I think when people read things like this they overly focus on the hocus pocus part of it rather than something that is probably or even definitely true with human beings - that there is a certain power to belief. I’ve had treatment resistant PTSD and depression most of my life and inevitably stuff like meditation/spirituality comes up, which I had always felt was a desperate last resort, and although I am agnostic, I am extremely materialist and find much of it dumb/silly. I started however reading textbooks about tantric yoga and their claims, while some of it is indeed weird or silly, there is definitely something to some of it - particularly tibetan yoga practitioners being able to withstand extreme heat, cold, or endurance for long periods of time with no seeming explanation. I had discovered my ability a long time ago to control pain levels and my perception of hot/cold, but they seem to be doing something that is actually controlling internal body functions, and that got my imagination going about how one could use that to treat things like PTSD.
I have had some success. a lot of it is visualizing and “believing” any way you possibly can, I think much of the ritual in stuff like this is to get you into whatever state is needed to trick your body or mind into doing something, at least that’s how I think it “works.” The author seems kind of aware of this and it seems to borrow many similar concepts as the stuff I’ve read, but with much more occultish ritual.
tsimionescu 18 days ago [-]
That's because the people putting out stuff like this always go on and on about the hocus pocus. They never stop at claims that it's a way to control certain limited aspects of your own biology/psyche, they always go on to claims like telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis, mind control, and others.
And that is when you realize they aren't some wise thinkers describing deep understanding of the human mind in more poetic terms, they are deluded or crackpots thinking they can fling spells at each other if they just beleive hard enough.
Is there some insight that they may have hit on in their collective tinkering? Possibly yes, just like the alchemists had really discovered some good bits of chemistry despite being completely misguided as well. But unless and until someone goes in and creates a true science out of their mumbo-jumbo, it's not something most people should spend their time on, lest they end up wasting time on the many parts that don't work.
nuc1e0n 17 days ago [-]
Psychology is supposedly that science, although it is still a bit wooly here and there. That's how chemistry was in its infancy as well. There may also be real phenomena that those working in that field don't yet consider to be valid for investigation as well. Another point to make is that scientists need to take proper safety precautions, lest they end up like Marie Curie, who was poisoned by what she was studying.
tsimionescu 17 days ago [-]
Psychology is trying to be that science, but it's hard to call it that at this point. It's more like a craft at this point, trying to masquerade as a science. But hopefully in time it will develop into a true study of this type of mental phenomenon.
And just to be clear, I'm strictly referring to things like meditation as a way to change your own mindset, not any of the silly concepts that assume the mind is somehow able to move atoms around without emitting radiation.
nuc1e0n 16 days ago [-]
The human mind is able to move atoms around. Chiefly by means of human hands.
tsimionescu 16 days ago [-]
Sure, but that still emits radiation (in the form of chemical or electrical signals in the nervous system down to the muscles, and also in the form of the massive amount of particles constituting your hand).
nuc1e0n 15 days ago [-]
Who told you that it wouldn't? And philosophically speaking where do you draw the line between 'you' and the rest of the world? Do you think the neurons in your head are 'you' and the neurons in your arm are just inanimate in some way? That seems a rather arbitrary distinction to me.
tsimionescu 15 days ago [-]
I specifically said "silly concepts that assume the mind could move matter around without emitting radiation". You responded that the mind can move objects, mostly with the use of hands, and I pointed out that the use of hands is a form of radiation, so that was perfectly in line with my original line.
As to the other question, it's irrelevant to this discussion (but no, I don't draw such a distinction, except insofar as recognizing that the neurons in the arm will not normally fire to create a movement in the arm without first receiving a signal from neurons in the spine or brain, in healthy people).
Ultimately my point is that the only way a person can influence the broader world is by emitting radiation in measurable ways, and the only way they can find out about the broader world is by receiving radiation. So a person in an EM shielded, inertially dampened, sound proofed room with no one to talk to can't view the city of Jerusalem from above, regardless of how hard they concentrate or believe they can.
nuc1e0n 15 days ago [-]
Yeah that's a reasonable conclusion. The way we can take information in at a subconscious level and extrapolate from it I find remarkable. Maybe the extent of that capability could be tested. I also have heard that physicists may now think retro causality is real. That seems a bit far fetched to me, but I imagine that would be testable. The ancient Greeks belived it was possible to see the future in dreams, and shamans in prehistoric times tried to predict where herds of animals would be. A present-monition rather than a premonition lol. But even complex animal behaviours can be estimated. Shamans wore Animal headdresses to 'think' as those animals would.
moralestapia 17 days ago [-]
No, it's not psychology.
These are metaphysical phenomena.
tsimionescu 17 days ago [-]
The phenomena I was talking about, and that indeed would fall into the category of psychology, are the ones that are purely physical - poorly understood bio-psycho-social phenomena like meditation as a way to control your own mind and body (in biologically limited ways, such as being able to lower your pulse slightly, not fantasies like mending broken bones with the power of will), or the ability to influence others by talking to them.
