Religion is to God as Sci-Fi is to Science

[PixyMisa]

Well lets suppose for a moment that mainstream science overcomes the sheep-goat effect and validates parapsychology by using supergroups of the sheepiest sheep. What would happen to secular belief systems then? What would happen to materialism? What would happen to choice? Your choices of belief systems that exclude psi would shrink to zero. What if your remaining choices conflict with your psychological needs?

In that case, we'd follow the evidence, and apply reason to analyse it.

In other worse, the exact opposite of what you are doing in your blue-cow world.

 

[Donn]

Because if parapsychology were to become validated by mainstream science..

If unpowered human flight were validated by mainstream science, then we'd shortly find ourselves flying everywhere, all over the planet. Feeling the wind through our hair.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

 

[Limbo]

Ah, I see. Bad (unclear) wording on my part. The point is, looking for psi-talented subjects was the first step in many parapsychology projects. Concentrating the sheep and removing the goats would be a rather obvious thing to try, would it not? If you were testing to see whether it's possible for a human being to outrun a bear, you'd start by recruiting people who can run fast, wouldn't you?

Yes of course it would be an obvious thing to try. Then you would end up with a lot of bears getting free meals, because there are more variables than just belief that influence psi, just as there is more to outrunning a bear than raw speed.

Not really. You're assuming Dr. Persinger is correct about his ELF theory.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9l6VPpDublg

Maybe the trickster has him (and you too) on a wild goose chase.

Maybe.

But if he were correct about it and could build the technology, the trickster could no more stop him from making strong psi communication work than it could stop Galileo from looking through his telescope or Bell from talking on the phone or Oppenheimer from detonating fission bombs.

[vader]Don't be too proud of those technological terrors we've contructed. The ability to drop a big bomb is insignificant next to the power of the Force.[/vader]

What good are all these unlikely maybes depending on other unlikely maybes? Maybe God is one of us. Just a stranger on the bus. Maybe the earth is surrounded by invisible alien battle fleets sent to put an end to all Sharknado movies, and the inevitable making of Sharknado 3 will bring about the end of the world.

Unlikely maybes depending on more unlikely maybes all the way down are not much good to the uninitiated, I'm sure. But to the initiated, there is a certainty at the bottom that unlikely maybes are resting on. That certainty is, among other things, that psi is both legitimate and tricky.

If they're "my own" then they're not "collective."

If your guiding, personal myth is the Justice League, then the archetypes will take that form in your dreams, visions, etc. Your next door neighbor might experience them in the form of The Avengers. DC or Marvel? Which denomination do you prefer. Different forms, different universe, different aspects of the same archetypes.

Well, okay. I admit I used a deliberately provocative description. One, however, that is essentially accurate, since you said you considered the collective unconscious to be part of our physical being (i.e. our brains, since I'm pretty sure you didn't mean our kidneys) and that you expect to continue on after death (undead) by "tapping into" it and "making a home there" (like a parasitic beetle in a tree, say).

Actually, I really wouldn't limit it to our brains. And yes I do intend to live on after this body can't support me. My body of light, which I was initiated into, is standing by. It will be a blast. I'm looking forward to exploring the cosmos.

I'll tell you what and where the collective unconscious is. But first we have to consider where you (and me, and everyone) come from. You didn't come from your genes and your biochemistry. Although those were necessary for you to become you, they weren't sufficient. You wouldn't be the same you if you'd been switched at birth and raised in a logging camp in Siberia, say.

And you didn't come down from the astral plane of thetan unicorn angels as magic spirit version of a Star Trek gas-sparkly alien with a copy of your Karma Report taped to your non-corporeal wrist, to operate your body as a puppet until you're done with it.

I think you probably agree with both of those, right?

Actually I'm not going to agree or disagree. I don't know where I'm from, but I'm working on it.

We aren't going to settle the issue of psi. But we did make a lot of progress fleshing out my overall argument. I appreciate your help with that. I respect you and I like finding skeptics I can respect and have a civil discussion with. JREF is lucky to have you here.

