Threads for discussing consciousness and magical philosophy?

I noticed that there’s no folder for direct discussion of consciousness, ontology, magical epistemology, and examining mind and what it does or, getting really egg-headed, parsing the variables of the word illusion to see what fits its warnings and what’s properly emergent stuff with it’s right value in it’s proper domain of activity (when understood).

It seems like a lot of us are getting into the nuts and bolts of our own brains, sort of trying consciousness-hack, and I’m wondering how those sorts of conversations, clusters of them, or the people who want to on about that with each other, have gotten on with that order of business to date here. Don’t get me wrong - I love all of the praxis on this forum! I think that these are all different and in their own right important layers, such as you could have a vibrant magical life but have your talents held in abeyance without insight and equally you could have great intellectual theories about magic and even insight into it but have your magical development in abeyance from being too timid about the territory to jump in and do it. We hall have preferences that exist along that line and across many other vectors.

Enough people here seem to acknowledge both and even give their own take on what the nexus points are between private imagination and working with one’s own images and software vs. where it extends to something like a broader pool of conscious agents. Might not be bad to have a way of indexing those dialogs!

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I don’t understand what you tried to say, but most people here just want their ex back and summon Paimon, I think those things should have their own folder

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Well @MagickAndBreakz is proposing that we continue to talk about things with substance in regards to magick.

The core members here don’t post about exes. The majority of those threads come from people who are new, or possibly even spam accounts.

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Good to know

I see that phenomenon as a Barroque painting being buried under piles of Sonic fan arts, I’ve seen that

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I’m sure there are people here as well who lets say might indeed be top flight practitioners with decades of experience who just don’t do nearly as well by chipping away at it intellectually as they do by having an overpowering emotional connection, getting taken through visions, and as a byproduct more intellectual apprehensions sort of accrete as a side effect and that’s totally fair - especially if scrying in the astral comes to them almost as easy as dreaming, not everyone’s wired like that though.

My balance has been more about working myself into the kind of state (with or without the aid of psychedelics or dissociatives) where I could get enough noise to then add more elements (like sexual work when I first started) to… kind of strange metaphor maybe… but to get the ‘rabbit ears’, like on an old analog TV, up in the astral and start sifting signal from the static. More recently what I’ve done has been somewhat less extreme but I’m sort of fishing for these spikes, and those spikes sort of reminds me of how Dostoyevski described his seizures (approximating all knowledge right up until the seizure hits), like you’re spiraling toward either a psychotic break or seizure, see increasing layers of connection and feedback loops in front of you, many causal worlds conjoined, and at least in my case I pulled myself back from one of those events partly because I ended up posting on my facebook wall ‘I get it now - we’re the geese crossing the road when the gods are going to work’, and few minutes later I pulled it down because I realized just how many people I have professional connections with who’d be like ‘WTF is he talking about - is he doing drugs?’, ie. it’s much too dangerous a social world to go out there and leave social media open even if you have something profound to say that may even have a good shot at being true.

My point above though - I tend to take those launches into the deep, or the odd moments where the inexplicable happened like touch at a distance (a halo of three feet around me) where it was like a kinesthetic Dare Devil vision, the contacts with what may have been gods, goddesses, or pieces of their current, and when I have more of these I have a lot of time to extrapolate them, and I’m especially interested in truing up the difference between the white-light overdose aspects of the divine with the very brutal, nasty, ‘life isn’t about truth it’s about survival’ layer where so much of what we have around us are apes trying to (within the lines of the law) rape and kill each other to possess each other’s stuff, take their social status away from them by hook or crook, etc…

It’s a big project, it’s sort of an unshakable long-term interest of mine, and for as much as Donald Hoffman’s theory of conscious agents might hurt from the standpoint of being a very egg-headed technical description of what this might be I think he’s done something that very few people have succeeded at doing - ie. giving the theory of mind called functionalism (which seems to house egregores and thoughtforms better than anything else) and reified it down to a testable theory.

