Occult, Spirituality & Philosophy

[LunaLiuna]

Hello everyone :)

I'm fairly new, so I apologise if this isn't the best of posts.

I just wanted to ask if anyone is interested in the Occult, Philosophy and various other religions like Buddhism ect.

I've yet to find someone my age who is and I'd find it very comforting to know people are. To be honest I have no freinds so I'm obviously not going to find anyone!

I'm super interested in trying to find a way to revive idealism, as the entire western world is suffering heavily for it's materialistic ways, which breaks my heart.

I'd love to combine it with psychology, science, and quantum physics and some how inspire people to look inside rather than outside.

Thank you.

[AlexOnToast]

I find things like mythology and the occult very fascinating, (especially if it was ever involved in an Indiana Jones plotline) but i don't actually seriously believe in any of it.
It is interesting stuff, the thinking behind it and such.

[Harry Smith]

One of my mates who happens to Irish told me a story about his Nan in Ireland who had someone break into her house at night, when she woke up the cross around her neck had burned into her skin. That's pretty trippy

But beyond Assassins creed I don't have much knowledge of occult shit

[LunaLiuna]

One of my mates who happens to Irish told me a story about his Nan in Ireland who had someone break into her house at night, when she woke up the cross around her neck had burned into her skin. That's pretty trippy

That does sound pretty weird!

[Tarannosaurus]

I'm really interested in spirituality and most things occult, I was Wiccan for a while and I'm kind of a mixture of Buddhist and pagan now. And yeah, Ireland has loads of weird mythology and freaky shit happening.

[LunaLiuna]

Buddhist and pagan! well that's a fairly interesting combination ;)

[Zenos]

Very much into the occult and Druidry/druidism as well as modern forms of the occult inspired by H.P.Lovecraft's writings.... and I don't mean that Necronomicon editied by Simon.


The Influence of H P Lovecraft on Occultism

http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/LovecraftOccultism.html

Jung and Lovecraft on Prehuman Artifacts

http://crypt-of-cthulhu.com/jungandlovecraft.htm

Cthulhu Mythos Occultism,

http://intothemound.blogspot.com/2013/03/cthulhu-mythos-occultism-1.html

http://intothemound.blogspot.com/2013/03/cthulhu-mythos-occultism-2-old-mans.html

http://intothemound.blogspot.com/2013/04/cthulhu-occultism-pt-3-whats-nameless.html


Calling Cthulhu
H.P. Lovecraft's Magick Realism

In this book it is spoken of...Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow.
—Aleister Crowley



Consumed by cancer in 1937 at the age of 46, the last scion of a faded aristocratic New England family, the horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft left one of America's most curious literary legacies. The bulk of his short stories appeared in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine devoted to the supernatural. But within these modest confines, Lovecraft brought dark fantasy screaming into the 20th century, taking the genre, almost literally, into a new dimension.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the loosely linked cycle of stories known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Named for a tentacled alien monster who waits dreaming beneath the sea in the sunken city of R'lyeh, the Mythos encompasses the cosmic career of a variety of gruesome extraterrestrial entities that include Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and the blind idiot god Azathoth, who sprawls at the center of Ultimate Chaos, "encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws."[1] Lurking on the margins of our space-time continuum, this merry crew of Outer Gods and Great Old Ones are now attempting to invade our world through science and dream and horrid rites.

As a marginally popular writer working in the literary equivalent of the gutter, Lovecraft received no serious attention during his lifetime. But while most 1930s pulp fiction is nearly unreadable today, Lovecraft continues to attract attention. In France and Japan, his tales of cosmic fungi, degenerate cults and seriously bad dreams are recognized as works of bent genius, and the celebrated French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari praise his radical embrace of multiplicity in their magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus.[2] On Anglo-American turf, a passionate cabal of critics fill journals like Lovecraft Studies and Crypt of Cthulhu with their almost talmudic research. Meanwhile both hacks and gifted disciples continue to craft stories that elaborate the Cthulhu Mythos. There's even a Lovecraft convention—the NecronomiCon, named for the most famous of his forbidden grimoires. Like the gnostic science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft is the epitome of a cult author.

