To SystemiK:

No, you can't have your own beliefs on this. That's because they have absolutely zero empirical proof that they might even vaguely be grounded in reality, and is the sort of medieval thinking that kept us in the Dark Ages. Don't give me no "freedom of expression" bull either, because you'd tell someone who told a kid the earth is flat to shut up too. So that's why I'm telling you.

This kind of blase, ridiculous and blatantly false theory is how superstitions and cults get started - around something that doesn't exist. I feel morally obliged to let you know it's all rubbish, and to make sure you actually understand why. Please keep reading, I think you'll get it quite quickly.

Originally posted by refinement
Of course it's in your own head. Magic is basically reality hacking - hacking your own reality, not objective reality.

Settle in, this will be a long one, and if you want to just get the point: magic is wishful thinking, and nothing else.

To start, agreeing with my point doesn't mean the two are compatible. To agree with my point invalidates anything else you can say to support "sigil magic".

I will state now, your post is full of double-speak. It's full of words that sound clever when strung together in a certain way, but make absolutely no sense when you pick them apart. I encourage the other readers of this forum to use their minds and do just that.

"Hacking your own reality, not objective reality" is one of those phrases. To hack one's own reality means to change nothing but the way one sees the world. Ergo, you have not altered reality in any way for any other person, place, object or thing. Nothing else in the entire universe is affected by your, now innaccurate, perception.

This means if a force does not change objective reality, it is not a real force. It is nothing. So this side of your argument has failed.

Originally posted by refinementThe subliminal/subconscious imprinting is precisely why it works. You can be well aware of this fact and it .....

In the real world, we call this "psychology". It's because moods and emotions dominate our lives. It is not mystical, and nothing is "forced into reality". Reality is what we make it, and what others make of it for us.

If a superstitious person had a job interview, and I told them I had put them under the sign of the evil eye, that person is bound to fail to get the job. They believe they are hexed, their confidence goes down, and the prospective employer looks at them like someone who can't do the job because they do not present themselves as if they could.

If I were to instead tell that person I had cast a blessing on them, they would instead walk in head back, chest out and prove they are the man for the position. They'd get it, and attribute it to the magic spell than to the real cause - their own self belief.

People are very sensitive to confidence - it attracts people. It stands out and makes you noticed. This argument has also failed.

Originally posted by refinementIn a sense, it's all an illusion - so? If it works well enough to create a strong sense of an illusion, and if you can will yourself to believe in that illusion through concentration and sheer force of will, then, well, it works.

You can't defend your position by brushing this off - you are presenting fiction as fact, and should be held accountable for making people believe a lie. And I'm sure you don't think of yourself as a liar.

What is worse though, is that you are taking away people's responsibility for their own actions. You are saying to people that its alright not to know, not to understand, but not to question or strive because this is how it works anyway, because its magic. This means that when something good happens, they can ascribe it to their favourite superstition, but when something bad happens, all they can do is the same, to relieve themselves of the weight of the consequences.

This is a dangerous type of thinking, because it breeds minds unable to cope with rapid change. It breeds minds that are no longer able to self-analyse, and therefore not see that they themselves might be the root of their own problems. Was it Socrates that said "a life unexamined is a life not worth living"?

The slogan of this site is "deny ignorance", and that is the rallying cry I am using now.

OK....

WILL THIS HELP ME GET ALL 5s ON ALL MY AP EXAMS IN THE NEXT 6 YEARS AND 2400s ON MY SAT?

IF YOU SAY SO THEN I WILL TRY THIS MAN.


For some phenomenon like this, we HAVE to consider to possibility for coincidences and counfounding variables.

Originally posted by refinement
The reason you can't will a pot of gold to form in front of you or will someone to be resurrected (though Jesus seemed to be good enough at magic to do this) is probably because there are limits to the kind of power you can achieve with this. no one ever said it was infinite. But it is a quite useful way of actuating your desires, at getting at what you really want - and bending your will towards it. That is why the subconscious imprinting is useful, and how it works.

"Is probably". Slick, sly corporate words that get inserted because you have just admitted that you don't know the answer. I do know the answer, so please read on.

You can't use mythology as precedent, because it has no proof. Like magic.

The reason no-one has ever, in your purported multiple-millenia of magic, conjured up a big pile of gold, is that magic is not what you want it to be. Magic as you think of it does not exist. You can never, and will never under any circumstances make something happen that was nothing better than coincidence because you are not doing anything.

