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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2689 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 5, 2024

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The Complete Psychonaut Field Manual: A Cartoon Guide to Chaos Magick

Thought this was interesting as a simplified demystified introduction to the occult. Not my cup of tea but interesting to get a handle on what they're driving at and how without the extraneous waffle.

The Psychonaut Field Manual, attached in whole below, is a comic book guide to chaos magick created by Bluefluke. It’s an incredible, concise piece of work, demonstrating how to use altered states of consciousness and flexible belief to achieve a greater experience of reality.

This is fun. Thanks, when I get some time I'm going to read through this. I don't buy any of it but I enjoy reading through if it's done in an engaging way.

Still looks pretty mystified to me.

But perhaps, without the waffle, there would be nothing left at all?

There's definitely a lot of waffle.

I'm not convinced it's empty, underneath, though. There's a lot of overlap in the actual exercises here with tulpamancy, though a few parts of the surrounding framework (eg 'must delete agents after task completion') would have the two perspectives at each other's throats, and you don't have to spend too long talking with practicing tulpamancers to see sometimes radical changes in behavior or personality. Tearing out the mysticism and rankings and obfuscation would give a description that's a lot less interesting (and might still come across as a self-improvement cult), but it'd still involve testable predictions of whether certain meditative practices change your own behaviors. The extent psychonauts want (maybe need?) to imply some broader metaphysical impact can and should raise alarm bells, but it doesn't make the actual claims undisprovable.

((This is separate from whether it's a good idea: tulpamancy scares the pants off me, or see some of Scott's discussions on the Dark Night for traditional meditation. I have done some therianthropic practices, and there's absolutely a version of it that's completely stripped of mysticism or spiritualism, and can still give you phantom limb syndrome or put you into a short duration fugue state, and some level of quadrobics seems a) unavoidable and b) Not Great for certain tendons on your legs. And as dumb as 'astral doppelganger' sounds, it's still not as bad as phantom-shifting.))

There are some usual defenses of the waffle. "Wait, were all the nouns in that paragraph synonyms for each other?” faces the possibility that they aren't, and as much as the author here tries to draw links between different religious meditative practices and their own, practitioners would be horrified if someone used their name for the root chakra to describe the crown chakra. The Third Eye is a goofy metaphor, but there are reasonably well-established (if not especially well-understood) mechanisms where practicing repeated visualization exercises improves ability with their broader class, as any Factorio player will tell you. Scott compares classical meditation enlightenment to low-grade bipolar disorder, and that's not wrong, but it's an awkward fit, and as a naive non-psychologist it seems like it'd be useful to distinguish even in a non-therapeutic context.

But I think there's a more fundamentally weird option. In the same way that the Dodo Bird Verdict implies that a lot of psychology is less about what's being done, and more that something is, the (claimed? but the psychonauts don't really claim it) overlap between wildly disparate spiritual practices suggests that it's more important to have weird terms than what exactly those weird terms are. They may not describe a real thing -- I absolutely don't buy that the Brodmann Area claims for the Third Eye metaphor correspond to physical behaviors in any sense but the dead fish fMRI -- but by presenting a set of descriptions and behaviors with a name and explanation (even a wrong one), you get a more effective way of thinking about the matter and training yourself into whatever the end goal is.

(Again, for better or worse.))

Among therians, there were some people successful using boring and prosaic frameworks, but at least back when I was able to follow those spheres, it was very uncommon for people without some degree of spiritual or metaphysical structuring of their beliefs to get a lot of the more immediate and controllable results. ((VR may change or have changed that.)) Even prosaic stuff seems to run on this sorta problem: there's a lot of problems with True Believers in outreach organizations, but it's not rare for them to have more insight. Maybe the arrow of causation points the other direction -- it's quite possible that only people open to the waffle have the right neuroplasticisity -- but I'm skeptical, especially given how readily people with strongly tuned anti-waffle instincts struggle with 'mainstream' problems of belief.

But perhaps, without the waffle, there would be nothing left at all?

You're a describing a human.

Perhaps I should have said comprehensible instead of demysitifed. I suspect there's a kernel of "something" in there as a lot of it is reminiscent of things I've heard about meditation, hypnosis, mental illness, anthropology, mysticism, tai chi/yoga, psychoanalysis, placebo and so on.

Clearly you didn't read the part about the third eye.

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