During the spell, something called a thought-form is created, which then becomes independent, with specific tasks to do. A thought-form can act like a conscious entity.
And you can get there quickly with Ayahuasca :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca
Neo-Paganism is naive, but perhaps its cute side is represented by people like Maia.
Maia,
I write rather formally and articulated, rather than casual and light.
Indoctrinated simply meant that they accepted me, I accepted them, and they taught me what they knew.
It meant nothing about this scarecrow idea of Harry Potter school of magic that you leveled at me without merit.
Conveniently, you did it again; though I’m not certain if you are aware of it.
You just chose to focus on the word, “Indoctrinated”, jumped to a premature conclusion of what was being said, took it to the worst possible rendition of what could have been meant, and then therefore used that premature conclusion that the word indicated that I was of the wrong mind to give yourself the liberty to not address anything else that I wrote.
Again, you built a premature conclusion and used that conclusion to isolate any propositions that were counter to your perspective.
Perhaps now that you understand the right meaning of my use of the word, you might oblige me and go back and respond to the dialogue we have going rather than outright dismissing me without merit?
Especially considering that I do not perform this action upon you, but instead rather take my time to take you earnestly.
Presumption, the seed of all sins.
That’s starting to make sense. So it is kinda like my “invisible servant” scenario, except the servant is born out of your own mind.
Now, you said earlier that you’re sworn to secrecy regarding the tricks of the trade, but you said that you can’t reveal too many details. What about just a few details… are have you revealed too much already (and now you’re going to have to kill me 
)?
I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to here, so to avoid me having to trawl back through this entire thread, and listen to it all again in all its depressing detail, can you state your question again please? Thanks.
The thought-form is crucial, fundamental to magic. Thought-forms are everywhere, we all create them all the time, without realising it. What we are taught in coven is to use them, rather than let them run wildly and chaotically across our lives, messing things up, as they will do if not given direction.
What I can’t, or rather shan’t, reveal is how we do this. Simply because I promised not to as a condition for joining the coven.
Conspiracies underfoot.
Materialism can be associated with Marxism, so my guess is that philosophers of science and others moved to physicalism just for clarity.
Sure, but then, what is that law made of?
But then, you are asking someone with our brain capacity to speculate on whether everything can be known by any mind with any (finite, I guess) mental ability can ‘know’ it. How can one know that?
And in the air too …
I think your shift in context confuses the issue.
I don’t see what adding the phrase in principle does when speculating
about whether we can know everything about nature.
I think it would be radical speculation to try to answer this question (which is in statement form)…
And given this radical speculation, it makes no difference to say in practice - now or in the future - or in principle. How can someone distinguish between these for this example? How could they know that it will be in principle possible to know everything or any particular truth about reality but not in practice possible?
What added not radically speculative - fantasy level - information do we get by adding the phrase ‘in principle’?
Maia,
Certainly:
Firstly, music is just a metaphor, or an analogy, to how magic works.
Further than this, I still can’t understand what you’re saying. It seems to me, and maybe I’ve misunderstood you, that you’re saying that music can be anything. My point is that this is not the case, any more than language can be anything. There are some noises that are music, and some that aren’t, and the difference is that music is structured.
I’m honestly astonished that this is such a contentious point. I can tell the difference between music and noise literally with the first note that’s played. Noise doesn’t have notes.
I understand that it was a metaphor, and apologize for any confusion, but that was why I was hitting on the idea that music isn’t exactly strictly that which is structured.
I feel that if you approach magic in this way, that you won’t be able to walk the winds of magic, rather than always relying on ritual pulling (to use a phrase) from magic.
Music isn’t just anything, however, it isn’t either just structured or organized sound.
I cannot teach you, over the internet, how to hear music where currently you just hear noise.
All that I can offer you is the assertion that if you drop the lexical barrier that you are used to that music is only that which is organized sound, that you will hear music where it was absent to you before.
Contrived music is organized sound, absolutely. That’s what pieces and songs are.
But this is not the boundary for what is and is not music itself; that is one form of music, in much the same way as rituals are one form of magic, but not magic itself.
In another metaphor, and this isn’t a great one - just the best one I can pull together; the air isn’t just what you breath.
That is clearly obvious to just about anyone around, and so it would seem odd to claim anything different because it is widely easy to observe air outside of our breathing.
Music, on the other hand (as well as magic), is not so easily observed because it is incredibly subjective to the individual’s perception.
If you are only listening for music under one exact and confined idea (like people looking for Harry Potter proofs of magic), then you can easily be convinced that music is only organized sound and nothing outside of this boundary.
Sounds Buddhist in a way. It also sounds a lot like something I like to practice–monitoring thought, watching it, and making conscious decisions on where to direct it and which ones to cling to. I’ve never thought of this as having the potential for magical effects on the world, but maybe I ought to give it a try.
That’s only fair. Thanks for divulging as much information as you did.
In my encounters with physicalists, there seems to be two motives, which can divide physicalist into two camps. First, there are those who are genuinely interested in understanding. These are the ones who buy into physicalism because, to them, it promises the most plausible alternative to dualism. What they seem really interested in is a form of monism that makes sense out of the world, and particularly the mind/body problem. They don’t seem particularly stuck on “matter” or the “physical,” but rather a single “stuff,” whatever that turns out to be, that can account for both matter as it presents itself to our senses and our inner subjective experiences. Then there are those physicalists who seem more interested in attacking religion. They seem to regard physicalism as the last best weapon in the anti-religion arsenal, the one hope for scientists (and that can be read as adherents to scientism) to get rid of the “soul” once and for all.
