Reveal Your Uncool New Age / Spirituality Beliefs

more people should read echkart tolle

the earth is alive

oof. coming in hot, map

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My complete chart on co-star describes me perfectly. Not saying its real but a coincidence.

lol, i predict this thread will be even less successful than 'reveal your uncool conservative beliefs". if there's one thing ilx is more hardcore about than liberalism, it's rationality

dunno, I might bite here, my wife is training to be an acupuncturist and doctor of Chinese medicine (she is Chinese so this is not really new age) and as a result I follow lots of things which would probably get me an eye-roll

maps fuck yes

i have so many

everything is *energy*

xxp a close friend was doing the same about a decade ago (and is now a practicing acupuncturist), and i went through a long process of trying to reconcile the esteem in which i held his intellect/life view with his chosen career path. where i ultimately landed is that despite its hubris, western medicine (indeed, science) knows way less than it thinks it does. there is so much we don't understand or only scratch the surface of understanding, that it behooves us to be as humble as possible. plus my wife was having a lot of bleeding during one of her pregnancies and it stopped as soon as she saw an acupuncturist - i don't claim that the correlation is causation but with that perspective of humility i was able to note that data point for what it is

speak to the plants. touch the plants. they can hear and feel you.

gimme all those doterra oils i love that shit so much

haha hi five, that is cool and interesting. there is a lot of colonialist wish-fulfillment / guilt management in new age stuff. i feel like it's good to be aware of it so you can suss out when the appeal of something is more racist than not.

xp omg marcos!!!!! hi hi hi!

heyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!

buddy are you on social media? if not no prob, it's good to catch you here!

i'll message you

the earth is alive

b-b-but, this is not uncool!!

alternative medicine has no shortage whatsoever of hubris

i'll message you

― marcos, Monday, October 18, 2021 7:30 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i lost my ilx mail but drop me a line at struggin at gmail :)

will do!

alternative medicine has no shortage whatsoever of hubris

of course, need to be humble on all sides.

echkart tolle is a dimestore mystic

planet x is in retrograde, I gather

echkart tolle is a dimestore mystic

― Andy the Grasshopper, Monday, October 18, 2021 7:58 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

*points to thread title* this is a safe space

Ask me anything about the time I almost completed a masters degree in TCM. (I broke my hand at the end and had finished all the academic coursework, just had a few weeks of clinic left to do.)

It can be effective for some conditions — namely fertility, chronic muscle pain, and possibly insomnia although it never really cured my lack of sleep. The real kicker for me was realizing success in the field depends much more on self-promotional abilities than anything related to actual effectiveness as a healer.

In general that field, both westerners and Asians, is also extremely averse to critical thinking. Especially when it’s directed at the common biases of the field. I’m sorry but just because something’s in some 1500 year old book, that doesn’t denote any exceptional validity.

i don't follow astrology much but i do take aspects of my sign pretty seriously

The real kicker for me was realizing success in the field depends much more on self-promotional abilities than anything related to actual effectiveness

(tries to count all the fields for which this is true, but runs out of numbers)

Accountancy

Have a few Ouspensky books on the shelf. Have found a randomly acquired new agey self help book by Robert De Ropp genuinely interesting and useful. I mean maybe those guys are proto new age rather than proper crystal shop stuff but anyway.

I bought a couple of books on Asatru a few years ago but decided I didn't want to join a white power gang, so left it alone.

i mostly find the UAP/UFO 'disclosure' stuff fun, but part of me believes there is something definitely going on, and it's not just a gov/intelligence psy op. call me naive

i believe in 'presences'

right around the first time a big relationship fell apart, she was suddenly reading eckhart tolle a bunch and urging me to read it. in retrospect, my total unwillingness to even give it a shot was probably what really pissed her off. i was different in those days. i don't know, these days i see the world from such a disconnected way, very absurd, what is happening and trying to not be so sad all the time, at least. i've figured out ways to sort of make that work for myself that probably look absurd to the outside, as absurd as the tolle stuff did to me in my 20s at least. i think it bugs me that there is always a profit motive with pop-spirituality

I didn't want to join a white power gang, so left it alone.

