woo

my go-to definition, that comfortably dismisses much the nonsense that often gets caught up in ‘woo’, is “experiences that cannot be articulated by the part of the mind that can only understand experiences by articulating them”

If you’re looking for a good entry point into woo land, I recommend this book as a practical way to investigate the territory for yourself. It makes no big claims about reality. It just gives you some linguistic games to play that highlight the boundaries of the simulation. https://t.co/gRRXdX3E6Y

I’m not saying material life isn’t a thing. I drink H20 and shit entropy like the rest of the species. I’m saying it’s a lot weirder than we’ve dreamt of in any of these peer-reviewed philosophies. Physics is great. I love satellites and semiconductor chips. But we are, um, aware it’s incomplete, and we can’t begin to describe more if we don’t even... See more

A lot of woo is actually true. We just lack the mental capacity, the frameworks, the language, the ease of articulation, and the consistency of evidence to make it philosophically coherent and scientifically grounded. But we will get there. Disregard culture punishing you for taking this seriously. It's just a social fad that comes from the coll... See more

I don’t actually care that you even know about the chakras. I do care that you remember your wholeness. I don’t care if you’re woo or not. I do care that you are moving in a way that creates a life you want to be living as the person you are.

So, while we don’t have any scientifically valid theory about what such “energy” could be—all traditional explanations of it make no sense to the modern understanding of physiology—we can bring a certain empirical sensibility to our experiences anyway. We can become spiritual pragmatists. We can accept “energy” and its various traditional maps in a... See more

just let go of needing to explain it at all, and just go with it as an experience. There is something there, but we don’t really understand it, and maybe we can’t really understand it. And that’s OK.

a) I’m sick of pretending that psychic stuff doesn’t exist, and, b) materialism is bullshit. This office-park-version-of-reality charade has gone on long enough.