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.
Quick thread on coincidences, synchronicity and magic. I think it was Gordon White who defined magical practice as working to maximize the number of meaningful coincidences in life.
Coincidences are powerful, in a way that's hard to understand at first.
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”
when we tell stories about magic but coat those stories with a layer of "btw magic is impossible" we are saying that having power and helping people is impossible
Woo from people who take phenomenology, cognitive science, machine learning, and epistemology seriously of course will hit different. It's vastly more capable of self-articulation, development, testing, and consistency-checks. It's the good stuff.
this idea that divination is real, but that it has little to do with what system you use. Some people will prefer tarot, others astrology, others the I Ching, or cracked tortoise shells, or bird signs or dice or just about anything else. All of it works, not because there’s anything inherent to the images of the tarot, or the position of the stars... See more