The psychonaut field manual [pdf]
thedaemon.space
thedaemon.space
I have had some success. a lot of it is visualizing and “believing” any way you possibly can, I think much of the ritual in stuff like this is to get you into whatever state is needed to trick your body or mind into doing something, at least that’s how I think it “works.” The author seems kind of aware of this and it seems to borrow many similar concepts as the stuff I’ve read, but with much more occultish ritual.
And that is when you realize they aren't some wise thinkers describing deep understanding of the human mind in more poetic terms, they are deluded or crackpots thinking they can fling spells at each other if they just beleive hard enough.
Is there some insight that they may have hit on in their collective tinkering? Possibly yes, just like the alchemists had really discovered some good bits of chemistry despite being completely misguided as well. But unless and until someone goes in and creates a true science out of their mumbo-jumbo, it's not something most people should spend their time on, lest they end up wasting time on the many parts that don't work.
These are metaphysical phenomena.
The other parts of "magic", such as the ability to view things that someone else is viewing without emitting or receiving electromagnetic waves are clearly fantasies, not in the purview of any science.
And just to be clear, I'm strictly referring to things like meditation as a way to change your own mindset, not any of the silly concepts that assume the mind is somehow able to move atoms around without emitting radiation.
As to the other question, it's irrelevant to this discussion (but no, I don't draw such a distinction, except insofar as recognizing that the neurons in the arm will not normally fire to create a movement in the arm without first receiving a signal from neurons in the spine or brain, in healthy people).
Ultimately my point is that the only way a person can influence the broader world is by emitting radiation in measurable ways, and the only way they can find out about the broader world is by receiving radiation. So a person in an EM shielded, inertially dampened, sound proofed room with no one to talk to can't view the city of Jerusalem from above, regardless of how hard they concentrate or believe they can.
Oddly though every such thing that “defies explanation” also defies being reproducible in controlled experiments.
That’s the thing a about non scientific stuff like this. If it actually worked it would literally just be science and we would be able to reproduce it.
If you buy a magic moon rock that lets you only roll 6’s on dice, you would equally be left feeling that the 1/6 of the time that it worked was proof enough to you that it was actually true, because you bought yourself a bias along side the useless rock.
Same is true a lot with things like yoga for anything outside the Pilates component, it only “works” if you dedicate enough time and money to it, at which point you’re just biased because you don’t want to feel you’ve wasted your time and money. Sure 1/20 might find that it “cured” their illness, but only if that’s the rate of improvement in a control group as well.
It is almost entirely explained by three things:
1. Some ability of the mind to interact with the effect of the medication - such as heart rate being tied to mood (so that being administered a heart-rate reducing drug in a menacing way could have the effects of the drug masked by your heart rate increasing because of your anxiety), or when the effect itself is tied to mental phenomena (depression, pain, nausea, etc). Apart from psychoactive drugs, this only significantly impacts a relatively small amount of drugs, since only a small amount of biomarkers are very directly tied to mental states - heart rate, blood pressure, maybe a handful of others. There may also be a smaller effect on longer term treatments of other kinds due to the myriad effects of stress/anxiety on various other systems in the body, that may have interactions with more complex biomarkers as well, especially in the longer term.
2. The experimental setup being impacted more or less knowingly by people based on their pre-conceived notions. This can take many forms, from outright doctoring the recorded data to fit the desired outcome, to much more subtle effects like differences in the level of care, differences in how well the patients follow the prescribed protocol, and many others. None of these are "real" effects, they only affect the relevance and quality of the data being collected. For example, if patients have a way of finding out they are in the placebo wing, they may drop out at a higher rate, and thus the data may show that the patients who stuck out had a higher benefit than the ones on the control wing simply because of that skew.
3. Noise in the disease itself - sometimes, people spontaneously heal or improve from various conditions on various fronts without any intervention whatsoever, and any medical intervention has to be compared to this baseline level. This is similar to the problem of checking if a code fix actually addresses a hard to reproduce bug.
There is no proof whatsoever of the placebo effect being some ability to heal the body through belief (again, beyond certain mental phenomena, either related to mental illness or pain or nausea relief). It is simply a matter of noise and measurement artifacts for the vast majority of studies.
Yes, this is the place where the placebo (and nocebo) effect was observed and where it has an impact.
> But noise in how the disease naturally progresses is also split amongst control and experimental groups, and so the important test is the control group compared to people with no treatment at all, or even unwitting of their observation.