The word "fan" comes from fanaticus, an ancient term for a temple devotee, and Lovecraft fans exhibit the unflagging devotion, fetishism and sectarian debates that have characterized popular religious cults throughout the ages. But Lovecraft's "cult" status has a curiously literal dimension. Many magicians and occultists have taken up his Mythos as source material for their practice. Drawn from the darker regions of the esoteric counterculture—Thelema and Satanism and Chaos magic—these Lovecraftian mages actively seek to generate the terrifying and atavistic encounters that Lovecraft's protagonists stumble into compulsively, blindly or against their will.

Secondary occult sources for Lovecraftian magic include three different "fake" editions of the Necronomicon, a few rites included in Anton LaVey's The Satanic Rituals, and a number of works by the loopy British Thelemite Kenneth Grant. Besides Grant's Typhonian O.T.O. and the Temple of Set's Order of the Trapezoid, magical sects that tap the Cthulhu current have included the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the Bate Cabal, Michael Bertiaux's Lovecraftian Coven, and a Starry Wisdom group in Florida, named after the nineteenth-century sect featured in Lovecraft's "Haunter of the Dark." Solo chaos mages fill out the ranks, cobbling together Lovecraftian arcana on the Internet or freely sampling the Mythos in their chthonic, open-ended (anti-) workings.

This phenomenon is made all the more intriguing by the fact that Lovecraft himself was a "mechanistic materialist" philosophically opposed to spirituality and magic of any kind. Accounting for this discrepancy is only one of many curious problems raised by the apparent power of Lovecraftian magic. Why and how do these pulp visions "work"? What constitutes the "authentic" occult? How does magic relate to the tension between fact and fable? As I hope to show, Lovecraftian magic is not a pop hallucination but an imaginative and coherent "reading" set in motion by the dynamics of Lovecraft's own texts, a set of thematic, stylistic, and intertextual strategies which constitute what I call Lovecraft's Magick Realism.

Magical realism already denotes a strain of Latin American fiction—exemplified by Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende—in which a fantastic dreamlike logic melds seamlessly and delightfully with the rhythms of the everyday. Lovecraft's Magick Realism is far more dark and convulsive, as ancient and amoral forces violently puncture the realistic surface of his tales. Lovecraft constructs and then collapses a number of intense polarities—between realism and fantasy, book and dream, reason and its chaotic Other. By playing out these tensions in his writing, Lovecraft also reflects the transformations that darkside occultism has undergone as it confronts modernity in such forms as psychology, quantum physics, and the existential groundlessness of being. And by embedding all this in an intertextual Mythos of profound depth, he draws the reader into the chaos that lies "between the worlds" of magick and reality.




A Pulp Poe

Written mostly in the 1920s and '30s, Lovecraft's work builds a somewhat rickety bridge between the florid decadence of fin de siecle fantasy and the more "rational" demands of the new century's science fiction. His early writing is gaudy Gothic pastiche, but in his mature Chtulhu tales, Lovecraft adopts a pseudodocumentary style that utilizes the language of journalism, scholarship, and science to construct a realistic and measured prose voice which then explodes into feverish, adjectival horror. Some find Lovecraft's intensity atrocious—not everyone can enjoy a writer capable of comparing a strange light to "a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh."[3]

But in terms of horror, Lovecraft delivers. His protagonist is usually a reclusive bookish type, a scholar or artist who is or is known to the first-person narrator. Stumbling onto odd coincidences or beset with strange dreams, his intellectual curiosity drives him to pore through forbidden books or local folklore, his empirical turn of mind blinding him to the nightmarish scenario that the reader can see slowly building up around him. When the Mythos finally breaks through, it often shatters him, even though the invasion is generally more cognitive than physical.

By endlessly playing out a shared collection of images and tropes, genres like weird fiction also generate a collective resonance that can seem both "archetypal" and cliched. Though Lovecraft broke with classic fantasy, he gave his Mythos density and depth by building a shared world to house his disparate tales. The Mythos stories all share a liminal map that weaves fictional places like Arkham, Dunwich, and Miskatonic University into the New England landscape; they also refer to a common body of entities and forbidden books. A relatively common feature in fantasy fiction, these metafictional techniques create the sense that Lovecraft's Mythos lies beyond each individual tales, hovering in a dimension halfway between fantasy and the real.

