OneOfFourth wrote: ↑Sun Aug 08, 2021 1:19 pm
These days I've started making a clear distinction between science and scientism.
yeah
the beating heart of science is "I don't know, but I wanna know, and to do that I wanna know how to know"
but so many think science is "I know", as though science was smug, and oblivious to the uncertainty principal. (and i know I'm somewhat abusing the term uncertainty principal, it's intentional)
Science is good and great. Scientism is not. I must admit that when I was an atheist, I was more into scientism, i.e. "if it can't be explained by science, it's not real". Scientism is a religion of sorts, science is not. Glad I'm not into scientism anymore. These days I'm more into what you described there: keep scientific mindset but also a very open mind for "what could be"
I think technically I've never been "exactly an atheist". Although when i was a true believer in a religion, I even then gravitated towards the company of atheists because I really enjoy pragmatic realism in the manner of thinking process.
As a child I was a bit of a mystic-leaning but also atheist-leaning person, then i became a religious person (due largely to a lifelong indoctrination process). Then eventually I fell out from that. What is interesting, is that in order to break away from the religion, it required the formation of an emotional wedge. Which is not to say that I quit my religion because god hurt my feelings, but rather, because I for a time distanced myself, I was able to see the seams at the edges of the circular logic systems which kept me in the fold. In particular the manipulation of "faith" as a mental process. How fear of un-faith, and having faith on a pedestal of virtue, was in fact acting as a sort of cognitive limiter. And then eventually how my religion was a sort of paradigmatic lens which warped all that I beheld. As, I think, all paradigms do, to be fair. Scientism no less so.
Once out of that, I was left with a kind of void of ideology. But instead of an intimidating thing, it was a relief. I knew then that I don't know, I wanted to know, but I made a sort of commitment to not pretending to know what I don't know. To not filling the void with bullshit. Better it be empty than full of garbage. Much of my disagreement with those who are into the occult, stems from the basic premise that I disdain dogma and faith. Likewise the dogma and faith of scientism. And organized religion. And ultimately of cultural and species-centric paradigmatic distortions.
Much like a true lover of science, I am excited to find out that I was wrong about something. That has only ever been the herald of a broader, more vast, more interesting and engaging reality.
About left/right brain balance: There was an interesting analysis in a video I saw a short while ago. It had an analysis of what happens to a person if either left or right side of the brain is clearly dominating mental processes of a person. If person lets either side of the brain be the dominant one, there will be mental balance issues which will fool the person into believing things that aren't necessarily true. Here's a quick recap of how the imbalance affect thinking:
If a human being's Left Brain Hemisphere becomes chronically dominant, the person will become ruled by selfishness and base desires, and develop a personality based in domination and control. I.e. "psychopathic master" mentality:
- Ridid sceptiscism
- Scientism
- Atheism
- Solipsism
- Moral realitivism
- Social darwinism
- Eugenics
- Authoritarianism
If a human being's Right Brain Hemisphere becomes chronically dominant, the person will become ruled by their own emotions and develop a personality based in submissiveness and naiveté. I.e. "willing slave" mentality:
- Naiveté
- Blind belief
- Religious extremism
- Solipsism
- Unworthiness
- Self-loathing
- Order-follower
- Willing slave
Left brain dominant world view: "survival is the highest goal of existence."
These are the hallmarks of dark occult.
Right brain dominant world view: "God controls everything. There is no free will. Everthing is predetermined."
These are the hallmarks of newage.
I read once a book on freudian psychology. It attempted to sort of translate the id, ego, and superego, into "the child, the parent, and the adult", where both the child and the parent (id and superego) were both sort of warped and immature. It outlined how we as people fall into these frames of mind, often as a reaction to someone else's frame of mind. I'm not really a fan of freud, plagiaristic hack, and victorian era 'shock jock' really. But, that book was very interesting.
In some ways I think it relates to what you're saying about right & left brain. Although, interestingly, if you look at your lists for left and right brain, the qualities of religious extremism, and authoritarianism, often have a strong correlation, even though here they are listed as having divergent roots/habits of thought.
In your 2 lists, i lean a bit to the left. But only because moral relativism and social darwinism are I think more reflected in the nature of the universe, and I'm kind of a fan of the universe.
Ultimately I like to just kinda make myself aware of what the heart is good at (and not good at), and what the brain is good at (and not good at) and delegate tasks accordingly. And avoid falling into either the child or the parent mindset in any broadly encompassing way. On a more neuroscience level, i'm a very lateral thinker. On a more poetic level, i flow like water, I abuse the terrain a bit, but also adapt to it and work around it.
