That is kind of what I am saying... Just because one group of people can't imagine something doesn't mean that all groups of people can't imagine it (and perhaps even completely understand it).
All people can imagine something that are parts of psychical reality but concepts such as soul and the divine is beyond human imagination (because they are beyond physical reality). Magical working can only be argued from a spiritual point of view and not scientific. Science and magic are both tools but they are separated from each others.
How can we generate a concept of soul and divine and magic if we cannot imagine it. Concepts originate in the imagination.
If the supernatural exists as you describe it there would have to be a link of some kind for us to understand it or recognize it, otherwise it would cease to be known to us.
We imagined symbols, did we not? For that matter these letters I type are symbols to make words that are symbols of my thoughts that originated in my imagination.
You cannot symbolize something you cannot imagine.
(I'm sure Hartnell will have input on my origin of thought.)
First, you're right -- in that we can't connect a meaning to a symbol (in the ordinary sense of the word) without being able to represent it (in the NLP sense). Without the representation, there's no meaning which can be linked. (Feelings and states can be linked, ala anchoring, though.)
Here I'm going to take a slight detour into how one form of sigilization works. The kind I'm talking about is really little more than priming up and welding together a group of schemata which you want to work together as a group and with as little interference from other structures as possible. Once that's done you forget the sigil because you want it working automatically from the depth of the subconscious and not tied up in the conscious (thus preventing it from sinking into the subconscious.) (I really need to write this up on it's own.)
Now, I think he's naively taking about symbols in the Jungian sense but doesn't know as much as he thinks he does about it. Sigilization as described above is the process of intentionally creating a Jungian symbol. It's actually the reverse process.
Check it out:
The last step of sigilization is forget the sigil to make it inaccessible to your conscious mind and let the subconscious mind take over. It's like throwing an object in a muddy lake, it disappears beneath the water and is forgotten though it's still there.
The first step of working with Jungian symbols is like peering down into.the water of the lake and discovering that you can see the indistinct shape of an object that's already submerged. You don't know what's down there but you know something is down there. And then you start work on discovering more about it and eventually bringing it to the surface.
This is the kind of work Jung was talking about in these quotes:
"Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious."
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
"And many, many more..."
So he's right that there's stuff in the soul (psyche, Google it) that can't be consciously imagined because it's not directly accessible to our conscious mind. But, we can sort of begin to know something's down in the lake because we start to see glimpses of it in our dreams, or have an unexplainable feeling whenever something seemingly unrelated happens, we slip when talking or begin to notice new deep structures that seem out of place or oddly bent.
I have a feeling that Frater thinks this sort of thing only applies to the hard-wired archetypes of the collective unconscious.
Cheers!
(For the record, I had the same objection about representation until I started noticing the simiarities between what he was saying and Jungian symbols.)
It doesn't matter if in your model you say it "liberates energy for change" or "makes change inevitable by changing someone's habit patterns" the effect is the same -- change.
Didn't I send you something on the meta model shortly after I met you?
@Hartnell. Since reading the link I posted above I have been making frequent use of your "centre of my universe everything comes to me" idea. You are correct - it gets really trippy. However, I'm still getting comfortable in my saddle and can't do it for a long period of time yet because I feel like I'm going to fall off. Lol. But I walk up and down stairs for exercise so I am going to see if I can get the stairs to move under me so I don't get puffed.
It is trippy but the point is to realize that your experience has structure, and to see first hand that this structured experience is actually what we call 'reality' rather than some outward objective reality.
It's useful to be able to do it at will but not really necessary to do it all the time. Try doing it while driving a car. :)
Let me first say that there's nothing wrong with this. A lot of people would say it's full of woo and I would agree but that's only because of the complete misappropriation of scientific concepts which don't actually gel with esoteric psychology. This misappropriation is used to get the important concepts across in a similar way that some mythic tales do.
For example, there was no Odysseus, and with all the harpy's, cyclopses and other such obvious horseshit that the Odyssey could be said to be so full of woo it more appropriately should be classified with everything published by the Weekly World News. And yet, I've learned quite a bit from it. It's the concepts that it's trying to get across that are important, not the actual "facts" that appear to be presented. At the the point anyone goes looking for a real Atlantis (or cares if there is one), they've demonstrated a misunderstanding of the most important things an initiate can know and that is:
! AUCHTUNG MOTHERFUCKER !
------------------ Never take anything literally !
Instead, go ahead and treat everything esoteric which you read as factual bullshit which contains some ideas and concepts the author was trying to get across, To illustrate, let's look at Proteus from Greek Myth:
Proteus is a god who knows all things and can tell you all things, assuming you can hold onto the slippery bitch. In order to get an answer out of him you had to hold onto him as he changed from form to form to form to form to form (you get the idea) until he gets tired, gives up, resumes his proper shape and tells you whatever it is you want to know.
Obviously, there's no god named Proteus, therefore you can't catch him and wrestle with him until he cries "unkle!" before giving you the truth. But, such is truth. Proteus is a symbol for the search for truth, or at least, since there is no such thing as truth, he's a symbol for the search for a deeper understanding beyond how things appear to you now. He is, in essence, a symbol for what all us occultists are actually doing when we refer to ourselves as someone who's into the occult. As time passes, our understanding deepens. As our understanding deepens, it appears to change. For example, I once believed that money was actually valuable. Now I know money is dependent on implicit agreement that it's worth something. So, once, money was the coin, now it's something psychological which says more about the humans who use it rather than something in of itself. Anyway, as our understanding deepens, things appear to change, and no matter how much things appear to change, an occultist holds fast to the search for a deeper understanding, because he knows that the appearance of things have changed in the past and are likely to again -- in the end, the lesson of Proteus is that the appearances don't matter as much as the actively seeking a deeper understanding of whatever things appear to be,
Kapeesh? Great.
So, yeah, getting back to what I was saying, this misappropriation of scientific concepts is meaningless ... scientifically. On the other hand, when taken as myth -- and not literally "science" -- then your link becomes a worthwhile read when we try to discover not the scientific validity of the words written, but the actual concepts he was trying to get across.
I suppose I should note that there's some people who take this sort of misappropriation literally and still get a lot out of it, so long as they are separate from academics. As myth it's useful, as science, it will get you laughed out of a lab. You gotta keep 'em separated.
The same goes for the miraculous tales of healing and such. Don't take them literally either. They either have a point embedded within them or someone's got the wrong idea and has included them as "ancedotal evidence of THE HOLY POWER OF THE WOO." If there's no point beyond the "miraculous healin'", then it's the second type.
Personally, I really would like to see occultists talk more directly and with less mythic language about what it's all about. But, meh, that's why I'm writing this. :)
Before writing a second part, I'm going to end this part with a complete mindfuck:
Would you believe that, in essence, the writer of this article is in complete agreement with the punk band The Offspring?
Check it out. Here's a quote from your linked page:
"This is because at the fundamental level of reality, anything is possible, and the restructuring of reality is dictated entirely by our beliefs and expectations. We are pure energy, and there is infinite potential in that energy. ****It is entirely up to us what we choose to manifest out of the field in our lives*** and in our bodies.
You have no limitations, and nothing is impossible. It is only your beliefs which dictate what you can and cannot do."
And, though they express it slightly differently, here's The Offspring version:
Lastly, here's my version:
The only rules that matter are the rules I can't break.
