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Temple Forum Users – Explain Yourselves!

  
  

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Jub
15:01 / 19.10.05
Dear all Temple Forum users,

First let me assure you this is not a troll post and I am not rabble rousing for the sake of it.

Having said that, I don’t quite know how to put this without sounding like I am trying to start a fight. Essentially, I just don’t understand this entire part of Barbelith. Whole conversations come and go without my following them – I try, really I do – but whenever someone mentions potions, tarot, hexing or anything to do with Magick, I just get confused. I see beliefs in this kind of thing just plain silly, but the reason I am posting this is to find out why it’s not silly. I am genuinely interested in why people are attracted to this kind of thing. Bill Posters tried to describe it to me once but I failed to understand at all.

Do people look at these things as a personal subjective look at the world or believe these things are unexplained objective phenomena? Let me put it another way – I find most the talk in this forum to be the same as certain Christian groups discussing Creationism or Rapture. I have no “in”, no basis in which to find the talk serious, or in any way helpful to anything. Do serious Temple users see Magick activities as a separate part of themselves to be enjoyed like a kind of role play or do people believe there an underlying Magickness to everything you do.

People like Derren Brown who do what was typically referred to as Magic, but (sometimes) show how they do it and always say that it isn’t anything supernatural – it’s all psychological manipulation. The Fox Sisters who held the first séances later admitted these were complete shams but people had already started on the craze by then. Do things like this debunk your beliefs – and if not, why not?

Now, I’m not asking for proof of anything – I understand that some things are actually outside one’s ken etc, but please let me know the reasons why you believe what you do? I find it difficult to see why these beliefs have any credence at all among intelligent people and I would like it if you could explain what you see in it. Thanks in advance.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
15:13 / 19.10.05
Sorry to be a pain, but why?

If you think it's silly, that's fine. Why do you want to change that attitude?

Or are you looking for verification that it is a tenable and useful attitude to continue holding? Testing it out by the responses you get to see if it still works for you, or if you may be compelled to change it?

More splain...
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
15:22 / 19.10.05
As an experiment, try a few practices that fall under the broad heading of magic for a period of no less than a year. See what happens, and if you think any of it has been personally valuable to you at any level. If it has, continue further along that road and see where it takes you. If it hasn't, don't. That's all anyone else who posts in this forum has done. We talk about the results of those experiments here.

Why would a stage illusionist and a couple of wind-up merchants undermine an interest in exploring something that every culture on the planet has been involved with since the birth of the species?
 
 
grant
15:24 / 19.10.05
I don't know if I count as a "serious user" or not, but I'll take a stab at an answer.

These are my own answers.

Do people look at these things as a personal subjective look at the world or believe these things are unexplained objective phenomena?

I can't tell the difference between the two. I don't think this division is nearly as clean as it is convenient to assume. That's kind of where a great deal of all this stuff operates.


Do serious Temple users see Magick activities as a separate part of themselves to be enjoyed like a kind of role play or do people believe there an underlying Magickness to everything you do.

Again, I'm really not sure what I do that isn't role-playing to some degree. I lead a very segmented life, I suppose. (I should also point out that I'm far more of a researcher than a doer, at least lately, with all this stuff.) I'm big on existence as an active process of interpretation, which throws the whole subjective/objective thing and the whole role-playing/authentic existence thing into disarray. Am I a Tabloid Writer just because I write for a tabloid? Am I a Husband and Father just because I'm married with children? Yes, I suppose I am, but those are just roles I play. They're not the whole truth, and they can't be.

So, for me, the whole Magick thing is about tinkering with that interpretive, role-playing part of existence. It's closely related to psychology, but it also, like, creates *tangible results* rather than simply internal results. Strange things happen once you make your mind up they'll happen.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
15:34 / 19.10.05
I find most the talk in this forum to be the same as certain Christian groups discussing Creationism or Rapture. I have no “in”, no basis in which to find the talk serious, or in any way helpful to anything.

Links? Concrete examples might help...
 
 
Jub
15:45 / 19.10.05
Money $hot:

You’ve summed it up quite nicely. Is it silly? Obviously most people here think not. I’m interested in why. Why do I want to know what people see in it? Partly because I feel as though I’m missing out. Partly because I see people I respect and like from other parts of the board joining in and don’t really know why. Partly because I like trying to understand as much as I can about as much as I can. And lastly, and most truthfully, because I am unsure anyone will be able to explain what the temple does to my non-temple ways – ie one must have an “in” before you get involved. There’s a leap of faith involved which I haven’t taken and can’t see myself taking and therefore think it’s silly. Does that make sense?
 
 
Jub
15:52 / 19.10.05
Gypsy Latern:
Fair Points. I guess the problem with spiritualism in general for me – no matter whether it is eg Christian fundamentalists, a suicide cult, a earthy pagan type religion, Hinduism etc is all within an unproved and unprovable realm. I would feel like it was all guess work if I tried one of these options – I do see the allure of the do it if it works for you approach however and guess that the temple forum will be a fine place to find some things to look at in finer depth.