When you start getting into particle physics you see why there is no such thing as magic. It would have to be something. Even light is something, with a physical form. As you are just wishing for something to happen, you determine that any coincidence that agrees with your reasoning is applicable to magic, yet any that is not in agreement is your poor application of the spell. This is a strawman fallacy - you should actually be accepting of the fact that when the coincidence does not play out, there is no magic.

Originally posted by refinementAs a sidenote, demons are real in a symbolic sense. They are a framework through which the magical act can be seen and accomplished. In a sense, they are illusions.

"Real in a symbolic sense" is another one of your double-speak phrases. Either everything is real in a symbolic sense, because the nature of symbolism is anything can represent anything else within a given framework, or nothing is real in a symbolic sense because they are just that - symbols of something else. They are not themselves, and therefore not real.

You have used the term "demon" because it adds to the mystique of your argument, in which you are using these flashy terms to dazzle the more influential members of this board with ignorance and lies.

Originally posted by refinementConsider the Mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism. You are familiar (as I see from your sig) with the Vajra, correct? I saw a Tibetan sand mandala this past year, and the focusing idea of this mandala was the Vajra, the indestructible, the diamond, the thunderbolt. However, to focus on the Vajra, in this ceremony, the monks invoked the Amida Buddha, a deity in Tantric Buddhism associated with a certain kind of wisdom (I'm not a buddhist so I'm not really familiar with all the particulars here). They certainly believed that some sort of spirit or essence of the Amida Buddha entered into them, or the room, or the mandala itself, as they went through the invoking ceremony. The overall idea was to bring about indestructibility and to focus the monks' minds on it - to do so involved a complex ritual and belief in a deity, but, well, it seemed to work for them.

I'm not familiar with it, but I don't think for a second a bunch of old men sitting around in a mountain staring at sand and reading the writings of another little old man who lived 2,500 years ago are going to have the facilities to contest the billions spent in the west on scientific research. We spend over £800 million in the UK alone.

An invocation of a god does nothing more than produce the sound of a dozen old men making a droning noise. It does not call forth a god, because it cannot call forth a god. I'm sure everyone who's ever been killed can testify to that.

I have yet to see an argument in this that sticks. So far every one is complete nonsense that you should be ashamed of foisting onto other people.

Originally posted by refinementIt's not a shtick - I mean, of course demons don't exist in the sense of something you can touch or something external to the mind. But they do exist in our heads as a kind of potentiality or archetype that can be accessed in certain ways.

"But they do exist in our heads as a kind of potentiality or archetype that can be accessed in certain ways." - more double-speak. That is not a demon, that is called social conditioning, and every society does it so each member can interact with the next and reasonably expect how the response will be framed. It allows us to be social creatures. It is nothing to do with "demons".

This is heavily tied in with two concepts called "imagination" and "reasoning ability". It is by these processes we use our brains to conceptualise of unreality.

What you are doing is presenting your audience with an idea, which they can visualise and then understand by giving a frame of reference to get across an unfamiliar concept (using the word demon - connotations of a dark, evil, parasitic super-entity that is from beyond the world). This is a standard technique.

Try it,

But guys, remember to be carefree about it. That's very important. Treat it as if it would be nice to have the results, or that it's logical that it is working, and do not worry if or when the results will be there. Then you will not interfere with it working.

Originally posted by refinementMagic has been around for millenia

No. The idea of magic has been around for millenia, magic does not exist. We have established this.

Originally posted by refinementand despite scientific thinking, which is very useful and important, it will remain for as long as the human race exists, even if it must survive as an occult phenomenon.

You see, what you do is an affront to every scientist on earth. These people, who are far smarter than I, spend their whole youth studying, then their whole lives researching to discover how it all works, so that we may truly have knowledge and enlightenment.

The things you say fly in the face of all of that, and undermine every advance these people make. If it wasn't for them doing what they do, we wouldn't be where we are. I can see no reason at all to fight against it.

Originally posted by refinementThe earliest religions evolved from magic, and the majority of the rituals you see in religion today have magical significance. Think of rosaries or invoking a Catholic saint, or the symbol of the cross or the lighting of ceremonial candles. all of these have a sort of ritualistic significance that is useful and real, at least for the participants.