The other parts of "magic", such as the ability to view things that someone else is viewing without emitting or receiving electromagnetic waves are clearly fantasies, not in the purview of any science.
nuc1e0n 16 days ago [-]
Plaster casts for broken limbs are produced by an application of will also. And those plaster casts help bones to heal more rapidly.
tsimionescu 16 days ago [-]
No, they are a product of labor. Sure, labor is a product of will, but the intermediate step is crucial. Many mages claim that they can fix ailments, quickly, by simply willing them to mend and maybe laying their hands, almost like in a video game.
nuc1e0n 15 days ago [-]
Yeah, that ain't real. For something to work there's gotta be some mechanism by which it does. Bonesetting is a real thing, but second hand stories can get distorted by the ignorant. Usually towards being more dramatic. Although relocating a dislocated shoulder is pretty immediate.
gklitz 18 days ago [-]
> with no seeming explanation
Oddly though every such thing that “defies explanation” also defies being reproducible in controlled experiments.
That’s the thing a about non scientific stuff like this. If it actually worked it would literally just be science and we would be able to reproduce it.
If you buy a magic moon rock that lets you only roll 6’s on dice, you would equally be left feeling that the 1/6 of the time that it worked was proof enough to you that it was actually true, because you bought yourself a bias along side the useless rock.
Same is true a lot with things like yoga for anything outside the Pilates component, it only “works” if you dedicate enough time and money to it, at which point you’re just biased because you don’t want to feel you’ve wasted your time and money. Sure 1/20 might find that it “cured” their illness, but only if that’s the rate of improvement in a control group as well.
JohnMakin 18 days ago [-]
There actually has been some science done on the monks in the example I am talking about, particularly their ability to control their body temperature in a controlled setting, and the conclusion was that they can, but there was some skepticism as to what precisely was going on: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/meditation-ch...
skepticism is healthy but if you discard things out of bias immediately without looking further, you’re kind of practicing the same kind of ignorance that leads to these types of superstitions.
nuc1e0n 17 days ago [-]
Another factor is a poor understanding of selection bias and statistics can skew expectations as well. Mentalists like Darren Brown make use of this for their stage shows.
trilbyglens 18 days ago [-]
I think only very simple mechanisms can be fully described and reproduced by modern methods. Is it not too hard to image that our grasp on reality is limited, and that the tools and language we possess right nowight simply not be up to the task? Why be so fast to dismiss things that are not currently reproducible? I bet if you took 100 people you'd have a hard time reproducing an Olympic athlete even if all 100 were subjected to the same fitness regimen. But we know Olympic athletes exist. Maybe you should also be skeptical of your skepticism.
vacuity 18 days ago [-]
Also, we know placebos exist and in fact are expected to exist in medical trials, but...how? Why? Can we control this? Evidently we're seeing something, and we've incorporated it into scientific understanding, but only at a high level so far.
tsimionescu 17 days ago [-]
The placebo effect is much less mysterious than it's made out to be.
It is almost entirely explained by three things:
1. Some ability of the mind to interact with the effect of the medication - such as heart rate being tied to mood (so that being administered a heart-rate reducing drug in a menacing way could have the effects of the drug masked by your heart rate increasing because of your anxiety), or when the effect itself is tied to mental phenomena (depression, pain, nausea, etc). Apart from psychoactive drugs, this only significantly impacts a relatively small amount of drugs, since only a small amount of biomarkers are very directly tied to mental states - heart rate, blood pressure, maybe a handful of others. There may also be a smaller effect on longer term treatments of other kinds due to the myriad effects of stress/anxiety on various other systems in the body, that may have interactions with more complex biomarkers as well, especially in the longer term.
2. The experimental setup being impacted more or less knowingly by people based on their pre-conceived notions. This can take many forms, from outright doctoring the recorded data to fit the desired outcome, to much more subtle effects like differences in the level of care, differences in how well the patients follow the prescribed protocol, and many others. None of these are "real" effects, they only affect the relevance and quality of the data being collected. For example, if patients have a way of finding out they are in the placebo wing, they may drop out at a higher rate, and thus the data may show that the patients who stuck out had a higher benefit than the ones on the control wing simply because of that skew.
3. Noise in the disease itself - sometimes, people spontaneously heal or improve from various conditions on various fronts without any intervention whatsoever, and any medical intervention has to be compared to this baseline level. This is similar to the problem of checking if a code fix actually addresses a hard to reproduce bug.