Now that I think of it, this might be somewhat prerequisite as an attitude for other more interesting evolving matters of consciousness.
Note that both imbalances lead to solipsism. This means that person eventually believes that only thing real is "self" and everyone else in the universe are there just for that one single person, or others don't even exist at all, i.e. "everyone else are just my imagination". You can easily see how fast that kind of thinking can lead to psychopathic/psychotic behavior and ideologies, which ignores the wellbeing of everyone else in the world. Thus it'll be exremely likely that people suffering from solipsism will ignore evil in the world an let evil prevail. Even contributing to it, since they don't care.
I'm not really focused on the good/evil axis myself. it's just one of infinite arbitrary ways to lay a tape measure on the universe. Though it does relate to the interaction of beings, where we have innate instincts of social behavior and all a mutual desire to exists and flourish. So it's somewhat more relevant to living life than the salty/sweet axis or the hot/cold axis
soliplism... I think anyone who thinks they have none of that is full of shit
But I don't think having 'some' of it is undesirable. Selflessness and selfishness are both equally misguided ways to screw up I think.
If 50% soliplistic is an ideal, I probably lean a bit more like 60%. And yet, I think that's kinda where the "small self" is. The underlying nature of consciousness and reality... I think leans rather anti-soliplistic. In the sense that individual identity is an artifact of incompleteness of being 'whole', where each 'bit' of reality is a note in a larger melody.
I guess the axis I hold most interesting is the one where at one end is a high degree of individual will, but a low degree of ..lets call it "leverage on the larger system of reality", because the focus on self is 'more finite'. And at the other end is a broader engagement to more of reality (less finite), but a diminished sense of self or individual will. And my interest there is kinda to sort out a multiplicity of states of being, in concert. What does that axis look like in 5-D? You can wrap your fingers around small things and move them, or you can press your fingers against something large, and not move it, but what if that is an incomplete understanding of the nature of things?
Maybe I am theistic. But I regard god as the sum total of all reality in all levels and forms. Some say it goes "Ommm". Personally I think it makes all imaginable and unimaginable sounds at once, in different places and times. What does it think? nothing, and everything. Which is not particularly useful information for a finite being with finite interests, hehe. I want to touch it, and not superficially. Become a cone-shaped thing with a sharp point which likes cherry pie and the color of the leaves in autumn, and an open end which extends into the everything of everything. Maybe a cone emanating from self is an intensely soliplistic model of the universe, but then again, I think the sharp point (self) is just a frame of reference really. But should large things be moved? Everything is already moving. Maybe they're moving in the best way already. Maybe small self moves little things, and large self communes with the grander concert of flowing motion?
What about medium sized things???????!!!!! hehehe
Yep, you're right saying that in a conflict person learns fastest. I think there's even a psychology study on this very subject. Brain goes into "super learning mode" when it feels that it's in danger. Thus you need to learn fast or get ran over by a group of mammoths, etc. Makes sense
Still it's not fun being in the receiving end of things when you have to quickly learn something you have no idea how to do what needs to be done to survive the situation. But following intuition usually helps a lot in finding answers and solutoins to sticky situations.
Also though, there's the unforseen things which the imagination can't provide.
For example, from an armchair, one might imagine the concept of rocket propulsion. Contain a substance with mass, and expand it so that it pushes the container. But when trying to 'apply' theory, suddenly the shape of the nozzle becomes of utmost import, and you hadn't really considered the shape of the nozzle, you'd just been thinking about the fluid dynamics of expansion against a directionally contained field. But now you're scrambling to understand how the nozzle should be shaped to best apply directionality. And then, OHHHH, altitude affects the surrounding air pressure which actually changes the ideal parameters of the nozzle... and then OMG, it's tipping over! This thing needs fins, and a gyroscope! How the hell do you make the gyroscope talk to the fins? and what do you do when above the atmosphere and the fins have no leverage?? And it goes from an idea of how things would work, to a much more fleshed out thing, which could actually work in practice.
And it seems you need to overcome more "thwarting variables" when in a conflict. Like a torture test of your ideas. And it lights a fire under your butt which makes you improvise FAST, drawing on instinct and intuition more dynamically than you would otherwise.
Plus you can observe the opposition and steal all their methodology & understandings.