I think Derren and the Fox sisters do to a degree undermine somethings, because people believed in them whole heartedly and they were proven to be wrong. Do you think the belief is the important thing or the “facts” behind them?
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
15:53 / 19.10.05
There’s a leap of faith involved

Hmmm...not necessarily. Depending on whether you mean "Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing." or "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence".

Which is it?
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
15:58 / 19.10.05
There’s a leap of faith involved which I haven’t taken and can’t see myself taking and therefore think it’s silly.

No there isn't. No more faith is needed than to try something that might seem a bit weird in the eyes of much of society, and then see what you think about it and whether you get anything from it. No more faith or investment of belief is required than it would take to begin any other practice, ballroom dancing for instance. You wouldn't expect to automatically have an "in" to a forum for high level discussion of the intricacies of ball room dancing, especially if you had never been to a class.

You can't really interact with this forum with any level of depth unless you are practicing, or at least researching, as you will be unable to speak from your own experiences. To a large extent, that is what this forum is about, experiential comment from people who are actively engaging with a variety of practices and techniques that are, in some cases misleadingly, labelled "magic".

You do not need to believe in anything or have faith in anything other than the evidence of your five senses. However, what is mandatory is that you are prepared to do something, and then look closely at your responses to it.
 
 
*
16:00 / 19.10.05
I think I see the problem.

People like Derren Brown who do what was typically referred to as Magic, but (sometimes) show how they do it and always say that it isn’t anything supernatural – it’s all psychological manipulation. The Fox Sisters who held the first séances later admitted these were complete shams but people had already started on the craze by then. Do things like this debunk your beliefs – and if not, why not?

No, because these things really have very little to do with what people talk about here. Mostly what people are talking about here is, from the perspective of someone who doesn't do it or believe in it, a lot like putting on an elaborate ceremony in a church in the belief that following the ritual will make you alright with God and grant you whatever else may be your heart's desire. This is rather different from table-tapping or showmanship, in that the effects are generally meant to be more subtle, affecting (from the perspective of a nonmagickytypeperson) only the mind of the practitioners*. It is also not the sort of thing which you necessarily have to understand in order to enjoy the boards.

Do you feel that your experience of Barbelith is significantly affected by this forum being here and being a closed book to you?

It does bother me when I see people post stuff from a magicky perspective in other fora— not Conversation; that's free space, but IIRC it's discouraged to go into Head Shop and talk about how the dusty mirror of the mind focuses the will on the polar bears swimming for the something something. Does that help you enjoy the rest of the board free of our mumbo-jumbo?

If you really feel you need to get a handle on this sort of thing but you aren't able to engage with magick qua magick, you could read anthropological treatments of magick and think of us as the curious foreign hill tribes with strange rituals designed to help them feel more in control of the random forces of nature if you want to. It makes no difference to me, and it certainly won't impair you from having productive conversations on Barbelith.

*not to minimize the usefulness of spectacle and sleight of hand/mind in magick, of course. sorry for the overgeneralization; I'd be happy if someone could articulate it better.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
16:42 / 19.10.05
Basically, what they said. You may also wish to have a read of the following threads, for they are juicy and full of vitamins:

Why did you get into magic? (In which we endevour to explain how we started.)

Talk to the Cynic. (In which we endevour to explain why we haven't yet stopped.)

You may also wish to look at Smoke and Mirrors (In which we endevour to find an innocent explanation for the ostrich feather and the six yards of luminous butter-muslin.)

  
 
sine
16:45 / 19.10.05
I'm coming in here somewhere between grant and gypsy lantern...my experience with the basket of techniques, beliefs and attitudes we shorthand as "magick" has been that it works - much to my initial surprise as a skeptic all those years back. Now the fact that I don't see any indelible and immutable border between things "seeming" to work and things working "in fact" may account for some that, but the real beauty of magick is that there are a wide variety of entry level experiments one can easily perform and assess for themselves. You can get your toes wet before you decide if you're interested in jumping in the pool.

As for the general appeal I think I could summarize it as: "if we're right and this shit is real, then...wow, holy crap!"
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
17:19 / 19.10.05
I've radically altered my take on the veracity of the 'models and metaphors' used within 'magic' over the past year because, well, I haven't really had much choice about the matter...if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck, and drops mallard feathers on your carpet, and has a large neon sign above it blatantly blinking on and off with the word 'DUCK' and an arrow pointing at it, then there seems little point, to me, in struggling to explain it as a duck-shaped product of some other as-yet-undiscovered-by-science duck manifesting duck-like phenomena merely because accepting that, y'know, it's a duck, makes you sound like a bit of a weirdo who most likely played a bit too much Dungeons and Dragons (or Dungeons and Ducks, whatever).

Personally, I have no problem accepting it's a duck and engaging with it as a duck, and possibly finding out if it and me have any sort of useful relationship to explore (no rhyming jokes, please...)...Like, you know, stuffing pillows or something.

It certainly was the last thing I expected to occur in my own life, and I sympathise with your position to a certain extent...in some ways, though, you're in a position of wondering what the fuss is about the Grand Canyon - I mean, it's just a big hole in the ground, right? Or Niagara Falls - load of water tipping down a cliff...you have to go there, swim in it, abseil down it, take a helicopter ride round the perimeter, feel the spray in your face, and then make up your mind if there is anything at all to be fussed about.