I’d have to think there are some other people here though who are prone to get intense downloads from time to time (maybe a dozen per decade) and spend more time in the interest of tree-shaking them to see what intuitions can come out of that which seem knock-on solid when applied to reality. I’m sure it’s not everyone’s thing and I’m sure there are ways where it could be mishandled and lead to people thinking it’s a nested ‘look how smart I am’ sort of aristocracy, IMHO there has to be a way of doing it where such conversations can be had and the tendency for it to rub people the wrong way can either be avoided or that in some way the conversation perhaps can be semi-closed just so that people who’d be triggered don’t need to see it…

Probably the most direct question I’m chewing on - it seems like the world of imagination, psychological magic work, and working with active imagination are one thing, actually having contact with dieties is another, and the distance between these to things has a considerable void space between them. It’s a bit like either what’s going on with psychological work is climbing up the fire escape on a building to the second floor and working there, having no fire escape between floors four or five, and the place where the gods reside or sometimes send a signal down from is anywhere from being on that fifth floor landing to even somewhere out in space. It’s a difficult distance to judge and also tricky to make sense of just what it is, how it’s bridge, and whether or not there may even be profound dangers in bridging it to where one indeed shouldn’t rush at such an endeavor without thoroughly transforming themselves and letting it happen of its own based on that sort of personal alchemy.

I think as well people generally tend to get punished for having ‘high’ conversation. It’s probably a lot less bad in a place like this than it is if you’re out at a charity dinner with your boss or coworkers (one dare not chain two coherent sentences together deeper than smalltalk without being stoned in those environments) but it’s still a thing that can arouse hostility.

Too much language, too much left brain trying to logic it out - it’s doesn’t work, I’ve tried.
Re: your experiences, the impression I have is, it’s like you’re looking for colors using your sense of smell and forcing yourself to develop synesthesia.

You’re also using unnecessarily obscure words when perfectly good common ones exist and that’s just going to alienate the audience you’re trying to reach. Practice would have been better than praxis, for example, it looks like an affectation. In modern parlance: stop being a tryhard and speak plainly. If you want discussion, make it accessible, and don’t forget many people here do not have English as a first language, and I assume you don’t really want to eliminate them.

What you’ll find, I believe, is that everybody has a different philosophy and worldview. Which means they’re using a different framework and underlying assumptions. Sometimes those are couched in a post, sometimes they’re not.

So, it stands to reason that the common ground we can discuss is the practical effects, which are the same regardless of the practitioners philosophy of why they happen.

For myself, while I’m aware of the variations in philosophy, I’m not that interested in what other peoples particular choices are, I’m live and let live about it. If I was interested in that kind of discussion, I’d be on a philosophy forum. I’m not on any philosophy forums - I have been, and ime they tend to turn into thread after thread of intellectual posturing for the sake of it. Which defeats the purpose, imo, so I left.

The fact that I’m on a magik forum is because it meets my goals re learning about practical magik specifically.

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I love you for saying all these things

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First of all thank you for a high quality dissenting opinion. That’s genuinely helpful and I think it’s educational in the sense that there’s enough here to learn from and suss out differences in a productive way.

[quote=“Mulberry, post:8, topic:89675, full:true”]
Too much language, too much left brain trying to logic it out - it’s doesn’t work, I’ve tried.[/quote]
I really think this comes down to how people are wired, ie. different people have different problems they’re looking to solve and need slightly different means. It’s already quite rare to end up on a magic forum for example and I do get that I’m talking about a fraction of that fraction.

Wouldn’t that actually be credible from the standpoint of attempting personal alchemy? The alternative from my perspective seems like it would be a person just being born with it, being like a fish in water, going with the standard assumption of ‘If I can do it anyone can unless they’re just really going about it wrong-headedly’, and often enough that later sense can get dished out liberally because it seems like it in human nature for people to assume that with everything from athletic ability to this.

