[Opinion] The Goetic Debate: Psychological Illusions vs. Objective Entities

[Robert Ramsay]

After reading through all of these responses (you fuckers are really smart), I can't help but feel the urge to scream a little. Not because the discussion is wrong, honestly, it's fascinating, but because I think sometimes we try so hard to explain a mystery that we forget to actually experience it. Good luck putting lightning in a bottle.

I am reminded of a quote from Tommy Kelly: "Some mysteries are to be experienced rather than solved."

Some minds cannot help but build castles and cathedrals around a mystery. We construct systems, models, philosophies, and explanations. There is nothing wrong with that. Those things can be beautiful and useful. But we should be careful not to mistake the explanation for the thing itself.

Sometimes the magick is in the mystery. Read that again if you need to.

The presence of a spirit does not become more real because we finally found the perfect words to describe it. The experience does not become more profound because we built a perfect container for it. Some things refuse to be contained.

Stand in awe of it. Let the encounter change you. Let it challenge you. Let it burn away what needs to be burned and teach what needs to be learned.

Maybe the mystery is not a problem to be solved. Maybe it is a relationship to be entered.

Experience is always greater than description. The terrain is not the map, and it never will be. You can spend a lifetime studying the ink, the paper, the lines, the cartographer, and the mathematics of the map, but eventually you have to step onto the land.

Don't let your desire for a box to contain the mystery become an excuse to never enter it. And don't let your attachment to one answer become the very thing that blinds you to what is actually happening.

What the hell do I know. I'm just another voice in the void. But I think sometimes the greatest wisdom is not having the final answer. Sometimes it is standing before the unknown and just saying: "Teach me."

Oh absolutely! Remember, though, that the castle building is usually a result of the experience - how you interpret your experience decides how you interact with it. You're going to need some kind of interpretation to get a handle on it, and you need to remember that all interpretations are transitory and should be replaced the minute you get a better one. I've always been instantly suspicious of anyone who claims to have that "final answer".

I don't think anyone no-one goes on about the map and the territory more than me As Robyn Hitchcock put it: "Wisdom cannot be transmitted".

Leaving yourself open to new stuff is the only way to go. As Isaac Asimov put it: "Scientific progress doesn't start with 'Eureka!', it starts with 'that's funny...'"

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 7:21 AM

Guard the mysteries!
Reveal them constantly!

 

[MorganBlack]

I can't help but feel the urge to scream a little.

heh.

It's tough being a Daimonic Idealist. That time I tried to summon a cosmic entity beyond human imagination to ask about the nature of reality, but it just put me on hold and asked if I tried turning my universe off and on again. Buh-boom-buh-smash!

Models work best as tools for us to think and share our experiences in magic - after having them. Or just become sterile intellectualism that will waste your entire life ruminating over. Unless you want to.

There is only the Mystery (by many names). House Awe is the only house that really matters, in the end.

And to quote myself at the start:

"OK, when you encounter a spirit you conjured standing in front of you that you really didn't believe in, all this debate falls away. But until you get there, you sort of have to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Most of the online discourse does not help. And now the internet debate culture makes everyone think too much and feel too little. Let's see if we can use some other thinky ideas to get past thinking in locked-down ways."

I am calling this "Daimonic Idealism" partially to honor the people who helped me articulate it, and because 'Neoplatonic-Orphic Daimonic Idealism' is getting a bit long and excludes more houses than I like.

My current ur-model (as a way of thinking about it) is built on top of time and place of Gen-X magical experimentation, testing specific parameters of how the various magic systems interact with perception and intent. The elevated status of a "model" here was reached only after rigorous stress-testing against raw data. Without real lived evidence, it remains just a hot take or a "faith."

So this is my personal ur-model for magical practice I'm articulating, drawing on other models. It is not supposed to be thought of as a stand-alone religion or "faith" - but for us to use in a practice, to think about and reintegrate all the crazy things that happen in traditional magic. Not to dismiss them as hallucination, which is silly. It models the experiences of many magicians, using my own as a baseline, but not only my experiences. I did not find the models first. I did grimoire magic first and was like... HOLY FUCK!! There really is no point in becoming another crazy schizoid talking about loony wack-a-doodle stuff most people don't care about.

Gen-X magicians DIY'd the FUCK out of western magic and the grimoires, very much in relative isolation in the 1980s and 1990s, and found what worked for us, then met up in Yahoo Groups, finding surprising similarities of experiences among us from many different personal backgrounds and ethnicities. Then many published books, spawned interest in pop-occultism, and it was all downhill for 15 or 20 years or so. (I blame the Neptune in Pisces transit as everyone threw off any Saturnian discipline for identity politics and dissolved all ritual precedent. "Do whatever you want" magic mostly failed. See Neville for the good stuff here.)

This Idealism also "fixes" the tendency in Analytic Idealism to float back into Secularism, and the Animist tendency from being grafted on to materialism. "Spirits = energy" is a pet peeve of mine. It funnels downstream back into paganism, vampirism, and other "faiths" with their materialism-adjacent magical electricity as the only causal agent for magic, so people waste time trying to set paper on fire with their fingers rather than becoming powerful. (not enough minds behind that idea to be a "thing" )

The true "mechanism" of magic, in this model, is not magical electricity, but immersion. The real engine is not found in intellectualized left-brain frameworks or rigid categorical thinking, but in total psychological and environmental surrender to the frame. (House Islam, House TradCath, and House Artist actually get this right, but the word culd needed upsating for the modern age - which is why I propose 'Immersion' You 'surrender' here the same way you surrender to a movie you are watchingm or a video game you are playing. ) It uses anticipatory architecture to prime the nervous system to register anomalous data. It is "belief " - but not held as a dogmatic, left-brain "thinky" conviction, but experienced as an embodied, right-brain, and whole-body state of being where knowing and doing quantum collapse into a single act and reality.

Every House offers an accessible, entry-level hot take designed for newcomers. It gives beginners a tangible hook, but it is fundamentally a surface-level placeholder. Then newcomers mistake the model for the key itself, believing that mastering the architecture of the explanation unlocks the phenomenon. In reality, the models are ritual and mythic affordances for us to enter what I am proposing we think of as different game server realities.

Ultimately, there is no box. The box is just for us to integrate experiences. But there are rules for each shared, dreamed-up reality. Most newcomers are looking for the perfect model to pre-adopt and graft to their head like an Alien's face-hugger, which they think is the trick to making the magic work, and cheap, fast magic theory sells best.