There is no proof whatsoever of the placebo effect being some ability to heal the body through belief (again, beyond certain mental phenomena, either related to mental illness or pain or nausea relief). It is simply a matter of noise and measurement artifacts for the vast majority of studies.
vacuity 16 days ago [-]
I think your points are mainly issues with determining that an experimental treatment actually has a significant effect. They aren't as relevant to explaining how the control group experiences an impact. I've heard that patients and doctors often correctly guess if a placebo was administered, so if a placebo actually does have some mind-driven impact then I would expect it to disappear when known. Then your point 2 reduces to point 3. But noise in how the disease naturally progresses is also split amongst control and experimental groups, and so the important test is the control group compared to people with no treatment at all, or even unwitting of their observation. Although you are likely right that the placebo effect is fairly simple: something along the lines of lowered stress and anxiety from a potential treatment, even if it could be fake.
tsimionescu 16 days ago [-]
> I think your points are mainly issues with determining that an experimental treatment actually has a significant effect.
Yes, this is the place where the placebo (and nocebo) effect was observed and where it has an impact.
> But noise in how the disease naturally progresses is also split amongst control and experimental groups, and so the important test is the control group compared to people with no treatment at all, or even unwitting of their observation.
It's basically never possible to do a study comparing a new medication to no treatment, mostly on ethical grounds (beyond the complicated logistics of studying people outside of clinical settings). There are very few diseases for which we have no treatment whatsoever, so it's very rarely ethically acceptable to compare between offering a medication vs no treatment.
17 days ago [-]
zeeed 18 days ago [-]
I just read the whole 44 pages and some years ago I spent a day or two delving into Crowley’s work. (I was curious but never had the time or need to practice any of the teachings)
There’s a spooky coherence in the descriptions and that’s what makes it such a fascinating read. The spin that this work puts on the subject - calling this “technology” and likening it to programming adds to this.
To anyone honestly wanting to take this for a spin, I recommend reading the biography of Aleister Crowley first. It’s an interesting read in itself and it also illustrates the risks/dangers. Pictures speak a thousand words.
krzat 18 days ago [-]
The whole guide could be retitled as: how to cultivate your own psychosis. The technology is sound but does not lead to wellbeing.
I think Buddhists figured it out (at least some of them). For example metta practice could be thought of as a magick that is specifically aimed toward wholesome happiness.
zeeed 18 days ago [-]
Spot on, well put.
Once I could personally meet or just see people (in person or otherwise) that attempted this kind of rewiring of your synapses I realized how deeply unwell they really are.
And for the untrained eye, your point takes it away: Have a hard look at folks who tried (like Crowley, probably the most documented case) and be wary of following advice on the web that puts your mental health at risk, even on HN.
One thing that makes me wonder: how does intentionally created psychosis compare to involuntary one? Can science study those things to have better understanding of mental health and actually help people?
I also spent -much more than a day or two reading Aleister Crowly; and Dion Fortune; and other lesser known authors, and all sorts of other similar stuff.
Then I read a book called Foucault's Pendulum by one Umberto Eco, and that's how I realised all the magick stuff was a circus and the people peddling it charlatans and clowns. Sometimes you just have to look at the funny side of all the self-serious mediums and gurus and teachers and spend a few days laughing at their bullshit before your mind finally decides the "teachings" are really just garbage.
noch 18 days ago [-]
> I realised all the magick stuff was a circus and the people peddling it charlatans and clowns.
Hear hear. Your comment reminded me of when Christopher Lee said, "Never get involved in the occult. You'll not only lose your mind, but you'll lose your soul." [^0]
This is basically a chaos magic book updated for the next generation.
Like an anime/video game culture version of Peter J. Carroll - Liber Null & Psychonaut.
Crowley on the other hand is basically a trust fund kid rebelling against Victorian and Christian morality. I don't think what he was doing makes all that much sense in a secular society because much of the taboo is lost.
thehappyfellow 18 days ago [-]
The classic, train your mind to believe anything you want, use it to improve your life, try believing some really cooky stuff, woah you actually believe it, no shit, you descend into crazier and crazier stuff.
I’m currently leaning towards believing that learning intense focus through meditation + setting intentions for yourself in that state is genuinely useful, just like rituals are (saying “yes” to your partner in front of friends and family it changes you). But the border between it and “I’m a trans dimensional shaman in psychiatric A&E” is a bit to thin for my liking.
macrolime 18 days ago [-]
This stuff works, it's just that people interpret what's happening in different ways. You can believe you are visiting an astral plane that is a separate physical dimension or whatever or you can believe you are essentially having a type of lucid dream. There are people who believes regular dreams are seeing the future or visiting alternate dimensions. That doesn't mean dreams don't exist, but it also doesn't mean that dreaming is traveling to some alternative physical reality.
thehappyfellow 18 days ago [-]
I can believe that it works. But there's a risk of actually starting to believe that the astral plane and other stuff is real, particularly if someone has predispositions for schizophrenia.
