Reveal Your Uncool New Age / Spirituality Beliefs

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?