I've dabbled a bit, and I concur - there's an ickiness about it. But I don't the ancient norse gave a shit about white supremacy, by & large

*think*

Agree with that; all the history I've read suggests that they traded extensively with Arab nations and whatnot. But any Asatru organizations I'd have been able to actually get in contact with where I live would have been sketchy at best.

Who here remembers when hardcore punkers went slightly Krishna? Shelter, Cro-Mags etc... that was a weird turn of events

eckhart tolle is just repackaged zen stuff for the masses, meditation 101, good stuff about what the ego is and how it operates imo that i think more people should be aware of.

I believe in the spiritual tombola and how to pick magic numbers on the Irish Lotto/Daily Millions draws. I mix up my magic numbers with some randomly generated integers and then mix them up some more and have won a couple of grand occasionally with this method, but it's no living.

I was inspired by that Roberto Bolano novel character who wins the lottery by picking his numbers in a similarly strange manner and by the connection of that monk that won a $249 million Powerball jackpot and spent some of it funding a five-hour, three-intermission adaptation of 2666.

i wish we could get that monk on ilx

I'm animistic af

I used to be a witch's apprentice

For the last several years the most important relationship in my life has been with the Yijing (I Ching).

I started practicing Yijing divination when I was 16. I'd had a cursory interest because of the Pink Floyd song 'Chapter 24' that quotes from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, and a street bookseller friend gave me a copy when I expressed a curiosity.

I'm immersed in it to the extent that I've been studying Early Old Chinese for about 5 years.

I still have the following books on my shelf (mostly acquired and during my time as a witch's apprentice):

Shamanic Voices
Dreamtime & Inner Space
Theatre, Ritual and Transformation
Other Lives, Other Selves
The Way of the Tarot
Divination and the Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World
Temiar Religion

etc

some of these are quite dense academic studies rather than self-help gobbledygook and a couple are admittedly too 'out there' for me but I own and have read them.

My wife has quite a few 'new age' beliefs and a goodly number of books that fall into that category, but I've discovered she handles her odder beliefs surprisingly well and I cannot detect much if anything in the way of real life problems that have arisen through them. They mostly give her a sense of the universe as being a less hostile or uncaring place and her existence as taking place within a deeper purpose and structure than is apparent in our capitalistic society. I can't kick against that. I admire it.

I've come to realize in the last few years that my 'spiritual beliefs' are largely aesthetic/cultural but not all that hearfelt. I think I come at the stuff more from a Joseph Campbell perspective than an actual believer, and I think I'm worse off for it.

I feel better when I pray every morning.

I bought some beautiful tarot decks at a thrift store many years ago on a whim and have become increasingly obsessed with the card meanings and tarot iconography and history ever since. I learned to read tarot and have been reading for friends for a few years now

I don't believe in fortune telling, just in how tarot readings can bring forth ideas we already know to be true in our subconscious but haven't recognized

same - and the strength of my belief is directly proportional to how much attention i give it / how many goofy documentaries i watch on it.
― namaste darkness my old friend (ledge), Tuesday, October 19, 2021 2:37 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

omg did you watch 'the phenomenon' (2020) then? so great. got a jacques vallee book as a result, it's freaking me out

no but i will! the last things I watched (and the first in many years) were the ufo episode of unsolved mysteries, the bob lazar doc, and unacknowledged - all on netflix. Part of the appeal is the conscious cognitive dissonance of knowing a lot of what they talk about is plain batshit crazy, and that people lie or make up stories for all sorts of unfathomable reasons, alongside the compelling weight of testimony from multiple sources, often in agreement, with no reason to fabricate or specific reasons not to.

bob lazar is a certified freak, and possibly a murderer? this doc plays it all very straight-faced, doesn't let guys like him on screen. the stuff about them turning on/off nukes is wild. peter coyote narrates!

i believe in 'presences'

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Monday, October 18, 2021 3:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yea I've got too many friends/family members who are generally skeptical of this kind of thing who regardless have some sort of weird story they can't explain. I went to school w/ someone whose house apparently had a spirit in it and I remember how nonchalantly he'd talk about it, it wasn't "guys check this freaky shit out" it was "it's actually kinda annoying"

my own story is about 6 years ago my wife's aunt died. we just had our first child and she talked a lot about how he was going to "replace" her. the night she died we put him to bed and suddenly his eyes were darting around & he started laughing. it was really weird because he seemed to be focusing on something but there was nothing there. also he never really laughed in the crib. I wish we'd recorded it. not gonna say it was something spooky but it's something that happened

