Ch. 6 The Flight From Reason & The Cult of Instruments (3/9-3/15)

Hannah

Weather permitting, leave the house, go outside to the street and look around. How much of what you see would have existed if humans had not designed and built it? How much that "just grew there" would look different if humans had not cultivated and encouraged (or polluted) it?
Look at the sky. If you can distinguish stars from planets, can identify some of them, etc., try to forget this knowledge and imagine how the sky looks to very intelligent animals without human science. Then look at it again with your knowledge of astronomy back in focus.
If a meteor passes, how does it make you feel when trying to see without scientific glosses? How differently do you feel when you allow yourself to remember what you know of meteors?
Go back inside and discuss this:

If all TV shows about the police (about 20 a week in most areas) went off the air and instead we had an equal number of TV shows about landlords, would this change the average American reality-tunnel?

In how many ways would the reality-tunnel change?

What would Americans "see" (or remember) that they now tend to ignore? What would they become less aware of? What would they become much more aware of?

Try to figure out why there are so many TV shows about police and virtually no shows about landlords.

Who decides this? Why have they decided it this way? (Attempt to avoid paranoid speculations or grandiose conspiracy theories, if at all possible.)

Hannah

Exercise 4 is so important right now in our society where we are all tapped into the hive mind with greater intensity. I imagine in the past, with smaller communities and limited information sources, we experienced a similar funneling of perception dependent on our environment as we do today. But now, we are connected on a much larger scale, all the time, and the content we are seeing and reacting to influences entire nations of people. This book seems to be teaching critical thinking applied to the instrument that uses critical thinking! It goes one step beyond, and I think it is so important to teach this kind of meta-consciousness of our own perception to younger generations raised in AI.

jjones

@Hannah I completely agree. This is a chapter that has had profound consequences for my personal cognition. In fact, this is a chapter I wished my psychotherapy class in college read before anyone took and/or taught the class.

Without spoiling anything, wait until we get to "E-Prime" in future chapters!!

jjones

This is one of my favorite chapters of the book. There is a lot to unpack here.

RAW illustrates how linguistic features (especially limitations) determine not only how we describe Reality, but also how we experience Reality. Even more convoluted, we often make statements about Reality that cannot be tested against reality. He describes how so much of Philosophy has evolved as a process of weeding out these statements and axioms that cannot be tested, discovering that many of them do not survive reality testing.

As @hannah pointed out, this is most easily analogized with AI. AI has never actually experienced the physical world, yet it will spit out volumes about manifestation. Does this mean AI is intelligent, or does it mean that it can fabricate the illusion of intelligence? If you answer that AI is intelligent because it can spit out volumes about a topic, what if those volumes are filled with useless information? Does that still qualify as intelligence?

Humanity, quite often, displays this same uncertainty. In college, I met many who claimed to know exactly what was being described in the Psychology textbooks yet were perfectly unable to identify those same concepts in their own psyche and day to day life. Worse were people who claimed that their projection of those concepts was the entirety of those concepts, ignoring further nuances. In my daily life, there are people who claim to know everything there is to know about plumbing because they can describe a generic plumbing system. They have never actually performed any plumbing work, but still assert to my coworkers that they somehow know more than the plumber that they hired. It seems to be confusion of the map with the territory.

In many day-to-day interactions, I encounter people who claim that because their "map" is not as detailed as mine, mine must simply be wrong. What this is really pointing to is simply a disparity in the awareness of myself and the other (rather than any type of moralistic or egotistical reason that the Nephesh likes to mythologize and project). In my experience, this is typically because someone has decided within themselves that things "should be" a particular way. When their map of how things "should be" fails reality testing, people often resort to "Bad Faith". This is because it is easier to say that the world must be imperfect than it is for the Nephesh to admit that it could be wrong and course correct. As an individual's Bad Faith increases, their senses seem to dull, and they neglect the observation of their external environment. I suspect that this is because the Nephesh retreats further behind Bad Faith until the Bad Faith turns into Saturnian Lead. Ultimately, it means that an individual has decided to neglect the calibration of their instrument/map (their nervous system in this case) to justify their Bad Faith and protect their Ego.

Even in the case where I am comparing my map to someone else's of equal quality and similar terrain, differences in vocabulary further obfuscate that our maps describe the same thing and function the same. I cannot tell you how many arguments I've gotten into with friends only to realize that we were saying the same thing and had not properly understood each other’s definitions of terms. In cases like these, I have caught myself doing exactly what RAW describes in this chapter, asserting that my map and my variables must be correct and that the other's map must be flawed, otherwise they'd see what I saw. When I come to an agreement with the other, both of our maps are validated, and we now develop a wider vocabulary of terms to describe the terrain our maps illustrate. In other words, when more of our maps withstand reality testing and align with each other, they create a richer picture.

This is precisely why shared maps, such as those of the Tree of Life, can be so powerful and so dangerous. If understood properly and defined adequately, it provides a shared language and units of measurement that allow conversation to flow. If misunderstood, it is no different from the example I gave in a previous paragraph of someone whose map that does not survive reality testing. In those latter cases, these people appear solipsistic and delusional. "Every religion, for instance, seems to other religions (and nonbelievers) the result of logical deductions from axioms that just don't fit this universe." (pg. 61).

Crowley, in Porta Lucis, is abundantly clear that a proper Thelemite respects the maps of other religions, even if that Thelemite does not agree with the map. I suspect that this is partly explained by the reasons described in this chapter of Quantum Psychology. A map (religious, political, or otherwise) is ultimately human-made and therefore is bound by the same limitations that any other instrument is. It is a system of units that serve as convenience to talk about reality, but do not replace the ineffable reality. This is no different than me saying that "Nothing is real until it manifests in Assiah," not unlike what Jim says in Chapter 16 of 776 1/2. So one of the safeguards Crowley builds into his system is this acknowledgement that (no matter how much richer of a map it is) a map is just a map.

This implies that even the Qabalah or Thelema is subject to the same problems that any other map is subject to. Qabalah is a system that, relative to itself, is coherent and well developed but holds no inherent reality in the face of "Things as They Really Are". There is no "figuring everything out," there are only closer approximations (like Pi or the Golden Mean) to the truth.

This was a difficult pill for me to swallow at first given how much Qabalah is written about being oh-so Holy and Divinely created. Instead, it means that things such as the Hebrew alphabet, the Tree of Life, and any other glyph included in the Qabalah is not any more special than the glyphs the comprise a math textbook, or a tool used for measuring electricity. In fact, I know many people who harness the same or even more intellectual rigor than me to study Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Those same people find me to be strange for wasting my intellectual abilities on Qabalistic nonsense.

The advantage that Qabalah does have over mathematical symbols or Lord of the Rings, however, is that we have centuries of data collected from the users of Qabalah that provide a much clearer map than a map made of mathematical symbols. This is the basic idea behind “Tradition." There is nothing inherently special about one tradition over another outside of "Success is thy proof." Qabalah has survived centuries of reality testing (to greater and lesser degrees depending on the operator) and puts the objects that obscure reality from the operator front and center. Given that the Qabalah is such a transparent map, it succeeds in showing the operator what they must get over if they wish to ever perceive things as they are.

But this also means that we are not inherently exceptional or special for practicing Qabalah. In fact, to assert exceptionalism over non-initiates for being unaware of Qabalah is precisely the same thing RAW describes in the quote above. It basically is saying, "I must be better than you because I have better variables and I can judge you for things that you've never told me to hold you accountable for!" Not far off from a Christian telling me that I will go to Hell unless I abide by their Law