Lovecraft did not just tell tales—he built a world. It's no accident that one of the more successful role-playing games to follow in the heels of Dungeons & Dragons takes place in "Lovecraft Country." Most role-playing adventure games build their worlds inside highly codified "mythic" spaces of the collective imagination (heroic fantasy, cyberpunk, vampire Paris, Arthur's Britain). The game Call of Cthulhu takes place in Lovecraft's 1920s America, where players become "investigators" who track down dark rumors or heinous occult crimes that gradually open up the reality of the monsters. Call of Cthulhu is an unusually dark game; the best investigators can do is to retain sanity and stave off the monsters' eventual apocalyptic triumph. In many ways Call of Cthulhu "works" because of the considerable density of Lovecraft's original Mythos, a density which the game itself also contributes to.

Lovecraft himself "collectivized" and deepened his Mythos by encouraging his friends to write stories that take place within it. Writers like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Howard, and a young Robert Bloch complied. After Lovecraft's death, August Derleth carried on this tradition with great devotion, and today, dozens continue to write Lovecraftian tales.

With some notable exceptions, most of these writers mangle the Myth, often by detailing horrors the master wisely left shrouded in ambiguous gloom.[4] The exact delineations of Lovecraft's cosmic cast and timeline remain murky even after a great deal of close-reading and cross-referencing. But in the hands of the Catholic Derleth, the extraterrestrial Great Old Ones become elemental demons defeated by the "good" Elder Gods. Forcing Lovecraft's cosmic and fundamentally amoral pantheon into a traditional religious framework, Derleth committed an error at once imaginative and interpretive. For despite the diabolical aura of his creatures, Lovecraft generates much of his power by stepping beyond good and evil.




The Horror of Reason

For the most part Lovecraft abandoned the supernatural and religious underpinnings of the classic supernatural tale, turning instead looked towards science to provide frameworks for horror. Calling Lovecraft the "Copernicus of the horror tale," the fantasy writer Fritz Leiber Jr. wrote that Lovecraft was the first fantasist who "firmly attached the emotion of spectral dread to such concepts as outer space, the rim of the cosmos, alien beings, unsuspected dimensions, and the conceivable universes lying outside our own spacetime continuum."[5] As Lovecraft himself put it in a letter, "The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and measurable universe."[6]

For Lovecraft, it is not the sleep of reason that breeds monsters, but reason with its eyes agog. By fusing cutting-edge science with archaic material, Lovecraft creates a twisted materialism in which scientific "progress" returns us to the atavistic abyss, and hard-nosed research revives the factual basis of forgotten and discarded myths. Hence Lovecraft's obsession with archeology; the digs which unearth alien artifacts and bizarrely angled cities are simultaneously historical and imaginal. In 1930 story "The Whisperer in Darkness," Lovecraft identifies the planet Yuggoth (from which the fungoid Mi-Go launch their clandestine invasions of Earth) with the newly-discovered planet called Pluto. To the 1930 reader—probably the kind of person who would thrill to popular accounts of C.W. Thompson's discovery of the ninth planet that very year—this factual reference "opens up" Lovecraft's fiction into a real world that is itself opening up to the limitless cosmos.

Lovecraft's most self-conscious, if somewhat strained, fusion of occult folklore and weird science occurs in the 1932 story "The Dreams of the Witch-House." The demonic characters that the folklorist Walter Gilman first glimpses in his nightmares are stock ghoulies: the evil witch crone Keziah Mason, her familiar spirit Brown Jenkin, and a "Black Man" who is perhaps Lovecraft's most unambiguously Satanic figure. These figures eventually invade the real space of Gilman's curiously angled room. But Gilman is also a student of quantum physics, Riemann spaces and non-Euclidian mathematics, and his dreams are almost psychedelic manifestations of his abstract knowledge. Within these "abysses whose material and gravitational properties...he could not even begin to explain," an "indescribably angled" realm of "titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings," Gilman keeps encountering a small polyhedron and a mass of "prolately spheroidal bubbles." By the end of the tale that he realizes that these are none other than Keziah and her familiar spirit, classic demonic cliches translated into the most alien dimension of speculative science: hyperspace.

These days, one finds the motif of hyperspace in science fiction, pop cosmology, computer interface design, channelled UFO prophecies, and the postmodern shamanism of today's high-octane psychedelic travellers—all discourses that feed contemporary chaos magic. The term itself was probably coined by the science fiction writer John W. Campbell Jr.in 1931, though its origins as a concept lie in nineteenth-century mathematical explorations of the fourth dimension.