This is only tangentially related but is extremely uncool and cringe:

When I was 19 someone gave me The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail to read and I became OBSESSED with all that stuff. It’s so obviously a hoax but I was such a dumb idiot, I got totally swept up in it. It did lead me to another book that had an interesting theory on how the shroud of Turin was created (pinhole camera, I think?) but which also had pretty hoax-y thriller/mystery undertones.

this is exactly it for me - I've got a Tarot deck and I've used it to do readings for friends, not because I and they believe we are tapping into something greater than ourselves and a sense of pre-destiny, but because it's a useful psychological reframing device that encourages you to re-examine previous events through a different perspective and be more open to what's ahead when it arrives for you.

I don't really have much in the way of spiritual belief, but I've had a life-long love for the paranormal - more for mysterious experiences and encounters that ordinary people have, and not so much for the worldviews and mythologies that sometimes develop around these subjects. There's some pretty interesting writers and blogs approaching the subject from a more sociological angle, which makes a change from the believer/skeptic binary that seems to dominate discussion on these topics.

Got DVDs of the first two Arthur C Clarke series,

Mysterious World and World of Strange Powers, still pretty great, especially for the witness interviews ("I've never seen a one-legged man run so fast in my life...")

For the most part I think I'm in the same not-that-out-there zone as much of the thread - divination (specifically tarot) as a practical way to examine oneself and one's situation; a pretty much aesthetic love of paranormal shit & forteana. But since trying ayahuasca I have been relentlessly bugged by wondering what is going on with DMT & the entities & consistent patterns in encounters. The feeling that there is ~something else~ though I have no idea what it is, or its status in relation to consensus reality.
Not really a new age/spiritual belief at this point, more like young stoner redux in a middle aged man. But it feels like there's something I keep picking at there about how I should live, what I should believe.

Teaching and being around young people more has led me to think more deeply about certainties I developed in my 30s, particularly around spiritual and religious language. You're kind of forced into taking a position on these things and to have shorthand answers available when asked about God, the soul and the paranormal etc and I tended to say things like 'I feel like I've done my work there' or 'I'm just not that interested anymore', which closes down conversation when really you want these things to be as open as possible. I also come into contact with people for whom spirits are very much a reality and I was pulled up more than once for having a slightly mocking tone when discussing things in this area.

All of which is to say, I'm less certain about a lot of this stuff than I was 15/20 years ago and in a pretty positive way, I think. I'm broadly in the godless camp but tend towards a Buddhist conception of oneness and consciousness. I like the idea of the soul as a metaphor that helps understand self and other and how best to live one's life. I like how psychedelics play into this and after some pretty positive (and not so positive) experiences with psychedelics in my late teens, would love to explore this more, while fairly safe in the knowledge that I wont have the guts to do anything about it much beyond the odd joint here and there when I come into contact with it. Young stoner redux seems like a nice way of putting it. I might nick that.

I'm pretty un-woo-woo but I find that I'm increasingly able to ride with most woo-woo stuff to the extent that it hasn't completely eroded a given proponent's critical faculties (or is itself an outgrowth of critical faculties in a state of collapse). Because I ultimately don't know shit about dick and neither does anybody else, is the thing.

hey dog latin!!! how are you

dl post to what are you into right now? i wanna hear what you've been listening to / wearing / etc

The feeling that there is ~something else~ though I have no idea what it is, or its status in relation to consensus reality.
Not really a new age/spiritual belief at this point, more like young stoner redux in a middle aged man. But it feels like there's something I keep picking at there about how I should live, what I should believe.

― woof, Tuesday, October 19, 2021 5:33 PM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this describes where i'm at pretty well, besides the dmt. i'm also happy to leave it very vague and unformed. like, the mystery of being. i really have no control over it but i don't want to quash it as it can suddenly and unexpectedly give me power or insight.

