Magick as a test for thelema
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@kasper81 said
"don't you slip-up there by quoting from Crowley who, evidently lacked self-awareness for most of his life?"
The implication here is that you think I am of the opinion that Crowley "lacked self-awareness."
I'm not really following you. If I had to guess, I would predict that your implicit argument is something like, "Well, Crowley believed in goblins, and Los thinks that anyone who believes in goblins lacks self-awareness, so Los must think that Crowley lacked self-awareness!"
There are a number of things wrong with that argument, beginning with the fact that I don't think goblin-believers "lack self-awareness" necessarily: I think they are very wrong about at least one of their ideas about the universe (and likely many other ideas), and I think that their false ideas very often hinder them from discovering or fully expressing their True Wills.
But more important, I think it's an open question how much Crowley actually "believed" in this supernatural stuff. To give you a for instance, he's on record as explicitly saying that it doesn't matter whether past life memories are nothing more than fantasies because there is value in fiction (like Aesop's fables, he points out). So he "believes" in reincarnation not in the sense that he thinks it's factually true but in the sense that "Sure this may not be true, but what they hey, I'll accept it because there can be value in fictions."
That's not what most people mean when they say they believe a claim.
I consider it a real possibility that Crowley did not "believe" in many of these supernatural claims in the way that other people do and that Crowley was much more skeptical than many people assume.
But even discounting that and assuming that Crowley just blindly and stupidly accepted all manner of claims for which no one -- not even he -- had sufficient evidence...we still have no way of knowing whether or not Crowley discovered or was following his True Will.
It's both unknowable to us and irrelevant to us.
What we have is Crowley's system, and from that system we can draw sound conclusions about what a True Will is, how one goes about discovering a True Will, and the relationship of that system to skepticism. These points are not affected in the least by Crowley's personal beliefs about the supernatural or the degree to which Crowley himself succeeded in practicing the system that he developed.
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Cool
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They way I see it is "magic forces" act upon the "forces of chance". Science cannot explain the reason behind "chance" or the laws dictating probability. Whatever is directing this, COULD be what we would call "magic" at work, or the divine, or that's a catch phrase for some hidden mechanic that enables "magic". Everything is reduced to mind anyway, all our perceptions, all experienced phenomena, is turned into "patterns" interpreted within the brain. This being the case, IF magic acts upon directing the foundation of chance, and so the infinite factors that bring about an experience, any experience, then even those "chance encounters" entirely of our "imagination" could be directed, or not, if that's what a person believes or expects. This would generate no real results in a number of cases, for example with the skeptic, or the doubt rubbing off onto another performing the same task.
Regardless, magic occurs, as AC points out, as if it were chance or luck or coincidence, which even Los admits occurred with him. Yes, you can "explain" it away, or if doubtedly looked for, of course obtain the negative results you truly believe will occur. You then set yourself up for failure. Again, we are locked within our heads, and so what we perceive as "reality" is a mental construct, perhaps even allowing some greater range who have opened themselves to it.
The main point is, if we cannot truly even explain the phenomena of "chance", how can we not accept this can be effected in a manner beyond our ability to detect in a mundane manner? Magic no doubt lies in this "higher" place superior (figuratively) to natural laws, laws we still do not know everything about. "Goblins" may be just imaginary to some who "invoke" that, and valid and real & useful to others.
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@Jason R said
"Regardless, magic occurs, as AC points out, as if it were chance or luck or coincidence, which even Los admits occurred with him."
Coincidences occur all the time. I had coincidences happen to me today. Coincidences are nothing special.
How do you distinguish a "successful act of magic" from an act of magic that seems successful but is in fact just a coincidence?
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@Los said
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@Jason R said
"Regardless, magic occurs, as AC points out, as if it were chance or luck or coincidence, which even Los admits occurred with him."Coincidences occur all the time. I had coincidences happen to me today. Coincidences are nothing special.
How do you distinguish a "successful act of magic" from an act of magic that seems successful but is in fact just a coincidence?"
Reread what I said. I was talking about us (science) not totally understanding the laws behind "chance". Yes, magic may SEEM like luck, or coincidence, yet of course directed, luck manifested, by way of manipulating the "force" directing happenstance. The would be skeptic sees just wild luck, "wow that seemed to work, I got the results I wanted, but it was just a crazy coincidence." Etc. Ive done this MANY times, and trust me, it would have to be the most UNBELIEVABLE good luck or coincidence imagineable. We differentiate these results by way of how "unlikely" it was, and how perfect the results reflect our intented outcome, including timing
etc.Again, my point was that of course, those who "see" it as luck, who BELIEVE and expect just "luck" and that it is impossible, create the very result this mind set implies.
