Re: If Magick Exists (was RE: Ideological blinders)

From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Thu Apr 03 2003 - 00:29:59 MST

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    Charles Hixson wrote:

    > That said, I don't consider a hallucination supplied by a "God" to be
    > any proof. I've encountered a few, and decided that they were
    > projections from activated archetypes (I was going through a heavily
    > Jungian period).

    Well, if we claim that any/all experience of what appears to be
    a transcendent reality usually considered spiritual is in fact
    an hallucination then we have a rather closed loop system going,
    don't we? We can't possibly get any experience of anything
    transcendent because we will just chalk it up as hallucination
    or "activated archetype" and be done with it. So I am not at
    all clear there is anything that could be encountered that would
    in fact be convincing that God is.

    > Again, these are difficult to notice as what they
    > are. A starlet isn't called a "love goddess" by mistake. When people
    > see her, they are projecting an emotional hallucination from the
    > internal "love goddess" onto the image that they see. There are other
    > gods, and they act the same way. I don't believe in the messages that
    > they provide... their hit rate seems pretty low. But they exist. I
    > suspect that in the environment for which we evolved they were much more
    > accurate. Think of them as one of the necessary preconditions for
    > language coming into existence. But when you encounter them, you can't
    > be rational (except partially). Rational judgements need to be
    > postponed to appreciate the numinosity of the event. THEN you can
    > rationally analyze it. But be cautious, for some of the emotional
    > arguments can be quite convincing.

    It is a tad more than emotion that is involved in some of these
    experiences. The grand numinous joining with all that is, was
    or can be, of *being* all of that, is an experience more
    powerful than any other I have ever encountered or can imagine
    encountering. The actual experience was many, many orders of
    magnitude beyond anything I ever thought or imagined it might
    be. Rational judgement? Rational judgment is a very pale best
    effort to eke out a few truths without really being able to See
    compared to that. But is even this sort of experience
    incontrovertible evidence of the reality of what is then
    experienced? No. At least it was not enough for me.

    - samantha



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