Esoteric, (Hidden,) Knowledge

noxious, tomatoes tomahtoes. he accepted it and you can hear it in his voice and see it on his face too; the man is no fool, he is not deaf to a nuanced argument of rhetoric which is presented to him here. Does he have financial interests in these discourses? Yes, it has become part of his career. Wish I could say the same for me. It doesn't detract from what he says, and there are arguments for his abrasive methods; I for one sympathize with the sentiments of the editor of New Scientist.

Chinacat: If science is too dogmatic to study magick, then why doesn't magick do something about it? why doesn't magick show science that it is worth being studied? that's what we've all been asking you chinacat . . . take the first step and pique the curiosity of scientists. so far there is more reason to study bigfoot than magick; at least with bigfoot we have some blurry images and video that raise questions. with magick all we have here is your words, and they have been cryptic, vague and hidden from any kind of inquiry due to risk of being criticized. you have to take that fist step; you are the one who is coming to us, saying "guys guys, youll never guess what awesome titanic earth shaking discovery science is ignoring", and then refusing to get into it, telling us to look into it ourselves (without providing any good places to start) and only providing some anecdotes regarding a rock band in which one member may have held some beliefs regarding the thing you wish studied.

You say the energy of this thread, THAT is magick. What do you mean? Applying subjective to objective, and back to subjective . . . do you mean posting something to a forum, and then coming back and reading other posts, and having them affect you? because that's well within the aegis of what we would call Psychology, Sociology, Communications, Anthropology, etc. Still not seeing something called "Magick" that we can point our big science machine at to study.

 

You are talking about reading and writing and yes our facility with the abstract allows us to run the world by ourselves before we even go out the door. I would learn to use your words more wisely.

 

Economy of expression. Don't say in thirty words what you can say in three. Understand that the miraculous man commands the wind and waves simply through command.
In the beginning is the word, the self reflective utterance. And that self reflective utterance becomes flesh, representative of you and by it and through it you narrate to life all the scenes you will contemplate on your journey. Think before you speak. Speak those thoughtful things only. Think if life is measured in number of breaths what would you spend them on? It is so easy to fritter your opportunity to truly gladden the world by talking about how much you like or dislike something. Speak of what you know and what you would like to learn. This is the way to apprehend the power of speaking things into existence.

 

I want to know how to communicate the principles of inquiry to a difficult audience.

 

The discussion of likes and dislikes gives you nor anyone else any information about the world. Such discussions are for testing companionship. As you present to the world what you think are the important things they can't see. Well guess what, everybody has likes and dislikes and whether one likes this or one likes that is irrelevant sometimes to your saddest distraction.
Liking is common for everyone. the potential for intensity is the same in everyone. To like a tomato and a tomatoe provide the experience of liking or conversely disliking .So understand these are things we already know about the world and about each other yet people continually sift through the dust of naming as a matter of vital cause every pickyune spec of them. Your sorting doesn't matter. You have not yet accounted for taste.

 

If you are talking about in conversation, teach them in a different way what they already know. You speak their language to the point you can see they understand you and then you start building a new body of discussion.. With me the challenge looks like this, getting by the tendency to feather ruffling. The challenge is penetrating the defense of one who believes he is essentially unworthy. The pride and humiliation complex in the human psyche is a vain replication of who you are and can be completely undone to expose the ever radiant thing you are.
Pride in accomplishment is but a shadow fo the glory that you may experience on a standard basis without deflation.

Unremitting joy.

 

I'd say, (since you still haven't answered my question ) consider what is "real" versus what is "material". Anything that can be experienced is real, which means what you experience through reading fiction novels is an intrinsic part of reality. In essence, you replace your everyday conceptions of consensus reality(different to your own, if your neighbor read the same book as you he'd get something different from it - nature/nurture effects) with an entirely new conceptual paradigm. An apt simile would be when you close the book, it's like you take off a glove.

When I close a good book, there's that lull period afterwards which is like "umm... now what's this all about again? Oh yeah.. coffee".


My point is, materialism is fixed and stable, more or less... reality is far stranger.

 

Based on this, it seems you are saying magick is essentially science with an admitted confirmation bias, which may or may not assert testable predictions.

Is that accurate?

 

But really Mr.Writer, an audience will take it or leave it. The ones who are listening and understand are the ones that matter as far as preserving and extending valuable information.
The serous mined work in intimate groups over periods of time, Who are taught core principles, a group of twelve for example. This group of individuals then goes out and practices these core principles in their life situations and it is theses practice that build on the body of knowledge. The body of knowledge is extended biologically through the gene. The individual human body is a common currency of being human. In other words everyone's apprehensions are gathered there because we share mind which is the communication between the spirit and the communication device the body.

 

Forrest Flower I am going to unwrap you every time you come here so bring good gifts because every one is going to see what you brought.

 

Well in keeping with being honest, I do see a lot of myself in his methodology, as I also tend to employ the "are you fucking stupid or what" tactic here probably more than I should if I want to get my intended audience to consider my input.
so I can relate to the emotionality of it, but I am also intelligent enough to realize a lot of religious crap is completely and totally personal subjective experience, and seemingly lacking such experiences himself, Dawson is a blind man describing an elephant.

