Goetic "Demons"
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The Mechanics of the Facial Reflection-Distortion Technique
R. Eugene Laughlin
The visual effects associated with this evocative magick (or scrying) technique take advantage of a little eye physiology and the mechanics of perception. First, we learn to stare for extended periods without blinking. This causes classic eye-strain, which means that the muscles of the eye are overworked, just as any muscle in your body can be overworked.
The most critical muscles of interest here are the tiny ciliary muscles that control lens accommodation. When these muscles become strained it becomes increasingly difficult to focus the eye and attain a sharp visual image. For dark mirror scrying, sharp vision of the mirror surface prevents the desired visual effects from happening, or will end ongoing visual effects if attained at some point during a working. So we intentionally strain the ciliary muscles to make sharp focus less likely.
Another eye-specific operative is more difficult to explain: rhodopsin, or visual purple. I won't attempt a full explanation here. The short version is that rhodopsin is involved in transducing the very few photons that hit the retina under very low-light levels. In other words, the rhodopsin system is designed to make the most of the very little visual information we get in very dim light by amplifying the signal sent into our perceptual machinery. Because we're doing dark mirror work in an extremely dim environment, we're exploiting the rhodopsin system for all it's worth.
Perception tends to be experienced internally as a smooth and continuous representation of the environment, but in reality the neural structures involved in perception receive input in small samples or snapshots, with real gaps of a couple of milliseconds in the information coming in from the environment. It doesn't seem like an efficient system at first flush, until you realize that the most important function of perception is to detect changes in the environment. For that function, it's easier to compare snapshot to snapshot than it is to monitor a continuous stream.
So what we experience as a perception of the environment is really an internal reconstruction based on the samples we get and what's "most likely to be there" given the most recent samples and our general history of experience. In other words, rather than always having a faithful representation of the environment, perception tends to be a probabilistic affair. This is one of the reasons we are prone to various perceptual illusions. Previous experience and the quality of current sensory input interact to produce the most likely precept.
Now we can combine these factors (along with the hand-held candles) into an explanation of how dark mirror scrying works on a mundane level. First we use a mirror that gives us a dim, non-distinct reflection, and we strain the eye muscles to prevent sharp focus, which degrades the visual image further. Then we make the environment extremely dim, so that the dim and degraded image that hits the eye will be maximally amplified by the rhodopsin system. So what's actually reaching our perceptual machinery at this point is a strong signal of a much distorted image in the general shape of a face, probably scarcely recognizable as our own face.
Remember that we said that perception works by filling in the real gaps in the actual sensory information coming in with probabilistic representations based on past experience, and that the system is tuned specifically to detect changes. The hand-held candles provide a constantly changing image, because no matter how we try, we cannot hold our hands perfectly still. Our head will be weaving around a bit too, adding to a continually shifting image.
All of the pieces are in place now. We have a highly degraded but also highly amplified signal coming into our perceptual machinery; the image is constantly undergoing subtle changes in form, causing the perceptual mechanisms to work overtime to update the representation it builds.
The most common report under these conditions is something of a monster-like face, though the reasons for this are not perfectly. What is clear is that the perceptual machinery is doing the best it can with what's its getting. Once the image begins to morph, it becomes a matter of preparation, skill, and will to use the resulting image as a functional magical tool, but that is beyond the scope of a mechanical discussion.
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93
"And it would be wise to do a blind test so that the magician does not know which if any sensors are present, and a double blind would be to not let the scientist know what the ritual is meant to do. "
Now we are doing controlled tests of magical invocation and evocation? I find such a notion fundamentally delusional.
Objective study of subjective experience and spiritual evolution may seem like a very tempting and reassuring idea, but it goes utterly against the basic premises of magick, which is a spiritual practice to be used to lead us to wild freedom, not to reams of laboratory data.
93 93/93,
EM
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
@jw said
"Modern science's credence is limited to a segment of society willing to accept its fundamental premises (which is not--for better or worse--100%). This includes the notion that independent verification of results is somehow meaningful. "
I love the analogy that follows. I don't want to muck it up by making a response in its terms. Also, I don't want to get too far off the topic of goetic demons.
You implied earlier in this thread that scientists' error is a cause for distrusting the scientific method. The method must be distinguished from the resulting theories of science. The method is only as powerful as the number and degree to which variables can be controlled. Independent verification is just a way of controlling another variable. (human error.)Obviously, science is tied to physical factors, and doesn't get to any underlying "truthiness" about a thing or process. However, when applied to the right (limited) subject matter, it represents a kind of knowledge independent of one's "belief" on the matter. The resulting theories of science are all about physcial phenomena, and completely lose their meaning when applied elsewhere. (Sorry string theorists.)