My days of free time are almost over. I won't have hours to spend on-line anymore, but I might be able to drop in a bit here and there to make a post. I come and go alot.

 

[asydhouse]

If it falls down at that point, then it goes without saying that it stands prior to that point.

Fantasy stands on its own as a pleasurable exercise of human nature. It's one of humanity's saving graces.

It's only when one tries to make the fantasy real that difficulties arise: prior to the Wright brothers' canny developments of machinery which they rode off from the surface of the planet into the air, many people tried to fly through wishfully thinking they were doing mechanics and being "experimentalists" cobbling together lumps and cogs and they rode those fantasies off the edges of docks and wharfs and plunged into the water below.

Fantasy is a thing for its own sake acceptable. Claiming that evidence exists for a dream's substantial existence apart from the dreamer is a disingenuous perversion of the understood rigorous nature of "evidence".

My personal testimony that psi is real is evidence. Of course, it's only anecdotal evidence, but it is still evidence. So what you're really saying is, there isn't enough evidence to satisfy you. Your bar is set higher than anecdotal evidence, but that doesn't mean that anecdotal evidence isn't evidence per se.

Hallucinations are not evidence of anything but that the human brain is a complex dynamic organ and engine of marvels which can and does create the evident substantiality of your perceptions. You do not experience the world directly. You only get the edited version that your brain cobbles together from all the input coming via various transformations (like your senses are sort of microphones: I'm no sound engineer, but I believe mics are translating the sound waves impacting their diaphragms into electrical voltages and directing those transformations down the chain to the next transformation-junction).

Your brain literally creates what you "perceive" or experience as reality, whether it be the ground you observe (and feel!) beneath your feet, or the sense that you are in love, or are being watched… or are in touch with an "energy" or spiritual stuff that's flowing through your "insubstantial body"… or other such mystical mumbo jumbo "philosophy" religious "experiences".

Of course I don't expect you to take my word for it. Ideally, you would take the advice of Sam Harris and 'build your own telescope'. That is to say, elicit your own psi and see it for yourself.

Here's news for you, Mr. Limbo: I have had plenty of experiences that you would claim to be evidence of psi. I've dealt with it deeply and extensively over many years. My conclusion is that it's all been my brain's creative, artistic, psychotic, organically messy and dynamic surging and sizzling.

My father is a mystically minded fellow, intelligent but not that well educated in scientific subjects, despite training to be a design draughtsman after leaving the Navy, and proving to be a first rate mechanical draughtsman. There was no mention of religion in my family when I was a child, so I grew up ignorant of such things. There was no supernatural or mystic conceptual baggage at all. (I did have some odd perceptual experiences when young: there was a girl I liked, and once she was suddenly really small and I was looking down at her, and another occasion the reverse happened and I was looking up at her.)

I was bemused and not interested when eventually a playmate tried to explain God to me. But of course as my Dad discovered mysticism and I read the Ripley's books and my Dad accepted the stories without any skepticism, I was delighted to learn of reincarnation. I was open to all and every claim. My Dad did not help me become less gullible. I believed it all.

But then he got into astral traveling, and suddenly freaked out. He suddenly;y wanted a Christian church. I was 14 and not interested in church, but cut a long story short being an only child I went with my parents when they joined the Mormons. I sincerely prayed for a testimony. It never came, and after two or three years I left the church.

My friends were smoking dope and taking acid, and I was doing zazen. After a while I realised I was young and should be getting out into the world, and that I was perfectly happy and had absolutely no need of pursuing meditation. A few months or a year or two later, and I found my zazen had prepared me well for staying calm and open in the centre of the energy unleashed by a powerful hallucinogen I imbibed with friends on Anglesey.

I became an acid Mercury for a beautiful Spring of sunny weather and blossoming heads, tripping every three or four days in Oxford among the living breathing sculptures in the old university streets. Oxford was full of acid heads, and I was free to wander in their heads by visiting their rooms, each one an artist expressing their visions. I was a mendicant zen monk walking in the gardens of satori.

