The Validity of the Sigil

Magic. That’s the foundation of the topic.
By standard, our modern cultures dismiss magic because there’s no evidence to suggest that any person can actually manifest fireballs from nothing or curse a person into deteriorating to death instantly.
I agree.
However, let’s not throw out everything just because the hyperbolic evolution of practices became obsessed with antics beyond reasonable tangibility.

We are tremendously powerful manipulators of our own existence and in that lies some degree of validity in magic.
Take the sigil.
The sigil is broadly described as any spiritual symbol believed to evoke an affect through using it as a medium for just such.

Modern magic adherents have plenty sigil practices. One such is the simple sigil of desire.
The idea described is to put down what you desire and then form a sort of symbol through a process.
This symbol will then act as the medium by which an adherent will channel their energy into so to receive the result of their desire.

That all sounds like a line from any random fairy tale, and it’s incredibly easy to dismiss it as flights of fancy.
It’s easy to say that adherents that swear by these things are simply under an illusion that they work because they want them to work.

In fact, the last assessment is not exactly far off the mark.

What is described in sigils for “charging”, as it is now called most often, is essentially pushing the human body to extreme sensational inputs, which would neurologically indicate that such an event would rev the CNS so that all processes in the body at that time are more embedded sensations.
Some of these practitioners bungee jump, others have sex or masturbate, some take radical drugs, and some inflict pain upon their person.

What all are doing neurologically, however, is dumping a huge amount of adrenaline, dopamine, and endorphin’s into their body within a confined and concise spiked burst while focusing on the symbol derived into that sigil; severe meditation basically.

Our bodies are extremely powerful receivers and transmitters of implicit information.
So much so that we have laws banning certain practices from being used in advertising because the effects of using the implicit part of the human body as a means to manipulate self control of other people is understood to be rather effective.

The practice of a sigil is not too different when you boil it down neurologically.
Let’s take a simple sigil of modern day culture.

We write a concept out that is of our desire regarding our self.
“I want to be happier at work.”
Commonly, this will then be slaughtered apart until you have:
WNTBHPRK

These are then warped radically by drawing the letters until they no longer represent letters, but end up in some way combined.
There are too many variations on what this can look like as the only real requirement is that it is manipulated by you into a form you feel best fits your design.
But you can see some in a google search.
google.com/search?q=example+ … 80&bih=945

This is then the only semblance left of the desire from what the adherent wrote.
In a way, it is rather poetic.

From the abstract and implicit sensational network of the adherent’s body came a sensation which arose as a cognitive reaction which was then taken by the person and articulated in mechanical linguistic activity, that requires explicit reasoning, so to be manipulated into an abstract and implicit medium to produce a sensation perceived and conceptualized by severe meditative chemical memory locking.

This process is a process of self brainwashing.
Or, to say it another way, it is the process of self installation.
If you do this, then you are essentially choosing what it is that you want to install into your memory as the piloting script for your perception so to subliminally cause you to create the concept which you had desired.

In a way, that is magic.
Well, it’s not magic, but we don’t have a word for controlling your emotionally existential experience in perception like we do for things like boxing.
So I suppose the best placement is to call it magic.

Although, to me, it seems more like pathological ontology. Pathontology?

At any rate, the point is that this actually stands as neurologically effective.
You could quite literally imprint what you passionately desire in earnest upon your amygdala affiliated processes in the lower frontal cortex where decisions first start popping in before they reach the cognitive stage.
You would be saving your cognitive will to your sub-cognitive reasoning data storage.

Which means that whatever you go after in such a way would be limited to what’s practically possible and not what’s simply fancied.

It also explains why many ancient civilizations perceived the act of doing these kinds of processes in attempts to manipulate the self control of other people than yourself in some fashion as bad, and using these same methods for leveraged self control was considered good.
The names differed, but regardless there was a gradient of good things to do with these methods and bad things to do with these methods.

A lot of other ideas were held alongside this one, and it ranged all over the geography, but this is one of the concepts that does seem to be consistent as functional.
We may not be able to conjure up externally physical spirits and elemental sources, but self evocation of perception does actually neurologically stand practical.

