Esoteric, (Hidden,) Knowledge

If you're wondering, well why would Siddhis not work but Magick would? Well all I can say is I haven't put enough interest and focus into making a spoon bend with my mind to give you a real answer about that. I would say that I never discount the possibility of ANYTHING being possible in this infinite universe. Perhaps if we evolved to a point where we utilized much more percentage of our brains, maybe that would be possible.

Maybe this is a farther down the line thing that will evolve from Kundalini, as Kundalini is very much about a physical transmutation of the brain.

 

But obviously, Writer, you feel that rituals have no inherent value and don't contribute to your daily life. That's fine by the way. Nonetheless, I'm still interested in Science's study of it. It's studying meditation; that's literally one step away from studying ritual. Anthropologists at the very least study ritual. Science should study ritual and its affect in your daily life...aka Magick.

 

bathing and getting ready for work are rituals commonly practiced.

 

No doubt about it. In my opinion a ritual gains a depth when it's recognized as such. There's a phrase I once came across that one may or may not agree with, but that goes "a tree can't see itself except through a human looking at it"...in the same light, a ritual is just mundane unless it becomes recognized as an end in and of itself, rather than just a means to an end (which it also is). All spaces are sacred, but it's up to the individual's awareness to recognize it as a Sacred Space.

This all points to a human's consciousness. Animals don't have the self-reflective quality that humans have. Humans self-reflect on themselves all the time. But to see that there's no separation between oneself and its environment, and to reflect on your immediate environment in this way, gives the environment a certain presence.

If anyone wants to argue about this, just walk into a room and see if you can sense the general vibe of the room just by being aware of the energy, with or without people in there. It's very intrinsically obvious that humans (and other life forms) add their vibrations to their surroundings at all times, but usually unconsciously.

 

I'm curious.. how can you be so sure that animals don't have the self-reflective quality that humans have?

Personally I think animals have trouble with abstract thinking. But I don't buy that their consciousness is so much more different than ours. Animals clearly reflect on their experiences and learn from them.

 

^^^ That...


Although in some cases I wonder about the abstract thinking. Crows can be very deep.

 

I forgot you had a little crow buddy, that's pretty badass Tyrson - the thought's only just really settled with me.

Can you elaborate on how?

 

I've wondered the same myself. Maybe animals and nature are ridiculously more intelligent than we give them credit for. They see the world in a whole different way.

But would most people agree that it's humans that have the self-reflective aspect...meaning they not only exist but they can reflect on this sense that I exist. Can animals do the same? Maybe they can.

 

Most complex animals can't transcend their environment the way humans can. Plants and fungi can disperse themselves widely and remain dormant until better conditions appear. The same is true for many aquatic species.like the brine shrimp for example. Animals of many classes display what appear to be emotional responses. We manipulate matter.

 

Depends what you mean by self-reflective aspect.

Some animals can recognize themselves in mirrors, many obviously have the visuospatial coordination to manuever their bodies. Elephants bury their dead so that suggests some sense of mortality.


I think I agree with CannbisSoul insofar that we rule abstract thinking. Even there though you need to sharply define abstract thinking, as I've see a study with chimps where they performed better than Graduate Students on a short term memory test.

So yes animals are in many cases are ridicuously smarter than we give them credit for. For us, I think being bipedal, having our brain sit atop our brain stem, being social and having a highly developed cerebral cortex in particular is what gives much of our breadth of distinction among animals in terms of intelligence.

Standing up right and having our brains sit atop the brainstem, rather than at an angle like most primates allows for fluid communication from our whole body. Our social behavior allows us to gain knowledge from each other to compared say a solitary predators which have to learn everything on their own. Then while our brains are not substantially bigger relative to our size then apes, the development of some areas is pretty substantial.

 

I just mean being able to reflect on your own existence. I guess that we can't know for sure, but it seems from a surface point of view that animals don't know how to go "I exist. I'm me." But perhaps they do in some way that's beyond our comprehension or language.