You scoff. "Drugs". No, the responses of your central nervous system and your endocrine system etc to the interactions with introduced materials in your brain's receptors, the manipulation of your biochemistry and the presentation to yourself of profound shamanic transformative experience thereby. Regardless of the cause, your mind, your "self" is undergoing challenging and "eye-opening" experiential material with which to grapple and grow.

Part of that growth is to recognise the subjective nature of that experience.

Moving on, having traveled overland to India on the hippy trail, having been ripped off and conned out of all of my money, having dwelt on the beaches in Goa among the throngs of partying freaks, tripping and smoking the best charas in the world, receiving food from people every day, surviving homeless in Goa really quite nice, but as the season goes away so do the people and the monsoon arrives and I suffer malnutrition and loss of gumption mind,and so I wind up in Poona and fall in love with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later to be called Osho. But my atheist childhood lies at the core of my being, and something held me back from actually getting absorbed, from actually joining. I left in a stupor after 6 weeks.

I went to the mountains to get some charas. I got paranoid about police. I wound up having the most amazing experience of being contacted by aliens. Many weeks I was wandering, dealing with the energies in my head connecting with these alien human hybrid Indians. Projecting like mad to make them sweet, having been scared for my life, too many ideas to put here… suffice to say it was thrilling and terrifying and cosmically important. It seemed to respond to the direction of my thoughts (surprise! is that a clue do you think?), so I was working to make it positive and loving instead of threatening, as it could turn to be. It was as if I was tripping for about two or three months.

Wandering in the streets, like a sadhu. But not a hindu. So they didn't know what to make of me, and in the end they decided to drive me away. They decided to blame the devil. Because of my childhood, I had no truck with devils. That is such a dumb outlook, after that cosmic aliens etc stuff, that I just knew they were not true. I rejected them… long story short I came back overland to Britain just to check if it was the same planet I'd been on when I went out there. I checked the geology and shapes of the land all the way back and it sure looked like the same planet. Just felt different.

I've spent decades dealing with the aftermath of that. It took me about 20 years, and studying science with the Open University, to appreciate that science is the method we as a species have developed in order to avoid the kind of self-deception inherent in relying on one's own perceptual testimony. I sometimes have flashbacks when I hear birds apparently talking to me in English. I know it's my own mind, repeating patterns burnt into me during that intense period of paranoia leading to psychosis in India nearly 40 years ago now.

So no, I don't consider your experiences to be any quality of actual evidence of anything. I trust real science to discover actuality, and I trust Susan Blackmore's reports more than I would yours.

To sum up: your claim that "Science can and does produce much evidence of an anomaly we call psi" is a disingenuous claim for which you have no backing. You lose credibility by making that claim.

The first requirement for spiritual growth is honesty. I leave you to it.

 

[Craig4]

If evidence of remote viewing is all it takes to overcome your skepticism, then why are you still a skeptic? There is plenty of evidence, even supergoat Richard Wiseman admits it. The problem is, people are using double-standards. There is a super-high standard of evidence for parapsychology, and a nice normal standard for mainstream science. It's basically philosophical prejudice; taboo.

Where is his work published?

 

[tsig]

Yes of course it would be an obvious thing to try. Then you would end up with a lot of bears getting free meals, because there are more variables than just belief that influence psi, just as there is more to outrunning a bear than raw speed.




http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9l6VPpDublg




Maybe.




[vader]Don't be too proud of those technological terrors we've contructed. The ability to drop a big bomb is insignificant next to the power of the Force.[/vader]




Unlikely maybes depending on more unlikely maybes all the way down are not much good to the uninitiated, I'm sure. But to the initiated, there is a certainty at the bottom that unlikely maybes are resting on. That certainty is, among other things, that psi is both legitimate and tricky.




If your guiding, personal myth is the Justice League, then the archetypes will take that form in your dreams, visions, etc. Your next door neighbor might experience them in the form of The Avengers. DC or Marvel? Which denomination do you prefer. Different forms, different universe, different aspects of the same archetypes.




