Magick

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Something else I saw on the American Statistical Association chair that Dean Radin brought up. He was correct in quoting her I think although I did see an article where he padded one of his results heavily from a metastudy where the authors had shaved off the top and bottom 5% results and he took the study at gross. I think the article said that the gross value of that meta-anlysis was a .02, the buffered version a .012.

If anything I've hated how insidious this debate's been in the public sphere and, if the effect under discussion is real, it's so squirrely and marginal that it's been making everyone involved look like liars on both sides. Jessica I think does a good job in illustrating how down-to-the-wire that analysis is.

http://ww2.amstat.org/publications/jse/ ... manint.pdf

The miracle either happened or didn't.

I once saw a man pull a rabbit out of his hat.

Can you?

Much preferable to pulling a hat out of rabbit.

I was thinking about the relationship between math, science and the hermetic tradition while falling asleep last night and had some very interesting dreams. When I woke up this morning, I was thinking about Newton, Leibniz and symbolic systems. These remarkable polymaths each independently pulled the rabbit of calculus out of their hats, along with great contributions to optics and various other branches of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and various applied sciences. Remarkably, given their reputations as personifications of rationalist, empiricist materialism, the Hermetic tradition and magick seems to have been very much a contributor to the intellectual processes of both men.

Newton was an alchemist and numerologist. My impression is that he drew heavily on kabbalistic gematria for his bibliomancy, despite making many hostile and derisive statements about Kabbalah. Perhaps this opposition was a necessary public ruse, like his public observance of Trinitarian C. of E. forms, despite his own deep unitarian convictions.

Voltaire propagandized Newton as the ultimate rational empiricist and ridiculed Leibniz with the caricature of his subtle and difficult monadology and "best of all possible worlds" in the form of the idiotically optimistic Dr. Pangloss. In the end, there is not much substantive difference between Voltaire's "tend your own garden" and Leibniz' " We find in the universe some things which are not pleasing to us; but let us be aware that it is not made for us alone. It is nevertheless made for us if we are wise: it will serve us if we use it for our service; we shall be happy in it if we wish to be."

Newton did use empirical data in a beautiful way to support his theoretical exploration, but that wasn't even close to the whole story. He kept and frequently used a Latin translation of the Zohar and his dedication to alchemy, not just as proto-chemistry but as a magick process for gaining insight into the deeper nature of things is now well documented.

A considerable body of evidence has emerged showing the influence of the Lurianic Kabbalah on Leibniz and his strong connection with the leading figures of contemporary Christian Kabbalah and Hermeticism, . Platonic and Pansophic ideas permeate his critiques of Aristotelian entelechies, as he developed a metaphysics based in ideal forms. There is much to look into there, but the hermetic connection is evident.

It's interesting to see that the rabbit of modern rationalism was pulled out of a hat woven from mysticism, hermetic and occult sources.

The thought that came in my dreams last night was that the habit of developing and using symbolic systems like the TOL may have contributed to the development of scientific abstraction and mathematics as a language for exploring patterns and describing their working in reality.

Magic, with or without the k, is make believe and only exists in the fairy tales. It pains me to think there are adults in this day and age who not only think it exists, but that it's pure evil. Just today I saw a video about made for JW about a little boy who was given a toy wizard action figure from a friend at school. When he comes home happily playing with it his mother reacts almost as if he was waving around a dead frog he just killed, and then she reminds him that magic is evil and that it makes Jehovah "sad". So he and his mom throw the toy away, because he doesn't want Jehovah to be "sad" at him.

So even though it's only a plastic toy wizard and not really magical, make believing that it is will send you straight to hell. That is the most stupid thing ever, do these JW's still think it's the Middle Ages? I'd like to see a continuation of that cartoon where the boy goes back to school to secretly pray for his horrible evil Satan-worshiping friend who so generously gave him that toy.

I think the biggest elephant in the room is the word magic/k itself.

When that word comes out it seems like curiosity or even desire to clarify definitions wanes with most people. It's been the byword for bronze-age stupidity and superstition for the last couple hundred years and continues to be, therefore even using it in most cases runs the risk of self-pejoritizing.

I am hopeful of at least one thing - in the next few hundred years and maybe even over the next one hundred years, a lot of the really sloppy and arbitrary bucket categories we still have for a lot of things will disappear as will ham-handed wholesale dismissals of anything placed in these buckets. Brain-mysticism for example, where any theist or any antitheist can project almost any physical capacity or lack thereof on the brain that they please will be long gone. Similarly the 'occult' will likely no longer exist as a phrase - you'll just have vetted and debunked components of what was previously in that container. The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution blackout on researching and ripping apart the components of anything seemingly mystical or 'woo' will likely be depleted to the point that serious research will separate both baby and bathwater properly. Similarly, and I see this happening a lot sooner, the category of 'drugs' - in the full 1970's and 80's sense - will be a barbaric curiosity of a time when it seemed like no one could tell an entheogen or a mind-exploratory substance from a cannabid from a dissociative, nor had the capacity to understand their medical and psychotherapeutic list. The best laugh will be thoughts that some of them were legalized based on interracial relations and not far behind it will be the churlish notion that all these substances were good for was kids being naughty or rebelling. Also I think the grand stupid political -isms that dominated the 20th century and are dying again in a much more granular form in the early 21st century will likely be on their way out for good; we could see a constant renaming and repackaging of this crap but it'll be increasingly tougher to get away with.

I think a lot of this goes to show just how much superstition our culture still seems to have, you can count the number of these superstitions by the number of political third-rails and no-go zones, and how much further the human condition can be unpacked and clarified for the betterment of us all.

Wow, that is great stuff!

I wish I had that source of wisdom when my kids were younger.

Daddy is pleased with you and loves you for your total obedience.
Make sure to always do what daddy wants you to do or daddy will be very, very sad with you.
And you don't want daddy to be sad with you, do you?

Nothing like totally conditional love to set the young ones on the right path!
/sarcasm

I'm glad you liked it