Looking at pictures and reading about other people's experiences just doesn't measure up.
 
 
Seth
18:47 / 19.10.05
This forum covers a broad remit. You’ll find martial arts, the body, psychology, religion, drugs and dreams discussed here in a lot of detail - both experiential and theoretical - as well as communing with spirits, Gods and ancestors, ways of making non-causal change in the world, divination, out-of-body wanderings and throwing blue fireballs from your fingertips. And where the posters who frequent this forum believe that all existence is magical you’ll find interesting and possibly illuminating chat about relationships, movies, science, music and nature. Think carefully about what is actually here in the Temple before making a judgement based on what you believe to be here.
 
 
kowalski
20:27 / 19.10.05
Or Niagara Falls - load of water tipping down a cliff...

I've stood at the bottom of the falls, behind the curtain, water up to my waist in an abandoned hydroelectric discharge tunnel. The Falls is magic, you just have to get rid of all the tourists and money traps and traffic and the whole touristrated act of visioning the falls from the top of the cliff, and suddenly its full, multidimensional reality thunders back through into our world. If it hadn't all been just about showboating, I could easily find something thoroughly romantic in the era of barrel-riding daredevils: there is something deep and pure and magic to the core when it is just you and the Falls. Maybe it's the 70% of our bodies that is composed of water and the possibility that being in proximity to such a quantity of water falling such a distance affects some subtle change in our own internal body of water. I don't know, but a year later I can still feel it.
 
 
LVX23
21:56 / 19.10.05
I see beliefs in this kind of thing just plain silly

Belief is not necessary here. Belief is the realm of Science and Religion (to reiterate Ramsey Dukes a bit). Magick is about personal experience. It's inherently subjective. Have you ever experienced anything that you couldn't rationally explain? You know, like love, or inspiration, or insight, or that sudden chill when listening to really good music...

From your current POV, you'd probably just go "huh" and gloss over it assuming it's just something you don't understand but has some rational explanation. From my POV such experiences are further instances of mystery and deity ingressing into my local reality. This perspective gives me more meaning in my life. Why would I ever want Science to "explain" love???

Science provides mechanism, magick provides meaning. We use these magickal technologies to understand our selves, our place in the cosmos, and to effect the aetherial currents flowing through all of us and everything. As noted elsewhere in this thread, you won't get it unless you try it. But don't assume it's silly just because you don't get it.
 
 
cirranon
01:01 / 20.10.05
I think that, if any "leap of faith" is required, then you have already taken it by asking the question in the first place.

The upshot is that when one does certain things, certain things follow. If that weren't the case, I don't think the folks around here would waste their time.

It is true, much of what one deals with when engaged in magickal work falls into the subjective realm. Lots of it takes place in your mind. The problem is, EVERYTHING takes place in your mind, and so racking things up to "mere imagination" can be a rather disingenuous dismissal. You've heard the Matrix spiel!

Now - I know, I know, The Matrix Spiel is, for those who want solid proof, a cop-out. It plays right into the accusations of those who maintain that magick is simply psychological conditioning and self-induced psychosis. So, let me say that it seems to have a real-world, measurable cause-and-effect component to it.

Up front, let me say that to me, magick seems to be, as the skeptics say, primarily about psychological conditioning, but not entirely. In my experience, magickal work is 99% self-motivation. It's amazing how the difficulties and roadblocks in life seem to melt away when one has the proper attitude, and has developed the ability to really focus efforts on the desired goal. It, in fact, seems magickal!

HOWEVER, that other 1% - which generally manifests itself in the form of strangely helpful coincidences that fall directly in line with a desired goal and seem to come out of nowhere at exactly the right time - is just as "real" as anything else, but UTTERLY inexplicable from anything other than a magickal perspective. Science doesn't have the tools yet to unravel this problem - but that doesn't mean the phenomena aren't real.

"The art and science of causing change in accordance with will" is a very good way of describing this process. (Go Go Power Crowley!)

Stated simply, human beings seem to have the ability to exercise non-local influence over what happens to them. Whether they do it by praying to a god, becoming one with the universe, casting a spell, meditating, or getting their shit together so they're prepared when a lucky break comes around - who knows? All of these methods seem to result in the same thing - better control over the world around you.

I think this topic only seems silly to people because they have been taught that this topic is silly. In fact, I would imagine that many in the Temple are of the opinion that what we are doing and discussing is not UN-scientific, but rather touching on aspects of reality which science hasn't adequately explained. And so, until all this is cleared up and written down in a college textbook somewhere, any rational person "knows" that non-local influence at the macroscopic level is bullshit!

This is not a new phenomenon. For example, back in the day, it was "known" that rocks do not fall out of the sky. Therefor, any reports of rocks falling from the sky were, by their very nature, known to be mistaken and were chalked up to lightning. If said rock was actually located, then it had either been jettisoned into the sky from an earthbound location, or it was already there before it was found. If the rock was hot and there was a crater, then the rock had actually been struck by the lightning that had made the light in the sky that had been mistaken as a falling rock. This was KNOWN to be true and there are many accounts of very reputable, levelheaded scientists who closed investigations on such reports with the above conclusions. Obviously, those scientists were wrong. It took awhile for science to catch up to what other people already knew.