I could just as easily make a correlation between the theory of evolution and goetic demons, saying that they change over time and such. However, this idea only correlates to the theory of evolution. I've just done a little bait and switch: the theory of evolution being nearly airtight to the subject matter to which it applies, but goetic demons having no DNA and no opportunity for random mutation. My theory just sounds good because the idea already exists in a powerful form. But the reason that it is powerful totally rests on the results of specific experiments. If it did not, the theory of evolution would have been discarded long ago, and we proabably wouldn't even know about it to use it in a correlative sense.
The theories of science, thankfully, involve subject matter that has controllable variables, because such are the subjects choosen by scientists. When extrapolated beyond this, they completely loose their power, and are just as looney as any other idea. We shouldn't confuse limitations of applicability of a method with inherent limitations of a method itself.
Love is the law, love under will.
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ALL PHENOMENA ARE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA!
My subjective phenomena = your objective observation of my brain matter.
If I see a spirit, that vision IS the firing pattern of neural activity in my cortex.
There is absolutely no phenomena that does not reduce to physics.
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@Froclown said
"ALL PHENOMENA ARE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA! "
No. To limit "ALL PHENOMENA" to the physical manifestation is very obtuse.
@Froclown said
"There is absolutely no phenomena that does not reduce to physics."
Physics intends to explain matter, energy and their interactions, but it is really just one way the Spirit manifests. You put the cart before the horse. All phenomena streams from Atziluth and manifests physically in Assiah.
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How much physics do you know? How do you define physics?
Life is just a theory, with a mind that makes up patterns from the input of the senses.
If the instrument collecting the data is flawed or insufficient, the pattern is not complete, and the meaning of the pattern can be misconstrued.
There is the theory, which most of us espouse to, that the human body can be transmuted into a more finely tuned instrument, able to detect layers of energy that have been hidden from a coarse instrument.
You have better information when you can see gradations of colors .Or better gradations of sound.
In L.V.X.,
chrys333 -
Speaking of 'hidden things' which we can not prove and yet accept on faith via deduction: neither the future or the past are observable, nor is the present outside of our direct experience, yet we have no trouble believing events in time exist or that objective phenomena expands beyond our awareness. These are deductions based on probabilities and Occam's Razor. Likewise, the basic 'stuff' of physicality is no more than probability at the most essential level of analysis.
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Froclown:
Read about Idealism.
I suggest "Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonus" by George Berkeley.
It might help balance your obviously Materialist way of looking at things.
I am not saying Idealism is "more true" or "true while the converse is false;" Im saying its worth considering and I personally tend towards it over materialism.
65 & 210,
111-418 -
I know about Idealism, perhaps you should read Karl Marx' critique of Hegel.
The the Kantian distinction between Phenomena and Nuemena, which along with Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, was progressed by Martin Heidegger into a denial of metaphysical means to exploring Ontology.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tracticus, in which he first develops logical positivism, and Thomas Khun (a student of Heideggers ontology) who developed the notion of paradigm change within the philosophy of science.
Further we have the postmodernist (deconstructionist like Lecan and Dierda), who attempted to defeat Logical positivism with Goedelian statements and such, only to find Neo-positiveism rise from the ashes.
And it is along the same vein of these Neo-positivists that I set my bearings.
matter and entities are logical constructs this is true, but they are structurally similar to that which the represent, even though subject to malleability and distortion.
On the nature of semantic constructs and structural similarity, see Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity.
Perhaps once you start to digest that you can understand clearly Crowley's 0=2 ontology, which is really an exposition on the Theravada Buddhist's state of nirvana. (an epistemic state, rather that an ontological one)
And look close at the intro to the Goetia, where Crowley explains the nature of spirits, in terms no scientist or skeptic will dismiss without research into the subject.
The motto af the A.'.A.'. "our method is science our aim is religion"
This passage "In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them."
and finally from confessions, Crowley an the Gnostic mass:
I resolved that my Ritual should celebrate the sublimity of the operation of universal forces without introducing disputable metaphysical theories. I would neither make nor imply any statement about nature which would not be endorsed by the most materialistic man of science. On the surface this may sound difficult; but in practice I found it perfectly simple to combine the most rigidly rational conceptions of phenomena with the most exalted and enthusiastic celebration of their sublimity.so, it seems that magic and mysticism can very well be expressed scientifically, without any element of faith in bazaar entities or abstract, poetic, allegorical, or otherwise unfamiliar metaphysics. As such, I fail to see of what use it is to continue the use of fairy tales, which have little to no practical ability for progression. It seems like continuing to use roman numerals, which are useless for advanced mathematic, for aesthetic reasons.
