Stuart Evans

Framing is decisive. At every moment, we live and operate and relate to the world from inside our framing of it, our mental model of it. Relating to the world as made up of ecosystems will result in very different outcomes than relating to the world as made up of individuals, of discrete things that can be treated distinctly.

Any understanding of the mundane world that we develop necessarily involves dimension reduction and simplification: so the story goes. We may end up with a tractable model that predicts reasonably well, but we’ll never get our error term to zero, and we mustn’t confuse our toy conceptions for a high-fidelity reproduction of “reality.”

I constructed a world-view in which the forces I experienced fit within the natural order of science, as what Jung called "archetypes of the collective unconscious". I rejected supernatural explanations, but learned to believe in magic -- the magic of the human mind and hand and heart.

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

chakras in the west is funny because you have so many disbelievers who have no experience with it and so many professed believers who also have no investment, knowledge, or experience with it