Arguing about meaning

Sometimes people spend allot of time arguing even though they completely agree with each other, they just don’t know it cause they think words carry a meaning.

Let me put this simply, words do not carry meaning, there is no meaning in them by them selves, it’s we who fill words with meaning, language is a symbolic structure that we then apply meaning to.

For example, when we read a book or a blog, symbols are arranged in such a way to be intelligible to us, hopefully, but our minds are not playing with what is already in the words, it’s the mind who fills the words with meaning, or you could say that the words are playing with what is already in our minds!

Wikipedia says “meaning is the content carried by the words or signs”, this is wrong, this misunderstanding makes people think everyone is hearing the same meaning in words as they do, and because they think words are that static they sometimes can’t understand other peoples arguments, it just sounds like some crap, cause the meaning they hear is not the same meaning the one speaking meant to be heard.

Bob: UFOs are real!
Joe: UFOs are not real!

It’s like an optical illusion, more then one meaning can be extracted from the same text, making both of these statements right and wrong at the same time, depending on how you look at the optical illusion, but the speaker only meant one of the different meanings.

Bob was saying that UFOs have been experienced and are therefor real, Joe is saying alien spacecrafts are not real, so they aren’t really talking about the same thing, Bob is talking about UFOs, while Joe is talking about a popular explanation of what UFOs are, but even if they finally find this error they might, like I’ve seen so many times, stop arguing about what they where talking about and start arguing about what words mean, which is like trying to say an optical illusion only has one right meaning.

It’s good to be precise in speech but what is forgotten often is that it’s also good to be aware that the speaker might not apply the same meaning to a word as you do, or just simply evaluate what each word means in relation to the rest of the text, the environment, the nature of the situation and so on.

There is no future in history.

Mind/Counciousness studies

This will be an addition to my last post, in it I focused on, I think, eastern and contemplative traditions in relation to mind training, you might not want to call it mind training though, but I think most people get that wording and it puts a focus on a specific way to look at the mind, basically something that can be trained, not just in a specific area like painting but in general, the fundamentals, which is what I’m interested in anyway.

I want to make a small list of how humans are thinking about the mind/consciousness at the moment other then the eastern and contemplative traditions, those would be cognitive science, introspectionism, neuropsychology, individual psychotherapy, social psychology, clinical psychiatry, developmental psychology, psychosomatic medicine, nonordinary states of consciousness, quantum consciousness and subtle energies research.

This is at least what I’m aware of or slightly aware of, if anyone knows of more places to look then that would be great.

My mind will become strong by accident!

“All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind.” - Aleister Crowley

The way I look at it, we don’t become a good chess players or martial artists by accident or random chance, or just simply we don’t get good at anything by not doing anything about it, that’s fairly obvious, some people belief though that their mind is an exception, that it will just work really well without any conscious effort or that it’s impossible to train it, I have no idea from where they get these ideas, they don’t seam to be able to point at any information on it, anyway, I want to point in another direction.

I think it’s pretty obvious that the source or close to the source of all that we can do is found in the mind, and it works outwardly from there, the brain, nervous system, arms, keyboard.. from that reasoning, if we can train the fundamentals of the mind to become thousand times more useful/optimized/powerful, it will have a chain effect to every area of our lives, working from the source and outwards, or in other words working inwards and in turn outwards.

I have little doubt in my mind that people throughout history have realized this and created science and arts on perfecting the mind, we have all heard about turning lead into gold right?

“Alchemy traditionally of course revolves around the refinement of the base material of consciousness into ‘gold’” - Zac

If we look at martial arts, or in other words training the body to become the ultimate battle machine, the core of it is very old and very efficient. We should see a similar science/art form that has been created to train the mind to it’s ultimate potential.

The literature that I have identified so far that contain the training for the mind are Yoga, Buddhism, Thelema and Hermeticism, but really anything that fits under the hat of spirituality and magick will probably contain explanations on training the mind amongst other things, these two categorize both have a strong history like martial arts, there are of course other places to look but I think these are the essentials, most of the other stuff I’ve seen is still pretty experimental, very little information on what you can actually do to train the mind and the little that does exist only helps in small areas, that’s at least the feeling I get at the moment.

Also there is allot of bullshit out there disguised as spirituality and magick, so there is something to be said about that, for example what most people here in the west consider Yoga is what I would call a fashion form of Yoga, which might get you something but I think it’s like getting one bite out of 50 divine cakes, not sure what to say about that other then just do your research.

Yoga proposes to start from the internal world, study internal nature, and through that, control the whole, both internal and external. It is a very old attempt. India has been its special stronghold, but it has also been attempted by other nations. In Western countries it was regarded as occultism, and people who wanted to practice it were either burnt or killed as witches and sorcerers. In India, for various reasons, it fell into the hands of persons who destroyed ninety per cent of the knowledge and tried to make a great secret of the remainder. In modern times, in the West, one finds many so-called teachers, but these are worse then those of India, because the latter knew something, while these modern exponents know nothing.

