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Something someone said in another topic inspired me to bring this up. I thought it might be a lot more interesting to phrase it as a question to other people here and have a conversation about it rather than rattle on about it myself in block paragraphs.

Have any of you noticed that when you search out the best arguments and best thinkers between the philosophic idealist and philosophic materialists camps that they increasingly seem to approach a place in the center but that the center is something like a vertical asymptote with no join at the top or bottom?

I've found myself puzzling over that - not so much that there's a fault-line between seemingly antonymous claims about reality but that there's a palpable upward spiral of thought quality as if the people at various closing proximity to the edge of that canyon. One of the little tells that people are dancing closer to the lip of that canyon is when you hear A.N. Whitehead or M. Heidegger being invoked in their discourse or debate. The more you follow that progress the more it seems like there's an uncanny 90 degree break of plane and not that its so much a rift of opinion but something a lot more profound - almost like a whole new terrain where some people are walking on the ceiling, some on the ground, and where varying degrees of full-blown belief or non-belief constitute the trench instead instead of the people who find themselves increasingly flirting with agreement.

For me at least this is part of where I have deep suspicion for anything that might feel like an easy or conclusive final answer on what my mystical experiences are or aren't. Just to watch this phenomena open up in public discourse and realize that its the result of conscious analytics rather than approaching the heights of what can be seen in the fanciness and sophistication of subconscious phenomena - I could easily imagine there being thousands of possibilities for what my experiences may or may not be without any of those possibilities either bluntly being 'It's all real exactly as you see it!' or 'It's all just brain chemicals and you're tricking your brain into hallucinating'.

I think I get your meaning though i dont know the individuals specifically mentioned but I think it's mirrored in things like magick vs science, democrats vs republicans etc. At least in the USA we tend to be raised with a very black and white out look on reality and with no middle ground to stand on the blending of 2 ideas may as well be in another universe let alone a few steps up the ladder. It does seem worse when they get closer to each other I surmise its because fear of becoming the thing they hate so things become more and more warped in order to justify and establish a distance from that opposing side even while being forced to accept some of its truth. I am amazed how complex the dance of lies is when some one is refusing to see a different perspective. How they justify their own experience while condemning anothers. I also find it so entertaining to see non magickal people constantly invoking and evoking other humans names to lend weight to their arguements and not even realize its a magickal act. Its an interesting paralell. Well einstein said this or crowley said that so what I say is more true. Jesus said... or the bible says... how often we invoke authorities everyday and then wonder how magick works. We even invoke the names of our bosses at work when it suits us. Seems simple in the material. The question I guess this leaves us with is "is the spiritual plane black and white so we humans behave thus, or is it just a poor education or a manipulation that leaves us in this divided state unable to see the middle ground?"

Daremo,

I do agree that people who have the combined characteristics of entrenched worlviews and the desire to be right at all costs will stir up some remarkably Byzantine frameworks to preserve both their rightness and their original beliefs. On the other hand though with the Idealist/Materialist debate I think they might - deliberately or otherwise - be dredging up some very important ground as to peering into the nature of reality.

I find myself hovering around that space between just because it seems like an incredible amount of topsoil is accruing in the rift between the two. I don't think everyone involved is particularly honest, just that the quality of questions and responses they need to chase each other seems to climb up toward infinity. That and, there are people who I could give example of (although I'm wary of posting Youtuber names - they're not quite public figures) who seem incredibly honest who are debating both sides of the coin and they're both looking for the smoking gun or clincher that can take their debate to a level of providing something wholly new for humanity in terms of understanding the nature of reality on an assured and broad level and what kinds of things can be done with that understanding.

To me magic by and large jumps past the how into a place of faith and works from there. Those who do it know that it works, their faith strengthens because it works, and often they leave it there. The challenge for the nerds like myself perhaps is trying to reconcile this knowledge to presently 'accepted reality' or find a door of practical acceptance, such as with 'better software' arguments, because I think there's a sense that every step of the way that we're able to guide society along the path toward truth offers new ways to counter some very real and nasty sociological problems that our world has had for thousands of years and in some cases these problems get worse as technology improves without an equal sociological step forward in cultural maturity.