DMT machine elves or entities, never had the opportunity yet to try DMT, yet others who have have reported meeting and interacting with such entities. Enough people report this that it can't just be dismissed off hand.
Now should I completely discount their reports of subjective experience based on my lack of the same experience, or would it wiser to afford them the benefit of doubt seeing as I lack the same information/experience they are describing?

Seems to me the prudent thing to do would be adopt a simple "I don't know" attitude, as that is the real truth, sans experience, you can not "know" an experience and thereby pass judgement on it, can you?
This was the point I tried to illustrate to GB when asking of his psychedelic experiences.

why is it so difficult for some people to admit "I don't know"

 

There is no book learning. There is gleaning information from books. Knowledge is practical magic or knowledge is being shared and sharing being. It must be face to face but more importantly heart to heart. If you don't value the same result then you shouldn't be associating. You are just spitting into the wind.

 

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "I am absolutely sure that machine elves exist" and 10 is "I am absolutely sure that machine elves do not exist", are you saying you are a 5? Are you also a 5 for Shiva? Tooth fairies? I would say I am a 9.5 on this scale. While I cannot disprove the existence of any number of these phenomena (we can dream up an infinite variety) I can venture to put a probability to it. I think the probability that machine elves have an objective existence outside of the mind of someone tripping on DMT is extremely low, perhaps only slightly higher than the probability that there is a Santa Claus at the north pole.

Any point on this scale other than 1 or 10, is considered agnostic. You don't have to be a perfect 5 to be agnostic; any amount of doubt counts for it. But surely, you are not right smack in between "I know for sure yes" and "I know for sure no", you must have some inclination of what the answer ultimately is.

Plenty of people, including myself, have smoked DMT, with no entity contact. There are also psychological explanations for what is happening here (in the midst of a powerful entheogenic experience) that have strong explanatory power, even across multiple users. I think if you actually got all DMT smokers together and polled them in a controlled fashion so as to eliminate social pressure, you'd find that actually not THAT many of them have experienced machine elf contact. To me the whole thing is a successful meme dreamt up by terrence mckenna and repeated by eager psychonaughts seeking the Great Other, seeking that esoteric knowledge so they can be in the club of secrets.

 

when it comes to things outside of my personal realm of experience I allow the benefit of doubt, regardless of my personal convictions concerning said topic, because I could be wrong.

it really is that simple, So I guess on some topics I would be a qualified 5

 

Sliding scales are not useful for measuring anything. They are attributing to taste what should be known in fact.

Forget you now the value of anything, because if you haven't seen it now you will the moment you fine yourself despairing because you lost something valuable

 

I'm not sure.

 

What is the purpose of knowledge?

 

Reality is the same whether you recognize it or not.
Relative reality is not a definition of reality.
Start with one thing, a standard metric that we have different takes on.
Reality is. No variation in the state of reality. A thing is either real or it does not exist.
It seems you are trying to firmly account for the subjective experience by saying it is less than real or relatively real.
What is reality, information. Every informational bit of reality is every bit informed.
We are relatively informed. which does not mean less than informed. It means we are informed through relationship and are increasingly informed as we expand our relationships. Never in any part of this are we less than informed, or information less.
What is it to be informed, in the know. What is knowledge, being shared. to be bit by bit informed is perception.
Truth is relative in that it requires comparison and true terms are, same, different, or purposeful. You are the arbiter of truth if you arbitrate on true terms. If truth is a qualification then no one qualifies.

 

I'd go with 3, with the understanding the 'elves' are self-transforming machine elves as Mckenna describes and not elves of common folklore.

The phenomena of entity contact does seem to be much more frequent with DMT and Salvia Divinorum, these smoked/vaped instantaneous psychedelic experiences, compared to the slower developing trips. I'd concede that it's possible that there are some significant neurological abberations taking place which may induce these visions, but I don't think many suggest they have this experience to be in a "club of secrets."

Strassman's studies on DMT did eliminate social pressure and they were in an enviornment which would not necessarily be a catalyst for such phenomena and a percentage still report entity contact.

 

I don't think they would even be aware of their motivations for claiming to see, or even seeing machines elves; it is subconscious. The same way someone might "see" a statue crying that no one else saw.

You're a 3 out of 10? That's fairly certain. Certain enough to wager things, I'm surprised.

A percentage report entity contact while tripping on DMT, yes. I don't want to derail this thread on this tangent but this is still far from anything we can call evidence. Extraordinary claims and all that. If someone brought something back from those elves in the form of information which was somehow novel to human knowledge I'd be more impressed . . . but these elves seem to only show themselves to SOME people who are tripping on certain psychedelics? Way too many red flags to be even remotely likely IMO.

Dope, I understand that reality is what we experience, but you wouldn't go hunt game based on where the tea leaves told you to go, and I am saying that the same goes for magick. Chinacat disagrees; he would attempt to feed himself and his loved ones by using trinkets and chanting words, instead of using observations and theories. So the issue isn't the inherent validity of our experiences, it is the applicability of ways of thinking to real world situations. Surely there is a difference between running out of a burning building based on where you see smoke, and which door handles are hot, versus running out based on which way the bottle spins when you put it on the ground and chant "fireescapefireescape".

If every piece of "knowledge" is valid, then no knowledge is valid. They can't ALL be right.