Actually, I really wouldn't limit it to our brains. And yes I do intend to live on after this body can't support me. My body of light, which I was initiated into, is standing by. It will be a blast. I'm looking forward to exploring the cosmos.




Actually I'm not going to agree or disagree. I don't know where I'm from, but I'm working on it.

We aren't going to settle the issue of psi. But we did make a lot of progress fleshing out my overall argument. I appreciate your help with that. I respect you and I like finding skeptics I can respect and have a civil discussion with. JREF is lucky to have you here.

My days of free time are almost over. I won't have hours to spend on-line anymore, but I might be able to drop in a bit here and there to make a post. I come and go alot.

What happens in your head has absolutely no effect on the outside world. All the meditating and mystical insight will not unstop the drain.

 

[tsig]

Fantasy stands on its own as a pleasurable exercise of human nature. It's one of humanity's saving graces.

It's only when one tries to make the fantasy real that difficulties arise: prior to the Wright brothers' canny developments of machinery which they rode off from the surface of the planet into the air, many people tried to fly through wishfully thinking they were doing mechanics and being "experimentalists" cobbling together lumps and cogs and they rode those fantasies off the edges of docks and wharfs and plunged into the water below.

Fantasy is a thing for its own sake acceptable. Claiming that evidence exists for a dream's substantial existence apart from the dreamer is a disingenuous perversion of the understood rigorous nature of "evidence".




Hallucinations are not evidence of anything but that the human brain is a complex dynamic organ and engine of marvels which can and does create the evident substantiality of your perceptions. You do not experience the world directly. You only get the edited version that your brain cobbles together from all the input coming via various transformations (like your senses are sort of microphones: I'm no sound engineer, but I believe mics are translating the sound waves impacting their diaphragms into electrical voltages and directing those transformations down the chain to the next transformation-junction).

Your brain literally creates what you "perceive" or experience as reality, whether it be the ground you observe (and feel!) beneath your feet, or the sense that you are in love, or are being watched… or are in touch with an "energy" or spiritual stuff that's flowing through your "insubstantial body"… or other such mystical mumbo jumbo "philosophy" religious "experiences".







Here's news for you, Mr. Limbo: I have had plenty of experiences that you would claim to be evidence of psi. I've dealt with it deeply and extensively over many years. My conclusion is that it's all been my brain's creative, artistic, psychotic, organically messy and dynamic surging and sizzling.

My father is a mystically minded fellow, intelligent but not that well educated in scientific subjects, despite training to be a design draughtsman after leaving the Navy, and proving to be a first rate mechanical draughtsman. There was no mention of religion in my family when I was a child, so I grew up ignorant of such things. There was no supernatural or mystic conceptual baggage at all. (I did have some odd perceptual experiences when young: there was a girl I liked, and once she was suddenly really small and I was looking down at her, and another occasion the reverse happened and I was looking up at her.)

I was bemused and not interested when eventually a playmate tried to explain God to me. But of course as my Dad discovered mysticism and I read the Ripley's books and my Dad accepted the stories without any skepticism, I was delighted to learn of reincarnation. I was open to all and every claim. My Dad did not help me become less gullible. I believed it all.

But then he got into astral traveling, and suddenly freaked out. He suddenly;y wanted a Christian church. I was 14 and not interested in church, but cut a long story short being an only child I went with my parents when they joined the Mormons. I sincerely prayed for a testimony. It never came, and after two or three years I left the church.

My friends were smoking dope and taking acid, and I was doing zazen. After a while I realised I was young and should be getting out into the world, and that I was perfectly happy and had absolutely no need of pursuing meditation. A few months or a year or two later, and I found my zazen had prepared me well for staying calm and open in the centre of the energy unleashed by a powerful hallucinogen I imbibed with friends on Anglesey.