Spida wrote:

Cybernetic_Jazz wrote: I think anyone who's had the vision and synchronicity combo spooled tightly together has experienced something that's, per physicalist philosophy, ineffable and permanently unexplainable. That's part of why I consider physicalism a dead-end because it ends up in tautology, circular reasoning, and finger wagging when people bring up the exceptions to the Newtonian 'feel' of things.

This is the exact reason why I turned to Magick after meditating on Divine concepts, or any concept
that transcends the monistic paradigm. Reason will only take you so far, and any attempts to go beyond
with conventional thinking is synonymous to a chicken running around with its head cut off.

It's simply because material manifestation is the end result of eons of cosmic anabolism. And the end result
cannot be explained in terms of itself. The Occult seemed like a viable avenue for further progression. So in
lieu of trying to reason out that which is hidden(or upon completion of a Theory). Instead, trying to affect and
interact with it. So we are left at times attempting to differentiate the Macrocosmic phenomena from the Micro,
although some of the external manifestations are pretty cut and dried, and exactly what is sought by me for further progression.

Sorry about the other thread BTW

I still feel like to offer the world something from what we've gained with respect to knowledge involves making an air-tight case on behalf of that knowledge.

The easiest case to be made, as I suggested above in my last comment, was that better software (ie. cultural narratives, mythos, logical buckets that both enrich culture and mirror truth) makes better and more sturdy societies. I worry in the west that our run to the left in the last 50 or 60 years has been incredibly dangerous to the future of what we have in that it's been a constant destruction of old values, under highly dubious philosophies tantamount to 'Marx was right!', and there's been no replacement of those values with something more wholesome.

The thing I love about Sam Harris's argument against free will and how no person's actions are their own - it really suggests a model where it's not just a quaint hypothesis that better cultural software makes stronger, more resilient, and happier societies - it's an inescapable conclusion and that it should be our top priority to get that as right as we can.

To that end I see magical and occult philosophy being as profoundly beneficial to culture as the military and space-race were to current states of technology. Interpreting occult knowledge to civil practicality seems incredibly important as the 'other shoe' to drop and balance our technology with emotional and social maturity.

I grow concerned with the idea that our actions are not our own and that we are merely following the chemical processes involved in stimulus. It disturbs me because it removes any responsibility for our actions as opposed to accepting responsibility for every choice and action we make. I have watched a great number of people behaving this way andnit is definitely detrimental to growth/evolution imho. I follow the idea of 93 and though its often criticized as being a do what ever you want and who cares attitude I myself have always viewed it as a call to responsibility and owning up to the consequences of ones own actions. I watch as those who accept responsibility and consider how their actions affect the world tend to make the way easier versus the more child like wanderings of those who shirk responsibility as they tear through the world in a constant state of tantrum to get their fix. Psychology keeps pushing for brain chemistry and slavery to impulse and environment instead of the mind and the depths of it. Just my observations. Granted I don't really believe in free will myself but its semantics because i believe in freedom of choice which in this case may be synonomous with free will as its being used. I do agree with your indication of importance on this topic and I would imagine the youtubers would be better to site than the more well known figures because of the genuine honesty you feel they have. I will have to look into the idealism stance both for definition and for the stance they take as I am less familier with it in this context, where materialism is all to familier so I may be way off base.

Daremo wrote:I grow concerned with the idea that our actions are not our own and that we are merely following the chemical processes involved in stimulus. It disturbs me because it removes any responsibility for our actions as opposed to accepting responsibility for every choice and action we make.

That's part of a side-point that Spida brought up with respect to a different thread.

If you want to look at that one further I'd recommend the second video in this thread:
http://www.occultforum.org/forum/viewto ... 17&t=39175

Dennett in that seems to be arguing 'Yeah, I agree but if too many people hear that we'll have civil collapse - so I'm favoring compatibalism as a fudge figure'. I don't think the majority could live by, just like they can't thrive on nihilism, but I do think it's an important point to approach to take - as Sam seems to make good points for - with respect to crafting better societal software and memes meant to target societal problems and making the penal code and the justice system more humane and actually rehabilitative.

