A number of gems are repeated over and over again. These include:
*The power of the mind over biology, AKA the placebo effect. This is what happens when what started out 500 megayears ago as a glorified thermostat gains sentience. When the same organ system that does the thinking also controls body temperature and blood pressure and even the base level of inflammation throughout the body (some really cool research I saw here at the university in the last year or two), what goes on in the mind has a profound direct effect on health and well-being. I can almost make myself pass out from low blood pressure at a thought (having teased apart my old psychosomatic reaction to flu shots), and when weaponized the placebo effect cankill. It can also be weaponized for good, and many of these traditions essentially do so to some degree for their practitioners.
*The power of symbols to change the world-as-it-is-experienced-or-valued without changing the physical world, or to produce anchor-points for behavioral change, or to redirect basal urges into arbitrary directions.
*The ability of a human to contain multiple agents with their own agendas, or to instantiate a ‘local copy’ of an abstract agent represented in a culture.
In my cursory poking around, there seem to be a lot of variations on these themes, perhaps along with a whole bunch of practical ‘this works for this purpose’ things. As someone rather concrete-minded and very busy I’m not exactly the best person to get in for first hand experience unfortunately.
Also, to clarify, I didn’t mean to say that all of these occult/magical traditions were tied to counterproductive ideologies. LaVeyan satanism or Christian science seem pretty counterproductive due to poisonous philosophy and rejection of useful practices respectively, while modern druidry for example seems nearly completely benign (and incidentally even admits that one of its gods was made up by a university class project, and doesn’t care because he still works and shows up when invoked in ritual). I also don’t think that the visualization of, or acting in response to physically unreal things is necessarily counterproductive when the intended effect is upon human behavior or thought or nervous-system-state rather than the external physical world.
A number of gems are repeated over and over again. These include:
*The power of the mind over biology, AKA the placebo effect. This is what happens when what started out 500 megayears ago as a glorified thermostat gains sentience. When the same organ system that does the thinking also controls body temperature and blood pressure and even the base level of inflammation throughout the body (some really cool research I saw here at the university in the last year or two), what goes on in the mind has a profound direct effect on health and well-being. I can almost make myself pass out from low blood pressure at a thought (having teased apart my old psychosomatic reaction to flu shots), and when weaponized the placebo effect can kill. It can also be weaponized for good, and many of these traditions essentially do so to some degree for their practitioners.
*The power of symbols to change the world-as-it-is-experienced-or-valued without changing the physical world, or to produce anchor-points for behavioral change, or to redirect basal urges into arbitrary directions.
*The ability of a human to contain multiple agents with their own agendas, or to instantiate a ‘local copy’ of an abstract agent represented in a culture.
In my cursory poking around, there seem to be a lot of variations on these themes, perhaps along with a whole bunch of practical ‘this works for this purpose’ things. As someone rather concrete-minded and very busy I’m not exactly the best person to get in for first hand experience unfortunately.
Also, to clarify, I didn’t mean to say that all of these occult/magical traditions were tied to counterproductive ideologies. LaVeyan satanism or Christian science seem pretty counterproductive due to poisonous philosophy and rejection of useful practices respectively, while modern druidry for example seems nearly completely benign (and incidentally even admits that one of its gods was made up by a university class project, and doesn’t care because he still works and shows up when invoked in ritual). I also don’t think that the visualization of, or acting in response to physically unreal things is necessarily counterproductive when the intended effect is upon human behavior or thought or nervous-system-state rather than the external physical world.
Thanks for the examples.