I think that dogmatic rationality is utter bullshit— Steven Pinker can kiss my ass— but I also have a lot of complicated feelings about certain elements of the occult arts, such as tarot, crystal healing, divination and etc. I can see that it seems to help a lot of people I know, but I also can't take it seriously myself, at all. Astrology is fun, but generally meaningless afaict.

I think the issue that gets me down the most with "this stuff" is that so many of its practitioners seem suspicious of or downright hostile toward more mainstream religious beliefs. This view seems lazy and hypocritical to me.

I also genuinely believe that people who are whole-heartedly invested in a lot of these practices are fascists.

That said, I do believe in divinity and "presence," but yknow, that's just standard woo.

new age vibes i feel that other threads presence right here right now

― marcos, Tuesday, October 19, 2021 12:55 PM (eighteen seconds ago)

i feel it as well

#onethread

anyone incapable of feeling overwhelming awe when contemplating this earth and all it contains, let alone the rest of what is a functionally infinite universe, is dead to all feeling for what their life is.

But since trying ayahuasca I have been relentlessly bugged by wondering what is going on with DMT & the entities & consistent patterns in encounters. The feeling that there is ~something else~ though I have no idea what it is, or its status in relation to consensus reality.

I had just read a good book exploring things of this nature; specifically about how many ancient/native civilizations all arrived to the same things. particularly in the tools that they developed, which didn't make sense to be consistent across many parts of the world. I forget what the point was but it sounded cool when I was reading it

It's as much the awful shitbastard 'dogmatic rationalists' that have led me to re-examine what I think as anything else. When you're on something approaching the same side as Dawkins, Sam Harris, Pinker, Gervais etc something's broken. Which isn't to say I'm going to start buying crystals or looking at my horoscope just yet but still.

Dogmatic rationalists believe that "mastery" is possible— anything that cannot be easily explained by modes of western thought, logic, and science cannot possibly be real or correct. It is an arrogant and racist worldview that presumes hierarchies of knowledge that are quite literal delusions.

also male-supremacist. clinging to rationality is very irrational imo and much of the underlying motivation for it is chauvinist afaict.

Right, the whole outlook also plays into colonialism, environmental destabilization, and on and on

Spurs and mayo are both genuinely cursed and were i to choose nba and nfl teams i would have the same jinx effect

I'm a working scientist and I'm repelled by dogmatic rationalism. It's the opposite of the scientific mindset, which is "happy to be wrong when new evidence repudiates the old." I'm happy for people to have unprovable beliefs and I think there are many important, even crucial, elements of the universe that science is unable to describe or fit into its framework. It's just a mode of discourse really. I find Dawkins' arrogance pathetic and disappointing after his many deep insights about evolution. It's the populists' disease, you get so used to giving an answer to every question that you begin to believe your own bullshit.

There's an old analogy: around 1840, a New York whaling captain was charged with evading fish oil tax payments. He brought a specialist into court, who declared that whales aren't really fish, therefore he didn't owe the tax. Well, of course whales are fish, they look like big fish and swim in the ocean. He lost that case, but of course was vindicated in the years to come.

Hardcore skeptics can be like this - infected with acute 'presentism,' the dogged belief that know all there is to know

And yes I'm a subscriber to Fortean Times

Yeah I basically think greed and hatred are the result of delusion, looking at your own experience closely enough will eventually free you of that, you'll see that all things arise in interdependence and that love will arise from that insight.

Basically standard-issue Western "Buddhism except without all the supernatural stuff" ... which honestly is in some sense watered-down.

Western Buddhist teachers will admit to personal experience of plenty of supernatural-seeming things - mind-reading, shared astral projections, that kind of thing.

One of my teachers saw enough weird stuff that he eventually asked himself what he *didn't* believe in. He decided the Loch Ness monster - it would have to reproduce, so there would need to be more than one of them, so it would be unlikely to stay hidden ...

I was introduced to the Enneagram by someone who spent time at conferences devoted to it and who was able to explain it very convincingly. I think its description of 9 basic different personality types with characteristic roles - and the interactions between those personality types - is interesting.