Clarity is certainly a plus that both can brag about, but I see a deeper motive here.
You see, this presupposes precisely what I was arguing against. Physical objects are made of stuff. But then there are physical properties or processes or states which needn’t be made of anything necessarily. Physical laws are certainly too abstract to be made of anything, but I think they still fit nicely into the physicalist’s formula for what counts as “physical”–the physicalists only demand that things, if they are to be real, can be described or explained exhaustively with only physical terms–that is to say, we don’t need to bring in non-physical terms or concepts. So a law, as abstract as it is, can be described/explained in terms of physical systems undergoing regular patterns of behavior under specific physical conditions.
I’m not asking Ierrellus to explain what he knows, just what he believes (or how he sees it).
I might also add that whether human thought is capable of comprehending any phenomenon or aspect of the universe that might be real might be determine by some theory of thought. I’m reading a book–Why Does the World Exist?–in which the author interviews a somewhat famous philosopher (I forget his name) who believes that human thought literally is capable of understanding anything real. He believes that human thought evolved based on a principle that’s built right into the very nature of physical existence (he argues that this is precisely why we are able to comprehend such a concept as “physical laws”) and if this is so, then human thought has the potential, given enough time, effort, and creativity, to comprehend any physical phenomenon presented to it. Ierrellus may not know whether there is anything that is in principle unknowable, but this philosopher, if I were to pose the same question to him, would certainly say there isn’t.
Yes, we agree that we are using it as a metaphor and that has not changed.
I have taught children to play this music in a choir. Body percussion and then jumping on a wooden floor for the thunder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chUkpaez_sY
So how does music work? Well that depends on the person playing but it also depends on the person listening.
Yes, and then you get these really silly arguments where the theists feel compelled to defend a dualism, not realizing that the physicalists monism (so far) includes neutrinos, massless particles, particles that can be in the same place as others, fields, wormholes potentially between universes and so on. Most theists are not formally dualists, like dualist philosophers are, but rather think in categories that make sense to them in their lives. Some stuff already seems rather non-physical to them, without even getting into exotic things like Angels.
I don’t think you can describe laws using only physical objects. You can say what the law describes/explains but not what it is ontologically.
My reaction was likely defensive and not fully understanding the context, which includes
where you are coming from, etc.
It seemed, at the time, like someone with a naturalist realism calling Irrelius rational and thinking that because of this he might see what can be known or the universe in those terms. To me it is radically speculative to do something beyond guessing, unless one does not limit oneself to scientific methodology to arrive at knowledge, or even liklihoods.
Wouldn’t it simply be any phenomenon? or? Notice also you mentioned physical phenomena presented to human thought. A better word might be noticed or noticable. But in either case, how would one know that the set of things presented is the set of physical things or phenomena?
And actually the question in this case is how would one know that it will be or can be?
Sure, I am not questioning that some people will say no. My point is more in the context of certain belief systems the question is very odd. I often read physicalists who speak about what will become known, with certainty. Which means that they have arrived at what they consider the truth through nonempirical means. I think that is problematic and that’s where I jumped in. I now see, from other posts, that I really don’t quite know what your epistemological stance is or your metaphysics - considered as such or not. With this author I might not see an possible contradiction. I would have to see his whole system.
In a sense you asked the kind of question I have seen posed by scientific realists to people with beliefs that are considered unfounded by that group. IN that context I think the question has problems. Not just as a question. I think pretty much any question is acceptable, but given the seeming implication that a rational person holding scientific realism could answer it, it becomes problematic to me.
I hope I made that clear, but I am not sure.
I don’t know how you have got the impression that I’m trying to limit magic in any way, or that I don’t believe it’s everywhere and all around us.
This is what comes of attempting to explain it, I suppose. I should never have bothered.
Having had my post accidentally deleted (at least partially) I would like to again congratulate Maia for getting so much response and still sticking with it. She really has had people going.
With regard to the OP, so many posts ago and yet not so long ago, I don’t believe that Paganism is a natural state of being - and especially not Neo-Paganism, which draws on many traditions and practices and lives in the comfortable 21st Century.
The natural state of being for homo sapiens is surely awaking to the fact that he/she is cold, hungry, endangered and sheer naked, and needing to find some strategy to survive. Prior to that, he/she lived in the bliss of ignorance and lack of awareness, and reacted instinctively to the stimuli he/she received. The various methods progressed and understanding assisted further and so we have the spiral of development, including the burial of mates, which seems to have been the first sign of religiosity. The gods and spirits were very much a case of trial and error, trying to find what is reliable and amenable and, as we know, there were very different developments leading to various cultures.
The problems of organised religion will not be something that Neo-Paganism can avoid, since those problems are specifically human, not specifically religious or monotheistic or whatever else has been said here. Neo-Paganism is naive, but perhaps its cute side is represented by people like Maia. The problems come when people start organising themselves and rights and wrongs become important to certain members in order to define who is and who isn’t. But this has already been said …
I think the most important part of this movement is an understanding that human beings don’t live “in” the world, but come out of it and are very much part of the biosphere. Another thing is that we (the biosphere as our outer being) are also very fragile and we are presently in danger of breaking down if we go on forgetting the interaction we have in the world - as Anon was pointing to earlier. However, Neo-Paganism doesn’t seem to be the answer.