I became an acid Mercury for a beautiful Spring of sunny weather and blossoming heads, tripping every three or four days in Oxford among the living breathing sculptures in the old university streets. Oxford was full of acid heads, and I was free to wander in their heads by visiting their rooms, each one an artist expressing their visions. I was a mendicant zen monk walking in the gardens of satori.

You scoff. "Drugs". No, the responses of your central nervous system and your endocrine system etc to the interactions with introduced materials in your brain's receptors, the manipulation of your biochemistry and the presentation to yourself of profound shamanic transformative experience thereby. Regardless of the cause, your mind, your "self" is undergoing challenging and "eye-opening" experiential material with which to grapple and grow.

Part of that growth is to recognise the subjective nature of that experience.

Moving on, having traveled overland to India on the hippy trail, having been ripped off and conned out of all of my money, having dwelt on the beaches in Goa among the throngs of partying freaks, tripping and smoking the best charas in the world, receiving food from people every day, surviving homeless in Goa really quite nice, but as the season goes away so do the people and the monsoon arrives and I suffer malnutrition and loss of gumption mind,and so I wind up in Poona and fall in love with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later to be called Osho. But my atheist childhood lies at the core of my being, and something held me back from actually getting absorbed, from actually joining. I left in a stupor after 6 weeks.

I went to the mountains to get some charas. I got paranoid about police. I wound up having the most amazing experience of being contacted by aliens. Many weeks I was wandering, dealing with the energies in my head connecting with these alien human hybrid Indians. Projecting like mad to make them sweet, having been scared for my life, too many ideas to put here… suffice to say it was thrilling and terrifying and cosmically important. It seemed to respond to the direction of my thoughts (surprise! is that a clue do you think?), so I was working to make it positive and loving instead of threatening, as it could turn to be. It was as if I was tripping for about two or three months.

Wandering in the streets, like a sadhu. But not a hindu. So they didn't know what to make of me, and in the end they decided to drive me away. They decided to blame the devil. Because of my childhood, I had no truck with devils. That is such a dumb outlook, after that cosmic aliens etc stuff, that I just knew they were not true. I rejected them… long story short I came back overland to Britain just to check if it was the same planet I'd been on when I went out there. I checked the geology and shapes of the land all the way back and it sure looked like the same planet. Just felt different.

I've spent decades dealing with the aftermath of that. It took me about 20 years, and studying science with the Open University, to appreciate that science is the method we as a species have developed in order to avoid the kind of self-deception inherent in relying on one's own perceptual testimony. I sometimes have flashbacks when I hear birds apparently talking to me in English. I know it's my own mind, repeating patterns burnt into me during that intense period of paranoia leading to psychosis in India nearly 40 years ago now.

So no, I don't consider your experiences to be any quality of actual evidence of anything. I trust real science to discover actuality, and I trust Susan Blackmore's reports more than I would yours.

To sum up: your claim that "Science can and does produce much evidence of an anomaly we call psi" is a disingenuous claim for which you have no backing. You lose credibility by making that claim.

The first requirement for spiritual growth is honesty. I leave you to it.

Sounds like a long, strange trip, kudos for arriving alive and sane.

Discovering there is no gold at the end of the rainbow drives some to invent their own fantasy worlds.

 

[Belz...]

If evidence of remote viewing is all it takes to overcome your skepticism, then why are you still a skeptic? There is plenty of evidence, even supergoat Richard Wiseman admits it. The problem is, people are using double-standards. There is a super-high standard of evidence for parapsychology, and a nice normal standard for mainstream science. It's basically philosophical prejudice; taboo.

No, it isn't. The problem is what you consider evidence. Evidence isn't something you can fit to a preexisting theory. Evidence is something that supports the theory no matter what your biases are.

For instance, someone claiming to read minds, or claiming that someone else has read their mind, is not solid evidence, because there is no reason to take it at face value, especially given what we already know about both physics and human psychology. A thousand people making the same claim doesn't help, for the same reason. You need to be able to replicate it in conditions where human bias is extremely improbable.

 

[Myriad]

Actually I'm not going to agree or disagree. I don't know where I'm from, but I'm working on it.