In many ways, however, Lovecraft was the concept's first mythographer. From the perspective of hyperspace, our normal, three-dimensional spaces are exhausted and insufficient constructs. But our incapacity to vividly imagine this new dimension in humanist terms creates a crisis of representation, a crisis which for Lovecraft calls up our most ancient fears of the unknown. "All the objects...were totally beyond description or even comprehension," Lovecraft writes of Gilman's seething nightmare before paradoxically proceeding to describe these horrible objects. In his descriptions, Lovecraft emphasizes the incommensurability of this space through almost non-sensical juxtapositions like "obscene angles" or "wrong" geometry, a rhetorical technique that one Chaos magician calls "Semiotic Angularity."

Lovecraft has a habit of labeling his horrors "indescribable," "nameless, "unseen," "unutterable," "unknown" and "formless." Though superficially weak, this move can also be seen a kind of macabre via negativa. Like the apophatic oppositions of negative theologians like Pseudo-Dionysus or St. John of the Cross, Lovecraft marks the limits of language, limits which paradoxically point to the Beyond. For the mystics, this ultimate is the ineffable One, Pseudo-Dionysus' "superluminous gloom" or the Ain Soph of the Kabbalists. But there is no unity in Lovecraft's Beyond. It is the omnivorous Outside, the screaming multiplicity of cosmic hyperspace opened up by reason.

For Lovecraft, scientific materialism is the ultimate Faustian bargain, not because it hands us Promethean technology (a man for the eighteenth century, Lovecraft had no interest in gadgetry), but because it leads us beyond the horizon of what our minds can withstand. "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the mind to correlate all its contents," goes the famous opening line of "Call of Cthulhu." By correlating those contexts, empiricism opens up "terrifying vistas of reality"—what Lovecraft elsewhere calls "the blind cosmos [that] grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness".

Lovecraft gave this existentialist dread an imaginative voice, what he called "cosmic alienage". For Fritz Leiber, the "monstrous nuclear chaos" of Azathoth, Lovecraft's supreme entity, symbolizes "the purposeless, mindless, yet all-powerful universe of materialistic belief." But this symbolism isn't the whole story, for, as DMT voyagers know, hyperspace is haunted. The entities that erupt from Lovecraft's inhuman realms seem to suggest that in a blind mechanistic cosmos, the most alien thing is sentience itself. Peering outward through the cracks of domesticated "human" consciousness, a compassionless materialist like Lovecraft could only react with horror, for reason must cower before the most raw and atavistic dream-dragons of the psyche.

Modern humans usually suppress, ignore or constrain these forces lurking in our lizard brain. Mythically, these forces take the form of demons imprisoned under the angelic yokes of altruism, morality, and intellect. Yet if one does not believe in any ultimate universal purpose, then these primal forces are the most attuned with the cosmos precisely because they are amoral and inhuman. In "The Dunwich Horror", Henry Wheeler overhears a monstrous moan from a diabolical rite and asks "from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articular thunder-croakings drawn?" The Outside is within.




Chaos Culture

Lovecraft's fiction expresses a "future primitivism" that finds its most intense esoteric expression in Chaos magic, an eclectic contemporary style of darkside occultism that draws from Thelema, Satanism, Austin Osman Spare, and Eastern metaphysics to construct a thoroughly postmodern magic.

For today's Chaos mages, there is no "tradition". The symbols and myths of countless sects, orders, and faiths, are constructs, useful fictions, "games." That magic works has nothing to do with its truth claims and everything to do with the will and experience of the magician. Recognizing the distinct possibility that we may be adrift in a meaningless mechanical cosmos within which human will and imagination are vaguely comic flukes (the "cosmic indifferentism" Lovecraft himself professed), the mage accepts his groundlessness, embracing the chaotic self-creating void that is himself.

