Making Occult Studies more Accessible

[minuspace]

Okay, last thought on this, really...  Not saying I would be susceptible to this, however, practices that now seem commonplace may have seemed like magic in the past.  I mean, what about when mnemonics were considered occult arts?

[kingyak]

This reminds me of a Dara O'briain quote about alternative medicine

Herbal medicine has been around for hundreds of years. Sure it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became medicine!

Which in turn reminds me of Fort:

Witchcraft always has a hard time, until it becomes established and changes its name.

[LMNO]

Okay, I think this thread's done.

Shall we actually start putting these conclusions into practice?

[AFK]

Woo!  I mean, Yes!

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Magic is a bunch of jargon for manipulating the bits of your brain that process language and concepts, moods, emotions and shit like that. the "behind the scenes" shit. It's not really a science, although most of it is described by straightforward science, it's more of an artform. Taking the raw materials of a human mind and rebuilding some parts, ironing out the kinks of others and polishing up the whole thing til it works the way you want it to. If you're good at it and/or you get lucky then you'll end up a vastly improved organism compared to when you started - for a given, and purely subjective, definition of improved (hence the "art" thing) If you suck at it you'll either accomplish nothing or reduce yourself to gibbering basket case in the eyes of your peers.

Just like in the world of non-occult art, most practitioners fall into the latter category.

Yeah, but since there's nothing supernatural involved, why call it magic?  Magic already has a definition.

Sorry if I can't get away from this...It's the main problem I have with the whole thing.

This seems more like a long running semantics troll than a genuine issue with people using words that generally refer to some kind of woo. It has been pretty clear the point of this thread was to strip out the useful parts from occult practices for clarity and wider appeal. No one claimed to believe in the supernatural nor did they argue for it.

Look, if you want to shit on occultists, GO FIND SOME FUCKING OCCULTISTS. AND TAKE A SHIT.

THERE AREN'T ANY ITT.

This thing about using the word "occult" or "magic" sounds like woo to me. Like people are going to start believing in fairies and unicorns merely because the unholy word has been uttered. Oh shit, I said the words, "fairies" and "unicorns"!



JESUS CHRIST! WHAT HAVE I DONE!

I think a slightly better example than Twid's cello-tipping poltergeist is something like the expression "thank God," which I hear atheists/non-Christians of every stripe say all the time. They don't mean "good thing that magical invisible guy in the sky made it so," they mean something more like "I'm glad that circumstances that I cannot immediately quantify led to a favorable outcome." As long as the audience understands that you don't literally mean the former, it's convenient shorthand and makes you sound like much less of an jagoff than someone who says things like "I'm glad that circumstances that I cannot immediately quantify led to a favorable outcome."

In the case of the OP, I think most of us are smart enough to figure out that talk of making occult studies accessible was not intended to be taken literally because something that's occult is by definition inaccessible. If the OP were about a specific woo thing like yoga, then specific language along the lines of "making yoga more accessible" would have been much better. But since the OP is about finding the meat behind the woo in general, "occult studies" is a handy way of getting the point across. Replacing the word "occult studies" with a long list of things that may have some value when you strip away the woo would have just led to a long thread title and clunky, hard-to-read text and may have unnecessarily constricted the discussion*. Once a specific hunk of meat gets pulled out for discussion, anyone using woo terminology when non-woo terminology exists should, of course, be summarily executed.

*I'm assuming an alternate universe where there was an actual discussion on the topic rather than a multi-page battle over semantics.

Of course, which is why I think the purpose of taking the word literally and anal-retentively is more to get people wound up and wreck the thread.

[East Coast Hustle]

Yep, because there are totally not still people in the world who believe in that sort of crap, no way, nuh uh.

I mean, I understand you don't have a personal stake in it, but I'll be goddamned if people come to my website and see crap like this and think we believe in the occult because some people are too stubborn/lazy/hung up on sounding special to call this stuff what it really is without me putting my two cents in enough so that my two cents can't possibly be missed by outsiders reading these threads.

So, if you don't like that, you know what to do.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Yep, because there are totally not still people in the world who believe in that sort of crap, no way, nuh uh.

I mean, I understand you don't have a personal stake in it, but I'll be goddamned if people come to my website and see crap like this and think we believe in the occult because some people are too stubborn/lazy/hung up on sounding special to call this stuff what it really is without me putting my two cents in enough so that my two cents can't possibly be missed by outsiders reading these threads.

If someone is going to come to this site and decide we're all into the woo-woo based off of a thread title, they're probably coming to all sorts of idiotic conclusions based on other thread titles too. All they would need to do is read a few pages of the thread to realize we're interested stealing their good stuff after we brush the bullshit off of it, not indulging in supernatural wankery.

Changing the thread title so that it reads "Making Woo Studies more Accessible" could attract atheist wankers, who are just as bad as people riddled with woo. It seems odd that this new policy of avoiding thread titles that could attract the wrong kind of people or be subject to continuous thread derailling was rolled out now, in the context of this thread.

I don't understand how you could be so concerned about what a bunch of smelly pagans think about you or your site. Suppose they DO think we're big occultists and tell all their friends, what's going to happen? Are we going to be flooded with occult-tards that leave every thread smelling like ass-sweat and sage? Are they going to DDOS the site? Since when were we so afraid of what occultists think of us?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

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"?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Also, in keeping with the spirit of this thread, I am going to start calling dogs "werewolves", deer "unicorns", and robins "fairies".

[P3nT4gR4m]

Okay here's a stab at an introduction.