The point is, I think these things CAN be discussed, albeit tentatively, in scientific terms. There seem to be actual rules at play here which are as consistent as many of the accepted scientific laws. If you boil down magickal practices, from Hermetic Theater to Yoga to Aikido, you are in essence left with the same things - "strange attractors" that all of these practices have in common. These elements allow for reliable reproducibility among many different people. You can do something, then teach someone else to do the same thing. The possibilities inherent in the union of science and what is loosely termed "mysticism" are, to me, very exciting. Most major advances in quantum physics over the past century have left many scholars of the occult going "Told you so." For a good example of current studies on these topics, check out the Global Consciousness Project

In fact, I would posit that in many ways, the people here in Temple who are engaged in these sorts of activities are often MORE genuinely scientific in their approach to the subject than many traditional scientists are in their chosen fields. As you might have noticed, no one around here is telling you what magick actually IS - and that's because we haven't a clue. I have stated my thoughts here, but am fully prepared to admit that I might be 100% wrong. We have lots and lots and lots of guesses about what these strange attractors mean. Many of them are contradictory. We have no certitude. All we can describe are the results of our experiences.

And this speaks to your very valid point regarding stage magicians and charlatans. Since the subject is so fascinating and yet so subjective, there is a HUGE market out there for people to make a buck on the trusting. People WANT to believe that things may be other than they seem, and so open themselves up to being taken in by the clever and unscrupulous. All this says to me is that dishonest people are everywhere. It says nothing, one way or another, about the validity of magickal phenomena.

If you decide to give anything a try, I'd be very interested in hearing the results ...
 
 
+#'s, - names
01:50 / 20.10.05
i enjoy the temple because since i started posting (well, reading more than posting) no fucker can kill me with conventional weapons.

its a dangerous world out there and you need every advantage you can get.
 
 
illmatic
06:25 / 20.10.05
Jub: someone famous, dead and Greek said "the unexamined life is not worth living". I suppose that's where it starts for me. Much of the bumph classified under the heading of magick is a useful starting point for examining my own life, personality and attitudes and the world around me. Some of this investigation has led me to believe that Western scientific rationalism hasn't got all the bases covered, as mstonsihing as it's acheivements are. Magick is interesting as a discipline because it provides these very useful tools, as well as plenty of ammunition for insane self-aggrandisment, delusion and self-justifiying alienation. The fine line between the two provides a lot of the fuel for the debates on this forum.

If you want to really understand though, experiential is the way to go, try something - buy a tarot pack, keep a dream diary. As someone not famous, dead or Greek but very hard said to me "give it a go".
 
 
Cat Chant
10:57 / 20.10.05
You can't really interact with this forum with any level of depth unless you are practicing, or at least researching, as you will be unable to speak from your own experiences.

This quote (and the whole of GL's post) made me think that a comparison with the Music forum might be useful - your point, Jub, about feeling you have to have an "in" seems to me less about faith/belief/science, and more about a set of experiences and a vocabulary. I can't really interact in any depth with the Music forum on similar grounds to those Gypsy Lantern evokes here: not because I don't believe in music, or don't think music is good, but because I don't seem to listen to music in the same way as most of the posters there. (Certainly I don't listen to as much music or as many kinds of music, and I listen with much less knowledge and commitment.) I don't have the same experiences and I'm not familiar with a lot of the vocabulary.

Anyway. I'm in a slightly similar position vis-a-vis the Temple: I'm not a total non-practitioner, but I really don't have a collective frame of terms, experiences and thoughts in which to talk about and expand my practice. So this thread (and the links - thanks, Mordant!) is useful for me too. I'll go and read the linked threads and see if I can start getting a handle on all of this...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:35 / 20.10.05
I'm an occasional poster but I read alot here. I'd echo what GL says about trying things out.

I've slowly come to feel comfortable here, and one of the reasons I post here is that certain things I want to talk about with the members of the community, only fit in here.

In my case I'm thinking about experiences with pyschotherapy, connections/conceptions of body/mind/other, experiences with energy shifts. These are experiences I've had that I wish to discuss/share with people whose opinions I respect and whose input I'd like.

I think GLs post is key because it identifies the experiential nature (focus?) of many of the Temple threads.

As with many experiential environments(for me, my way in was via experiences with counselling and pyschotherapy, as a client, worker and student), it can feel like people are saying 'you get it or you don't, but that's not really the case.

It's people saying 'try some stuff out and talk about what you do or don't experience'. There's no 'you must experience x'.

Otherwise, and I appreciate that you are trying not to do this, there's a hint of 'justify yourselves' in your post, that people probably aren't going to react particularly positively to.

Although, having said that, the threads that Mordant links to are full of engagement and reaction, and you might find them interesting/useful.

I can sympathise/have and do feel similarly about some of the topics, which I don't understand a word of. But often, the more specific threads are just that, they are specialised threads. The comparion with the music forum's a useful one here. Over there I started a thread about synths and drums, referencing 303s, 909s.