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@Jason R said
"We differentiate these results by way of how "unlikely" it was, and how perfect the results reflect our intented outcome, including timing"
That's confirmation bias.
If a person does a ritual to -- for example -- obtain money, then he's going to be looking for scenarios that would count as a "hit" for that result. Potential "hits" could include finding money in the street, having a friend pay back a loan, getting offered a job, discovering that one had budgeted incorrectly (and thus has more money than one expected this month), being offered a scholarship or grant, making an unexpected sale, winning some kind of contest with prize money, etc.
If you wait long enough, something like that is going to happen to you. Sometimes, it'll seem extremely "unlikely" or "miraculous."
It demonstrates nothing.
Again: we know that coincidences happen, all the time, without any magic whatsoever. I don't do magic for "results" and coincidences happen to me all the time. There's no way to distinguish an act of magic that "works" from an act of magic that just seems to work but is in fact just regular ol' coincidence.
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@Los said
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@Jason R said
"We differentiate these results by way of how "unlikely" it was, and how perfect the results reflect our intented outcome, including timing"That's confirmation bias.
If a person does a ritual to -- for example -- obtain money, then he's going to be looking for scenarios that would count as a "hit" for that result. Potential "hits" could include finding money in the street, having a friend pay back a loan, getting offered a job, discovering that one had budgeted incorrectly (and thus has more money than one expected this month), being offered a scholarship or grant, making an unexpected sale, winning some kind of contest with prize money, etc.
If you wait long enough, something like that is going to happen to you. Sometimes, it'll seem extremely "unlikely" or "miraculous."
It demonstrates nothing.
Again: we know that coincidences happen, all the time, without any magic whatsoever. I don't do magic for "results" and coincidences happen to me all the time. There's no way to distinguish an act of magic that "works" from an act of magic that just seems to work but is in fact just regular ol' coincidence."
Knew this was going to be your come back - to which I reply, the guard against this is a well kept and detailed journal. If one is honest and records their attempts, intended results, times, and results, including failures (realistically) this bias is at the very least diminished.
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@Jason R said
" the guard against this is a well kept and detailed journal."
No, it's not. It doesn't matter how meticulously you note the time of the ritual, the astrological conditions, your state of mind, etc.
Doing a ritual for result X and then -- at some point in the future -- having X happen to you does not demonstrate a causal connection between the ritual and X (especially if X is so broad that lots of really common events could count as a hit).
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@Los said
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@Jason R said
" the guard against this is a well kept and detailed journal."No, it's not. It doesn't matter how meticulously you note the time of the ritual, the astrological conditions, your state of mind, etc.
Doing a ritual for result X and then -- at some point in the future -- having X happen to you does not demonstrate a causal connection between the ritual and X (especially if X is so broad that lots of really common events could count as a hit)."
I beg to differ kind sir lol. If I note the intention, and I receive that intended result (without allowing wiggle room) its a "success". For example, if I need to receive exactly 5000 and I receive exactly 5000, that's a hit. If I record I'm going to try to cure my family memeber of incurable stomach cancer, and succeed, the cancer is then "gone", I succeed, and so on. Of course you say otherwise lol, you believe its impossible, and chance alone, the very point intitially I was trying to make. NO lightening bolts, talking angels, or clouds of smoke required, just the "magic" of infinite factors generating my intended result as if by, well Magic!
P.S. no, I explained there is of course a time frame. It WOULD be silly (at least in most cases) to just figure its a success because 10 years later or what not I received 5000 etc. The journal keeping shows the pattern of usual timing for results.
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@Jason R said
" For example, if I need to receive exactly 5000 and I receive exactly 5000, that's a hit."
So let's use this as an example. You need $5,000 in the next, let's say, month. So you do a ritual, and sometime within the month, you receive $5,000. So does that demonstrate that your magic "worked"?
In order to answer that, we have to think about the larger picture. In any given month, there may be lots of people who need to come up with $5,000, for whatever reason. Imagine the population of people-who-need-to-come-up-with-$5,000-this-month.
In any give month, a certain percentage of people in that population are going to manage to come up with the money they need, without doing any kind of magic. Of the ones who come up with the money, a certain percentage of their stories are going to seem miraculous to them, again without doing any kind of magic.
So if you do a ritual and then manage to come up with the money, how do you know that you aren't just part of the subset that managed to come up with the money? That is to say, how do you know you weren't going to be part of the group that received the money without doing any magic at all?
I contend that you don't have any basis for making that determination, and your ridiculous sample size of one provides you with evidence that comes nowhere close to being able to support your grandiose claim.