For those who shun the religious-like underpinning of spirituality and therefor avoid it I would say who cares? If God or spirit is of no interest to us and we’re offered a million dollars and a bible, would we not take it? Of course we would, the bible shouldn’t matter to us if we are “that way”, ignore it, who cares, it’s just stupid to make that stop us. Take what you can use and throw away the rest.

You can also look at it like this, you and your friends can work on training your minds your own way from scratch which you are already doing even if you don’t know it, or use tried methods that span throughout history as the base to work from, do we really think we can become the ultimate martial artist, engineer, painter or whatever without ever looking at what has been done so far? That’s like being in the stone age my friend.

“The reason most people in our society have such ridiculous ideas about what our minds can do is simple: our minds are ridiculously weak. If you think five hours staring at a wall is a ‘long time’ you don’t get a opinion in the occult powers debate. Thanks for comin’ out.” - Zac

May the spell of scientific cheerleading be broken

How do people judge methods of attaining knowledge? And is there any worth in the knowledge base created by methods other then the scientific method? Most believe the scientific method is a good one, some of them not only belief that but attack people who also include other similar methods, and some of them not only do that but belief that the knowledge obtained from other methods can at best be right by a random chance, so they say “oh this is not scientific, therefor there is no reason to believe that any of this is right”.

I’m not sure they have thought this through, they seam to be forgetting the gap between knowing almost nothing and up to the point where you reach the understanding of the scientific method from a personal or a historical perspective. We got here somehow didn’t we? And I bet it was something else then random chance. They seam to acknowledge this though but do not acknowledge that what got us to the scientific method could possibly work after the invention of it, some mysterious force made it and all that was produced by it not work anymore they say..

Because knowledge obtained before the scientific method was not scientific, science needed to explore everything from square one and fit it into their knowledge base. Now from the logic of the scientific cheerleaders we didn’t know anything at that point except the method of attaining knowledge and we would expect science not to be in line with knowledge obtained before that, at best only in line by random chance. But what I think we really find is that science not only creates understating of things that we didn’t even know where there, it also compliments the knowledge of some areas we had already explored, it clarifies them, removes unnecessary chunks and adds hidden branches, but the basic idea of it still stands, our exploration of these areas where already to some extent accurate, just not as accurate. So that gives us reason to believe that the knowledge base created by other methods, even in areas science has not touched yet, could contain a level of accuracy and usefulness.

Now this line of thinking allows you to explore vastly more human knowledge then ever before. Let’s see how it might look like using images, these images are not meant to be accurate, they are meant to show a point.

This picture represents what we could make out of the world before the scientific method, the knowledge base we had accumulated. It got us to the scientific method and a hell of allot of other things.

This picture represents what science has been able to make out of the world after starting from square one to incorporate it into scientifically acceptable knowledge, much added clarity to the areas that where explored before it by other methods and some things removed, but much is missing from areas science hasn’t even addressed yet or is just beginning to address, which have already been addressed using none-scientific methods. (I didn’t include in this picture the things which where not conceived of before science)

And this is what you get if you use both the knowledge created by the scientific method and the knowledge created by other methods, the parts created by other methods might not be as accurate, some of them might not work but some will and have stood the test of time.

And this is what it’s actually like.

The point I’m trying to make is that knowledge doesn’t have to be scientific or supported by science to be accurate, useful or true, the scientific method is used to create results that comply with scientific standards, other knowledge does not comply with these standards as I mentioned earlier and therefor can not go into that particular pool of knowledge. Not being able to comply with scientific standards does not say that it contradicts scientific findings, that it’s not useful or true, it only says that it doesn’t fulfill the requirements to be considered science and as I have mentioned, thinking that the scientific method is the only way to acquire knowledge is like saying science could never have been invented.

When you think about it you are already using allot of things which are not scientific and most of the basic things you learned about the world from the day you where born where not found out scientifically though you might later on incorporate scientific knowledge to it, so what if mankind is like a child grown up and many of the basic things it has found out are not scientific and only later on is there added scientific clarity?

Where science is absent is everything a lie? Is Mysticism not useful and Magick not accurate? Does Taoism hold no value and Buddhism no truth? Think about that for a moment.

The stupidest word in Icelandic

In english we have the word “drugs”, in Icelandic it’s “lyf”, in English we have “illegal drugs”, in Icelandic it’s “ólögleg lyf”, but in Icelandic we also have a special word for illegal drugs which is “eiturlyf” which translates as “poisondrugs”, that’s a smart move, now all illegal drugs are considered poison! Enlightenment to all!

This makes me wonder how words might be influencing us in perceiving the world, some might be misleading, what if the word for sex would be immoralthrusting.. “Have you been doing some immoralthrusting?! Shame on you!”.

So what about words like magick or spirituality, can we really see past the words? Or are we stuck at how the letters go together.