Believe it or not that was a naive mistake on my part. I was on OccultForums.org and they literally had a major forum folder called ‘praxis’, and from that I assumed that it was a common term in the occult community.

So in that sense I’d say I’m talking past you and these kinds of topics would most likely be of only secondary interest to you. I get that a lot of people have a way of saying ‘my way or no way’, I’d just like to see this type of dialog be able to happen at all in the context of magical worldview.

Also apologies on the quotes above being a bit of a mess - it looked like the same thing yielded different results :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Lord Byron once referred to the works of John Keats as mental masturbation. I adore Keats (I’ve visited his house and my first ouija experience was undertaken to try and contact him) but I’ve always loved the way Byron expressed his criticism. Your lust for the cerebral will most likely be satisfied by reading books on your particular areas of interest in magick. There are experienced members here who are constantly making book recommendations (titles they’ve actually read). @DarkestKnight is a perfect example. If someone is compelled to write something profound and serious on a complex subject–magick being no exception–they almost certainly won’t choose a forum post as their preferred mode to communicate and share with others.
As an author myself (although, to date, not of occult texts or literature), I know I save it for the page.

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Also I’m getting the sense that one of the biggest show-stoppers for this sort conversation enduring is the common ‘If you’re not like me you’re doing it all wrong’ way of thinking, and even if no one has showed up in this thread so far whose like that (I mean it) it probably only takes a few more and the right chance landings before it goes to weeds under all sorts of accusations. It’s probably nothing to even do with it being intellectual and more to do with it just being off-center.

I definitely see what you’re saying - ie. if Keats was trying to write on Twitter we’d have no idea what he was thinking today.

I think my lust is for sense-making and trying to build and refine the cultural layer of information that we have (this is where I think people like Bret Weinstein and magicians like Jake Stratton-Kent are to some degree on about similar business whether they’d realize it or not).

Credible isn’t the word you wanted there, I think you mean possible or valid? It’s not that it’s not possible, and, it’s your life you should do whatever works… it seems like the long way around, and I think you really want all your astral senses working not just the one. This is why new people are advised to meditate and build thier energy, it opens all the senses.

So in that sense I’d say I’m talking past you

No, you are not “talking past me”. That is not the correct use of that phrase.
Talking past each other is a phrase describing the situation where two or more people talk about different subjects, while believing that they are talking about the same thing.

I understand you, despite your convoluted language. I can get a bit wordy myself. But as modern science papers now frown on the use of latin when the common English will make the paper easier to read, so it’s advisable to not use jargon or obscure and uncommon words here.

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Praxis is the item that upgrades skills in “Deus Ex: Human Revolution”. In my country is also a word that is used in a pretentious way by people that I cannot mention because of forum rules (a teacher of mine had to apologize for using that word because of that)

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Credible isn’t the word you wanted there, I think you mean possible or valid? It’s not that it’s not possible, and, it’s your life you should do whatever works… it seems like the long way around, and I think you really want all your astral senses working not just the one. This is why new people are advised to meditate and build thier energy, it opens all the senses.

Or, with the universality of human laziness being what it is it could be that there’s no such thing as a short way for me.

correct use of that phrase.
Talking past each other is a phrase describing the situation where two or more people talk about different subjects, while believing that they are talking about the same thing.

I understand you, despite your convoluted language. I can get a bit wordy myself. But as modern science papers now frown on the use of latin when the common English will make the paper easier to read, so it’s advisable to not use jargon here.

From the above I don’t think you did.

I mean you have every right not to be interested in philosophy, I have every right to talk about it and you have every right to ignore it.

Lol. I feel, if your browser thinks it’s a spelling mistake and it’s not the name of a goetic demon you might want to think before using it.

My exception being all the times I spell things the British way and my American English browser gets confused. :smiley:

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My Latin American browser marks everything red, so I have to constantly check online dictionaries

I’m very interested in Warhammer 40k, but if I cannot relate that to practical magick, I better don’t talk about it