Which only attracted a small number of posters who had an 'in' to that because it was about a very specific form of music-making. It was a specialist thread, and I was glad that a forum existed in which I'd find a few people interested in talking about that genre, the technology and their experiencse of it. (currently listening to Voodoo Ray, topically enough!)

Oh, and I'll bite on this:

I don't know if I count as a "serious user" or not, but I'll take a stab at an answer.


Do serious Temple users see Magick activities as a separate part of themselves to be enjoyed like a kind of role play or do people believe there an underlying Magickness to everything you do.

Do you read Head Shop threads? Alot of the more 'Theory'-based stuff in there answers these questions in a different language, but with, for me, simarly experiences/focus.

It's one reason I have a problem with the concept of capital T-theory, because that stuff, for example, Derrida (thread here, in which people do a similar thing wrt Derrida) is profoundly about the world, live as it's lived.

So, there is only really a distinction between 'serious' and 'unserious' role-play(and that distinction is muddy at best) rather than 'role-play' and 'everything I do'.

Something I said elsewhere about Derrida, which applies equally/is intertwined with the practices I talk about here:

I've loved Derrida from the moment I first came across his work and found a mode of constructing and existing in the world that explained much of what I found puzzling about life while prodding me to interrogate and investigate my own comforting assertions. I heart him
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:25 / 20.10.05
Also Do serious Temple users see Magick activities as a separate part of themselves to be enjoyed like a kind of role play or do people believe there an underlying Magickness to everything you do.

Dunno if I really count as a serious Temple user (I seem to spend half my time here askig stupid questions), but my answer would be the latter. Definately the latter. (I guess I'd qualify that to include an element of the spiritual in with "Magickness.") You can turn working on a production line into a magical activity. You can turn waiting for a bus into a magical activity. If you work with spirits or similar, you will often find them "coming through" (sensing their presence close by, receiving information ect) whilst performing an activity associated with that spirits particular field of operation. (As an example, I get a certain amount of interest from Freyja when I'm making jewellery.)

There is no mundane world of boringness and sheepality. Everything is touched by the same fire. You just have to learn how to see it.
 
 
Unconditional Love
19:50 / 20.10.05
The divine sheeple say ba grazing under ra, in the shadow of the lambs ka.

bah, humbug.

all the cows say mu mu.

turtle swimming, thrusting those hips.tonights chi gung left me with enough fart power to levitate off my chair.
 
 
--
22:25 / 20.10.05
Look at it this way, jub, even if you give it a try and it doesn't work out, at least you'll have something funny and interesting to write about in your biography.
 
 
Jub
12:40 / 21.10.05
First of all, I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who’s replied so far. It’s certainly given me a lot to think about. I’ll try to summarise my thoughts on your responses.

I thought it would be useful to caveat my earlier suspicion of the Temple by saying that over the years I have come to know the world as based on Causality – albeit very complex causality – and as such am finding it hard to reconcile some of the things I’ve been reading here. A good analogy would be to say that the weather in general is a huge system of input and output and although meteorology is not an exact science it approximates cause and effect. If all inputs were known then all outputs could technically be known – the fact that they are not, does not mean causality and causality alone is what is at play here. Similarly I believe human action is based on input and output in an ever increasingly complex system of cause and effect and as such free will is an illusion we use to give ourselves an agency we do not truly possess.

This background means I am still finding it difficult to accept the idea that science can’t technically explain all these phenomena if we just knew the causes, which some of the responses seemed to suggest. When the SZA talks of non-causal change etc and not criticising without knowing what I’m criticising – it’s fair enough – except to say what I have seen so far is so far removed from my world view that I simple cannot accept somethings on face value – eg non causal change. However as Cirranon mentions the inquiry itself which started the thread might be an “in” of itself.

When sine talks about it working despite initial scepticism, I am left with the idea that this is just specious reasoning. I haven’t been attacked by non-conventional weapons (or whatever) because I believe this/ have this stone (or whatever), therefore this thing must be protecting me. That’s not an argument that holds any water.

A point on meaning: on reflection I think this is what is most alluring about the Temple and spiritual thingymajigs the world over. When LVX23 says “why would I want science to explain love?” – I’m left thinking, “why wouldn’t you?” I don’t see how one’s wants should be taken as an accurate account of the world, but do appreciate this is part of the attraction, and why perhaps that cultures since the dawn of time have constructed false realities and associated ceremonies to make sense of their place in the world. Money $hot and Kowalski’s points about experiencing things for oneself is both related and relevant – and seem intuitive enough.

This is a point expanded on by Gypsy Latern’s call to action, and one I don’t take lightly. I think that explaining it in those terms is very helpful, as partly the taxonomy and vocabulary is the thing I have perhaps been finding so strange. Similarly ID Entity’s hill tribe analogy is equally gratifying. The comments on role play vs integral parts I see as a false dichotomy now and thank you for clearing that up. Grant’s “tinkering with the interpretive” was a good explanation for me, and this leads on to generally accepting the idea of being more receptive.

GGM and Cirranon strengthen this idea of experimenting somehow, and Illmatic’s suggestion of a dream diary seems one which is both a good start and in keeping with my former cynical self. I have acquired said diary and will give it a while to see if anything emerges and will let you know.