We aren't going to settle the issue of psi. But we did make a lot of progress fleshing out my overall argument. I appreciate your help with that. I respect you and I like finding skeptics I can respect and have a civil discussion with. JREF is lucky to have you here.

My days of free time are almost over. I won't have hours to spend on-line anymore, but I might be able to drop in a bit here and there to make a post. I come and go alot.

I'm sorry to hear that you have to cut back. (I hope it's because more interesting and rewarding activities are interfering.) But overall it seems like we reached a good stopping place.

I appreciate your help as well, in clarifying some ideas I've been working toward. I'd been thinking for a while that the "alliance" between mysticism and the paranormal is an accidental distraction that should be avoided or talked around to avoid bringing all conversation to an impasse. But now I'm also seeing it as an outright impediment to the very spiritual progress mystics aspire to.

If I can leave you with one idea to ponder (not, I expect, that you'll agree with it) it's the hypothesis that the mystic realms are not larger and shared and "out there" in some other plane or dimension or vibrational mode, but inward and individual. If HAL or Data could learn to observe the flow of procedural code through their own instruction registers, maybe they too would feel they'd experienced glimpses of the Great Cosmic All.

And they wouldn't even be wrong, if that's how the Great Cosmic All introduces itself into reality: not as vague abstract ideas from higher realms above, but as the routine ceaseless workings of the computational fabric below.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[Myriad]

Here's news for you, Mr. Limbo: I have had plenty of experiences that you would claim to be evidence of psi. I've dealt with it deeply and extensively over many years. My conclusion is that it's all been my brain's creative, artistic, psychotic, organically messy and dynamic surging and sizzling.

Write a book about these experiences. Please write a book about these experiences. Including your later experiences and conclusions up to the present day. Accounts like this need to be told.

 

[PixyMisa]

No, it isn't. The problem is what you consider evidence. Evidence isn't something you can fit to a preexisting theory. Evidence is something that supports the theory no matter what your biases are.

More specifically, it's his process of evaluating evidence. Limbo's process consists entirely of deliberate methodological bias. Under his process, all hypotheses evaluate as true, including mutually contradictory ones.

In other words, if we follow Limbo's approach, every hypothesis evaluates as both true and false simultaneously.

This, by itself, proves that the process is worthless.

 

[asydhouse]

Write a book about these experiences. Please write a book about these experiences. Including your later experiences and conclusions up to the present day. Accounts like this need to be told.

Well writing about it on JREF has helped me get to grips a bit with recounting it. It's not easy to stack the various aspects of the experiences so that they get across whatever the heck it was…even to myself! I actually felt some sense of relief when I finally acknowledged to myself that it had involved a psychotic episode (brought on by paranoia induced by the war on drug users.) So in that sense I know what happened… but it's a complex set of aspects of thinking and feeling and interpretation at the time and over time since...

I'm trying to get my head around the task, as it happens. I'm still in the process of understanding what happened, albeit nearing skeptical/critical thinking orientated stability, to get my fulcrum set, so to speak.

I'm more of a poet than an essayist, so a book length sustaining of literary equilibrium has never been my skill… but I'm thinking I could express things in various ways, to set the various need-to-knows in place.

Anyway, I'd be working on that right now if I wasn't running out of money and trying to find an income, i.e. a job!

I was hoping to get some freelance video editing work, but I don't have the gumption to find the work. There's too much competition too…now prices are so low for the software and computers etc. (That's why I'm able to do it now!)

Anyway, I need to get some stuff on paper, & then… do you know a publisher that might fork over an advance before it's written?

 

[asydhouse]

I'm sorry to hear that you have to cut back. (I hope it's because more interesting and rewarding activities are interfering.) But overall it seems like we reached a good stopping place.

I appreciate your help as well, in clarifying some ideas I've been working toward. I'd been thinking for a while that the "alliance" between mysticism and the paranormal is an accidental distraction that should be avoided or talked around to avoid bringing all conversation to an impasse. But now I'm also seeing it as an outright impediment to the very spiritual progress mystics aspire to.