It's basically never possible to do a study comparing a new medication to no treatment, mostly on ethical grounds (beyond the complicated logistics of studying people outside of clinical settings). There are very few diseases for which we have no treatment whatsoever, so it's very rarely ethically acceptable to compare between offering a medication vs no treatment.
skepticism is healthy but if you discard things out of bias immediately without looking further, you’re kind of practicing the same kind of ignorance that leads to these types of superstitions.
There’s a spooky coherence in the descriptions and that’s what makes it such a fascinating read. The spin that this work puts on the subject - calling this “technology” and likening it to programming adds to this.
To anyone honestly wanting to take this for a spin, I recommend reading the biography of Aleister Crowley first. It’s an interesting read in itself and it also illustrates the risks/dangers. Pictures speak a thousand words.
I think Buddhists figured it out (at least some of them). For example metta practice could be thought of as a magick that is specifically aimed toward wholesome happiness.
Once I could personally meet or just see people (in person or otherwise) that attempted this kind of rewiring of your synapses I realized how deeply unwell they really are.
And for the untrained eye, your point takes it away: Have a hard look at folks who tried (like Crowley, probably the most documented case) and be wary of following advice on the web that puts your mental health at risk, even on HN.
One thing that makes me wonder: how does intentionally created psychosis compare to involuntary one? Can science study those things to have better understanding of mental health and actually help people?
Crowley on the other hand is basically a trust fund kid rebelling against Victorian and Christian morality. I don't think what he was doing makes all that much sense in a secular society because much of the taboo is lost.
Then I read a book called Foucault's Pendulum by one Umberto Eco, and that's how I realised all the magick stuff was a circus and the people peddling it charlatans and clowns. Sometimes you just have to look at the funny side of all the self-serious mediums and gurus and teachers and spend a few days laughing at their bullshit before your mind finally decides the "teachings" are really just garbage.
Hear hear. Your comment reminded me of when Christopher Lee said, "Never get involved in the occult. You'll not only lose your mind, but you'll lose your soul." [^0]
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I’m currently leaning towards believing that learning intense focus through meditation + setting intentions for yourself in that state is genuinely useful, just like rituals are (saying “yes” to your partner in front of friends and family it changes you). But the border between it and “I’m a trans dimensional shaman in psychiatric A&E” is a bit to thin for my liking.
There's also a degree of danger, believing your dreams tell you the future is one thing but if you immerse yourself in occult, text about daemons, start believing they might have their own agendas - and I mean really believe - you can see how dangerous it can get.
And of course there are plenty of schizophrenics who claim to hear the voice of God and claim to be doing His will, something which might have gotten one canonized centuries ago, but no one pathologizes Christianity when that happens. If we're going to consider magical thinking normal in one sense, we should consider it normal in every sense, because the only difference between "religious" and "occult" practice is cultural acceptance.
Or else accept that all of it is equally ridiculous, that Aleister Crowley is no more divine or absurd than the Pope.
Practicing Christians will congregate weekly, reinforce their beliefs, chat about them, confess to the same priest - all of this stops going into crazy corners of the belief space. Also, normal to be openly Christian (at least where I'm from) and people have vague ideas about which beliefs are roughly in that category - and can call out deviations.
I'm basing this all on my guesses to be clear! Still curious to see if others have similar thoughts.
You still get similar community in a lot of alternative spirituality / occult practices but from slices of that community I've been exposed to it does focus much more on personal exploration and opens the door to the recursive degeneration that may lead to.
Many people, even many believers, certainly pathologize those that become too embroiled in Christian beliefs. Sure, they admire the deeply devout priest or nun or monk or who is spending their whole life in the Church. But if that person starts telling them that God is speaking to them, or that God is showing them far off events, or that they can pray to obtain physical results directly - they way this book suggests is possible - they will certainly take a few steps back and stop listening so intently.
Not to mention, there are vast differences between religious and occult practices. While religious people do sometimes pray for material improvements to their life, many religious practices are more moral or social rather than magical. People eat a certain way because they believe this is what they believe is the right thing to do, they help the poor or others in their communities, they worship their god or gods just because.
Wishing to live a good life because you believe that will guarantee you'll have a good after-life (i.e. religion in a nutshell) is extremely different from performing spells that you think will fix your life here and now (occult magical practices).
And there are... downsides to messing with such forces. There was a cult called Leverage that tried to exploit magick and most of them ended up having psychotic breaks.
My take is that either ESP works to some extent, or maybe we want our adversaries to think it does.
