What makes Practicioners believe in limitations

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Cybernetic_Jazz
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Re: What makes Practicioners believe in limitations

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Kath wrote: Thu Nov 26, 2020 6:40 pm If you use enough big words & dusty references, you can make people take your wild magical goal seriously, but if you say it in layman's terms, it loses it's mystique.
This is also a good guide for finding teachers. People who like to razzle-dazzle with aethetic mystique of things are a bit of a red flag unless you see them rapidly go from that to very useful content and that they're using the aesthetics as points of contact with reverence. A good example of this is when I've seen genius mathematicians or top-of-the-field coding authors, instead of doing a really sleek presentation, get up in front of a room and use old-fashion overheads or draw on the chalk board, try to treat the concepts in a nuts-and-bolts way, and does what they can to demistify things. It's perhaps not the only grounds on which I'd trust a teacher but it's definitely a sign that they care about conveying effectiveness and practical capacity to other people rather than having people idolize them, which is the sort of altruism that reinforces that they're worthy of your time and attention.
Kath wrote: Thu Nov 26, 2020 6:40 pmI'm extremely happy with my results as pertaining to abnormal physical strength & sensory perception actually (two of your examples in the OP). There's some validity to the idea that how you approach things will affect your results though. I didn't approach things seeking those results. I was exploring many many things, and those cropped up as possibilities as a result. If i had started out trying to get to the finish line, instead of trying to explore the map, would I have arrived at those results? hard to say, but I think it's less likely.

Now if I say "oh i can boost strength or sense things" that sounds... well it comes off sounding silly. But I can draw that out into a deep essay on the science, theory, & practice of applying effects in those areas, which sounds "somewhat" less silly. Or I could (in person) just demonstrate my own sort of nejia-mushin-berserkergang homespun strength effect, and it would seem extremely not silly. That one's actually very easy. well, my tendons and ligaments might not call it easy, there are some structural limitations. but i don't find it hard to manifest.

(I have a serious lack of hard data on the immortality idea though. it's not something you get a lot of trial & error with)
I also think of the James Randy challenge, whether or not he was a hack, and how that still ended up working out. It seems like a lot of people in those tests legitimately failed them. There's the possibility that other people's beliefs have as much impact on what your trying to do as your own (perhaps why the 'to dare, to will, to know, and to remain silent' has the 'remain silent' in there. The other part of this is the possibility that the world either isn't as fungible to mind as people would like it to be (plenty of non-human conscious agents whose preferences would be disrupted) or that when it is fungible to one's own mental processes it's certain vectors of use at certain times, like dealing with the physical world whether what you're doing is leveraging the laws. All of these things I find fascinating and want to keep digging into.
Kath wrote: Thu Nov 26, 2020 6:40 pmInternally, I actually practice being very careful with how I word things. I don't say "I can't XYZ", not without a qualifying remark like "so far I can't XYZ", or "I have not yet XYZ". I try to avoid clipping my own wings, so to speak. And I generally loathe to tell someone they "can't" do something. In my family tree, "can't" was the only dirty word which would result in corporal punishment.
Here's the other thing with having really precise phrasing - it's critical for being able to control your life on so many levels because having a fuzzy grasp of concepts means one can be manipulated just as readily by people in politics, at work, or anywhere else. Being resilient to and able too fight back against bad ideas really rests on one's capacity to be able to map their idea sets, then when they see BS in the news they don't throw it all over Facebook, get inordinately attached to it, fall into an echo chamber that sells them even more of it, and start drinking tribal / partisan kooliad.

Out of many reasons I live listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger talk about sociology and complex systems, aside from having a lot of very good ideas, is the accuracy that he inflicts on his own thinking. Similarly when I first came in contact with Jordan Peterson's digging into Sumerian mythology, Egyptian archetypes, digging into Communism vs. Capitalism, Gulag archipelago (when he just started to blow up - maybe late 2016) he'd always wait for a while, only start to answer the question with great labor to define the space and make sure that he's detailing it in a way that gives each piece of the puzzle a lucid description and I've seen Daniel do that quite often when he's asked abstract questions. I've similarly seen Aiyshat Akanbi (someone else I can relate to a lot) always holding herself back in interviews and carefully framing the space of the question before then using that frame to unpack the question and how many different obvious and less obvious pieces the answer might have. Samo Burja - same thing.

So yes - being able to define spaces really well is critical and TBH defining spaces tends to be a verbal process, at least for me. The visual world gives you some information but quite often it's insufficient to keep other people from being able to rearrange contexts in all sorts of seemingly probably but specious ways. This is also why political authoritarians fight so hard to subvert and distort language, it's the closest equivalent they can manage to putting roofies in the water.