A further note.
While this discussion focused on a very specific form and culture of a sigil, it should be noted that there are sigils everywhere around us.
The American Flag is a sigil. The police officer badge is also a sigil.
The wedding ring is a sigil.
The Christian cross, Holy Trinity, Gospel Story, Buddhist Dharmachakra, Eight Fold Path, Judaic Torah, Talmud, Barmitzfa, and just about every other spiritual practice man has.

A desired behavior implicitly embodied into a sensation by representation of direction for action so to evoke the implied conception in action.

It seams like you are looking for a more earthly magic, but anyhow…

For me magic exists exactly as it did before it was condemned and superseded by religion.
I sometimes wonder if there is great wisdom in not doing magic, ~ as I don’t believe in an interventionist god.

Ever heard of ‘greys’ or silver spirits? They connect to you and other people or even other realms of existence. I probably shouldn’t say this [some things were secret even to magic based religions] but if you manifest one you can turn it into a woman or part of one and etc, etc. you can also touch or speak to someone else who’s connected.
Here the language of symbols takes on a whole new meaning, once you’ve learned the basic [as above] magic, then a symbol brought up in the mind can actually contact other things out there [without the spirit interface].

Now we forget all that and watch for how it works in the world, take the saying; ‘the world lends itself to ones persuasion’ then that everyone is in some way utilising that. Soon we see coincidence and connections in a whole different light, there appears to be a language ‘out there’ and one which everything speaks. A whisper can transmit an idea to someone without them even hearing it, a face can be communicated with even if its one on TV, and even if its an old image of someone long dead.

This probably means nothing to you; it is just a load of gibberish to the casual onlooker. It seams we all have our own language for such things and one which means nothing to someone else who after all would have their own language too. However once we learn how to communicate the language barrier can be surpassed.

Now tell me what you actually meant lol

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How can magic have been condemned by “religion”, when magic is part of “religion”?
It was simply claimed as “heretical” (ironically) by one religion.

You asked: Now tell me what you actually meant lol

This is what I meant:
A desired behavior -
implicitly embodied into a sensation -
by representation of direction for action -
so to evoke the implied conception in action.

Here’s one.

Here’s another:

And another:

And another:

And yet another:

These are .rar files of mass compression.
They compress, not simply ways to think, but entire ways of feeling and living.

I see, its an interesting point about zip files and compression, symbols certainly seam to be like that. The alphabet, math etc are composed of simpler symbols which our minds use to cognate sensory input and language. I expect that the brain works in a much faster way when it is not so limited.

Then we can take collections of such simpler meanings and put them all into one more complex symbol. …but with the complexity comes more subjectivity, such that some symbols need translation, and the more complex they get the greater the need for such.

Yet the brain is doing something like that on a subliminal level and using the same symbols we all use ~ or at least correlating to them, such that it would seam there is a language to all this that we all innately know. …If we can reach a certain synchronicity between minds, would that not mean that the brains would intuitively know what the symbols mean?

Perhaps this is how people who practice together gain such intuitions about symbols.

Now what would be as interesting would be that such symbols correlate to universals and compose formulaic meanings concerning the way things work together. …a universal language of existence?

I sometimes wonder if maybe jesus could understand people speaking different languages in such a way. Perhaps there’s another science out there waiting to be discovered.

interesting stuff! :slight_smile:

That’s the general idea, and yeah…if you look at it…the “universals” already exist.

Snakes, dragons, rotational’s (like the swastika or yin yang), spirit, circle, triangle, square, and so many more.
These occur independently all over the world throughout human history and carry with them ontological meanings and understandings.

Even the symbols above; they all represent aspects of the same thing really.

I tend to look at it as the construction of the greatest sky scraper.
Depending what crew you work with, your perspective of how things work and relate to each other will change.
But the steel workers on the main beams should keep their perspective of how to work as it is; it is good for building that steel frame.
But it is a far cry different than the perspective of the finishing carpenters and their approach to doing work.
And again, a far cry difference between the general electricians and the security tech engineers that bring the final system online.