There's also a degree of danger, believing your dreams tell you the future is one thing but if you immerse yourself in occult, text about daemons, start believing they might have their own agendas - and I mean really believe - you can see how dangerous it can get.
krapp 18 days ago [-]
On the one hand, you're right, but on the other hand, what you're describing is essentially just religion. Believing in spells is little different than believing in prayer. The "astral plane" may as well be Heaven or Hell, or Purgatory. The Bible is an "occult" text about demons, containing spells and rituals, and many people believe in a literal God and Devil and intercession by angelic and demonic forces.
And of course there are plenty of schizophrenics who claim to hear the voice of God and claim to be doing His will, something which might have gotten one canonized centuries ago, but no one pathologizes Christianity when that happens. If we're going to consider magical thinking normal in one sense, we should consider it normal in every sense, because the only difference between "religious" and "occult" practice is cultural acceptance.
Or else accept that all of it is equally ridiculous, that Aleister Crowley is no more divine or absurd than the Pope.
thehappyfellow 18 days ago [-]
To be honest, my thinking on this is not crystalised but I do think there's an important difference between a religion like Christianity and other "occult" practices - it's about social guardrails against going insane.
Practicing Christians will congregate weekly, reinforce their beliefs, chat about them, confess to the same priest - all of this stops going into crazy corners of the belief space. Also, normal to be openly Christian (at least where I'm from) and people have vague ideas about which beliefs are roughly in that category - and can call out deviations.
I'm basing this all on my guesses to be clear! Still curious to see if others have similar thoughts.
_kb 16 days ago [-]
That's a sound theory. I'm a fairly staunch atheist so do believe both are equally absurd. Even with that frame though it's easy to acknowledge community that forms around (most) religion serves to align group behaviour. This can be both good or bad depending on what those behaviours are in a larger social context.
You still get similar community in a lot of alternative spirituality / occult practices but from slices of that community I've been exposed to it does focus much more on personal exploration and opens the door to the recursive degeneration that may lead to.
tsimionescu 17 days ago [-]
> but no one pathologizes Christianity when that happens
Many people, even many believers, certainly pathologize those that become too embroiled in Christian beliefs. Sure, they admire the deeply devout priest or nun or monk or who is spending their whole life in the Church. But if that person starts telling them that God is speaking to them, or that God is showing them far off events, or that they can pray to obtain physical results directly - they way this book suggests is possible - they will certainly take a few steps back and stop listening so intently.
Not to mention, there are vast differences between religious and occult practices. While religious people do sometimes pray for material improvements to their life, many religious practices are more moral or social rather than magical. People eat a certain way because they believe this is what they believe is the right thing to do, they help the poor or others in their communities, they worship their god or gods just because.
Wishing to live a good life because you believe that will guarantee you'll have a good after-life (i.e. religion in a nutshell) is extremely different from performing spells that you think will fix your life here and now (occult magical practices).
pstuart 18 days ago [-]
I've got very mixed feelings about magick, but skimming through the material looks intriguing enough to explore on my own terms. I've definitely gotten value from psychonaut-type explorations with various forms of medicine, but doing this in a self-powered way seems to be a lot more accessible and sustainable.
EdwardDiego 18 days ago [-]
If it worked, wouldn't practitioners rule the world?
isoprophlex 18 days ago [-]
Don't they? The megregores mentioned seem to have taken over the entire world...
moralestapia 18 days ago [-]
No.
If you had a magic gun with unlimited ammo would you rule the world? No.
For the same reason, AGI/ASI is not really a threat to humanity.
jack_pp 18 days ago [-]
Well there's stuff like Bohemian Grove, freemasons and in general if you try to sift the bullshit from the truth you will find most people in power have connections to "cooky shit".
You might say Elon Musk doesn't seem like the type and he's the richest (known) man in the world! But power isn't really about having money. Money can help with power but it will not automatically give you power. A scrawny nerd that got rich quick will not attract supermodels or sway elections at first until he learns to put the money to use towards those goals.
I haven't tried magick personally so can't attest to its effectiveness but I've had periods in my life where a ton of synchronicities happened that blew my mind away so much that I am now convinced the spiritual world is very much real. I just am hesitant to go into magick because it is touted as a tool to get what "you"(ego) want and that doesn't seem wise. Forcing reality to suit your ego's needs even if possible seems bad to me.
namlem 18 days ago [-]
Supposedly the CIA was able to get remote viewing to work at significantly above chance in their experiments, but they weren't able to get it to work reliably enough to actually be useful.
And there are... downsides to messing with such forces. There was a cult called Leverage that tried to exploit magick and most of them ended up having psychotic breaks.
tempodox 18 days ago [-]
> remote viewing
It's called a spy sattelite.
bnlxbnlx 18 days ago [-]
Do you have any sources for this?
K0balt 18 days ago [-]
Idk about the group, but the CIA FOIA docs were in a recent post here, iirc. I read it in its entirety and it’s basically as it says. Well controlled studies, statistically significant results, not a lot of actionable data from a military perspective.