What is 'occult'? It means, literally, hidden or concealed. In practice it refers to stuff that is normally hidden or concealed. More specifically, it's mechanisms that underpin 'normal' conscious thought. Ever had a thought or idea that seemed to just 'pop into your head'? Well  the truth is is didn't "just pop". What actually happened is that shit you weren't aware of happened in your head and the flash of inspiration was a result of it.

It's in the act of paying attention to these underlying 'mechanisms' that the stuff which is normally 'occult' becomes revealed. Genuine occult study is quite the opposite of the occult that hokey, mysterious, voodoo-mongers would have you believe in. Genuine occult study is a process of stripping away the mystery behind why you have such and such a thought or idea and bringing it out into the open where it can be examined and manipulated.

To put it in simple terms, the human mind is like an onion, there's the "me" on the surface - the bit that everyone is aware of but, beneath this there's another layer, and another and so on. If you were inclined to change your "me", your personality, your ego, you could probably do it all by concentrating on the surface alone but it'd be a hell of an uphill struggle. If, however, you could dig a bit deeper and really fuck about with the guts of the machine, you could accomplish much more, much more efficiently.

You could also fuck things up on a much more dramatic scale. The mind machine can be totally wrecked to the point of non-functional by this kind of fucking about. I'll testify to this. If left alone you might get lucky and it'll sort itself out over time, it's wired that way but why take the risk? You're not the first person in history to do this. You're not the Wright Brothers, hurtling down a runway, hoping you've got all your calculations right. Nowadays we have flight manuals.

Here's where it gets a bit sticky. You read one of these flight manuals and what do you find? Most of the time it's ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night, right? Thing is, when you're in the field of manipulating those hidden parts of your mind, one of the most effective tools you have available to you is imagination. And that's what very few of the manuals mention or stress enough. Your imagination is the faculty that is employed to create the interface with which you interact with the deeper layers of your consciousness.

The deeper layers are real. Science is pretty much happy with this but the interface is imaginary so it's not really provable. The results, also, are mostly subjective, aside from anything obvious that an outside observer might notice.

"how come you're suddenly so much more confident in such and such a situation, you used to go to shit?"

"well, you see, I invoked an entity that protects me from negative shit that might influence my ability to deal"

"Bullshit. You're imagining it."

"Yes."

the entity is immaterial. Could be an angel, could be a huge fucking bear, could be the ghost of John Wayne. It's your imagination. Make it whatever takes your fancy. It doesn't exist but there's a part of your brain that thinks it does. The part that usually responds to such and such a situation by freaking out and flooding your internal dialogue with all sorts of panic stricken shit that clouds your ability to react effectively. That part has been trained to feel reassured whenever the angel/bear/duke appears.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The thing is, it works exactly the same way if, instead of invoking this external angel/bear/duke, you use the same general techniques to instill in yourself the belief that YOU are strong and capable of protecting yourself. If you do this for long enough, you eventually totally internalize the belief. Of course, rather than "magic" or "wizardry" we usually call this "therapy", so it's not as appealing for guys who wear black sneakers and want to seem cool to high school girls.

[Placid Dingo]

Actually the best way to express my position is to look at the 'Common Walls' thread and imagine if it has been derailed after Cram's Demons Are Everywhere thread by people going 'that's stupid demons aren't real! Why don't you just call them bad ideas!?' we all get it, we all know we get it and we all know we all know we get it.

To me starting a corporate sigils thread or an exploring the good bits of occult thread should be equally possible. Because we all know that's demons aren't physical evil manifestations and we all know sigils don't actually use magic to rewrite someone's brain.

Anyway. That's my ideal world. I'm not the one who cant stand the terminology and I can't make it any more palatable by saying it should be so I might pull away from arguing the point now.

Thanks for the clarification, and I agree with you about narratives tending to lose important nuance.

Now about the bolded bit: "We" may know that if "we" = most of the people at PD.com, but "we" most certainly do NOT know that if "we" = "most of the world". So if your intention is just to engage in mental masturbation on a small niche internet forum, then I will absolutely concede the point. But if the intent is to ever at any point take this dialogue out into the world at large, then using these terms that most of the world cannot separate from the woo inherent in their definitions is just going to obscure the dialogue and perpetuate dangerous superstitious nonsense.

Stand back; I'm going to use metaphors!

So sometimes I use this place like a factory showroom but more often than not I use it as a workshop. Things here are not in a form that i plan to offer to the public but in tinkering mode.

The jargon here is meant, for me, to be useful not perfect. When I talk to a parent (as in a parent of my students at school) I don't tell them I've developed scaffolding that will help negotiate a differentiated outcome. I use that jargon to assist me in my work not to communicate with the public. 

Likewise I don't talk sigils with people, but I do use that language to refine my ideas of effective visual language in order to develop something that I can share or use in public context.

[P3nT4gR4m]

The thing is, it works exactly the same way if, instead of invoking this external angel/bear/duke, you use the same general techniques to instill in yourself the belief that YOU are strong and capable of protecting yourself. If you do this for long enough, you eventually totally internalize the belief. Of course, rather than "magic" or "wizardry" we usually call this "therapy", so it's not as appealing for guys who wear black sneakers and want to seem cool to high school girls.

In the introduction to the Middle Pillar system, Israel Regardie recommends a course of therapy as a precursor to the exercise. As for guys with black sneakers? Not my bitch. You want me to change my life around because of some guy in black sneakers? Truth is the fact that 99.99% of pagans are shit eating hippie retards with little to no grasp of reality is hilarious to me. I wouldn't have it any other way.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

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.

[East Coast Hustle]

I missed the part where I enacted a policy about thread titles? Someone remind me when my personal objections became board policy rather than just, you know, my personal objections.

Or am I not free to post in any damn thread I want to, just like everyone else is?