If I can leave you with one idea to ponder (not, I expect, that you'll agree with it) it's the hypothesis that the mystic realms are not larger and shared and "out there" in some other plane or dimension or vibrational mode, but inward and individual. If HAL or Data could learn to observe the flow of procedural code through their own instruction registers, maybe they too would feel they'd experienced glimpses of the Great Cosmic All.

And they wouldn't even be wrong, if that's how the Great Cosmic All introduces itself into reality: not as vague abstract ideas from higher realms above, but as the routine ceaseless workings of the computational fabric below.

Respectfully,
Myriad

The hi-lited bit is precisely what I was trying to say in my long post.

It's the direction of causality which separates mystics from natural philosophers (which we now call scientists, material scientists to the mystics).

I've in recent times come to notice more that a common division between the people I consider sound thinkers and the ones I judge to be faulty in their reasoning is that the latter posit that mind is separate from matter and even precedes the manifestation of matter, whereas sound thinking seems to proceed from those who consider mind to be an emergent process of the brain's different subsystems in synergistic function. ("Mind" is produced by matter).

It's that direction of movement that seems to be the contrary difficulty in communion. Mystics are consciously aligned with the opposite pole of the conceptual field dealing with these things (consciousness? metaphysics? existential angst? ontological rubber ducks? )

My orientation was always on the materialist/rational side, but I was naive and free enough to swim in the other side to such a depth that I caught some long rides back, moving in the opposite direction in the field of how we see things.

Wiped out, washed up on the beach, I can see back the way I came and know that the shore is my primary place, and my source, and that ocean is a fun place to swim, but there's no place to stand out there. I build my house of breaking and groaning metaphors from all the flotsam and jetsam (which originally came from the shore, let's not forget!) that washes up from out there.


Just so you know, Myriad, I think you're a much better writer than I! I've rather lost control of this, so I'll stop!

If HAL or Data could learn to observe the flow of procedural code through their own instruction registers, maybe they too would feel they'd experienced glimpses of the Great Cosmic All.


And they wouldn't even be wrong, if that's how the Great Cosmic All introduces itself into reality: not as vague abstract ideas from higher realms above, but as the routine ceaseless workings of the computational fabric below. Respectfully,
Myriad

Beautiful!

 

[Limbo]

I'm sorry to hear that you have to cut back. (I hope it's because more interesting and rewarding activities are interfering.) But overall it seems like we reached a good stopping place.

I agree.

I appreciate your help as well, in clarifying some ideas I've been working toward. I'd been thinking for a while that the "alliance" between mysticism and the paranormal is an accidental distraction that should be avoided or talked around to avoid bringing all conversation to an impasse. But now I'm also seeing it as an outright impediment to the very spiritual progress mystics aspire to.

The awareness of psi is something that all mystics have to deal with sooner or later, if they are practicing disciplines such as meditation and yoga. Some traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, see psi as an inevitable part of growth, and as a distraction and temptation. Other traditions, such as Chaos Magic, see it as a useful tool. I see it as part of what we are. A part that is frequently overlooked.

If I can leave you with one idea to ponder (not, I expect, that you'll agree with it) it's the hypothesis that the mystic realms are not larger and shared and "out there" in some other plane or dimension or vibrational mode, but inward and individual. If HAL or Data could learn to observe the flow of procedural code through their own instruction registers, maybe they too would feel they'd experienced glimpses of the Great Cosmic All.

It wouldn't be the Great Cosmic All if it was only subjective. Nor would it be if it was only objective. It's both, it's omnijective. The trick is to bring both into accord, so that your heartbeat keeps time with the universal heartbeat, so to speak.

And they wouldn't even be wrong, if that's how the Great Cosmic All introduces itself into reality: not as vague abstract ideas from higher realms above, but as the routine ceaseless workings of the computational fabric below.

Respectfully,
Myriad

As above, so below. As inner, so outer.

Respectfully,
Limbo