My take is that either ESP works to some extent, or maybe we want our adversaries to think it does.
OTOH, I’ve seen some shit that I can’t explain except by just making up an explanation that seems more stupid than the paranormal explanation, so I tend on the side of “probably more to reality than we conventionally think”.
bnlxbnlx 15 days ago [-]
Are there any studies out there that managed to replicate their results? Anyone aware of any they could share?
overu589 18 days ago [-]
It works quite well, only it takes decades to develop a technology that runs on human minds (rather than silicon.) It takes decades to develop with another “uplifting” you, which you don’t have on account of it being a controlled and coveted field. Those who certainly do run the world through these means are subtle. “Indistinguishable from bullshit or an act of God” subtle. Besides, what can’t you explain away by chance or psychosis?
Minds may be networked, the occult society which moderates this is lawless, immoral, and can hear every thought (and memory) in your head.
This PDF is a funsy lay guide. Psychonaught is how I got started. Power is not so innocent.
K0balt 18 days ago [-]
I did some dabbling in astral travel when I was in my late teens, and diligently studied Abramelin methods as well as those of Crowley et al. My adventures in such were brought to an abrupt halt when I can only say that I experienced either a one time, transient psychotic break or encountered things which I was vigorously convinced needed no more of my tender attention.
These experiences, tempered by time and augmented by some other observed and documented phenomenon in my life, led me to reanalyze the Abramelin translations in an effort to elucidate the key elements and remove the hocus-pocus aspects.
The hypotheses that I currently hold is that if there is anything to any of this besides distorted perception, it is implicit in a many-worlds observation, in that the bandwidth of probabilities within which we can observe may be somewhat malleable through the appropriate application of isolation from entangling casual interactions and intentional observation. We see some support for this hypothesis through probability manipulation vis-a-vis casimir fields and restrictive cavities.
Adjacent to this is a hypothesis that the web of electromagnetic fields carrying data in which most of us are intertwined, along with other forms of instantaneous communication makes casual isolation exceptionally difficult in the 21st century, as causal relationships leak in even in the subtle vibrations of water molecules or anything else that might respond, down to a quantum scale, to information carrying RF signals. This could, in concept, limit efforts to broaden the spectra of observable universes in a similar way that casimir cavities limit the casimir force experienced within. By introducing causal entanglements, we narrow the possible observations.
Anyway, my intrinsic belief is that the universe is dark, and cold, and full of terrors lol. Explore carefully, kids.
overu589 18 days ago [-]
Yes, most of what is experienced is curated. Large parts of our minds evolved to suppress and filter raw perception, that it does not drive us mad and we can think with clear purpose upon consciously important issues (whatever they may be.)
The first years would be spent quieting the mind, though the real work is rigorous and exhausting.
Aside from the immense crevasse which cuts one off from even perceiving the many subtle distinctions, those experientially adept may merely manipulate your perception. In fact, without an uplift curating your experience you could not in a thousand years stumble upon Power yourself.
Other than the immense difficulty, it really is kind of tame. The wormholes are in our heads. Some are masters in creating their own hyperdimensional space (which the flat lander may have trouble comprehending.) this may be every bit as amazing as generative AI creating an HD interactive experience, or a fuzzy blob in the back of the mind which leaves you with a forever haunting impression.
Anything substantive will be trivialized or made taboo (called “insane” ending all argument.)
And dark designs do thrive in the shadow of humanity’s incredulity.
“Yes Virginia, magic does exist in the world; like all things beautiful, dark minds covet and it is the innocent who pay.”
mionhe 18 days ago [-]
> Anyway, my intrinsic belief is that the universe is dark, and cold, and full of terrors lol. Explore carefully, kids.
Lovecraft felt the same way. Belief in something greater, but something so alien that it cannot be understood in human terms, is a mark of his time period.
There's a lot of that out there, but there's a lot of the opposite as well. There is brilliant, beautiful light and love. My experience is that the light dispels the dark.
overu589 18 days ago [-]
Dark is devouring the light.
The spiritual communities are going bonkers about lizard people and other occult (and worse), not because that is actually true rather a psyop spiritual battle is boggling minds from within.
The immoral and corrupt know they can trust (and will “pay”) each other. The moral will be ridiculed or prescribed antipsychotics for their troubles.
You say otherwise because that was the old teaching, that is what you want to believe, and no one has made trouble for you otherwise.
The light and love is precious, it must be nurtured and maintained, protected. The modern mind (comfortable, convenient, and convinced it’s all a state of mind) just doesn’t have the tenacity of will to endure the mounting struggles. Not at scale anyhow.
mionhe 17 days ago [-]
> You say otherwise because that was the old teaching, that is what you want to believe, and no one has made trouble for you otherwise.
Nope. I say otherwise because despite experiencing plenty of trouble this is what I've seen.