There was a really interesting article a few years ago (in the New Yorker?) that I’d love to find again: basically, there was a study where they took patients who had a type of brain injury where they’re literally unable to perceive half the world (eg they can’t see anything on their left) and showed them a picture of a house and asked how they felt about the house. In one picture, it’s a normal house. The patient can only see the right side of the house and they say they feel neutral or good about the house. Then the patient is shown a picture where the left side of the house is on fire, and they get a bad feeling when looking at it. So even though they couldn’t see/or perceive that side of the image (at least, not in the way we expect to be able to), the information was still being taken in and processed.

I think I probably got some of this wrong bc my memory sucks but I think the gist is correct. Anyway, I’ve been a big believer in >>>vibes<<< ever since. It’s also reinforced my belief that while I think paranormal encounters are real, I think they’re only real in that the brain is always trying to make things make sense. I don’t think ghosts etc are actually that, it’s just the brain processing information and trying to create a narrative or make it make sense. The only thing I believe in is literal energy.

To me the connections between people who love each other are more than just rational

There was a really interesting article a few years ago (in the New Yorker?) that I’d love to find again: basically, there was a study where they took patients who had a type of brain injury where they’re literally unable to perceive half the world (eg they can’t see anything on their left)

they're called split-brain patients, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of articles about them - if you fancy a book length treatment of the kinds of implications you talk about i can recommend the master and his emissary by iain mcgilchrist.

Dogmatic rationalists believe that "mastery" is possible— anything that cannot be easily explained by modes of western thought, logic, and science cannot possibly be real or correct. It is an arrogant and racist worldview that presumes hierarchies of knowledge that are quite literal delusions.

― I'm a sovereign jizz citizen (the table is the table), Tuesday, 19 October 2021 19:20 (yesterday) link

also male-supremacist. clinging to rationality is very irrational imo and much of the underlying motivation for it is chauvinist afaict.

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Tuesday, 19 October 2021 19:55 (yesterday) link

Right, the whole outlook also plays into colonialism, environmental destabilization, and on and on

― I'm a sovereign jizz citizen (the table is the table), Tuesday, 19 October 2021 20:37 (yesterday) link

Hey guys, is "dogmatic rationalist" a real term? I'm not familiar with the type of person in this description, despite some of these traits being shared among the famously obnoxious celebrity atheists that have been listed.

It's as much the awful shitbastard 'dogmatic rationalists' that have led me to re-examine what I think as anything else. When you're on something approaching the same side as Dawkins, Sam Harris, Pinker, Gervais etc something's broken.

This is why I've described myself as a relaxed agnostic for years.

Evan, I think we sort of made that term up as referring to those aforementioned shitbastards.

i thought it was in the dsm-v.

j/k

I guess I just don’t think that the spiritual, supernatural, paranormal, whatever, is the opposite to science and rational thought. I think there’s a bridge and that bridge is knowledge. Like, at one time people thought earthquakes, and thunder, and stars, and certain diseases and all kinds of things were supernatural events.

And I don’t think this makes love or social connections etc less-than.

Yes- it’s not an either/or. I’m not keen live in a society where science, reason and technology have no place and is dominated by superstition, but like a bit of flakiness to be tolerated.

I guess I just don’t think that the spiritual, supernatural, paranormal, whatever, is the opposite to science and rational thought. I think there’s a bridge and that bridge is knowledge.

Oh, yeah. The oldest divination texts show the beginnings of empiricism and science. "The careful observation and recording of nature", "the conviction that there is regularity in natural processes" and "the aspiration to discover the general laws underlying the multiplicity of phenomena" - It's not unscientific, it's proto-scientific.

Joseph Needham and Jean Bottero have written about this.

This isn't meant to single out Aimless, nothing personal. Just some food for my thinking box here.

an attitude that the Chinese are unfit custodians of their own heritage

The Cultural Revolution laid waste to a great many people and institutions where that heritage was valued and preserved. That damage can never be undone.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, October 19, 2021 1:31 AM

I'm definitely not here to take the party line but just as a counterpoint, before the Cultural Revolution Mao organized a veritable army of "barefoot doctors" who used a combination of traditional and western medicine to provide medical care in remote areas where primary care was generally unavailable.

