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Comment by thehappyfellow | Hacker News Reader

The classic, train your mind to believe anything you want, use it to improve your life, try believing some really cooky stuff, woah you actually believe it, no shit, you descend into crazier and crazier stuff.

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.

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This stuff works, it's just that people interpret what's happening in different ways. You can believe you are visiting an astral plane that is a separate physical dimension or whatever or you can believe you are essentially having a type of lucid dream. There are people who believes regular dreams are seeing the future or visiting alternate dimensions. That doesn't mean dreams don't exist, but it also doesn't mean that dreaming is traveling to some alternative physical reality.

I can believe that it works. But there's a risk of actually starting to believe that the astral plane and other stuff is real, particularly if someone has predispositions for schizophrenia.

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.

On the one hand, you're right, but on the other hand, what you're describing is essentially just religion. Believing in spells is little different than believing in prayer. The "astral plane" may as well be Heaven or Hell, or Purgatory. The Bible is an "occult" text about demons, containing spells and rituals, and many people believe in a literal God and Devil and intercession by angelic and demonic forces.

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.

To be honest, my thinking on this is not crystalised but I do think there's an important difference between a religion like Christianity and other "occult" practices - it's about social guardrails against going insane.

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.

That's a sound theory. I'm a fairly staunch atheist so do believe both are equally absurd. Even with that frame though it's easy to acknowledge community that forms around (most) religion serves to align group behaviour. This can be both good or bad depending on what those behaviours are in a larger social context.

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.

> but no one pathologizes Christianity when that happens

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).

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