As we find with Lovecraft's fictional cults and grimoires, chaos magicians refuse the hierarchical, symbolic and monotheist biases of traditional esotericism. Like most Chaos magicians, the British occultist Peter Carroll gravitates towards the Black, not because he desires a simple Satanic inversion of Christianity but becuase he seeks the amoral and shamanic core of magical experience—a core that Lovecraft conjures up with his orgies of drums, guttural chants, and screeching horns. At the same time, Chaos mages like Carroll also plumb the weird science of quantum physics, complexity theory and electronic Prometheanism. Some darkside magicians become consumed by the atavistic forces they unleash or addicted to the dark costume of the Satanic anti-hero. But the most sophisticated adopt a balanced mode of gnostic existentialism that calls all constructs into question while refusing the cold comforts of skeptical reason or suicidal nihilism, a pragmatic and empirical shamanism that resonates as much with Lovecraft's hard-headed materialism as with his horrors.

The first occultist to really engage these notions is Aleister Crowley, who shattered the received vessels of occult tradition while creatively extending the dark dream of magic into the twentieth century. With his outlandish image, trickster texts, and his famous Law of Thelema ("Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law"), Crowley called into question the esoteric certainties of "true" revelation and lineage, and was the first magus to give occult antinomionism a decidedly Nietzschean twist.[7]

Unfettered, this occult will to power can easily degenerate into a heartless elitism, and the fascist and racist dimensions of both twentieth-century occultism and Lovecraft himself should not be forgotten. But this self-engendering will is more exuberantly expressed as a will to Art. In many ways, the fin de siecle occultism that exploded during Crowley's time was an essentially esthetic esotericism. A good number of the nineteenth-century magicians who inspire us today are the great poets, painters, and writers of Symbolism and decadent Romanticism, many of them dabblers or adepts in Satanism, Rosicrucianism, and hermetic societies. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was infused with artistic pretensions, and Golden Dawn member and fantasy writer Arthur Machen was one of Lovecraft's strongest influences.

But it was Austin Osman Spare who most decisively dissolved the boundary between artistic and magical life. Though working independently of the Surrealists, Spare also based his art on the dark and autonomous eruptions of "subconscious" material, though in a more overtly theurgic context.[8] Today's Chaos magicians are heavily influenced by Spare, and their Lovecraftian rites express this simultaneously creative and nihilistic dissolution. And as postmodern spawn of role-playing games, computers, and pop culture, they celebrate the fact that Lovecraft's secrets are scraped from the barrel of pulp fiction.




< Proof in the Pudding

In a message cross-posted to the Internet newsgroups alt.necromicon [sic] and alt.satanism, Parker Ryan listed a wide variety of magical techniques described by Lovecraft, including entheogens, glossalalia, and shamanic drumming. Insisting that his post was "not a satirical article," Ryan then described specific Lovecraftian rites he had developed, including this "Rite of Cthulhu":





A) Chanting. The use of the "Cthulhu chant" to create a concentrative or meditative state of consciousness that forms the basis of much later magickal work.


B) Dream work. Specific techniques of controlled dreaming that are used to establish contact with Cthulhu.

C) Abandonment. Specific techniques to free oneself from culturally conditioned reality tunnels.



Ryan goes on to say that he's experimented with most of his rites "with fairly good success."

In coming to terms with the "real magic" embedded in Lovecraft, one quickly encounters a fundamental irony: the cold skepticism of Lovecraft himself. In his letters, Lovecraft poked fun at his own tales, claiming he wrote them for cash and playfully naming his friends after his monsters. While such attitudes in no way diminish the imaginative power of Lovecraft's tales—which, as always, lie outside the control and intention of their author—they do pose a problem for the working occultist seeking to establish Lovecraft's magical authority.

The most obvious, and least interesting, answer is to find authentic magic in Lovecraft's biography. Lovecraft's father was a traveling salesman who died in a madhouse when Lovecraft was eight, and vague rumors that he was an initiate in some Masonic order or other were exploited in the Necronomicon cobbled together by George Hay, Colin Wilson, and Robert Turner. Others have tried to track Lovecraft's occult know-how, especially his familiarity with Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. In an Internet document relating the history of the "real" Necronomicon, Colin Low argues that Crowley befriended Sonia Greene in New York a few years before the woman married Lovecraft. As proof of Crowley's indirect influence on Lovecraft, Low sites this intriguing passage from "The Call of Cthulhu":





That cult would never die until the stars came right again and the secret priests would take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.



Low claims this passage is a mangled reflection of Crowley's teachings on the new Aeon and the The Book of the Law. In an article in Societé, Robert North also states that Lovecraft referred to "A.C." in a letter, and that Crowley was mentioned in Leonard Cline's The Dark Chamber, a novel Lovecraft discussed in his Supernatural Horror in Literature.