Lastly thanks to Mordant for the links, I will have a look – clearly there’s a lot to be done!
 
 
Isadore
18:42 / 21.10.05
Religion is a model constructed by humans to help them understand their environment, id est, the universe.
Science is a model constructed by humans to help them understand their environment, id est, the universe.

Some models are better than others. I for one have an inherent distrust of mistaking the model - any model - for actual truth. I'm an empiricist. If it works, use it. That's what I found so appealing about chaos magic (at least until Pete Carroll started throwing around pseudo-physics) -- ritual bringing results.

To you, or most anybody else, the mumbo-jumbo I have been practicing these past two months is just mumbo-jumbo. That's fine. I have two months of empirical evidence that I am more functional -- I get more important tasks done, faster and more thoroughly -- when I do my mumbo-jumbo in the morning and evening. As a nice side effect, I find it fun (if 'fun' includes joy, awe, wonder, and a renewed sense of purpose on this little mudball we call home).

My SO calls these methods psychology (but that's why ve has a BS in it).
I call it the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, banishing at night, invoking in the morning.

Oh, and I said above 'to most anybody else'. Barbelith's Temple forum is the most functional group of practicing magicians, etc., that I have seen in nine years of involvement with the occult, pagan, etc. communities. The Temple is the reason I joined Barbelith; I can discuss and learn from many, many people in the flesh-world regarding physics, philosophy, history, and other 'conventional' topics, but the oopy-goopy psychoreligious bits? Good luck finding that anywhere else (and if you do, let me know).
 
 
Perfect Tommy
00:48 / 22.10.05
...over the years I have come to know the world as based on Causality – albeit very complex causality – and as such am finding it hard to reconcile some of the things I’ve been reading here.

The narrative I like to use when thinking about all this *waves arms* is that much of the world operates on a causal basis, but the magic world operates on a narrative basis. (I stole the idea from Sandman, if you must know.) Stories are not made of matter, yet they change the world. Magic can be about how things 'should' be, not how they are, and engaging with things on that level.

Love is a good example of what I'm talking about. I don't have a problem with reductionism--I think it is absolutely fascinating when I hear about the sorts of neurochemicals produced when you fall in love, and how those differ from those produced when you're in a long term relationship. Knowing those things can even help the relationship if you learn how to hack your own neurochemistry (long looks into each other's eyes, taking risks and increasing novelty, etc.). But the biochem doesn't substitute for the romantic narratives that we need, like 'courting' our lover even when technically we've already won them over.

Basically, it boils down to the fact that magic works. If I try to get a message through synchronicity and I see a newspaper headline which appears to exactly answer my question, it might be non-causality, or it might be having attuned my subconscious to pick up on that headline instead of a HELP WANTED sign or an overheard bus conversation. But my question was answered either way. So who cares?
 
 
Seth
10:46 / 22.10.05
Forgive me, Jub: I meant to type acausal, which I understand to mean events in which cause cannot be evidentially linked to effect. That they cannot now does not necessarily mean they never will be, but in many ways that's one of the least involving questions for me.
 
 
LVX23
08:29 / 23.10.05
Stories are not made of matter, yet they change the world. Magic can be about how things 'should' be, not how they are, and engaging with things on that level.

Just reiterating what Perfect Tommy said cause it resonates with my own feelings.
 
 
Colonel Kadmon
23:53 / 23.10.05
Come on, guys, get with it - Jub is joking!

I mean, to go on a web site and say 'Please explain your views because I don't agree with them' is a smokescreen. Why is sHe reading it in the first place? Does she go on Islamic or Christian fundamentalist sites and challenge their world-views too?

I think sHe is clearly a member of the "rationalist" cult. Apparently they believe that the universe was created by an explosion that "just happened", and they all think this makes us idiots for believing otherwise, despite the fact that they all believed something entirely different 50 years ago and none of them can agree on the details even today. I mean, imagine believing in magic, when the reality is clearly that there are an indeterminate number of other infinitesimal dimensions of which we can have no impirical knowledge! We must be insane!

I'd like to ask - why DON'T you believe in magic, Jub?
 
 
Chiropteran
14:23 / 24.10.05
Could be, Rex, but Jub's post in the Barbelove thread does at least seem to suggest a genuine interest in and respect for the responses in this thread, even if ze remains unconvinced.

Maybe Jub really is just trying to wind us up, but it's resulted in an interesting thread nonetheless, and one which may be useful to other readers who are not quite so committed to the "rationalist cult," as you put it. Personally, I'm willing to give Jub the benefit of the doubt and treat this as a good-faith attempt to understand something that puzzles hir. Unless you have specific knowledge to the contrary that you wish to share, Rex?
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
16:38 / 24.10.05
cultures since the dawn of time have constructed false realities and associated ceremonies to make sense of their place in the world.

Including this one, of course. Western rationalist scientific determinism is no more nor less of a 'false' reality cult than any other, historically or culturally, and the fact that it is the consensus shared by you does not make it any other way.

Science is a very (very) useful way of looking at the Universe with a specific agenda or desire for outcome as the intention. The italicised caveat is essential, and applies to every replacement of the word 'science' with any other discipline, be it magic, poetry, art or music (though that would be listening not looking :-)) or whatever takes your fancy. It is your fancy that is important.

