Making Occult Studies more Accessible

[The Good Reverend Roger]

In what way does his statement about "putting his two cents in" about something he thinks is stupid have anything whatsoever to do with "being afraid of smelly Pagans"?

There's a difference between letting people know where you stand and purposefully derailling any discussion of the idea. Even when that discussion is about appropriating useful, non-woo ideas out of it.

I'm sorry, but this Aspergers trip about using the word "woo" instead of "occult" is ridiculous. And it doesn't even work:
occult = a large range of spiritual practices that often include supernatural beliefs
woo = supernatural belief

This thread WAS about filtering out the woo and examining the parts of occultism with value to people who find supernatural belief repugnant, such as myself. Now it's more a temper tantrum over semantics.

The thread was old, dead, and cold before Roger bumped it as a joke.

And then Cram and Telarus brought it back to life.

And then at some point I aired my opinions about demystifying the useful elements of occultism by unoccluding them, which apparently is an "Aspergers trip" and a "kneejerk reaction". I am not at all sure you read my posts about it at all, although you do seem to be referring to them.

I think you're conflating an idea you posted in another thread with Roger's distortion of that idea in order to shit on Cram and LHX.

Hey, I think you can just fuck right off, Twitchy.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

In what way does his statement about "putting his two cents in" about something he thinks is stupid have anything whatsoever to do with "being afraid of smelly Pagans"?

There's a difference between letting people know where you stand and purposefully derailling any discussion of the idea. Even when that discussion is about appropriating useful, non-woo ideas out of it.

I'm sorry, but this Aspergers trip about using the word "woo" instead of "occult" is ridiculous. And it doesn't even work:
occult = a large range of spiritual practices that often include supernatural beliefs
woo = supernatural belief

This thread WAS about filtering out the woo and examining the parts of occultism with value to people who find supernatural belief repugnant, such as myself. Now it's more a temper tantrum over semantics.

The thread was old, dead, and cold before Roger bumped it as a joke.

And then Cram and Telarus brought it back to life.

And then at some point I aired my opinions about demystifying the useful elements of occultism by unoccluding them, which apparently is an "Aspergers trip" and a "kneejerk reaction". I am not at all sure you read my posts about it at all, although you do seem to be referring to them.

I think you're conflating an idea you posted in another thread with Roger's distortion of that idea in order to shit on Cram and LHX.

You mean this post: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,11209.135/msg,1147838.html in this thread, yesterday?

My bad.

A lot of these techniques are variations on tremendously popular and widely available (and completely nonmystical) cognitive behavioral therapy.

I just don't see much value in playing make-believe about the nature or even the esotericness (now there's a questionable word) of these practices. It seems terribly similar to bureaucrat-speak to me; making perfectly ordinary processes sound hopelessly complicated and specialized.

I completely agree and that was the point of this thread.

What I took issue with was the trolling people about not using that obfuscating terminology in the process of putting occultist practices into plain terms. If you're going to demystify something, you have to identify it using the obfuscating term. In order to say "most of occultism is horse shit," I need to use the word "occultism".

PDer's know most of occultism isn't worth demystifying because it's based in woo-woo. If I wish hard enough in the right way with the right things, it will magically happen via extradimensional quantums and shit. That stuff is irrelevant to this thread. Roger, being the asshole that he is, brought that irrelevant woo-woo shit back into the discussion and shoved it into all our faces with a semantic troll because we dared to identify the things to be unoccluded.



Good job Roger, you sure showed us the folly of occultism. I'm totally convinced that there is nothing of value in occultism because the word "occult" means superstitious in the dictionary and is like smearing feces on my sunglasses. We already attract idiots to the site because the Principia Discordia tends to do that, but that's another story. If there is anything in occultism that is useful to us empiricists it must be non-occult in origin. Looking for valuable things in occultism was a fool's errand because by definition it is all completely rooted in superstitious belief and incompatible with my psychological ecosystem, thanks for saving me from ruining my life.