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Crowley had a nice motto for the A.'.A.'. which reflected this modern age as well as his own tendencies for analysis which he damn well knew were relative expositions and ultimately hopeless, but not entirely fruitless, attempts to describe what lay beyond that relativity; the beyond-logic numinous which he often did express with "faith in bizarre entities or abstract, poetic, allegorical, or otherwise unfamiliar metaphysics."
If he felt as you felt, he would have never been a magician. A magician draws a circle in which to work, but the real power comes from knowing that that circle represents a relative universe in which we can make the empty potential of space wiggle a bit and become impregnated with our seed. The Qabalah and the intellect work together to eventually exhaust and collapse awareness into the recognition of the state of 0=2, which is experience of the nondual in duality, a logical inconsistency. And there is no physical 'proof' to such a concept possible within the realm of logic, since both the physical realm and the logical realm are only relative realities, the circle of the magician. 0=2 is both the circle and what's beyond the circle. Any physical thing, like a word definition, is empty of inherent reality. Why? Because! That is the answer he gives and it is the truth. Emptiness is form and form is emptiness.
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0=2
and concept (word, thought, emotion, perception) only has meaning in relation to what it is not.
A letter only exists because in is distinguished from and contrasted with the white background.
Thus every particular thought of phenomena in our mind only has existence for us in relation to all other thought which are not that particular thought.
However when we no longer draw a distinction between a particular thought and its opposite (negation) we experience nothingness. All thought at once is the annihilation of the thought process.
Thus thought A + thought not A = 0.
That 0 is all possible thought, from which all actual thought come by contrasting one with the others.
Perception is also thought, that is conscious brain activity.
just because in the 0 state conscious symbolic though stops manifesting phenomena, it does not make the actual world vanish. The body is still there, the heart still beats, the lungs exchange oxygen, and all is governed by the physical non-conscious functions of the brain.
so yes, this non-dual state is directly connected to the physical world without conscious symbolic manifestations, however the actual material substrata (not our brains models of it) continue to exist. This material substrata transcends the subjective models in the mind, but it has rules, limits and a nature that is analogous to the conscious perceptual world of material entities.
If the actual and the seeming were not analogous to a high degree we would all die, but luckily billions of years worth of evolution have killed off most of the genetic traits that build brains that poorly model their environments. Excellent models are still models, and unusually events can still cause strange models.
but more or less the transcendental must mirror the apparent. Thus I clam Transcendental materialism. Or perhaps Trans-cognitive materialism.
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Any physical aspect is just like a word, a temporary relative phenomena dependent upon the everything, which is the void, relatively empty and full of potential. There are rules we perceive which exist in time, in the relative realm you're attempting to use as a model or the 'glue' of the bigger picture.
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ok, everything you said complete gobbelty-gook.
Physical substance is the medium in which information subsists. The mind is information, that models and symbolically represents physical substances and patters of substances in space-time.
The brain is made of matter which represents other types of matter and patterns of matter in patterns made of brain matter.
Just as cyberspace only exists as patterns of chemical elements in semiconductors, so to does "inner-space" only exist as patters of brain matter.
A whirl pool is nothing more than moving water, and a thought is nothing more than moving brain matter.
All things exist in time and thus all things are temporary. The only thing that is eternal is the whole universe, which thought its parts change with time, it transcends changes. Just as a human transcends his changing cells.
The 0=2 only refers to the mind, not the brain. The brain is the medium that moves, the mind is the motion.
The brain (mind prior to thought) is the 0 the thoughts are the 2.
The 0 is called by Heidegger, the nothing, which is the way BEING itself is revealed to Dasein (subject conscious awareness).
All thoughts are a breaking apart of the 0, the highest synthesis of all categories. Thought only come to awareness when broken into categories A or not A. but A and not A is the unthought source of both the potential to think A or not A.
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@Froclown said
"so, it seems that magic and mysticism can very well be expressed scientifically, without any element of faith in bazaar entities or abstract, poetic, allegorical, or otherwise unfamiliar metaphysics. As such, I fail to see of what use it is to continue the use of fairy tales, which have little to no practical ability for progression. It seems like continuing to use roman numerals, which are useless for advanced mathematic, for aesthetic reasons."
First of all you are ignorant of the sociological potential of language, symbols, and cultural history on the mind. Second, some ideas are propagated genetically (instinct). I wonder how many generations does it take to get sensory information encoded, and if there is an instinctual response (psychological or otherwise) to certain auditory or visual stimuli. Third, you are speculating about the scientific correlation of mystical experiences you may have had - and extending your speculation to cover experiences you haven't had. There's nothing wrong with that; unless of course you intend to prove that your theories aren't bullshit.
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@Froclown said
"ok, everything you said complete gobbelty-gook.