Example - not a perfect one, but pretty good. Look at the room you are in. Do a quick sketch of it. A draughtsmans sketch. As quick as you like.

This is your subjective, draughtsmans Way of Looking at The Room. It is entirely 'correct' and makes 'perfect sense', yes?

Now, for the sake of this argument, lets say (it may even be true) that this room holds a lot of memories for you. So now, either do, or imagine, a painting of the room intended to convey the overall emotive connection you have within your memory-nervous system array and The Room. A painting of your feelings about the space.

This is (one of) your subjective, artistic Way(s) of Looking at The Room. It is entirely 'correct' and makes 'perfect sense', yes?

Now whip up an architects blueprint of the room. You know the form. This, if you like, is the scientific-rationalist Way of Looking at The Room. It is entirely 'correct' and makes 'perfect sense', yes?

Now take a photograph of the room. Now suspend yourself from the ceiling and sketch the room again. Now write a song about the room. Warrah warrah fishpaste.

To argue that the architectural view is the 'real' one is clearly codfish, though it is mathematically precise and would enable a qualified builder to recreate the rooms structural manifestation exactly. But it won't help you try to make your way across it, right now, in the dark, without barking your shins on the coffee table. Nor can it tell you anything about the beauty or aesthetic of the interior design, nor about what the room means. It is a Way of Looking at the room which serves a particular purpose. If you elevate it above any other Way of Looking as 'more real' you are succumbing to a form of Idolatry and dogmatism that is the calling card of that most despised of scientific-determinism, the fundamentalist. Strange, eh? It can be corroborated by others, sure...is that your gauge of 'reality'?

You should read 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray. (sorry, can't be arsed to do the Amazon.com link-up...you can do it!) It's a fascinating exposition on the self delusion of scientific - materialist- deterministic- humanism believing itself to be anything but a warty outgrowth of the most basic Christian belief in the superiority of man and progressive trajectory of history toward some kind of Utopia, nee Heaven...all through the obedient worship of the God of Science. It points out that Darwinism, far from threatening the Church as was supposed (though not by Darwin, ironically, who was a man of faith) has actually come to supercede Intelligent Design as proof of mans superiority on the planet ('Chosen' stature)...Ironical or what? Good, intersting book.

The 'cultures since the dawn of time' you are so quick to disparage as 'hav[ing] constructed false realities' did not share this Christian (now Humanist) view of history - redemption and progress - but, correctly in my view, saw history as a series of endless cycles, going absolutely nowhere in absolutely no kind of hurry, and with total disregard for the safety or wellbeing of man. They therefore did a fairly good job of not Completely Fucking the Place Up because, y'know, we're special and God won't mind. When in symbiosis with a giant organism (uh, the Earth) it's important not to become a cancerous or virulent invader to the host...Gaia theory...etc., never mind 'Save the Planet'...the planet is, and will be, fine. We need to save ourselves. I personally do not share George Bush's confidence that Science holds the answers there. The problem is unlikely, IMO, to contain the (entire) solution, though no doubt it will have a part to play.

I digress. So anyway, Ways of Looking. You seem, though perhaps I am mistaken, to be of the opinion that outside of yours, mine, Stephen Hawking's or Walt Whitman's or Whoever Else's Ways of Looking, there is an Ultimate Way, which is Right and True, and once Science has 'discovered' it, that'll be that and we can do away with all the other ways...or something like that, I don't know. What will we do with all the other Ways? I don't share that opinion, if that is your opinion.

Try this one : you drink an entheogenic (psychedelic, psychotomimetic, hallucinogenic - not just Ways of looking, Ways of Describing which influence Ways of Looking - isn't it great?) sacrament which science would explain chemically and describe the neuro-chemical effects within the blood and brain of said sacrament intersecting with a human organism. That is a Way of Looking at that process. Great. Substitute imbibing of sacrament with ritual chanting, drumming, invocation, whatever floats your magic boat.

Meanwhile, the subject who has imbibed the sacrament, peformed the ritual, beat the drum, invoced the pantheon, finds themselves in a sensory-perceptual world within, behind and all around the ordinary world of the five senses, which is populated to the brim with alien, apparently independently autonomous agents/entities, which interact, forge relationships, reveal information and have agendas with regard to the manifest world they are so interested in...

Now, faced with this, you can rush of to the scientific establishment, and they will absolutely say you are delusional, hallucinating, making it up, a charlatan, or simply ignore you completely as some wacko nutball. It just isn't Science, you see. It's in your mind, and rather amusingly, science, the product of a highly evolved consciousness, cannot explain...Consciousness! That which we are using to discover the Secrets of the Universe is the biggest Mystery within it. Can you use a tool to work on itself? Can you shine a torch to find it? Reach for own hands? It's atoughy. So...bugger off! That's Not Science!

But this will not change your need to understand what the fuck is happening. When you do this, this happens. Weird. What's it all about? What the fuck do you mean 'I'm imagining it?', 'It isn't real?'...I just fucking saw it! Talked to it! Got a cuddle from it! It was an angel, I tells ya, an angel! a Reptile insectoid alien! An adversarial demon! Don't lay that scientific rational crap on me now, I need some support!