Hmm did a quick look into it and I feel a little off topic with my earlier statements. Not sure how free will fits into the debate of idealism/materialism but I know thats an on going debate in and of itself so I think that stands just fine. However the brief look at defining idealism in that the mind is all is a little different than I was expecting and I definitely missed the context there. I think the origins of idealism from my research on other topics seems to be rooted in a scientific conundrum of quantum mechanics and perceptions and has now teetered into extremism from those that didn't fully understand the concepts. The idea is that our mind does indeed fabricate our reality based on stimulus so our reality is a construct of our own minds as our senses interpret the outside world our mind makes sense of it. Combine this with I think therefore I am and a splattering of spiritual ideas that also aren't fully understood and we have the extreme opposite of materialism that everything is mind and that none of you exist and are just creations of my imagination. Anyway in order to hash things out we need to examine its parts and hopefully put it back together instead of leaving it broken in half.

What does still confuse me on the definition of idealism though is hearing what Bernardo Kastrup has to say on the matter of idealism vs. materialism, which he says quite well in favor of idealism. Gordon White (Rune Soup) however shares his position that panpsychism is a new fraud foisted on the populace to supplement or replace a failing materialism (interestingly enough most devout materialist/physticalists still just think panpsychism is another brand of wooh-wooh-wooh nonsense, apparently they haven't received the memo yet) however I noticed that Gordon is not in favor of idealism - he sees animism as the better description, imputes the debt of both everything as 'Maya' and the need to 'Brahman-splain' everything off on ego to idealism. I'm not sure how that last part works but it's apparently some ideological baggage that either the most popular versions of idealism have or at least the particular one Gordon had previously subscribed to before finding it too encumbered.

Again I agree in your proposal that this topic is skirting some major changes in the over psyche of humanity and should eventually result in progress. The difficulty in the arguement seems to rest on an obscure and seemingly incomplete notion of what consciousness is and thought is. Its a subject that science tries to avoid because a thought can not be weighed and measured. We suffer from a massive dose of human ego that sets us scientifically speaking at the top of the brain chain, which is wildly questionable. At one point scientists believed life could only be carbon based but have discovered that methane based life forms exist on our own planet. We dont have a decent definition of intelligence, the average person thinks computers are super smart when they are more like specialized idiot savants. So to question idealism vs materialism seems out of reach when we don't understand a thought let alone a mind. Another example is thinking wolves are dumb because they can't do complex math but as a wolf i wpuld suspect they view us as quite stupid becuase over our inability to differentiate smells. Our superiority complex is a definite issue in understanding these subjects. I will look into the videos, and the term panpsychism was also new to me i was suprised to find out that my thoughts are pretty close to panpsychism.

Daremo wrote:Again I agree in your proposal that this topic is skirting some major changes in the over psyche of humanity and should eventually result in progress. The difficulty in the arguement seems to rest on an obscure and seemingly incomplete notion of what consciousness is and thought is.

That might be a lot farther down the road than adapting the implications of deliberate application of ritual, symbol, and mythos to life in an intentional way. Some people with a lot more in the way of steady experiences might want to push it farther but they also would have to ask themselves how much of their experience can be translated into something as meaningful for someone who can't have them (ie. the average layperson who we're hoping to pass such fruits out to).

Daremo wrote:Its a subject that science tries to avoid because a thought can not be weighed and measured. We suffer from a massive dose of human ego that sets us scientifically speaking at the top of the brain chain, which is wildly questionable. At one point scientists believed life could only be carbon based but have discovered that methane based life

A lot of this seems to be a combination of evolution and natural selection. From a lot of what you've been saying I think you'd actually get a lot of enjoyment out of the Jordan Peterson lectures I posted - he does a really good job of applying Jungian analysis to everything from the value of religious mythos and its embedded lessons to the atrocities of the 20th century (ie. the secular religions and various 'isms' that killed north of 100 million people) and the warnings we should be taking into account about the stability of the mass mind and the kinds of things we need to do to keep it moving forward productively.