Yes, things feel pretty grim in the world right now. Yes, people are very focused on the darkness of the world, and if they aren't now just wait because someone will point it out to them.
Despite that there is still light in the world. You can see it more easily on the 1x1 level, with people going out of their way to care for others. People you don't really have giving to those who have even less.
Darkness isn't a force, after all: it's just the absence of light.
overu589 17 days ago [-]
> Darkness isn't a force, after all: it's just the absence of light.
Are you sure? From a perspective it appears darkness is drinking away the light to light’s last embers.
keisborg 18 days ago [-]
I am curious of up to which level this manual is sound and become crazy
phoronixrly 18 days ago [-]
The art looks cool, not sure about the rest...
moralestapia 18 days ago [-]
Did Chapter 5 ever get released?
shortrounddev2 18 days ago [-]
I don't believe in any of this but I miss the days when the internet was FULL of shit like this
Modified3019 18 days ago [-]
This is some legitimately impressive bullshit
isoprophlex 18 days ago [-]
A sufficiently advanced bullshit is indistinguishable from magic, apparently
I have had some success. a lot of it is visualizing and “believing” any way you possibly can, I think much of the ritual in stuff like this is to get you into whatever state is needed to trick your body or mind into doing something, at least that’s how I think it “works.” The author seems kind of aware of this and it seems to borrow many similar concepts as the stuff I’ve read, but with much more occultish ritual.
And that is when you realize they aren't some wise thinkers describing deep understanding of the human mind in more poetic terms, they are deluded or crackpots thinking they can fling spells at each other if they just beleive hard enough.
Is there some insight that they may have hit on in their collective tinkering? Possibly yes, just like the alchemists had really discovered some good bits of chemistry despite being completely misguided as well. But unless and until someone goes in and creates a true science out of their mumbo-jumbo, it's not something most people should spend their time on, lest they end up wasting time on the many parts that don't work.
And just to be clear, I'm strictly referring to things like meditation as a way to change your own mindset, not any of the silly concepts that assume the mind is somehow able to move atoms around without emitting radiation.
As to the other question, it's irrelevant to this discussion (but no, I don't draw such a distinction, except insofar as recognizing that the neurons in the arm will not normally fire to create a movement in the arm without first receiving a signal from neurons in the spine or brain, in healthy people).
Ultimately my point is that the only way a person can influence the broader world is by emitting radiation in measurable ways, and the only way they can find out about the broader world is by receiving radiation. So a person in an EM shielded, inertially dampened, sound proofed room with no one to talk to can't view the city of Jerusalem from above, regardless of how hard they concentrate or believe they can.
These are metaphysical phenomena.
The other parts of "magic", such as the ability to view things that someone else is viewing without emitting or receiving electromagnetic waves are clearly fantasies, not in the purview of any science.
Oddly though every such thing that “defies explanation” also defies being reproducible in controlled experiments.
That’s the thing a about non scientific stuff like this. If it actually worked it would literally just be science and we would be able to reproduce it.
If you buy a magic moon rock that lets you only roll 6’s on dice, you would equally be left feeling that the 1/6 of the time that it worked was proof enough to you that it was actually true, because you bought yourself a bias along side the useless rock.
Same is true a lot with things like yoga for anything outside the Pilates component, it only “works” if you dedicate enough time and money to it, at which point you’re just biased because you don’t want to feel you’ve wasted your time and money. Sure 1/20 might find that it “cured” their illness, but only if that’s the rate of improvement in a control group as well.
skepticism is healthy but if you discard things out of bias immediately without looking further, you’re kind of practicing the same kind of ignorance that leads to these types of superstitions.
It is almost entirely explained by three things:
1. Some ability of the mind to interact with the effect of the medication - such as heart rate being tied to mood (so that being administered a heart-rate reducing drug in a menacing way could have the effects of the drug masked by your heart rate increasing because of your anxiety), or when the effect itself is tied to mental phenomena (depression, pain, nausea, etc). Apart from psychoactive drugs, this only significantly impacts a relatively small amount of drugs, since only a small amount of biomarkers are very directly tied to mental states - heart rate, blood pressure, maybe a handful of others. There may also be a smaller effect on longer term treatments of other kinds due to the myriad effects of stress/anxiety on various other systems in the body, that may have interactions with more complex biomarkers as well, especially in the longer term.
2. The experimental setup being impacted more or less knowingly by people based on their pre-conceived notions. This can take many forms, from outright doctoring the recorded data to fit the desired outcome, to much more subtle effects like differences in the level of care, differences in how well the patients follow the prescribed protocol, and many others. None of these are "real" effects, they only affect the relevance and quality of the data being collected. For example, if patients have a way of finding out they are in the placebo wing, they may drop out at a higher rate, and thus the data may show that the patients who stuck out had a higher benefit than the ones on the control wing simply because of that skew.