But so what? Lovecraft was a fanatical and imaginative reader, and many such folks are drawn to the semiotic exotica of esoteric lore regardless of any beliefs in or experiences of the paranormal. From The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and elsewhere, it's clear that Lovecraft knew the basic outlines of the occult. But these influences pale next to Vathek, Poe, or Lord Dunsany.

Desperate to assimilate Lovecraft into a "tradition", some occultists enter into dubious explanations of mystical influence by disincarnate beings. North gives this Invisible College idea a shamanic twist, asserting that prehistoric Atlantian tribes who survived the flood exercised telepathic influence on people like John Dee, Blavatsky, and Lovecraft. But none of these Lovecraft hierophants can match the delirious splendor of Kenneth Grant. In The Magical Revival, Grant points out more curious similarities between Lovecraft and Crowley: both refer to "Great Old Ones" and "Cold Wastes" (of Kadath and Hadith, respectively); the entity "Yog-Sothoth" rhymes with "Set-Thoth," and Al Azif: The Book of the Arab resembles Crowley's Al vel Legis: The Book of the Law. In Nightside of Eden, Grant maps Lovecraft's pantheon onto a darkside Tree of Life, comparing the mangled "iridescent globes" that occasionally pop up in Lovecraft's tales with the shattered sefirot known as the Qlipoth. Grant concludes that Lovecraft had "direct and conscious experience of the inner planes,"[9] the same zones Crowley prowled, and that Lovecraft "disguised" his occult experiences as fiction.

Like many latter-day Lovecraftians, Grant commits the error of literalizing a purposefully nebulous myth. A subtler and more satisfying version of this argument is the notion that Lovecraft had direct unconscious experiences of the inner planes, experiences which his quotidian mind rejected but which found their way into his writings nonetheless. For Lovecraft was blessed with a vivid and nightmarish dream life, and drew the substance of a number of his tales from beyond the wall of sleep.

In this sense Lovecraft's magickal authority is nothing more or less than the authority of dream. But what kind of dream tales are these? A Freudian could have a field day with Lovecraft's fecund, squishy sea monsters, and a Jungian analyst might recognize the liniments of the proverbial shadow. But Lovecraft's Shadow is so inky it swallows the standard archetypes of the collective unconscious like a black hole. If we see the archetypal world not as a static storehouse of timeless godforms but as a constantly mutating carnival of figures, then the seething extraterrestrial monsters that Lovecraft glimpsed in the chaos of hyperspace are not so much archaic figures of heredity than the avatars of a new psychological and mythic aeon. At the very least, it would seem that things are getting mighty out of hand beyond the magic circle of the ordered daylight mind.

In an intriguing Internet document devoted to the Necronomicon, Tyagi Nagasiva places Lovecraft's potent dreamtales within the terma tradition found in the Nyingma branch of Tibetan Buddhism[10]. Termas were "pre-mature" writings hidden by Buddhist sages for centuries until the time was ripe, at which point religious visionaries would divine their physical hiding places through omens or dreams. But some termas were revealed entirely in dreams, often couched in otherworldly Dakini scripts. An old Indian revisionary tactic (the second-century Nagarjuna was said to have discovered his Mahayana masterpieces in the serpent realm of the nagas), the terma game resolves the religious problem of how to alter a tradition without disrupting traditional authority. The famous Tibetan Book of the Dead is a terma, and so, perhaps, is the Necronomicon.

Of course, for Chaos magicians, reality can coherently present itself through any number of self-sustaining but mutually contradictory symbolic paradigms (or "reality tunnels," in Robert Anton Wilson's memorable phrase). Nothing is true and everything is permitted. By emphasizing the self-fulfilling nature of all reality claims, this postmodern perspective creatively erodes the distinction between legitimate esoteric transmission and total fiction.

This bias toward the experimental is found in Anton LaVey's Satanic Rituals, which includes the first overtly Lovecraftian rituals to see print. In presenting "Die Elektrischen Vorspiele" (which LaVey based on a Lovecraftian tale by Frank Belknap Long), the "Ceremony of the Angles," and "The Call to Cthulhu" (the latter two penned by Michael Aquino), LaVey does claim that Lovecraft "clearly...had been influenced by very real sources."[11] But in holding that Satanic magic allows you to "objectively enter into a subjective state," LaVey more emphatically emphasizes the ritual power of fantasy—a radical subjectivity which explains his irreverence towards occult source material, whether Lovecraft or Masonry. In naming his Order of the Trapezoid after the "Shining Trapezohedron" found in Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark"—a black, oddly-angled extraterrestrial crystal used to communicate with the Old Ones—LaVey emphasized that fictions can channel magical forces regardless of their historical authenticity.