Or, look at it like a whale.
There is a team of life that lives off of the whale, but each is unique to their purpose and need.
Together, all create a total ecosystem that is intransitively existent on the whale.

So if you look at a Christian Cross, what does it do?
What is the base and bottom line of that idea?
Preservation. You get to live after death endlessly.

What is the bottom line of Buddhism?
Flowing with; workable. You get to accommodate this life more clearly and therefore appreciate it more often.

How about Pagan (very loosely used) faiths?
Discerning and/or manipulation: you get to understand and control this existence.

How about Unitarianism (or the like)?
You get to work on getting the others to work together; finding coexistence provides longevity.

And so many others, but the point is there…the symbols of all of these are universal symbols.
Everyone is writing about the same big whale that we’re all riding.
The difference is that our ways are tailored to what our specific tasks on the whale are.

Interesting parallel with the steelworkers.
Can we equally be thinking of ordinary language as the slow lane on the mental highway, then that the mind is working at the same time at an incredibly faster rate though more subtle.
If we add enough symbolic and conceptual thought together would we arrive at massive complexity [though very fluid] over and above the simplicity of ordinary language?

Indeed, it’s the symbol of man [like the ankh] in its simplest and eternal* form.
There seams to be a correlation with both* here [even if we initially see symbols as more complex].

Cooperation is simpler than self-important individualism, specialisation than competition.

Indeed.

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That is exactly the case on many tiers of our neurology.

Absolutely. I already openly do this, and as humans, we do this constantly.
Simplest example, think of God.
How many images and emotions come to mind at the reflection of that one word?
Now how many tangents are related with all of those images and emotions?

Draw a nazi style swastika and then ask a 10 people the first 5 images that come to mind and what three emotions they feel for each imagery.
The amount of information one symbol can contain is immense.

And it doesn’t stand for just visual, we do this with auditory, and emotional ranges as well.
Truthfully, we do it with all senses.
Thought is a pretty slow sense by comparison. It’s language is finite and exact, while other senses are more vague and rapid.
For instance, the smell of incense in religions is a language, and that language speaks volumes, and at faster speeds, than cognition.
And they take hold of the cognitive because the cognitive, at some point, is slowly shown all of the various meanings of those non-linguistic concepts.

Greek Orthodox Christianity, for instance, uses all five senses while engaging the cognitive actively in its rituals.
Your sight in inundated with symbolism heavily, you smell incense, you touch sacred relics in some of the rituals, you taste the “wafer”, you hear the ongoing cadences creating a patterned tune, all while you think of the meaning of the words being said.
It is specifically organized for this reason; monks will explain it if you ask.

Individualism is flawed.
That bag of goods does not turn out to be working that great.
We’re still running around thinking in individualist philosophies, but that concept is relatively new…and imo, it sucks.
We’re not all male Bears.
We do need specialized cooperation being human. We are not individual shining separate gems that deserve their own separate terms of standards that determine the quality of the satisfaction therein.
That produces what we have now, ultimately. “The Best”…what a load of crap that is.
There is no “best”; there is what works and what’s enough to be satisfied.
“Best” has this culture bent on overpowered consumerism to the extent of thinking that only the “best” wins and does it by force of individuality.

You can’t grow fruit in a land of weeds where each weed wants to be the tallest tree.

My family is not a good family because I am the best husband, or I have the best wife, or we have the best kids.
We are a good family because we are a family. We each are the work and return of our cooperative specializations.
A good family is a family that is connected in effective living as much as our basic neurology is connected to its various family members.
A family isn’t a holding tank of limbs each doing their own function without regard for the other.
A family is a collective of humans united in living to a common purpose; to live satisfactorily.
This means each must be a part of the whole that specializes in a series of capacities for cooperating in assisting towards the familial pursuit to live satisfactorily.

The purpose of a family is to help make it easier to live satisfactorily than otherwise possible; and that means for each member when considered on the whole.

If we look at religion in this light; things change.
The “best” religion becomes a moot concept.

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It would be most awkward if it took a long time to exchange info between us eh!