Well, that's the point at which I personally became really interested in magic, cause, well, people have been doing this shit since the dawn of the species, and much of it has been worked out...channeled, written, recorded. It's esoteric, occult - meaning 'hidden' - precisely because most people do not care for it at all...Good for them. I don't really do nor watch much sport, which many people absoltely go crazy for...different strokes for different folks, horses for courses, warrah WARRAH!

At that point, engaging with it becomes essential because it is powerful and it works...so as stupid and silly as it may seem to the rationalist part of the memory-mind, accepting the Way of Looking, for example, that there is an Angelic host who occupy positions within a Celestial Court at the behest of the source of all this Isness, this KaPOW! Here it IS! this underlying condition of being - this Supreme Being, if you please - IHVH, Dao, I Am that I Am, Allah, Atman, Jehovah Elohim, whatever...becomes not only a viable and interesting Way of looking, but essential for understanding the workings and benefits and pitfalls of the new memory-mind you are creating by engaging with such powers.

If you like, think of them as energies, patterns within the dance of the quantum flux of all this hadron, quark, strangeness and charm which, due to the nature of your brain-as-a-receiver, tend to become personified, anthropomorphised and attributed qualities you are able to relate to. If you think that will help.

Me, I can dig being enfolded in the energetic appendages of one of those. Sweet. A pattern in the quantum flux that wants me to be safe and well. How inscrutable.

But I prefer being held in the wings of St. Tzadqiel and St. Michael 'cos I'm singing their songs and they are my protetora. It just, y'know, makes me feel a whole lot better. And I know what it means. It's available, and it works.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
16:57 / 24.10.05
Invoiced the Pantheon?

Now there's an idea. Never mind invocation, just bill 'em for your time!

Invoked, of course. I meant invoked.
 
 
LVX23
17:32 / 24.10.05
Nice one, Money.

Jub, it's not that magick says science is BS. It says that science has done a bang-up job at creating the vast technological accretions around our fragile little meat bodies and giving us a fairly usable set of tools with which to engage the material world. But it continues to fail at describing many of the more subtle, personal, and truly meaningful experiences that make us uniquely human. The scientific hold-out says, "well, wait around long enough and eventually all those mysteries will be solved and reduced to simple physics".

We laugh at that statement because we've got our own tools that help us to grasp the ungraspable, right here right now.

Note also that mechanism deconstructs itself. Physics and rationalism work well in very limited, defined conditions. Apply physics to determine how a low-pressure system in the Indian ocean will affect the salmon run on the Pacific coast and you will quickly run into major limits of your model. The system is tool complex. Apply rationalism to a peace rally in Central Park and you will have no understanding of when and where the demonstration will break into a riot.

Now the common mechanistic counter to this is to say that if you new all of the properties and variables, where able to plot every function and trajectory, then you'd know exactly what the system would be doing at any point in space or time. The implication is that the system could be run in reverse from any point in time and it would neatly return to it's previous state. Yet this ignores the fundamental iterative nature of complex systems. Linear equations can be run forward and backwards. Non-linear equations cannot, and these are what drive complex natural systems. At every step in the process inumerable inputs are adding to the system, all meshing together, some reinforcing, others cancelling, but all combining to produce emergent behaviors that are far greater than the sum of the parts.

Of course, when you dive into the micro realm of the quantum world, the situation becomes even more irrational and non-mechanistic. Particles are fundamentally mysterious, as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has shown. You can never know both position and momentum simultaneously. Observer-Participant (the physical paradigm most often invoked to "prove" magick, as if it needed such proof) reiterates this oddity suggesting that the state of a particle is the result of its observation. The implication here is that reality doesn't even exist until we look at it. Indeed, the mathematics show only fields of probabilities, not actual material stuff, emerging out of the vast quantum plenum the moment the wave function is collapsed and the thing "undergoe's the formality of becoming", to paraphrase Whitehead.

Einstein complained about quantum flakiness saying that God doesn't play dice. And yet, time and time again, quantum mathematics and their functional experiments hold strong. Einstein's greatest contributions to modern physics were in the field of light, showing how the fundamental speed, c, of light induced all sorts of funky anomalies in spacetime geometries and the notion of linear time. Now physicists have demonstarted Bell's theorem, that nonlocal information transfer is possible between two formerly paired particles. Hold them together, synch their spins, then pull them 10 miles, 1000 miles, a million miles apart, change the spin of one and, ZAP!, the spin of the other changes in accord. So what does this mean for the constant of light speed when particles can exchange information over great distances simultaneously?

So again, I'm not trying to explain magick here. I am suggesting two things: Science is constantly evolving to better model physical reality, though it does not and will never hold any dominion over the things that truly make us human. Secondly, science itself continues to reveal it's own limitations by moving out of the laboratory and into the real world. Life is just too bloody complex and indeterminate, nonlocal and nonlinear, for our simple 4d logic to wrap it's head around.

Magick is 5d logic.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:19 / 24.10.05
Money $hot: Could be worse. I seem to end up provoking Gods...
 
  

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