Prove Me Wrong: Magick and Psychology are the Same | Forum

Hmm.

Anywhoo, there more than one model of magick and they all work. 

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bos/bos065.htm

Enjoy :)

"@Hartnell. I understand what you are saying - that we are the centre of our own universe and that we perceive it from that centre. Or are you saying that you are your universe and I am something that you perceive within? Same difference.'

I'm not saying that we merely percieve it from our position in the center but that's the structure of our experience. People tend to think that you move and the ground stays still. Pay attention while you walk. You never move from the center of your universe. The ground on the other hand, moves towards you!

It gets much weirder than that. Essentially nothing exists within our experince except information processed and organized by the brain. If you touch something you never actually touch the 'thing', you instead recieve tactile information about the thing. Does this make sense?

Our experience of everything is generated by our brains. That being the case, the universe we experience is also a psychological phenomenon. 

Edit: I re-read your post. You said I massaged the "traditional dictionary definition of psychology." I didnt learn what I know from a simple dictionary definition. I can take pictures of a few of my textbooks if you like, though. 

I agree, this thread is a great discussion but isn't cutting it as a 'prove me wrong thread.' Oh well.

1.

the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in a given context.
2. the mental characteristics or attitude of a person or group.

You have extended the study of psychology to include the universe. I understand how you can do this and a not  saying it is wrong, if you see the universe as part of ones perception. You are just thinking a little further than others with an interest in psychology.

I do a similar thing myself...

Traditional Physics: the branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of matter and energy. The subject matter of physics includes mechanics, heat, light and other radiation, sound, electricity, magnetism, and the structure of atoms.

I am not a physicist so don't know all the rules, but I don't think traditional physics says that energy is conscious. I do.Everything is energy - energy is conscious...

What I find most interesting is that we both, in our theorising, need to include a universe and a consciousness.

@Hartnell. I'm reading your posts and I am finding them contradictory in parts. But, I'm sure it is something in the communication because I'm certain you wouldn't leave yourself that open. 

So help me here, please...

You interpret the universe as everything which isn't yourself. 

You also say the universe we experience is also a psychological phenomenon.

Are you saying that the universe is the matrix your mind created, or the mind of the thing that switched on your machine 38years ago?

What are you saying is real/tangible and what are you saying is perception?

Try this simple experiment before reading the following explanaton. Thar be spoliers there.

Step 1: Get a pen or pencil. Or anything else spear or rod-like you can poke things with.

Step 2: Hold this pen (or whatever you have) like you're going to poke something with it.

Step 3: Poke a lot of shit with it. Poke a pillow, then poke a wall. 

Step 4: Notice how when you poke shit with your pen, you sort of have a feeling for the end you're poking shit with and not so much where you're actually touching it.

Step 5: Note how totally weird that is now that you've taken the time to think about it. I mean, it's just the tip of a  pen, and not an extension of yourself you should be able to feel despite the lack of nerves extending into it right? Well...

Here be the explanation:

As sensory information streams into your brain and before you become consciously aware of it, your brain does something interesting to it -- it divides the sensory information into two categories:

1. sensory information about yourself

2. sensory information about that's not yourself (world, universe, environment, or if you're fan of buddism, not-self).

If you look at your hand, that's sensory information about yourself.

If you look at the wall, that's sensory information about something that's not you.

Even though the information about the wall and your hand can be encoded at the same time from the same retina at the back of one of your eyes, it's no big deal, when the information hits your brain it will helpfully sort out which is which before you even have a conscious awareness of what you've seen. This is fortunate because otherwise you couldn't tell your hand from the wall and would experience them as part of the same thing.

If all the sensory information you're receiving at one instant to be a sheet of paper, then the process I'm describing is cutting your shape out of the paper and standing you up out of it like a pop-up book.

BTW, this process is why self-relevant information is so damned salient and accessible. It's why you can distinctly hear someone say your name in a room filled with several  people talking all at once. See: cocktail party effect (later, after you're done reading this.)