For me it connects not only to an image of the deity and his ability to be both finite and infinite at once, but also with emptiness ~ which connects to my Buddhist beliefs too.
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Seams the part where we perceive ourselves to mostly be at is the slowest cog in the machine. Hmm that’s a good point about reaching out more by utilising all the senses.

Seams to me that risk is socialised while profit is privatised. Everyone’s life is purely situational so there is no basis for greatness. What would be best is best for ‘all’ surely, and I cant see that occurring while the few consider their workers to be merely changeable instruments in their machines.

Right, a good family is a whole, a good society is an extended family.
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Absolutely, for me its more of a jigsaw which comes together over time and via many sources.

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Ahhhh…Bronze Age philosophy.
Such simple and basic logic that seems…well…fucking obvious!
Meanwhile…

](*,)

OK…here’s your place in the family:

Now go to timeout and figure out why you like hurting your family.

This isn’t directed so much as Jayson, cause he’s cool, but I find it kind of interesting when people say ‘there isn’t any evidence for [fringe thing]’ cause… well I find it interesting when people say it now, as in, in the years when the internet has been available.

For instance I went through like 7 (or something like that) scientific studies presenting a strong correlation for psychic ability in another thread. Some goofball was playing devil’s advocate but even he couldn’t deny these were (strong) correlations. I will be linking another open and shut case for fireball/telekinesis below. It’s the same thing with other topics as well. There is no proof in the sense that the alphabet news agencies are going to get on air and see ‘Ok, you can believe this now’ but I mean… there is fucking evidence for stuff all around. You just have to look.

It’s definitely out there.

youtube.com/watch?v=nu99GRUUN6Y

Well I watched the video and I believe it when I experience it myself, actually no I still wont, I need evidence. The reason why I don’t believe such things is that the people being thrown around seamed predisposed to it, or that they were simply acting, or hypnotised ~ possibly without knowing/remembering.

That observation has been dismissed as showing something physical.
What it shows are forms of suggestive control.
The same is witnessed in miracle healers.

If you take a skeptic and put them in front of them, that chi does jack all.
The explanation has always been the same as the miracle healers; that the recipient skeptic is too skeptical and therefore blocking the chi flow (or healing powers) with their own negative chi (or evil spirits).

Honestly, if your super power can be overcome by nothing more than the thought of doubt, then it isn’t that great of a physical accomplishment.
Whether you doubt it or not, a human fist in your face will hurt.

Also, just for the record, my wife can stop people from moving her and so can my old high school friend.

If that was truly chi powered, he could do it standing on the toes of one foot and pushing back with nothing more than his littlest finger because his physical standing would have no bearing to what energy output he would be pushing with chi power.

I think it’s cool to always be willing to inspect these claims, but there’s also a lot of bullshit that comes with them.

It shows the mastery of qigong.

I mean are you serious right now? You’re going on about sigils and you cannot accept in energy manipulation.

I thought you were smarter than this.

What I went on regarding sigils is how they are valid in that they are a form of self brain washing, which is not a negative term.
It is a means of installing desired cognitive satisfactions into the lower prefrontal cortex where intuition, for one, and precognitive decision making, for another, fires off without direct linguistic cognition.

I’m not saying that the concept of Qigong is not capable of holding its own validity.
What I am stating is that that video showed me nothing usable.
The only people that interacted with the presenter were adherents or seekers to his teaching.
The two interviewing were never blasted with chi.
Instead, one was used to show how the chi could completely miss him and hit the person behind their body; the same adherent that was the individual used for most of the showing.

That is not very convincing at all.
It leaves loads of room for other explanations as to what is taking place, and fits in line with at least one known neurological condition.

We have studies on this, and some are quite interesting.
For instance, in some cases (and these are the more rare), recipients do not test positive for acute neurological hypnosis of any kind, but there are observed steep drops in blood pressure causing the recipients to basically just fall down.
There is nothing scientifically observed regarding doing the decapitated chicken dance like that one was doing in the video, but I’m sure they’d love to test that one.