By now it ought to be clear that the best thing that could possibly happen to all non-human life forms on earth is for humans to experience a massive and immediate die-off of about 90% to 100%, without it being caused by a nuclear war....

iow, we're fucked.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Thursday, October 21, 2021 10:48 PM

anyone incapable of feeling overwhelming awe when contemplating this earth and all it contains, let alone the rest of what is a functionally infinite universe, is dead to all feeling for what their life is.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, October 19, 2021 6:07 PM

This is what spirituality means to me, I really couldn't give much of a toss about new age associations that the term has been saddled with. It's about a perspective that is literally cosmic. We are nothing in the grand scheme of things, and that framework can be comforting to me -- especially when faced with the kind of existential dread expressed in the previous quote.

Meanwhile via Metafilter, an overview of 'spiritual bypassing'.

Psychologist and spiritual teacher John Welwood initially coined the term “spiritual bypassing” to describe the tendency in spiritual communities to use spiritual practices or beliefs to avoid conflict, bypass painful emotions, keep us out of therapy, and narcotize ourselves out of our pain, rather than treating what hurts. Robert Augustus Masters knows this well. As a reformed cult leader, he knew perfectly well how brainwashing people in the cult he led by teaching them how to spiritually bypass groomed them to tolerate the narcissistic cultic abuse he inflicted. After doing what he could to apologize and make amends to those he harmed in his cult, he wrote the book Spiritual Bypassing to educate people about the harms of spiritual bypassing and teach people how not to be vulnerable to people who abuse their power and expect to be let off the hook of accountability.

Yet, even in the social justice conscious milieu of 2021, people in the New Age world are still parroting these teachings and letting MeToo abusers, pastel QAnon conspiracy theorists, people who spread misinformation and profit from it, white supremacists in yoga clothes, and manipulative con artists off the hook of accountability, even amidst real global catastrophes.

It’s not okay. And those of us who give a shit need to do our part to heal ourselves so we can move beyond spiritual bypassing and take up the mantel of social justice. It is now entirely obvious to me that any spirituality that does not include taking a stand for those who are harmed by abusers of power needs to fall by the wayside.

Falling back on "everything happens for a reason" definitely had a strong appeal for me when I was younger and it still pops up as a desperate coping mechanism occasionally. Now it mostly seems like a very self-centered way to explain a largely uncaring cosmos tho.

We are nothing in the grand scheme of things

The way I see it, the sheer amount and complexity of life on earth, as compared to the relative sterility and emptiness of the vast majority of the observable universe, gives this planet a peculiar kind of energy that, in its own way reduces mere stars to relative insignificance. Just in terms of complex chemical reactions, earth has a MASSIVELY HUGE profile in this part of space. We (Gaia, if you will) seem to be quite prominent in the scheme of things by that yardstick.

Cat Earth Theory

Cat Earth Theory pic.twitter.com/gITengQYau

— Terrible Maps (@TerribleMaps) April 3, 2020

A lot of my friends like to talk about the zodiac and what it means for us and our other friends. I have always been surprised by that. They don’t otherwise seem to have new age beliefs. I think maybe it’s an avenue for finding ways to connect, which I am on board with

sometimes i have uncool new age / spirituality beliefs and sometimes i don't

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81xMur9eyuL._SX679_.jpg

mounds are so good

anyways enjoy this guided meditation, i sure did https://calmtapes.bandcamp.com/album/time-to-let-go-a-guided-meditation

I enjoy a good death/hibernation/rebirth cthonic framework as a way to enjoy the cycles of life and the passage of time. I don't get too specific about it though. Kind of allergic to "joining" vibes after leaving evangelicalism & Christianity altogether.

I've read anecdotally that both zodiac & tarot are enjoying a pandemic-related moment; probably less about genuine mysticism and more about 'what the fuck should I do with my life?'

And in that realm I really don't have a problem with either; in fact I've been looking at the rune stones again recently

Astrology and tarot seem like interesting ways for people to think about and reflect upon their own experiences and actions. What irks me about some people into these esoteric arts is that they take tarot readings or their star charts as determining factors in their lives— in a sense, they put their faith into them, all while being snidely dismissive of more mainstream religious practices. Like, maybe just allow that you're also operating on faith?