In his two rituals, Michael Aquino expresses the subjective power of "meaningless" language by creating a "Yuggothic" tongue similar to that heard in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Whisperer in the Dark." Such guttural utterances help to shut down the rational mind (try chanting "P'garn'h v'glyzz" for a couple of hours), a notion elaborated by Kenneth Grant in his notion of the Cult of Barbarous Names. After leaving the Church of Satan to form the more serious Temple of Set in 1975, Aquino eventually reformed the Order of the Trapezoid into the practical magic wing of the Setian philosophy. For Stephen R. Flowers, current Grand Master of the order, the substance of Lovecraftian magic is precisely an overwhelming subjectivity that flies in the face of objective law. "The Old Ones are the objective manifestations...of the subjective universe which is what is trying to 'break through' the merely rational mind-set of modern humanity."[12] For Flowers, such invocations are ultimately apocalyptic, hastening a transition into a chaotic aeon in which the Old Ones reveal themselves as future reflections of the Black Magician ("There are no more Nightmares for us," he wrote me).

This desire to rebel against the tyranny of reason and its ordered objective universe is one of the underlying goals of Chaos magic. Many would applaud the sentiment expressed by Albert Wilmarth in Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness": "To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and ultimate—surely such a things was worth the risk of one's life, soul, and sanity!"[13]

In his electronically circulated text "Kathulu Majik: Luvkrafting the Roles of Modern Uccultizm," Tyagi Nagasiva writes that most Western magic is ossified and dualistic, heavily weighted towards the forces of order, hierarchy, moralizing, and structured language. "Without the destabilizing force of Kaos, we would stagnate intellectually, psychologically and otherwise...Kathulu provides a necessary instability to combat the stolid and fixed methods of the structured 'Ordurs'...One may become balanced through exposure to Kathulu" (Tyagi's "mis-spellings" show the influence of Genesis P. Orridge's Temple of Psychick Youth). Haramullah criticizes black magicians who simply reverse "Ordur" with "Kaos," rather than bringing this underlying polarity into balance (a dualistic error he also finds in Lovecraft). Showing strong Taoist and Buddhist influences, Haramullah calls instead for a "Midul Path" that magically navigates between structure and disintegration, will and void. "The idea that one may progress linearly along the MP [Midul Path] is mistaken. One becomes, one does not progress. One attunes, one does not forge. One allows, one does not make."

In the Cincinatti Journal of Ceremonial Magic, the anonymous author of "Return of the Elder Gods" presents an evolutionary reason for Mythos magic. The author accepts the scenario of an approaching world crisis brought on by the invasion of the Elder Gods, Qlipothic transdimensional entities who ruled protohumanity until they were banished by "the agent of the Intelligence," a Promethean figure who set humanity on its current course of evolution. We remain connected to these Elder Gods through the "Forgotten Ones," the atavistic forces of hunger, sex ,and violence that linger in the subterranean levels of our being. Only by magically "reabsorbing" the Forgotten Ones and using the subsequent energy to bootstrap higher consciousness can we keep the portal sealed against the return of the Elder Gods. Though Lovecraft's name is never mentioned in the article, he is ever present, a skeptical materialist dreaming the dragons awake.




Writing the Dream...

Within the Mythos tales, one finds two dimensions—the normal human world and the infested Outside—and it's the ontological tension between them that powers Lovecraft's magick realism. Though Cthulhu and friends have material aspects, their reality is most horrible for what it says about the way the universe is. As the Lovecraft scholar Joshi notes, Lovecraft's narrators frequently go mad "not through any physical violence at the hands of supernatural entities but through the mere realization of the the existence of such a race of gods and beings." Faced with "realms whose mere existence stuns the brain," they experience severe cognitive dissonance—precisely the sorts of disorienting rupture sought by Chaos magicians.[14]