3. Noise in the disease itself - sometimes, people spontaneously heal or improve from various conditions on various fronts without any intervention whatsoever, and any medical intervention has to be compared to this baseline level. This is similar to the problem of checking if a code fix actually addresses a hard to reproduce bug.
There is no proof whatsoever of the placebo effect being some ability to heal the body through belief (again, beyond certain mental phenomena, either related to mental illness or pain or nausea relief). It is simply a matter of noise and measurement artifacts for the vast majority of studies.
Yes, this is the place where the placebo (and nocebo) effect was observed and where it has an impact.
> But noise in how the disease naturally progresses is also split amongst control and experimental groups, and so the important test is the control group compared to people with no treatment at all, or even unwitting of their observation.
It's basically never possible to do a study comparing a new medication to no treatment, mostly on ethical grounds (beyond the complicated logistics of studying people outside of clinical settings). There are very few diseases for which we have no treatment whatsoever, so it's very rarely ethically acceptable to compare between offering a medication vs no treatment.
There’s a spooky coherence in the descriptions and that’s what makes it such a fascinating read. The spin that this work puts on the subject - calling this “technology” and likening it to programming adds to this.
To anyone honestly wanting to take this for a spin, I recommend reading the biography of Aleister Crowley first. It’s an interesting read in itself and it also illustrates the risks/dangers. Pictures speak a thousand words.
I think Buddhists figured it out (at least some of them). For example metta practice could be thought of as a magick that is specifically aimed toward wholesome happiness.
Once I could personally meet or just see people (in person or otherwise) that attempted this kind of rewiring of your synapses I realized how deeply unwell they really are.
And for the untrained eye, your point takes it away: Have a hard look at folks who tried (like Crowley, probably the most documented case) and be wary of following advice on the web that puts your mental health at risk, even on HN.
One thing that makes me wonder: how does intentionally created psychosis compare to involuntary one? Can science study those things to have better understanding of mental health and actually help people?
Then I read a book called Foucault's Pendulum by one Umberto Eco, and that's how I realised all the magick stuff was a circus and the people peddling it charlatans and clowns. Sometimes you just have to look at the funny side of all the self-serious mediums and gurus and teachers and spend a few days laughing at their bullshit before your mind finally decides the "teachings" are really just garbage.
Hear hear. Your comment reminded me of when Christopher Lee said, "Never get involved in the occult. You'll not only lose your mind, but you'll lose your soul." [^0]
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[^0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRVQD4FKPrY
Crowley on the other hand is basically a trust fund kid rebelling against Victorian and Christian morality. I don't think what he was doing makes all that much sense in a secular society because much of the taboo is lost.
I’m currently leaning towards believing that learning intense focus through meditation + setting intentions for yourself in that state is genuinely useful, just like rituals are (saying “yes” to your partner in front of friends and family it changes you). But the border between it and “I’m a trans dimensional shaman in psychiatric A&E” is a bit to thin for my liking.
There's also a degree of danger, believing your dreams tell you the future is one thing but if you immerse yourself in occult, text about daemons, start believing they might have their own agendas - and I mean really believe - you can see how dangerous it can get.
And of course there are plenty of schizophrenics who claim to hear the voice of God and claim to be doing His will, something which might have gotten one canonized centuries ago, but no one pathologizes Christianity when that happens. If we're going to consider magical thinking normal in one sense, we should consider it normal in every sense, because the only difference between "religious" and "occult" practice is cultural acceptance.
Or else accept that all of it is equally ridiculous, that Aleister Crowley is no more divine or absurd than the Pope.
Practicing Christians will congregate weekly, reinforce their beliefs, chat about them, confess to the same priest - all of this stops going into crazy corners of the belief space. Also, normal to be openly Christian (at least where I'm from) and people have vague ideas about which beliefs are roughly in that category - and can call out deviations.
I'm basing this all on my guesses to be clear! Still curious to see if others have similar thoughts.
You still get similar community in a lot of alternative spirituality / occult practices but from slices of that community I've been exposed to it does focus much more on personal exploration and opens the door to the recursive degeneration that may lead to.
Many people, even many believers, certainly pathologize those that become too embroiled in Christian beliefs. Sure, they admire the deeply devout priest or nun or monk or who is spending their whole life in the Church. But if that person starts telling them that God is speaking to them, or that God is showing them far off events, or that they can pray to obtain physical results directly - they way this book suggests is possible - they will certainly take a few steps back and stop listening so intently.
Not to mention, there are vast differences between religious and occult practices. While religious people do sometimes pray for material improvements to their life, many religious practices are more moral or social rather than magical. People eat a certain way because they believe this is what they believe is the right thing to do, they help the poor or others in their communities, they worship their god or gods just because.