I'm not into numerology at all
me either. I just read a lot. strip mining for insights.
personally I think numerology is more kinda born from the same place that makes us feel like we have encompassed a thing in understanding when we label & categorize it. I think it can be utilitarian to do so, but it falls far short of truly sating the impulse to encompass something in understanding, entire.
A buddha once said "all words are lies", a statement which I think bears meticulous contemplation, given human nature and the labeling and measuring of everything. Not so much that we don't know what we measure and label, but that measurement and labeling can lead to a sort of idolatry of the measurements and labels of things, as something distinct from the essential nature of things. Words an an abstraction, reductive always, and considered in a vacuum from the entirety and essence of the subject matter itself, often misleading or distracting.
Mind you, I think if more than one sentient being is similarly driven, then such things could contain a meta of usefulness born from a sort of memetic or sigilistic or egregoric principal. Like if a group of minds considers a number magical, then it may be, but because a group of minds is focusing thusly, rather than because of the number itself. But it's not really on my radar of interests.
I believe people are often looking at side products of magick, instead of trying to find out what the magick itself is.
I don't make a habit of saying "can you give me that fish there?", I'd much rather say "can you teach me to fish?", or even "what do you think about fish?". Much of what people try to accomplish with magic, especially entity interaction, and/or or prayer, seems to me a little like pan handling. Instead of "give us this day our daily bread", or "make my crush like me more", I'd rather know "how can I 'be' more interesting?", "how does one make bread?", what is bread really? what is interest? in a nutshell "?" not "!"
That been said, my personal view on things currently is that magick in it's fundamental nature is much more simple than people tell themselves it to be. When you look past the traditions and methods, very simple "truths" start to emerge from the sea of information. You just need to simplify and throw away the traditional decoration. What will eventually be left is X amount of fairly refined concepts instead of tons of books worth of details after details to get things working even on the most basic level.
Some, many probably, here and elsewhere, wouldn't be overjoyed at the idea of discarding valued traditions
This general vein of the conversation reminds me a bit of the parable of the 3 blind men and the elephant.
Also, personally i really look for the point at which a list of understood ideas kinda coalesces into a sensibility on the art of a thing.
Sort of like how catching a ball could be looked at as a complex math problem, but at some point, the math of the process can kinda evolve into an instinctual understanding and then you can really play.
My own current explanation at the moment is that everything in the universe is a pattern. You, me, any of the spirits, actions, events, emotions triggered by things, cause and effect, etc. Things are linked together in infinite number of ways and you can look at them from different perspectives: patterns emerge, which describe what things affect thing X you're currently observing. Then you can see what in turn affects those things etc. Thus if you do magick, it essentially works through those patterns, adjusting them ever so slightly here and there, to make it much more probable that the final outcome is what you asked for with your spell. In other words: absolutely everything is part of a one grand pattern that covers every single thing in the whole universe. Some patterns are connected so that they have much more intelligent behavior in their vicinity (humans, animals, spirits) than others. (cars, shoes, gravity, fire, wind, car crashes, etc.)
I like that.
I'd probably have wrapped it up in different words which would make it sound like a different paradigm, but I think I'd be saying much the same thing.
Exactly like "6 degrees of separation": Draw a graph of every single person in the world and draw links between everyone who they know personally. Now you can trace a path from any one person to any other person in the world, just by following those links between people each of them happen to know personally. It's been said that there's maximum of 6 links you have to step through before you reach anyone in the world. That's one filtered perspective on how to view the patterns: links of people who know each other. Now imagine the same thing, but the links describe through time what affects your neighbours dog's attention throughout its day tomorrow... You probably get the idea from this explanation.
Makes me think of a quote: "God does not roll dice with the universe" ...which is a theoretical physics quote, not a religious one
If they have rituals, they probably use modernized version of it by creating art or performances with very specific mindset, so they can do it publicly without anyone realizing what's actually happening.
Well that sounds extremely prevalent in recent years. But I don't wanna wax political here
Maybe a ritual or two was targeted on me?
i dunno *shrug*
I just know that persistent effects tend to require different counters than transient effects.
Exactly. The butterfly effect. It's left to be seen what my source of synchronizities is up to eventually.
perhaps more interestingly, omniscient across a multiplicity of timelines & potentials, which i think is an dramatically larger in scope.
sort of beyond just the line which the universe moves through time potentiality, but also the breadth & scope of the potentiality field itself, and the universe as a clockwork object with inertia within it.