 

China check this out . . . this is hand drawn with pencil . . . the artist is Kris Kuksi.

http://walls4joy.com/walls/space/kris-kuksi-outer-space-signs-222830-1500x2000.jpg

thought of you right away when i saw it

 

Bonobos Speaking Ability: http://youtu.be/oHSI4_7xs_g


Koko the Gorilla with Robin Williams.mp4: http://youtu.be/GorgFtCqPEs


Also if that's not trippy enough, I believe there is experimental evidence that dolphins can understand human language.

 

And birds morn for their dead....

 

I saw what I felt like was a raven funeral once down at the golf course. One had been killed by a ball earlier in the day and a huge flock had gathered around the fairway of the 6th hole where the incident took place. The indignant cawwing was immense. As a golfer with a great deal of reverence for ravens, I bowed my head in silent apology.

 

As was mentioned, it depends on what one considers "abstract thinking"... There are many aspects of "higher thinking" that is now being studied with crows and ravens, other animals as well. Erin has made and used tools without being taught by her parents or by me. She was found as a fledgling, so hardly knew her parents. Although some things like this she has adapted from watching me, others I have no idea where she came up with these concepts. Sure there's instinct, but how would a crow have an "instinct" for using "dinnerware"... Anyways, these things would fall under the concept of intelligence but not necessarily "abstract thinking".

Some of what she has done that I find intriguing would be to bring me a stick, one of her "toys", to put in the woodstove... and then sitting on a stool and watching the flames. Now, most of you don't know this but she and I survived a house fire, as a matter of fact, if she hadn't woken me up neither of us would have survived... One would think seeing fire would panic her, but not only dos she know that fire in this instance is warmth, watching the flames is meditative. Even to the point of giving me one of her toys so the warmth/meditative deal continues... She doesn't do this every time I use the woodstove either... Just when I am using it and she wants to watch the flames... Odd, that. Would watching the flames be considered abstract?


The Native Americans called the crow a trickster... It's documented that they will often hide food, and make sure other crows had seen where they hid it and then secretly move it to another location. In essence "tricking" the other crows into looking in the wrong spot. Yeah, but why not just secretly hide it in the first place? Why the "trick"? Again not necessarily "abstract" and scientists would call on instinct and learning from watching others. But why the "trick"?

Abstract thinking as I meant it above would be not 2+2=4 but 2+2+2=6 To me one glaring example of this type of thinking goes back to when we lived at the old house I had two dogs. Koa was the watchdog and when he barked at what he thought was an intruder or something that might be dangerous, once I had checked it out I would tell him "Koa, that's enough"... (You don't tell a watchdog "No" for barking because they tend to learn barking is an undesirable thing to do) Now, she knows words, one could call it being a "parrot"... There is debate on how much of this is just copying or mimicking sounds or if the sounds actually have meaning to them. (Google Alex, the African Gray Parrot)

Anyways, here is 2+2+2=6 and being a "trickster" all in one... She was not taught this, there was no prompting and no elaborate setup or any setup at all for this. At least not on my part. One day several years ago I was in the kitchen, she was in the living room in her cage. She started "barking" like a dog. She did this a few times until Koa started barking and came running down the stairs to go see where this "dog" was... Erin stopped and waited. Koa ran past her cage to the front room, barking at the "dog" he heard. She waited... and then she said "Koa, That's enough!"... Strictly for her own entertainment she tricked the dog and then told him to stop. That's pretty abstract... This was a one off situation, she doesn't continue to do this, it's not chatter... As a matter of fact, she doesn't even bark now knowing that Koa died in the fire. (granted, she didn't see his death, so that's a "leap" on my part, But since the fire we no longer have a dog and we only have one cat instead of 7) She does know the devastation of that night.

