Starrfall on 30/12/2007 at 21:17

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wait where do crystals go?


edit: I have a red one if that helps

demagogue on 30/12/2007 at 22:39

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I think some of the critics here are looking at mysticism more from the perspective of crude fortune telling (which was always something of a distortion of the original purpose), and less on the divination side. On the divination side ("modernized" in the Freud/Jung tradition ... probably needs a re-modernization, again), mysticism is meant as a lens to explore some aspect of your own experience about the world around you, not to predict what will happen to you or it per se.

It's a kind of exercise that gets you to focus on that aspect ... so it's important that the categories be both universal and arbitrary, or it won't reach into the full breadth of people's experience. [* A footnote on that] People use everyday arbitrary events in real life as occasions to explore some particular aspect of their nature all the time. E.g., somebody close to the family dies, and it's an occasion to reflect on your own mortality, etc. I'd go so far to say as most "serious" reflection people have into a universal aspect of their life has its roots in some arbitrary "occasion" to reflect (a class, graduation, starting a job, getting married), so it's a very human thing (whether you want to call it mysticism or not). Mysticism just focuses that kind of reflection, it's an occasion, or better a discipline, and is not really meant to be any more or less than that. [** probably better as footnote 2]

Of course, it's a matter of taste whether the discipline actually helps reflection or not. But usually if you find it's not helping you reflect on some aspect of your life, chances are you're probably doing it wrong. On the other hand, if you think it's superstitiously telling you something new about the "reality" of your situation outside of your reflection, or certainly making important life-decisions based on the "prediction", you're also doing it wrong.

It also has a place in other forms of expression that share this kind of goal, in particular art and music ... and you'll find artists and musicians who have taken ideas from mysticism seriously. Surrealism is pretty much mysticism translated to art. This is also closer to the form of mysticism you find with people like De Vinci or Issac Newton, who you wouldn't really want to call irrational or crudely superstitious.

I guess one punchline is that people who are expecting mysticism to be some crude future- or personality-predictor are also going to be criticized from the perspective of authentic mysticism. Everyone blasting mysticism in this thread is coming up with criticisms that authentic-mystics would share from the opposite-side of the same coin.

By the way, I'm just giving something of a defense to mysticism here ... it isn't really my personal bag. I mean, I studied cognitive science, so I don't have any illusions that anything going on is outside of the brain; what's going on just in the brain is exactly what's interesting to me. But anyway, I think if people are going to criticize it, they should be able to distinguish the crude popular form and one more nuanced authentic form, which their arguments not only aren't attacking, but are actually taking its side against the crude form.

....................
* It's actually a criticism from within mysticism when occult categories aren't arbitrary enough ... far from Orb's view, the scientific studies are very helpful to this view of mysticism, e.g., in telling us when cultural or gender biases leak into some categories so that they apply more accurately to the "reality" for some people and not to others, or when the charts/cards/etc are being fixed or fake-read to the target based on what the reader knows, so there's maybe only a 90% non-correlation to reality ... when 100% non-correlation in all cases should be the goal. You want all the crude, fact-obsessed trash of "reality" to be pushed out of the way so you can reflect on some universal aspect of your nature unfiltered, and without a thumb on the scale.


** So, e.g., an astrological or tarot reading of your birth or wedding isn't a measure of your literal personality throughout life or a superstitious prediction of how the marriage will fare. It is an occasion to reflect on your "advent" into the world, or the meaning of a life with this person, just at that moment by giving you a set of universal semantic primitives and then inviting you to "spin a story" out of them. You could do the same thing without the primitives, but the discipline is supposed to enforce 'universal' parameters, to counteract the tendency in day-to-day reflection to hide yourself from the cold, hard truth, or detach yourself from the rest of the world as if you were a special case. It puts a "meaning" right in front of you (or rather, it is a tool in getting you to put the meaning in front of yourself) that you often wouldn't have the balls or occasion to put in front of yourself in normal circumstances, and forces you to deal with it. It's just a discipline for self-reflection.
That's actually why, in fact, it's often good to do multiple readings on the same event or question ... a crude superstitious view might want to say the first one is the "real" one and, oh my god, the second one contradicted it woe is me is none of this real?!, but the nuanced view would say that each reading further illuminates, just by putting you through the discipline at multiple angles. On that note, the most important part isn't really the "prediction" you get at the end (that's actually one of the least helpful parts, for obvious reasons), but the "process" you put your mind through in translating the primitives to fit your own story; it's a discipline that gets you thinking in detail on all the ins-and-outs of your situation while also being through a universal lens.

BrokenArts on 31/12/2007 at 00:37

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And why can't it be for fun? I don't care who does or doesn't take it seriously.

TBE on 31/12/2007 at 00:51

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I'm a water dog! :cheeky: Wait, I hate water and dogs, so what's the deal?

BrokenArts on 31/12/2007 at 01:22

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Tocky, come on man, you aren't trying hard enough.