OTOH, I’ve seen some shit that I can’t explain except by just making up an explanation that seems more stupid than the paranormal explanation, so I tend on the side of “probably more to reality than we conventionally think”.
Minds may be networked, the occult society which moderates this is lawless, immoral, and can hear every thought (and memory) in your head.
This PDF is a funsy lay guide. Psychonaught is how I got started. Power is not so innocent.
These experiences, tempered by time and augmented by some other observed and documented phenomenon in my life, led me to reanalyze the Abramelin translations in an effort to elucidate the key elements and remove the hocus-pocus aspects.
The hypotheses that I currently hold is that if there is anything to any of this besides distorted perception, it is implicit in a many-worlds observation, in that the bandwidth of probabilities within which we can observe may be somewhat malleable through the appropriate application of isolation from entangling casual interactions and intentional observation. We see some support for this hypothesis through probability manipulation vis-a-vis casimir fields and restrictive cavities.
Adjacent to this is a hypothesis that the web of electromagnetic fields carrying data in which most of us are intertwined, along with other forms of instantaneous communication makes casual isolation exceptionally difficult in the 21st century, as causal relationships leak in even in the subtle vibrations of water molecules or anything else that might respond, down to a quantum scale, to information carrying RF signals. This could, in concept, limit efforts to broaden the spectra of observable universes in a similar way that casimir cavities limit the casimir force experienced within. By introducing causal entanglements, we narrow the possible observations.
Anyway, my intrinsic belief is that the universe is dark, and cold, and full of terrors lol. Explore carefully, kids.
The first years would be spent quieting the mind, though the real work is rigorous and exhausting.
Aside from the immense crevasse which cuts one off from even perceiving the many subtle distinctions, those experientially adept may merely manipulate your perception. In fact, without an uplift curating your experience you could not in a thousand years stumble upon Power yourself.
Other than the immense difficulty, it really is kind of tame. The wormholes are in our heads. Some are masters in creating their own hyperdimensional space (which the flat lander may have trouble comprehending.) this may be every bit as amazing as generative AI creating an HD interactive experience, or a fuzzy blob in the back of the mind which leaves you with a forever haunting impression.
Anything substantive will be trivialized or made taboo (called “insane” ending all argument.)
And dark designs do thrive in the shadow of humanity’s incredulity.
“Yes Virginia, magic does exist in the world; like all things beautiful, dark minds covet and it is the innocent who pay.”
Lovecraft felt the same way. Belief in something greater, but something so alien that it cannot be understood in human terms, is a mark of his time period.
There's a lot of that out there, but there's a lot of the opposite as well. There is brilliant, beautiful light and love. My experience is that the light dispels the dark.
The spiritual communities are going bonkers about lizard people and other occult (and worse), not because that is actually true rather a psyop spiritual battle is boggling minds from within.
The immoral and corrupt know they can trust (and will “pay”) each other. The moral will be ridiculed or prescribed antipsychotics for their troubles.
You say otherwise because that was the old teaching, that is what you want to believe, and no one has made trouble for you otherwise.
The light and love is precious, it must be nurtured and maintained, protected. The modern mind (comfortable, convenient, and convinced it’s all a state of mind) just doesn’t have the tenacity of will to endure the mounting struggles. Not at scale anyhow.
Nope. I say otherwise because despite experiencing plenty of trouble this is what I've seen.
Yes, things feel pretty grim in the world right now. Yes, people are very focused on the darkness of the world, and if they aren't now just wait because someone will point it out to them.
Despite that there is still light in the world. You can see it more easily on the 1x1 level, with people going out of their way to care for others. People you don't really have giving to those who have even less.
Darkness isn't a force, after all: it's just the absence of light.
Are you sure? From a perspective it appears darkness is drinking away the light to light’s last embers.
It's called a spy sattelite.
If you had a magic gun with unlimited ammo would you rule the world? No.
For the same reason, AGI/ASI is not really a threat to humanity.
You might say Elon Musk doesn't seem like the type and he's the richest (known) man in the world! But power isn't really about having money. Money can help with power but it will not automatically give you power. A scrawny nerd that got rich quick will not attract supermodels or sway elections at first until he learns to put the money to use towards those goals.
I haven't tried magick personally so can't attest to its effectiveness but I've had periods in my life where a ton of synchronicities happened that blew my mind away so much that I am now convinced the spiritual world is very much real. I just am hesitant to go into magick because it is touted as a tool to get what "you"(ego) want and that doesn't seem wise. Forcing reality to suit your ego's needs even if possible seems bad to me.