I see.
Good.
I guess we must agree to disagree. But it was certainly an interesting exchange of ideas.
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Why are we conflating the acausal realm and HPLâs Cosmic Horror again? Did I miss that part?
(Possibly because I just donât use the ascausal as part of my model myself, for no particular reason other than my pov is more based on taoism maybe?)
One statement that is very hard to overlook is the assertion that one will go âmadâ from this truth.
I never got this either. I think you might be giving it too much credit. Personally I just put it down to projection, that since Lovecraft found it maddening (by his own definition, whatever that was) thatâs how he was inspired to write about it. He was a romantic writer, so I find it appropriate for him to wax lyrical about the subjectâŚ
Iâm not sure it makes sense to take his work and try to map it to modern philosophies directly. It seems like a philosophical form of pareidollia. 
Taoism doesnât have a point of view. There are many schools of thought, most sects donât believe the same thing, and it is generally complimentary to other currents. That was my only argument with your post Moerbei (Afrikaans for Mulberry).
I have a few thoughts on Lovecraftâs relationship to the occult. He understood himself as an atheist, but that doesnât mean he didnât have altered states of consciousness that informed his paradigm. Lovecraft said that many of his ideas came from dreams, others came from episodes of sleep paralysis. Nyarlathotep, one of his most famous stories, began as a piece of automatic writing, which Lovecraft began before becoming fully conscious and emerging from a nightmare.
There are a lot of structural similarities between Lovecraftâs mythos and the tropes that would later become the close encounter phenomenon and its corresponding literature. The realization that something impossible is actually real, the genetic manipulation, the ancient alien civilizations, etc.
If you read lovecraftâs accounts of sleep paralysis, he said he was surrounded by creepy faceless entities that he would later name ânight gaunts.â These creatures would carry him off into what we would call the astral.
Now lets take this somewhat further. There are deep structural parallels between what people call abduction literature, fairy lore, and ancient lore about daimons.
Given all of this, it is possible that Lovecraftâs paradigm was more informed by actual occult forces than he himself ever realized.
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Very true indeed, many feel this way.
I take a similar view to Sinister-Neophyte with respect to the âblack seas of infinity.â
The physicist Max Tegmark claims that the universe is a mathematical object. His proof for that, roughly speaking, is that anything that is isomorphic with its own description is a mathematical object. Since the universe is isomorphic with its description, and that description is mathematical, then it follows that the universe is a mathematical object.
Note that mathematical structures have no qualia. Qualia is a word philosophers use to refer to taste, touch, sound, beauty, ugliness. Anything affective, experiential, or qualitative in any way. Qualia only exist within consciousness.
It could be that the qualitative universe that is rendered by consciousness could be thought of as an island in the âblack seas of infinity.â
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This is also exactly what he meant by Acausal.
Yes, my intention was to plug it into the perspective of science. Tegmarkâs view is considered radical in scientific circles, but he is a widely esteemed expert. So I thought the parallel was worth commenting on.
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Iâm not necessarily averse to science, but growing up and seeing how limited their perspectives were was definitely something that put me off it as an adolescent. I like that you provided a different side to the concept, from a different perspective. Science tends to be too based in logic, and we tend to be too based in intuition. Oil and water may not mix well, but have more in common than most think.
The problem is that science is objective and quantitative, whereas consciousness is subjective and qualitative. Consciousness occupies a blind spot in the scientific vision of reality. And since all magical phenomena are first and foremost manifestations of consciousness, that means that science tends to look right past them.
However, I donât think it needs to be that way. I think it is possible for there to be a synergistic relationship between different epistemic capacities â namely reason, experience, and gnosis.
Ideally I think logic and intuiton can work together. I think they are meant to work together. The only reason conventional intellectuals think that they donât is because they arenât good enough at logic. They fall for relatively elementary fallacies that are given rhetorical force by the power of ideology â namely reductive materialism.
Exactly, it wasnât always that way though, philosophy used to contain both physics and metaphysics.
Sure, however if my goal is self-deification why waste my time on doing science 8 hours a day?
Well said again. The irony is they also seem to neglect the Teleological argument, which statistical mechanics has proven to be infinitely more likely than the chance of something coming from nothing, which as I understand is also possible, but very unlikely. I donât advocate the separation between the two, but science really just doesnât contribute all that much to the LHP.
Interesting point of view. Personally I see it differently. Science has contributed a lot to my experience of the LHP and my ability to put it to use.
I think of myself as a methodological skeptic, or a ontological agnostic. I donât want to believe anything unless I can justify it rationally, experientially, or both.
I have found that by putting occult perspectives into active dialectic with scientific ideas, it has helped me to hone my understanding to a much finer edge than would otherwise have been possible.