I'm fairly certain she can put 2+2 together and come up with why we no longer have the other animals, why we moved to a different place. The second dog, Thor had died almost a year before the fire. She was there watching when he passed, so she has at least seen death even if she doesn't know what it's all about. Common thinking would say Thor had just turned into "food" for her, they eat carrion, right? Instead she approached slowly, looked at him carefully, looked up at me, then went into her cage and was very quiet for the rest of the day. Was she mourning, feeling sadness?


Now, of course, none of this was documented. We don't live our lives in a lab with wires stuck into our brains with recorders running 24/7 so it must all be conjecture, hearsay and bullshit. But we aren't lab subjects either, so whatever.

 

to me, what abstract thinking is is the ability to derive a higher object from a set of of objects. the higher abstract construction only exists as a conceptual tool, and can be used as one peice but it exists as a collection of related objects or concepts which can be used functionally as a single construct in it's appropriate context. the ability to derive higher and higher levels of abstraction from sets of abstract objects requires a proportional level of intelligence.

in mathematics this is done all the time. the lowest level would be basic arithmetic expressions. (2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 3 ) can be abstracted into ( 2 x 8 ) +( 3 x 6 ) and then (2^4) x (3^3) and so on. the expression inside the parenthesis is treated as one object and expressions can be broken down into peices or restructured to suit their usage according to the commutative and associative properties of the operators.

animals have limited ability to do this, to deal with different levels of abstraction simulaneously. even humans can really struggle with this, it can be difficult to be able to simultaneously see the big picture, as well as the nitty gritty details all at once, and all at the same time truly realize that they are part of the same thing, and see the relation between all of the components on the smallest detail in the context of the highest level of abstraction in the system. to do so requires much mental effort and a certain level of familiarity with the construct. humans can easily recognize constructions that are idiomatic, and this is because of familiarity.

language is an abstract tool. it is tedious to use when working across more than one level of abstraction simultaneously. mathematics is much more suited to this sort of thing.

 

I'm not sure if it translates to other mathematical functions but Chimps short term numerical memory store is pretty impressive.

ABC News, Chimps vs Humans: http://youtu.be/cPiDHXtM0VA

 

Our animal cousins are not familiar with the idea of hypocrisy. They are not conflicted in what they want. Self doubt is the only detrimental use of our ability in possessing the naturally abstract mind.

 

On a tangent, just found this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvasir

Anthropomorphised mushroom essence? A formulated belief for the power behind amanitas stored in honey.

Loki being the trickster, an archetypal description of uncertainty. Note him only being bound, not eliminated. [SIZE=13.63636302948px]The one thing that my experiences with psilocybe have graced me with is a most [/SIZE]certainly [SIZE=13.63636302948px]a sense of clarity.[/SIZE]

Holding these legends in story mode, but intimately relating the behaviours of characters and events to the emotional cadences in our present experience, allow us a very accurate ontological map.

I'm guessing the reason we tripped up on religion is that over time it mutated to the point that we were told all we needed to do was to look at the map be able to know where we were going, never actually looking at the landscape itself. We continued to expand and have left footprints of this confused state of mind. This proved itself to be a failure, so we threw away the maps.
Like animals being let out their cage, we began to sniff things, analyse and familiarise ourselves with them. We claimed territory but got lost in our instincts to dominate and defend. This is evident on a planetary scale, but also present in the subtlest reactions in thought.
We hold onto the premise that we need to hold onto thing to survive, not realising the world we have created has lifted us far outside the need to function on that level of thought. Our predators are no longer lions and tigers and bears(oh no!), but the principles we constructed to navigate out of physically abstract circumstance.
We now stand in a place where we haven't actually "advanced" in the grander meaning of the word(whatever that may be), but have gained an enormous potential energy as a species that presents itself as frustration and stress because we don't know where it's coming from or where to direct it.

Emotionally confused teenagers fumbling around with our first tit, questioning whether our technological erections are the antennae of love.

Nope, but they sure help us fuck.