Wishing to live a good life because you believe that will guarantee you'll have a good after-life (i.e. religion in a nutshell) is extremely different from performing spells that you think will fix your life here and now (occult magical practices).
If you had a magic gun with unlimited ammo would you rule the world? No.
For the same reason, AGI/ASI is not really a threat to humanity.
You might say Elon Musk doesn't seem like the type and he's the richest (known) man in the world! But power isn't really about having money. Money can help with power but it will not automatically give you power. A scrawny nerd that got rich quick will not attract supermodels or sway elections at first until he learns to put the money to use towards those goals.
I haven't tried magick personally so can't attest to its effectiveness but I've had periods in my life where a ton of synchronicities happened that blew my mind away so much that I am now convinced the spiritual world is very much real. I just am hesitant to go into magick because it is touted as a tool to get what "you"(ego) want and that doesn't seem wise. Forcing reality to suit your ego's needs even if possible seems bad to me.
And there are... downsides to messing with such forces. There was a cult called Leverage that tried to exploit magick and most of them ended up having psychotic breaks.
It's called a spy sattelite.
My take is that either ESP works to some extent, or maybe we want our adversaries to think it does.
OTOH, I’ve seen some shit that I can’t explain except by just making up an explanation that seems more stupid than the paranormal explanation, so I tend on the side of “probably more to reality than we conventionally think”.
Minds may be networked, the occult society which moderates this is lawless, immoral, and can hear every thought (and memory) in your head.
This PDF is a funsy lay guide. Psychonaught is how I got started. Power is not so innocent.
These experiences, tempered by time and augmented by some other observed and documented phenomenon in my life, led me to reanalyze the Abramelin translations in an effort to elucidate the key elements and remove the hocus-pocus aspects.
The hypotheses that I currently hold is that if there is anything to any of this besides distorted perception, it is implicit in a many-worlds observation, in that the bandwidth of probabilities within which we can observe may be somewhat malleable through the appropriate application of isolation from entangling casual interactions and intentional observation. We see some support for this hypothesis through probability manipulation vis-a-vis casimir fields and restrictive cavities.
Adjacent to this is a hypothesis that the web of electromagnetic fields carrying data in which most of us are intertwined, along with other forms of instantaneous communication makes casual isolation exceptionally difficult in the 21st century, as causal relationships leak in even in the subtle vibrations of water molecules or anything else that might respond, down to a quantum scale, to information carrying RF signals. This could, in concept, limit efforts to broaden the spectra of observable universes in a similar way that casimir cavities limit the casimir force experienced within. By introducing causal entanglements, we narrow the possible observations.
Anyway, my intrinsic belief is that the universe is dark, and cold, and full of terrors lol. Explore carefully, kids.
The first years would be spent quieting the mind, though the real work is rigorous and exhausting.
Aside from the immense crevasse which cuts one off from even perceiving the many subtle distinctions, those experientially adept may merely manipulate your perception. In fact, without an uplift curating your experience you could not in a thousand years stumble upon Power yourself.
Other than the immense difficulty, it really is kind of tame. The wormholes are in our heads. Some are masters in creating their own hyperdimensional space (which the flat lander may have trouble comprehending.) this may be every bit as amazing as generative AI creating an HD interactive experience, or a fuzzy blob in the back of the mind which leaves you with a forever haunting impression.
Anything substantive will be trivialized or made taboo (called “insane” ending all argument.)
And dark designs do thrive in the shadow of humanity’s incredulity.
“Yes Virginia, magic does exist in the world; like all things beautiful, dark minds covet and it is the innocent who pay.”
Lovecraft felt the same way. Belief in something greater, but something so alien that it cannot be understood in human terms, is a mark of his time period.
There's a lot of that out there, but there's a lot of the opposite as well. There is brilliant, beautiful light and love. My experience is that the light dispels the dark.
The spiritual communities are going bonkers about lizard people and other occult (and worse), not because that is actually true rather a psyop spiritual battle is boggling minds from within.
The immoral and corrupt know they can trust (and will “pay”) each other. The moral will be ridiculed or prescribed antipsychotics for their troubles.
You say otherwise because that was the old teaching, that is what you want to believe, and no one has made trouble for you otherwise.
The light and love is precious, it must be nurtured and maintained, protected. The modern mind (comfortable, convenient, and convinced it’s all a state of mind) just doesn’t have the tenacity of will to endure the mounting struggles. Not at scale anyhow.
Nope. I say otherwise because despite experiencing plenty of trouble this is what I've seen.
Yes, things feel pretty grim in the world right now. Yes, people are very focused on the darkness of the world, and if they aren't now just wait because someone will point it out to them.
Despite that there is still light in the world. You can see it more easily on the 1x1 level, with people going out of their way to care for others. People you don't really have giving to those who have even less.
Darkness isn't a force, after all: it's just the absence of light.
Are you sure? From a perspective it appears darkness is drinking away the light to light’s last embers.