The word "magic" derives from the Zoroastrian priestly order, the magi. This is how it came to the Greeks, and how it got to our culture. What you are thinking of are mystery religions. These were a transference of knowledge, a relic of a more advanced civilization (not space age probably, just clever) that deduced mathematics and it's place in the universe. Priestly orders often used dots and dashes to produce a random number generator (obviously they didn't know it was random), which was used for divination, which is where "sorcery" (from the Latin meaning "fate") comes from.

Like your "sigil magic", they ascribed coincidence to their successful use of such spells, and failure to their own mistakes when casting.

Ritualistic significance means only that the person has been programmed to perform a certain sequence of actions on a certain cue. Pavlov did very much the same thing with his drooling dogs - any action and response can be programmed.

Rubbing your rosary beads while praying is a good idea, as it means the person who is praying is holding an object they only ever hold while they are praying, so it is a natural association. Again, none of these examples lends any credence to your assertions.

Originally posted by refinementWe're not talking about shooting thunderbolts out of our hands. This is not Dungeons and Dragons. But in the sense that I am talking about, magic is quite real, and quite useful, even if there are no forces involved other than the strengthening of one's own desires or will or connection with the universe.

Well that is the most productive magic you'll ever experience. When you fireball ten goblins in one round, you know you are getting much better economy per spell than someone spends four hours trying to do that which amounts to nothing.

A message of enlightenment does not need to be dressed in lies to make it more palatable. Your concessions just show you lack courage in your statements, because you don't know the answer.

And ultimately that is what it boils down too. Like everyone else, you are scared and confused. Not in a gibbering wreck sort of way, but in an expansive, "what happens next?" sort of way. You don't understand it all, and the catch-all phrase "magic" handily gives you not only a way of explaining it, but a way of manipulating it. It is a complete falsity, and you are doing nothing but decieving yourself and deluding the poor people who you spread this false message to.

Magic is not real. It is not useful. What is useful is self-confidence and analytical thinking, not pie-in-the-sky daydreaming.

You're probably going to just give me an "oh well anything appears foolish when you actually explain it!" response because I think you fundamentally know that you have no proof, and no comeback on this situation.

Please, please please don't let this vast essay (my teachers would have been amazed) go to waste and just dismiss it. You don't have to reply now, by tomorrow I'll have probably forgotten to come back and check it anyway, but just go away and think about it. Be reasonable with yourself, and be realistic.

Carl

Ben, what is your definition of magic.

Edit: Carl,

[edit on 14-5-2008 by depth om]

When you die, do you think the universe will end for everyone else?

The world of mine that all those others - including the billions who do not know me personally - inhabit along with me might. Or not.

In other, simpler words: you live in a world, in a "present", where Napoleon is dead, a part of "history": you are alive, and he is not.

But Napoleon - who himself once lived in a world full of venerable olden dead ones - might see it differently...


Sounds like self-indulgent sophistry - or worse, right?

It's not.
It's just an idea to ponder on.
Obviously, I am not saying it IS so, period. It is just a thought.

But the mere fact that such a thought can occur to a human in the first place - and that human can have a sustained idea of how such existence might work - makes it worth looking into.

Exactly

That's just it: there is no exactly.


P.S. I wish I could go into more detail - and I have, in other threads, scattered all over the place - but right now there is no way I could do that. Logistic and other temporal considerations prevent me from staying too long on this board.












[edit on 14-5-2008 by Vanitas]

Originally posted by C.C.Benjamin
NOTHING IS HAPPENING THAT IS NOT INSIDE YOUR OWN HEADS. YOUR EXPERIENCE IS DOWN TO YOUR OWN PERCEPTIONS ONLY, NO MAGIC HAS OR WILL EVER TAKE PLACE.

The great part about reality, is that we acknowledge only that which is relavent to our own beliefs in relation to ourselves.

In our universe, where we are the ones in control of our perceptions, you can only intimidate us so far before we are slaves to conventional thinking, and outside negative and controlling influences, no longer.

Bullies are bad, I notice you have old-testamet destruction styled signatures.

The Laws of Quantum Physics Trumps, your no-magic theory.

Call it science now, but in the Western Pre-Imperial heyday it was magick.

-ADHD

sigil? ritual? Does anyone care to educate me? How do you choose the right sigil for the right situation? What have everybody been talking about? Links? I would love to try this over the summer....