Your doting pupil,
Net

Yes, yes, choke on a dick made out of shit, you deranged fuckbat.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think you guys didn't even read the thread, submitted to your kneejerk reaction about "occultism", and are too proud to admit it. It's probably a combination of digging in your heels and Roger's paranoid hatred of Cram and LHX.

Or you could just admit that I broke your Harry Potter dreams and made you cry, you neurotic sack of shit.   

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

I think you guys didn't even read the thread, submitted to your kneejerk reaction about "occultism", and are too proud to admit it. It's probably a combination of digging in your heels and Roger's paranoid hatred of Cram and LHX.

Or you could just admit that I broke your Harry Potter dreams and made you cry, you neurotic sack of shit.   

Yes of course, that's exactly what I was advocating, genius.

How about you go fuck up some more threads that you didn't read.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Yes of course, that's exactly what I was advocating, genius.

So I saw.   

[Triple Zero]

re: my outburst previously in this thread.

I didn't realize it yet on that wednesday morning, but I'm seriously walking on my last legs regarding stress and energy. So my apologies if I offended anyone, but I was really just expressing my dissatisfaction and disappointment with myself rather than with anyone or anything else. Sorry about that.

I'm not better yet, I didn't read the rest of the thread--or any other threads for that matter--in the past couple of days. And I think I'll be away for some more days, because right now everything is too much for me. I'll try to respond to PMs maybe and otherwise there's email or texts (unsure who has my main email address, but I'll check the one in my profile too).

Right now I just need some quiet and real-life meat friends contact.

See you around, I'll be back soon.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Feel better, Trip!

[Placid Dingo]

Was my previous wall of text intimidating? Useful? Boring?

Another thought. I find it interesting that the work was written in hiragana. While technically it's correct to call hiragana 'simplified japanese' it's actually harder to read works in hiragana than in kanji, provided you can read kanji. In the sentence 'in the house lies a bird' can also be read as 'house chicken' in hiragana. Because kanji imposes specific values on certain words, it is impossible to make this mistake.

So the reason I guess of writing it in hiragana really is to free the mind to explore words meanings as they are in the context delivered without imposing all the values that might be caught up in kanji, for example, the values imposed by visualising 'upper hand' when reading 'good at' or the way in which the kanji for 'east' might hold associations with Tokyo (being probably the most common word using that kanji- this is just an example as I think Tokyo was probably Edo when the book was made).

[Telarus]

I've been meaning to pick up some Japanese tutorials/language programs, and actually start learning the language as a system.

Those are great insights!

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

In the sentence 'in the house lies a bird' can also be read as 'house chicken' in hiragana. Because kanji imposes specific values on certain words, it is impossible to make this mistake.

While a phonetic syllabet makes ambiguous homonyms possible, kanji do indeed have different readings depending on context -- themselves doubly ambiguous since they could be pronounced differently as well as meaning different things. I would by no means call kanji significantly less ambiguous than hirigana.

That said, kanji have all sorts of semantic assumptions. The character for 'ninja' is the character for 'knife' over the character for 'heart'. If I recall, three copies of the character for 'woman' in a triangular shape means something like 'irritating' (I'll double-check as soon as I can find my kanji dictionary, which has walked off somewhere). A phonetic writing system lacks such things, which could be seen as locking one into a particular way of looking at a situation.

I could see the use of phonetic writing systems in Japanese as a kind of gematria, then -- replacing the 'normal' ambiguities with 'unusual' ambiguities the same way someone using the NAEQ would identify words as being meaningfully connected just because their letters add up to the same number.

[Placid Dingo]

Without wanting to threadjack too badly, I'm familiar with how the language works. I mean to say that kanji mean specific things in one character. Ninja is a good example because to write it in hiragana takes away the enotional values associated with the whole knife heart thing (the knife-heart character is actually a character meaning a few things related to spyin and concealment; when added to 'person' it becomes 'ninja'.)

