"Mind games"

[Thaumaturgic Theorist]

Too often I find myself battling skepticism regarding my inclination towards spirituality, and stuff like this doesn't help as I become more fascinated with magick and psionics.

What the video says makes perfect sense - you experience what you expect to and nothing more. It's just biological reactions and nothing more. Anything spiritual you perceive is just your dumb, deluded self misinterpreting simply biochemical reactions. This particular individual has several "spiritual energy fails" on his channel (though to me that's like saying 'this experiment didn't produce the desired results/our hypothesis was way off, therefore all science is bullshit').

The notion that magick/psi is psychological is well-known, but there doesn't seem to be much of an argument for proving there's an external, non-biological force aiding in such a practice. And the burden of proof lies with us, the believers; we can't tell the hardcore skeptics to prove there's no other force besides our own biology. It's an unsubstantiated claim against a sketchy claim. You can measure neurotransmitters and physical symptoms, but spiritual forces are notoriously elusive. And how do you justify feeling energy, when it's been demonstrated that one can be induced to feel something as concrete as a flavor when there's nothing but memory to produce it*? Certainly it's possible it could be a total mental fabrication...

I get that writing this here is dumb in its own right - like having a crisis of traditional faith and asking your priest/rabbi/other church person for advice. Then again, what am I going to do, post this on the atheism Reddit where everyone agrees it's bullshit? Finding a neutral place to hash out something like this is tough, to me at least. I take a certain issue with the materialist /reductionist view of life, if only because it's so narrow, but I know just enough of reason to doubt. I think I wrote somewhere that experimenting with magick first required me to throw my doubts out the window and dive in. But they resurface nonetheless. So I'm here asking for thoughts and questioning of what we're here for.

*I think I just found a piece of the puzzlehere by accident. Spiritual experiences, energy, gnosis, etc, are almost always novel, sometimes mind-blowingly so. Those "tasting lemon by power of suggestion" demonstrations likely hinge partly on memory. Could the mind really produce something so visceral with little to no memory to work off of?

[LoneWolf]

This is a bad loophole and only dogmatic fools fall for it. It is like saying that since pain is in the mind, me falling from a 10th floor and hitting my face flat on the ground is just my mind playing tricks on me and that Gravity is hokus pokus stuff.

Moreover, if all experiences, high energetic states, nirvana or whatever are created by our mind, why wouldn't we train to induce them ourselves? Why wouldn't we push ourselves to exhaustion in order to experience as much as possible of this thing we call reality? (Even if you believe they are permutations of the puzzle of our mind.)

You can't say that all is mind, not take any responsibility or will to take action in what you experience, and then sleep at night believing only half of the argument. If you assume magick is your mind, assume that your whole reality is.

For me personally, I just say something works if it can affect my reality. Push a light candle with whatever you may call such energy and then assume it is so. That's how it goes for me. If the apple falls gravity works. If the candle moves energy goes through me and exists.

Take dark matter for example, scientists can't prove it is there. This kind of matter doesn't interact with light and therefor can't be percieved as such from the distance. However, they percieve how it affects the things that surround it and thus it is true, it exists (funny words).

Keys to happy life are believing your experience and not listening to dogmatic fools till the point of exhaustion. It's good to listen how the big ignorant mass advances slowly but surely, however I would not get caught on it.

My two cents.

Regards

[Thaumaturgic Theorist]

I thought I should return to this thread since my mind was going along the similar routes today after listening to some podcasts - mentions of our spiritual selves somehow made the existential dread hit me.

We inhabit flesh bodies. Physical forms of meat and fat and blood and sinew. For some reason the reminder of this fills me with irrational disgust I don't usually have for physical existence - probably because when it's mentioned, it's usually meant to be derogatory, to show how disgusting and weak humans are. After much thought, it seems irrational to be disgusted with the natural reality of things, and it shouldn't bother me.

But now I find myself thinking: how could spiritual, metaphysical things coexist in a crude meat-machine? Does that kind of materialism somehow disprove the existence of the spiritual? It seems like a weird leap of logic - "We are made of carbon flesh, so magick can't exist." The details in-between are fuzzy. But it hurts to think about, the possibility that the two can't coexist. There's something dreadful about a purely material existence where nothing "beyond" exists in any meaningful capacity. What if that feeling is prevalent so people like us convince ourselves there's something where there's nothing? How can we know?