"By everything else you've said, it's obvious this would be your interpretation, which is why I haven't bothered to write more than a couple sentences at a time. More detail is waste of effort at this point. Crowley was most prolific on this subject, but his gigantic body of work has obviously not phased you, so I won't bother trying.
You might want to start by examining any word in the dictionary and see how each word depends on another until eventually you find that you're going in a circle where two words mutually define each other such as "boring: weary, tiresome" and "tiresome: boring, wearisome" and "weary: tiresome, boring." and so are actually meaningless relative terms. Yet the experience is true enough indeed, which even now, I have verified for myself through the relative experience of this exchange.
So, too, with physics, the actual science that deals with matter, energy, motion, and force, which ultimately reduces to probabilities and potentialities which are interpreted as definitive experiences and substances in time and space by relative phenomena of awareness.
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again with this. I admit that language forms an semantic network where all words are inter-related an in a sense circular.
The tie down points of language are to the direct response or the nervous system. The automatic reactions of the body, which words only seek to define and explain. Those automatic responses are a direct cause and effect relation between the physical body and whatever physical entity bumps into it.
The "power" of words and symbols is also the interaction of physical matter with the physical brain. A word is a vibration in physical air, or a set of shapes drown with physical ink on physical paper, etc.
Those physical patters reflect light (entities called photons) which physically contact the cells in the eye, causing them to physically emit chemicals and electrical signals, that transmit through the physical brain, which physically sends a pulse to the muscles, which physically contract and move bones, which physically manipulate pens, and produce more ink shapes.
These physical entities (words, symbols, etc) change the physical structure of the brain, just as typing letters on a PC changes its processor state. These changes have nothing to do with genetic evolution across generations, as the brain has evolved to the point where it is sensitive to symbols and words, already.
The gene expression in individual neurons comes into play, as each synaptic fire alters the cell to add or remove receptor sites, which is a gene controlled process. But the cell DNA does not change, just which bits of DNA it uses.
And Enough of the probability fields, that only matters in Quantum mechanics, and its obvious you don't really understand it.
Here is a hint The probability field is a result of squaring the wave function that one gets by applying Schroedinger's equations to the evolution of quantum superposition prior to measurement. Thus it starts with an unknown and ends with an unknown. Until the actual measurement is made the best one can do is predict the possible out comes of a measurement at a particular time, with in an uncertain field of probability.
Just because quantum parts are weird and act as if this uncertainty is actually the case, rather than a mathematical guess, has no bearing on large scale physical events. Maybe they will find a better mathematics sometime, but the math we have now makes predictions, but can't explain what is actually going on.
Its not as if just because I can't see whats going on in my fridge with the door shut, that means jack frost is in these getting it on with my lasagna. Or some such supernatural bullshit.
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93,
Froclown, you wrote:
"And Enough of the probability fields, that only matters in Quantum mechanics, and its obvious you don't really understand it. "
Quantum mechanics is something I see cited often by people who want to impress others that those others understand nothing, or close to nothing. I wouldn't argue the point, since not only do I understand little about it, I don't particularly care to. Anything I have read indicates that at present it is a field of scientific study that is in an intermediate state, fascinating and frustrating to physicists in equal measure. Drawing firm conclusions regarding human consciousness around the ideas of quantum mechanics is just as dubious as somebody citing their dream material as evidence of a disaster or triumph to come.
You expound at great length, yet over-simplify so much. To cite just one example, on Wednesday you gave us your brief overview of philosophical evolution through the 20th Century. Among other arguable statements, you cited Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (the name of which you mangled as "Tracticus"), stating it was the text "In which he first develops logical positivism". Wittgenstein was critical of most of the logical positivists, and refused to attend their meetings when he lived in Vienna. Unlike them he was, in fact, quite willing to accept the notion of the "supernatural bullshit" you so desperately dismiss, simply seeing it as beyond his ability (and anyone else's) to analyze.
He would clearly have agreed that, "There is a factor infinite and unknown; and all their words are skew-wise." You can insist all you want that this unknown factor doesn't exist, but the people drawn to this discussion are here because most of us feel compelled to agree that it does.
Reducing everything to the measurable impulses of the central nervous system and other observable physical phenomena presents what you would like to be so. But denying the possibility that these phenomena might stem from something lying beyond their own apparent nature is not scientific, rational, or useful.
93 93/93,
EM
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It's funny when people try to convince you of something you know is incorrect. Reminds me of door-to-door preachers. By converting others, the proselytizer attempts to confirm and secure his insecure views. Otherwise, why not just shut the fuck up?
Oh, and as far as "not really understanding," things, the materialist projected a straw man to beat into the ground. On the other hand, it can definitely be seen that the materialist doesn't really understand 0=2 at all. I don't need to make anything up about lasagna in the fridge to assert this fact, either.