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@Los said
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@Jason R said
" For example, if I need to receive exactly 5000 and I receive exactly 5000, that's a hit."So let's use this as an example. You need $5,000 in the next, let's say, month. So you do a ritual, and sometime within the month, you receive $5,000. So does that demonstrate that your magic "worked"?
In order to answer that, we have to think about the larger picture. In any given month, there may be lots of people who need to come up with $5,000, for whatever reason. Imagine the population of people-who-need-to-come-up-with-$5,000-this-month.
In any give month, a certain percentage of people in that population are going to manage to come up with the money they need, without doing any kind of magic. Of the ones who come up with the money, a certain percentage of their stories are going to seem miraculous to them, again without doing any kind of magic.
So if you do a ritual and then manage to come up with the money, how do you know that you aren't just part of the subset that managed to come up with the money? That is to say, how do you know you weren't going to be part of the group that received the money without doing any magic at all?
I contend that you don't have any basis for making that determination, and your ridiculous sample size of one provides you with evidence that comes nowhere close to being able to support your grandiose claim."
Oh man. Relax, it was a quick off the top of my head made up example. However, I have maybe ONCE when in a situation I felt I wasn't able to get a particular amount of money I needed to make rent, I did magic for it. I believe it was for 300. A day later, without any possible way I could imagine I could get this money, a friend offered me a standby medic job for the weekend that paid 300. He called me that next day. Coincidence? To you, its the only option! Another example was my girl friends uncle was taken to the hospital, a doctor diagnosed him with stomach cancer. He got a second opinion, same diagnosis. After doing magic for him (agreed to), the doctor (the next day) said there had been a mistake, it was a stomach virus (or infection) and no cancer. Again, to you it was never cancer just a mistake, yet the intended result (no cancer) was the same. Same amount of time for it working. Ive done many of these. Yet NONE could be examined outside of my records and results in their details to be "outside the possibility of just awesome luck". However, when it really counted, and I was really into it, and in need, it "worked". Money is actually not a usual subject, I usually have a normal way to work that out, even though it wasn't easy.
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Hey Los,
I'm trying understand your point of view on Thelema and appreciate much of what you say. On that note, I'm interested to know if your denial of non-corporeal beings is practical or theoretical. I know you've found other's experiences and demonstrations unconvincing, but what about your own magickal workings? Have you ever tried to evoke an elemental or any of that kind of thing yourself? (I, to be fair, have not.)
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@Jason R said
"Coincidence? To you, its the only option!"
Well, what I said was that you have no method of demonstrating that it's anything more than coincidence.
We know that coincidences happen. All the time. For example, I've wanted money and then wound up getting the money, without doing any magic. I've wanted someone to get well, and they've gotten well, without doing any magic. I've wanted to get all kinds of things, and I've ended up getting what I wanted, all without doing any magic.
Had I done magic in between wanting X and getting X, I might be tempted to think the magic was a cause, but -- in those cases -- it wouldn't have been (though it might have seemed to have been).
And that's my point: no matter how many of these coincidences happen after you do magic, it still doesn't demonstrate anything -- unless you have a method of distinguishing magic from coincidence, which you don't.
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Well yeah.. Things can just pop up lol.
Like where i reside..we call it Australia. A business man was down on his luck not through any big mistake just a downturn in the area he was operating in.. 5 kids a mortgage and was about to lose everything.. Bang! he wins the lottery 15 million dollars, you can imagine the smile on his face..and be damned, a week later he wins it again, another 6 million.
He wasnt religious..he said so..Was he praying? well i doubt it. Did he wish he could find a way out of his impending doom? i believe so. -
@David S said
" On that note, I'm interested to know if your denial of non-corporeal beings"
To be precise, I don't "deny" that non-corporeal beings could exist, as if I'm just outright discounting the possibility. My position is that nobody has ever produced any evidence of their existence -- not even "to them" -- and that nobody, currently, has any valid grounds for accepting that non-corporeal beings exist.
If humanity discovers evidence tomorrow that there are non-corpreal beings, then I'll be the first one to say that I was wrong and that I accept that they exist. But -- based on evidence -- I think it's unlikely that anyone's going to come up with evidence that they exist.
Okay, back to what you were saying.
"I'm interested to know if your denial of non-corporeal beings is practical or theoretical. I know you've found other's experiences and demonstrations unconvincing, but what about your own magical workings? Have you ever tried to evoke an elemental or any of that kind of thing yourself? (I, to be fair, have not.)"