Now there's ways to fuck with this process in really interesting ways. For example, The Rubber Hand Illusion which tricks this process into granting self-status to a rubber hand (which then the illusionists always seem to  smash with a hammer, scaring the holy shit of thier subjects who fully believe it's their hand that was about to get smashed..) You should easily be able to find a fun video about it on Youtube.

So, about the "pen effect" (my term) -- something really interesting happens when you pick up something, especially a tool. The boundary between self and world moves to encompass the tool as a part of yourself. No shit. Think about using a broom and how you can kinda feel the floor and not so much the handle you're touching, or swinging a baseball bat and feeling what you hit more than where you're holding it.

This is how your brain does it: After encompassing the tool as a part of the self, it remaps the sensory information coming in from where you're touching it to  the place where the action happens. If you concentrate on where you're touching the pen while you poke something it'll drop that mapping and you'll feel the pen push against your fingers and you'll also (hopefully) have the "ah-ha" that your brain was using the pressure on your fingers to figure out what was going on at the tip, but presenting the information to you as if it was directly from the tip.

Allrighty, let's sum it all up.

1. Our brains separate incoming sensory information into two different categories: you and not you. Needless to say an unprocessed stream of neural impulses makes a lot more sense to you and your brain after this separation. The seperation more or less literally creates your experience of yourself and the environment you exist in. (the world,  universe).

2. The boundary is fuzzy and you can be tricked into thinking something that isn't you is you. (Rubber hand illusion) but the reason we can do this is to better handle things like tools which are more easily processed as a direct extension of ourselves automagically rather than having to consciously fumble around with them.

And about the universe of those astrophysicists:

3. The universe which extends in all directions infinately which astrophysicists study but can't ever properly define is actually created by the separation of sensory information into self and not self/environment. This is why there's no coherent definitions of what the universe is exist besides "all that exists". But, astro-scientists, not being into psychology, never realize that the fact we can experience ourselves within a universe requires a psychological process to create that experience -- which they're chasing down using math which breaks down in the "singularity" --- and what's the singularity but the whole sheet of paper (ala the metaphor above) before separation process?

Yes,that's funny to me.:) Everytime I see an astro-scientist talking about squinting at the math fo the singularity I hear the Binny Hill Theme. Get this, in studying the universe and bringing it down to the singularity they've unknowingly reverse-enginnered the psychyolgocal process I've just described in this post. The math doesn't break down at the singluarlty because they're stuck at some weird fundamental barrier in physics -- they've reached the limit of human understanding.  

(I wrote the below just in case you're into Kabbalah. Feel free to skip it. If you do skip it, the last line in this post is still worth reading. :) )

Anyway, as a final bonus this structure exists within the Kabbalah's Tree of Life as the seferiot Chockma  and Binah. Chockma's kinda like a dot and Binah is space expanding in all directions. When they are considered together Chockma goes right smack dab in the middle of Binah and wala! Self AND Universe, la focus and la fringe!

(Also note that Chockma is an infiniately small dot without any space. The important part of the structure is that there is a separation of a whole into a someting contained within another something. That  then goes through the trinity of Chesed, Tiferet and Gervurah to give it mass, shape and form..) 

Suprise super bonus: Read this one more time and watch the video for Parabola above.

In what way doesn't my post doesn't sound like it would  fall under psychology to you?

There's quite a bit more to psychology than you've been aware. Even a Psych 101 book discusses most of what I wrote about in my previous post, which barely even scratches the surface of all that psychology as a field includes.

It's possible that psychophysics isn't what you think it is. The description that it's psychology merged with physics is nothing more than a meaningless buzzphrase. It's more akin to consumer reports testing the range of frequencies a set of headphones is capable of producing, or the least amount of smoke a smoke detector can detect, except with human sense organs.

In the 155 years since it's been around it's contributed nearly nothing to psychology other than the concept that our sense organs have limitations in nearly the exact same way consumers electronics do, which hasn't advanced psychology as a whole one whit but is highly useful for a consumer electronics companies to optimize their earphones to the range of frequencies the average human being is capable of hearing.

How does this 'work for you" beyond helping to reduce the price of headphones? ;)