We are not yet certain what is causing the blood pressure drops in these individuals.
What we can determine is that no change in any known field takes place, as we can measure even electromagnetic fields and see if anything neat happens there - we’d be thrilled to see that happen! Imagine the military applications!

But what we have so far is sharp blood pressure drops from “adherents” only to these kinds of things.

I’m not sure why I struck you as someone that believes in magical powers like Star Wars Force or anything, as I openly stated that I’m not an adherent to throwing fireballs or the like (outside of Penn & Teller style).

Sorry if that’s upsetting. :confusion-shrug:

It’s not upsetting. Just an instance of you being wrong, and you having an argument that is horrible.

What you are saying is this: The whole thing could be fake, even though it plays as real. That’s really what your ‘criticism’ boils down to. And what that dichotomy boils down to is this: you cannot prove, 100%, this isn’t a hoax. Which, of course, I cannot do for anything. Anything. So awesome, your criticism is the one that we can apply to anything. Great work. Even if we were there IRL I could stamp my foot and assert that I have no way of knowing if the whole thing isn’t a hoax.

I don’t even know why people bother saying ‘That hard to believe thing cannot happen.’ Cause it always can. Always.

There comes a point where when it’s so obvious that a phenomena is happening that you can continue to assert that - increasingly with completely implausible rational, like the whole world is in on the hoax - that somehow there is some magic trick going on, or whatever the fuck. You reach a point, though, when you continue to assert that, say electricity is witchcraft, or something like that, you just look like a crazy old person who can’t accept the present realities.

It’s my job to drag you, kicking and screaming, into the new realizations.

OK…
I’m not really terribly concerned.
If one day someone literally shows me super chi punches more than the personal demonstrations that I’ve come across, then I’ll haven’t any problem acknowledging their existence.

People are capable of self motivation of their motor skills.
Seeing people appear as though they are being affected by non willful bodily control when I full well know the human body can move itself in those same patterns on the will of the individual of that same body, and that several hundreds of people have done exactly that bit of trickery for multitudes of reasons, and that no measure has yet taken place which supports the claims of the individuals involved, and that I have never personally been shown anything to which accounts for much in remarkable form of such a thing (and I do personally take an interest in the matter and regularly look into this possibility), doesn’t really cause me to accept the claim.

It would then be a belief; a faith.
I simply haven’t any faith in chi powers in this fashion.

I do allow for the possibility of remote effect between two humans, but anything shown to me regarding Chi Power moves have been very unimpressive.

I mean, come on.
This is the age where magicians make entire massive object just simply disappear right in front of audiences wide out in the open.
This is the age where magicians make themselves fly freely in the air, or walk straight up a building as if they were walking on the sidewalk.

I need a bit more than just a little video clip that claims to show chi power moves being conducted.

If I accepted that, then I would have definitely stayed Christian.
But I don’t have one shred of anything in which to base the functional means of the chi power moves to.
There is simply nothing to start with to where I can reach across the table and say that I can understand how that would work and in what manner; even if we couldn’t prove it.

I can take the sigil and find valid means for it to be functional and produce its intended application.
I can’t do that with Chi power moves.
All I can do there is say that what stuff has been brought forward generally sucks terribly at removing room for doubt.
It would be really nice if someone with Chi power moves would just buckle in and run the tests in a lab to just get it done and over with.

I mean, we may not be able to call God into the lab, but it seems like we sure as hell could get that old guy in a lab.

You’re right.

This is tantamount to believing in an invisible deity.

I think it’s more probable than deity claims because the claim for chi power moves is far less extreme in power by comparison.
I can imagine it visually working, for instance.

On the other hand deities win a point over chi power moves in that deities can’t be tested in a lab, but chi power moves could be tested, and have been to some extent. Meaning that it seems needless to believe in something that could be so easily tested.
Chi power study institute of blah blah.
CPSIblah.

So they somewhat balance out in my mind.

I was being sarcastic.

Chi is real.

I’m done entertaining stupidity.

Goodbye.

I never stated that chi was invalid.
I simply stated that chi power moves have all the ability to be validated, yet have not been.