Good point with something else I didn't talk about; that kanji images are made of other images (called radicals). So every character, as seen above, embodies a few things. Likeable is made of 'woman' and  'child', fear is 'heart' 'work' and 'mediocre'.

I'm not clear on that las paragraph. Could you please clear up what you mean?

[Cain]

Research continues.  Have a highly tenative thesis, but will need to consult my psychology library for further citations before presenting it.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

For someone accustomed to an ideographic writing system, phonetic puns would be unusual whereas ideographic puns would be more common. The kinds of connections made through homophony would therefore be 'unexpected' in the context of writing*. Systems of gematria attempt to do the same thing for people who use phonetic writing systems: by considering letters to be numbers and then claiming that patterns in these numbers have deep meaning, they force the person practicing gematria to make otherwise alien connections and then rationalize them. The NAEQ (New Aeon English Quaballah) is the system of gematria used by english-speaking thelemites, and is not entirely unlike rot11. Other systems of gematria work just as well, because the numbers don't matter; the only thing that matters is thinking that the numbers matter.

* assuming McLuhan is right and the behaviors of writing and speech are fairly isolated from one another in certain circumstances. Specifically: ideographic writing is 'purely' semantic and bypasses the phonetic layer, so reading something ideographic does not lead one to consider homophones, and ideographic writing is not optimized for phonetic rendering.

[Telarus]

I knew I saw Rushkoff writing about this very thing.

The following is from: http://www.realitysandwich.com/achieving_new_states_consciousness_through_nlp_neuroscience_and_ritual

Foreword

by Douglas Rushkoff

I DON'T BELIEVE IN TRADITIONAL MAGICK. Nor should you -- especially if you want to learn to practice it.

No, it's probably easier just to get everyone else to believe in it. Then just proceed according to plan and watch the rest of the world conform to your intention.

Of course, that's just fine for the independent wizard looking to manipulate his way to sex, power, and cash, but what about the person who sincerely means to make the world a better, more just, and pleasurable place for everybody? What about the magician who doesn't simply want to gain a disproportionate share of existing stuff, but wants instead to change the very relationship of matter, energy, and abundance?

That's the kind of person who should turn away from traditional ceremonial magick and turn instead to the work of Philip Farber.

Too many novice magicians explore the possibilities of their craft from the hopelessly closed mindset attending the zero-sum game. For them, magick is something one does all alone, for the purposes of improving, changing, or expanding the self. It's no wonder. Like every other mind technology, from the Torah to neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), chaos magick has been co-opted by the self-help movement. As a result, instead of destroying the "self" so that the person can be liberated, most magick practices only reconfirm the specious boundaries defining selfhood, further trapping the magician in the realm of the already possible -- and further isolating all magicians from one another.

As I've come to understand it, the intent of Farber's ongoing literary sigil is to move his readers beyond the practice of individual magicks into the shared space of collective, consensual hallucination. Beginning with the invocation of a known and accepted personage, Atem, Farber quickly branches out in new directions, casting a visionary world picture as if it were a guidebook -- a description and instruction manual to a realm that is quite literally created in the process of its depiction and subsequent imagination.

But Farber's world picture is not a specific map of forces. Rather, it is a place where his readers are free to develop their own. It is a meta-landscape -- a series of laws that are each invitations to create new ones. The only terra firma is the guarantee of access to this collective act of ongoing creation.

In this sense, Meta-Magick is truly a "meta" magick -- a menu-to-menu creation, an open-source approach to magick that puts each participant in the role of contributor and propagandist.

Meta-Magick is an invitation to participate in several levels of practice: the remapping of one's own mind, the development of memes that can be transmitted to others, the use of media, and the implementation of social change. It is a picture of a world in which we all contribute to the landscape and its bylaws. It is the world in which we live.

The rest of the article is a selection of techniques that Phil Farber shares from his book: http://www.realitysandwich.com/achieving_new_states_consciousness_through_nlp_neuroscience_and_ritual

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

On that note, I hope someone in the thread has already mentioned the excellent Art of Memetics (and if they haven't, well, I have now).