or personality style of the universe if it is fundamentally conscious, to figure out whether the conscious element of the universe has complete (God-like) control or just partial control, and I think most importantly I want to clear away as many false heuristics that I have with respect to reality and a lot of those heuristics are built on apparent or outward truths; if the internal or more generally cosmic truths are different entirely at a core level I want to know that as well and have better constructions of thought guide my daily life.

To that end there's not a lot I can really achieve without the direct experience that I can get from magic and mysticism. I can read like crazy, from that I can attempt to pick out the best minds on the topics and triangulate their ideas against each other and in a way that may at least help me have a much reduced risk of delusion should I be able to go out there at will or launch bits of software (such as one does with ritual) into the deeper geometry of the universe - obviously though with the last part I want to be extremely careful that whatever I'm doing is something constructive. On one hand I can do a heck of a lot just by keying away on a keyboard and sharing my ideas for criticism and assessment, past expedience I see experience as critical because without it assumption is stacked upon assumption and if the inner planes are anything like this world they're exquisitely complex and there's probably quite a few rules that go into how they interact with the domain we're generally more accustomed to. To get those rules I don't feel like triangulating good authors would ever be enough; it's like hoping to stand a chance with pro or semi-pro athletes in football or golf after having spent years just reading about them and never having picked up a set of irons at a driving range or gone out and played tackle football with friends to gain familiarity with the physical realities of the sport.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


Last edited by Adamantium on 03 Jan 2017, 6:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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03 Jan 2017, 7:32 pm

Interesting, thank you for the explanation.

I understand what you mean about the limits of talking about something that is really only meaningful, comprehensible (possibly even recognizable) experientially.

I have long been a meditator, and studied several Chinese, Korean and Japanese martial arts that involved a lot of moving in patterns. Such practices certainly open new perceptions and experiences, known to those who do them in certain traditions, not meaningful to those who don't.

Your discussion also called to mind Alan Moore's identification of artistic creation with magic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw1Sv04YQS4


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03 Jan 2017, 8:26 pm

smudge wrote:
5.50 minutes in, Lady Gaga's hand gesture after Jonathan Ross goes, "Oh, Good Lord".



She has her hand over her left eye the moment the camera cuts back to her.

Is THAT the gesture you're talking about about? Thats at around 602.

At 550 she makes a little gesture when saying "poker face" prior to him saying "oh good lord". That little gesture is an "air quotation mark" for the catchphrase "pokerface" that she just uttered.