By this, are you also indirectly referring to experimenting with spells and magic? If so, I guess you could say itâs using something akin to the scientific process, but beyond that I just canât bring myself to see it, but then again, Iâm not a scientist, and I donât try to rationalize things that I perceive to be beyond rationalization.
How so, specifically?
The philosopher Ken Wilber says that authentic spiritual systems confirm to the three strands of objective knowledge that constitute science:
(1) Injunction: try doing something
(2) Apprehension: observe what happens
(3) Falsification by a Community of the Adequate: present findings to people who have the requisite experience and to judge the observation and its implications. The reason it says falsification is because you can never really prove anything, because you would have to survey the totality of existence to make sure that there are no counterfactuals anywhere. You can, however, easily falsify claims by finding only one counterfactual.
I think the most reliable spiritual methods are those that are closest to the epistemological ideal outlined here.
How so, specifically?
Keeping my views close to science have kept me from buying into things that are are too speculative. I make a sharp distinction in my mind between what I can prove, what is probable, and what is possible.
More specifically, I feel that knowledge about physics, evolutionary biology, and consciousness studies has helped me to think more clearly about how magick might actually work. And that in turn has helped to guide the way I focus my practice and apply my effort.
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Wow, I absolutely understand what you mean now. I donât know this particular philosopher, and he certainly articulated what you and he both mean perfectly. Iâm glad we had this conversation, really great information.
So what you are espousing is keeping your views close to the above principles correct? If so, then I agree, that does make a lot of sense, and looking back, some of those points do seep into my approach to spirituality.
Awesome. Iâm glad we had this exchange too.
And yes, I am espousing keeping your views close to thee principles. But I am also saying that I like to keep a close eye on what mainstream science is saying, because I try to apply it within the greater tapestry of esoteric cosmology in an effort to have more knowledge that can be transmuted into more power.
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Pleasant evening fair maiden, I am off.
Same to you! Be well!
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I think that if one is going to address a causality as an aspect of inexistence then the whole framework of subjective/objective interpretations need to be examined within the light of the physicâs of alien abductions. Let us assume that our existence may be described as a series of situations which, in turn, may be pictured by an equal number of frames of a movie projected on the drop curtain of the virtual reality. The film with its events and frames are moving bottom up in space and in time and our brain reads one frame at a time.
If there was an hypothetical helicopter flying along the film at the same speed the film is moving in time, the pilot would always see, next to him, always the same imagine, always the same picture and would interact, during his flight, always with the same frame, which he would always and only highlight with his headlamp, as it is shown in the following pictures.
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Weâll see that this is only one aspect of what actually happens, but for now this is a step forward to understand what happens during an abduction. The helicopter is nothing more and nothing less than the alien craft which interferes with your space-time reality, while freezing time locally. This would occur because the alien craft somehow places itself on the time axis of our local reality and interacts, in phase, with our time. Time freezes for us and for the alien, but not for the rest of the animated things, not for the rest of those things endowed with Consciousness, which would tend to disappear from the scenery perceived by the abductee. It is like something is holding us back in Frame number 4 (as in the picture,) while all other âlivingâ things keep on regularly moving forward to Frames number
5, 6, 7âŚ
When an abduction starts we are being pulled out from our virtually pinned frame. In other words, the alien stop our journey on the various frames, let the other characters in the movie continue, as it normally happens, but it blocks us. In order to do this, it travels in time at the same speed as we do, as if it was a car that draws up beside us on a freeway because it goes at the same speed. But this shift is happening only along one axis, Time axis.
When the two cars (the one we drive and the alien drives,) are going at the same speed, they appear still to each other,and the alien is able to interact with our reality which would appear still compared with us. It appears still to us because as soon as the alienâs car comes by our side, both cars block. The landscape doesnât move anymore and everything is freeze-frame.
Soon weâll see that even the smallest inconsistency, difficult to understand at this level, will be quickly resolved, modifying some local parameters. The story-line that weâve just proposed you now is just the same one that we advanced before, while suggesting that the alien are physically moving on the holographic grid, traveling only in time or only in space.
To the abductee this story line would fit exactly to what he/she reports: everything is STILL except him/her and the aliens, who can move within this freeze-framed space-time. Nobody elseâs around because the other âlivingâ entities moved on to the next frames. Once again we can see that lifeless things remain still, while living things can move on in the holographic grid, as sustained by some scholars of Bohmâs virtual reality. And once again virtual reality appears to be quantized, both in space and time, and along the axis of the potential energies.
If Mr. Gray or who ever is driving the alien craft can just casually pull up and freeze time on a muthafucka then does that not give us some insight into the plasticity of existence/inexistence causality/acausality seems to me in the light of alien abductions there are varying degrees of interconnectedness along the axisâs of space time and consciousness. This was the first thing I thought about after I read your post which was superlative. Thank You.