Kath wrote: Thu Nov 26, 2020 6:40 pmI think one factor is that there are a fair number of people who don't want to explore, research, experiment, learn, grow, etc. They just want a particular result, today if possible. And that can be a pretty unrealistic attitude.
I'm having to admit - I think with that mentality and people who have, it could well be that this is the extent of their internal leverage. Some people might disagree with that assessment or say that they used to be like that until they found out 'x' and they believe that other people in that same spot are missing that piece, but there seems to be plenty of people - if not a slight majority - where they are what they are based on their own limitations. The trick is, when one finds themselves not being one of those people and having a leg-up on self-awareness, insight into how to learn or excel at things, is to use that to as benevolent or win-win ends as possible.
You don't have to do a thing perfect, just relentlessly.

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Re: What makes Practicioners believe in limitations

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Best litmus test I've found for figuring out if you're dealing with someone you could learn from, is to politely but rationally challenge one of their stated ideas. If they become angry, or reach for their title or station, then they likely are far too wrapped up in their personal reality to teach something meaningful. There's probably exceptions, of people with far more study & skill than emotional maturity, but the latter tends to engender the former.

The James Randi challenge... I've thought about that some. It's worth mentioning that there's a crap load of stipulations in his challenge which he doesn't really make public (I only know because I looked into it). And those would tend to actually filter out all but the delusional crackpots. But setting that aside and assuming his challenge was exactly as advertised, it's an interesting subject. I have seen, and done, many things which absolutely would win the challenge (if not rigged). But all of the things I can do "on command" tend to fall into categories which could plausibly be explained away, if one was strongly biased towards doing so. If I spent a really large amount of time with James R. I would eventually stumble upon something I can't do "on command" but which would freak him right the F out. But the idea of the challenge really is a kind of existential debate on the extra-natural, which is interesting.

On command, I could exhibit (just sticking with the strength trick example) strength which would remind one of someone on pcp or someone possessed. But that's within the natural limitations of physical ability, even if rarely manifest. But one time, in a very very VERY extreme circumstance, I punched a wall, and it went waaaay out of easily explainable bounds. It's one thing to break a brick in a martial arts show, but when the brick is in a brick wall, the force is distributed out through the whole wall. Nobody karate-chops a brick wall. I punched a brick wall, and it cracked a brick in the wall, and inside, someone said the whole back room shook from it, and it knocked a shelving unit off the wall striping the screws, and knocked over a bunch of stuff. They thought someone hit the building with a car. Still plausible~ish, sorta, maybe. But I used enough force that it should have broken every bone in my hand, and maybe half the bones in my arm too, but where it kinda leaves the realm of "scientific sense" is that i didn't even have a bruise on my hand. But I was not in a normal frame of mind, it was not a normal situation. i'm not a wall punching sort of person. I was more almost willing destruction into the wall, because it was more sane than committing murder. Not your typical tuesday, particularly for me, i'm actually super easy going, and pretty thoughtful & introspective. I can channel a pretty intense energy state, without a situation to support it, but not THAT high. Actually it's a little embarrassing to talk about it, it was a long time ago.

As for remain silent... I only talk about stuff like this in a non-anonymous situation (daily life) with people whom I both A) trust to be rational about it, and B) i'll be spending enough time closely with them that sooner or later they'll see what I mean for themselves. Otherwise, i limit discussion to just a small handful of occulticly interesting topics. Deja vu is a pretty easy topic since something like 60% of people have at least a small amount of experience with it. (my argument though is that it's legit precognitive, which has far-reaching implications as a causality violation).

Unpacking a question is fun. Maybe I'm weird.

As for defining spaces, I could almost call one form of magical practice I'm good at "re-defining spaces". It's uh... somewhere between Darren Brown and Frans Mesmer and horse whispering. Although the most crucial and difficult part is to just be able to emotionally and mentally step outside of the existing back & forth, which isn't particularly magical, except that for myself it's a byproduct of spiritual development.

hehe, well it would be lovely to have immediate results I guess :P
But in reality most of my most impressive results are a side effect of learning ("discovered functionality") rather than a targeted goal.
Ultimately though, apart from interacting with other sentient beings with greater agency and awareness, and the occasional precognitive edge, pretty much everything else is technically easier to do the mundane way. I wouldn't even fathom what kind of magical energy it would take to metaphysically make the grass in the yard shorter, but 30 minutes with a lawn mower works great.

PS: despite the bursting through brick walls thing, I don't really like to drink the kool aid ;)

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