At the same time, how can we be certain there's nothing beyond material reality? That this miraculous meat-machine isn't capable of some really transcendent things if our brains know what to do?

I'm not one to doubt or reject modern science; I just can't bring myself to be that person. But the ultra-materialist view so prevalent today, from what I've read and listened to, is rather unusual compared to the past. And it seems dismissive to call the scholars of the past just stupid, superstitious, ignorant, etc, or to say they were just misconstruing natural phenomena. I'm not sure what to think. Honestly, I just want to be right.

[Desecrated]

I should probably make a longer post and get more into details, but if I shorten it down it pretty much comes out to this:

We really need to stop thinking that we can understand and explain every single detail of every single thing. Almost every human being has sometimes dreamt in their sleep. We don't know why that is, we don't know how.
And then when you start looking into it you find out that there are different forms of dreams, some sleepwalk while others don't some talk in their sleep, some lay absolutely still. And so on and so on. And we don't know why, how, when, who or what.
There is no test that can determine if you're going to be a sleep walker or not. Some just are.

[Kath]

"cognito ergo sum"
After that, everything else is speculative.
And that's ok.

You can go to the store and get food to eat without knowing absolutely that you have a corporeal stomach, that your sensation of hunger is real. After all, you have sensations which imply that your stomach is real, that your hunger is real. These sensations are not absolute proof, there is no absolute proof. But since you have some evidence that your stomach is real, and no evidence that it's not, you build a sort of world view which includes having a real stomach that needs food.
This is where the trap of empiricism breaks down... nothing, except that you have conscious thought, can be proven "absolutely".

So when we speak of science (and mind you, I adore science), or of empirical concrete fleshy physical existence... we are not speaking in absolutes. We are merely speaking of things for which we have somewhat more evidence than we do for more intangible or spiritual topics.

It is not a black & white situation, it is a matter of shades of gray, and what sensory input you choose to believe when some of your senses tell you things that are at odds with established patterns that you've come to accept.

I do not rate my spiritual/magical experiences in strictly true or false terms, but simply accept them as experiences and rate them as more or less likely to be true based on the weight of evidence.

I will say that if I did not experience precognition, and a variety of inter-mind abilities, that I would lean much more into skeptical territory and struggle with this issue much more. But really, even one, truly explicit, absolutely certain, precognitive perception would violate causality, and unravel gigantic swaths of the conceived ordering of the universe as interpreted by current human society. A mind cannot violate causality unless the mind's complexity and nature are vastly greater than the sum of the meat-computer inside a skull.

None of which is to say I have anything against an empirical approach. I frankly much prefer an empirical analytical mind. Just don't let the day to day usual familiar experience of reality make a claim on being the entire and absolute truth of things. To do so is not even good science.

[Daremo]

Science has a massive flaw at the moment that its attempting to hash out and thanks to quantum mechanics its beginning to take the fore front. That is the attempt of science to isolate and describe existance as a purely objective reality without incorporating our subjective existence. Quantum mechanics is beginning to scratch the surface of the objective subjective interplay. So keep in mind during your dilemmas of science and spirituality 2 things: 1) science is presented these days like a bible to the masses, unequivicol truth and unchallengeable by those outside of its preisthood. The scientists onthe cutting edge however the great minds hashing out the real details know this and see the discrepencies and new questions arising. 2) magick/spiritual practice is an experiential science so the balance of subjectivity to objectivity interaction leans far more to the subjective side and its effects cant be proven to another like proving 1+1=2 because it must be personally experienced. This can be dismissed as you said by the notion that we get the results we expect(this is true in science as well esp. When it comes to statistics) however i think most dedicated practitioners will attest to experiences where their mind was blown by the unexpected results and knowledge gained by their work. Your dilemma is real it is a problem we will always confront when stepping outside of the box and going against the social reality we grew up with. I am also a big fan of science but i dislike its dogmatic presentation.

*edit just thought of an example i read once in either "the god particle* or "wrinkles in time:black holes,wormholes, & time travel". After einsteins theory of special relativity became "THE" physics doctrine a student discovered based on its mathematical theory that black holes must exist if special relativity were true. It was beyond the doubt of any who were shown the math and yet einstein adamantly refused to believe that such a thing could exist and the student was ostracized until the death of einstein at which point the theory of black holes was finally accepted. Denying proof despite evidence is a common human trait esp. if it rattles your beliefs scientific, religious, or otherwise.