I've never "evoked" anything -- though I studied Goetic evocation for a while and bought a copy of the Lesser Key with an eye on attempting such an operation one of these days -- but I have invoked plenty of beings over the years, including Enochian entities. Such invocations involve "conversing" with said beings and -- for some operations, requesting material "results" or charging talismans. I've also invoked "gods" into my body and experienced the world as said god for a time, on occasion writing down any "communications" from the being that came through. I've also done "active imagination" exercises, including skrying some of the Enochian aethyrs and conversing with beings there.
That's all I can think of, off the top of my head, that I've done with "non-corporeal beings." Granted, most of this was quite a long time ago now.
My conclusion based on my experience is that it's all in the practitioner's head. Certainly "entities" can appear to behave in unexpected ways or ways that the practitioner cannot necessarily control or predict, but so do other imaginary things, like characters you dream up for a short story or novel.
Although for a little while I did talk myself into thinking that my "results" (i.e. real-world coincidences) actually may have been "caused" by my magical operations, I came to realize that I had absolutely no reason to think that results were linked at all to the magic. I don't think I ever really thought that the goblins were real, honest-to-goodness spirits, though there may have been a time when I was willing to entertain the idea.
Looking back on it, though, I am very confident that I had nothing close to evidence to confirm that these beings are anything more than daydreams.
Further -- and more important -- no "communication" from them was ever useful in any real way. It was sort of fun, a neat distraction, and an interesting study of what kind of mental fireworks people can produce (it nicely explains why people of very different religious beliefs all have "mystical experiences" that tell them all different things about reality...because it's all induced make believe). But that's really it. Maybe I'd do it again sometime for entertainment purposes.
Now, it's not just my personal experiences that furnish my current evaluation of these claims. When I consider the claim of whether goblins exist, I survey all the available evidence, and when I do that, I can easily see that nobody has ever produced sufficient evidence for the existence of these creatures and, furthermore, our best models of reality, based on evidence, do not even suggest any kind of mechanism by which such critters would interact with the world.
I feel very, very confident on the basis of a whole lot of evidence -- including my own personal experience but certainly not limited to it -- that these sorts of "beings" are entirely make believe.
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You ever think perhaps your overly fixated on "evidence", when whet really matters, at least in the case of magic, is results? If one uses unproven methods, that may even be counter intuitive - yet produce valid results, why ditch them? Your responce is "well you can delude yourself" but so can so called evidence. There's evidence of things all the time that are later discredited, we are still uncertain of so many things! If our RESULTS are consistent, reasonable, and help us, I think that is valuable in itself. Maybe this is another meaning to "success is your only proof", in that we can argue over "evidence" and the validity of that evidence on and on sometimes, yet if it WORKS it works.
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@Jason R said
"You ever think perhaps your overly fixated on "evidence""
No. People who are interested in accepting true claims and in not BS-ing themselves use evidence to support those claims.
" If one uses unproven methods, that may even be counter intuitive - yet produce valid results, why ditch them?"
No one has said to "ditch" anything. If you find it fun to pretend to talk to spirits -- as I used to do -- then go for it. I support your right to pretend to talk to spirits all day long.
The use of evidence is in evaluating factual claims like, "There really are honest-to-goodness spirits that exist as independent beings" or "Talking to these spirits can reveal things about my True Will!"
Those are factual claims, and it is -- I hope you agree -- very useful to know whether there are any valid grounds for thinking that they are true. I have been pointing out that there are no such grounds for thinking that they are true...yet people accept them anyway. Hence the whole point of me discussing them in public.
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@Los said
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@Jason R said
"You ever think perhaps your overly fixated on "evidence""No. People who are interested in accepting true claims and in not BS-ing themselves use evidence to support those claims.
" If one uses unproven methods, that may even be counter intuitive - yet produce valid results, why ditch them?"
No one has said to "ditch" anything. If you find it fun to pretend to talk to spirits -- as I used to do -- then go for it. I support your right to pretend to talk to spirits all day long.
The use of evidence is in evaluating factual claims like, "There really are honest-to-goodness spirits that exist as independent beings" or "Talking to these spirits can reveal things about my True Will!"
Those are factual claims, and it is -- I hope you agree -- very useful to know whether there are any valid grounds for thinking that they are true. I have been pointing out that there are no such grounds for thinking that they are true...yet people accept them anyway. Hence the whole point of me discussing them in public."
Good, if you respect that right, you can relax a bit, and save all us the headache and yourself some energy.
MAGIC isn't (as you know) an excepted mainstream science, in case you haven't heard. So it seems a bit strange to join a group ABOUT such a subject and demand it conform to the standards of science.
Science has been wrong and updated many times from whet we thought was impossible. The findings of QM today's can be said to support what the Mystics have said for ages, they were obviously ahead of the curve. Read "The Tao of Physics˝
There's not much point then in you searching for "proof" in a subject unproven. Duh.