The role-playing game Call of Cthulhu wonderfully expresses the violence of this Lovecraftian paradigm shift. In adventure games like Dungeons & Dragons, one of your character's most significant measures is its hit points—a number which determines the amount of physical punishment your character can take before it gets injured or dies. Call of Cthulhu replaces this physical characteristic with the psychic category of Sanity. Face-to-face encounters with Yog-Sothoth or the insects from Shaggai knock points off your Sanity, but so does your discovery of more information about the Mythos—the more you find out from books or starcharts, the more likely you are to wind up in the Arkham Asylum. Magic also comes with an ironic price, one that Lovecraftian magicians might well pay heed to. If you use any of the binding spells from De Vermis Mysteriis or the Pnakotic Manuscripts, you necessarily learn more about the Mythos and thereby lose more sanity.[15]

Lovecraft's scholarly heros also investigate the Mythos as much through reading and thinking as through movements through physical space, and this psychological exploration draws the mind of the reader directly into the loop. Usually, readers suspect the dark truth of the Mythos while the narrator still clings to a quotidian attitude—a technique that subtly forces the reader to identify with the Outside rather than with the conventional worldview of the protagonist. Magically, the blindness of Lovecraft's heroes corresponds to a crucial element of occult theory developed by Austin Osman Spare: that magic occurs over and against the conscious mind, that ordinary thinking must be silenced, distracted, or thoroughly deranged for the chthonic will to express itself.[16]

In order to invade our plane, Lovecraft's entities need a portal, an interface between the worlds, and Lovecraft emphasizes two: books and dreams. In "Dreams of the Witch-House," "The Shadow out of Time" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth," dreams infect their hosts with a virulence that resembles the more overt psychic possessions that occur in "The Haunter in the Dark" and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Like the monsters themselves, Lovecraft's dreams are autonomous forces breaking through from Outside and engendering their own reality.

But these dreams also conjure up a more literal "outside": the strange dream life of Lovecraft himself, a life that (as the informed fan knows) directly inspired some of the tales[17]. By seeding his texts with his own nightmares, Lovecraft creates a autobiographical homology between himself and his protagonists. The stories themselves start to dream, which means that the reader too lies right in the path of the infection.

Lovecraft reproduces himself in his tales in a number of ways—the first-person protagonists reflect aspects of his own reclusive and bookish lifestyle; the epistolary form of the "The Whisperer in Darkness" echoes his own commitment to regular correspondence; character names are lifted from friends; and the New England landscape is his own. This psychic self-reflection partially explains why Lovecraft fans usually become fascinated with the man himself, a gaunt and solitary recluse who socialized through the mail, yearned for the eighteenth century, and adopted the crabby outlook and mannerisms of an old man. Lovecraft's life, and certainly his voluminous personal correspondence, form part of his myth.

Lovecraft thus solidifies his virtual reality by adding autobiographical elements to his shared world of creatures, books and maps. He also constructs a documentary texture by thickening his tales with manuscripts, newspaper clippings, scholarly citations, diary entries, letters, and bibliographies that list fake books alongside real classics. All this produces the sense that "outside" each individual tale lies a meta-fictional world that hovers on the edge of our own, a world that, like the monsters themselves, is constantly trying to break through and actualize itself. And thanks to Mythos storytellers, role-playing games, and dark-side magicians, it has.




...and Dreaming the Book

In "The Shadow out of Time," Lovecraft makes explicit one of the fantastic equations that drives his Magick Realism: the equivalence of dreams and books. For five years, the narrator, an economics professor named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, is taken over by a mysterious "secondary personality." After recovering his original identity, Peaslee is beset by powerful dreams in which he finds himself in a strange city, inhabiting a huge tentacle-sprouting conical body, writing down the history of modern Western world in a book. In the climax of the tale, Peaslee journeys to the Australian desert to explore ancient ruins buried beneath the sands. There he discovers a book written in English, in his own handwriting: the very same volume he had produced inside his monstrous dream body.

Though we learn very little of their contents, Lovecraft's diabolical grimoires are so infectious that even glancing at their ominous sigils proves dangerous. As with their dreams, these texts obssess Lovecraft's bookish protagonists to the point that the volumes, in Christopher Frayling's phrase, "vampirize the reader." Their titles alone are magic spells, the hallucinatory incantations of an eccentric antiquarian: the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Ilarnet Papyri, the R'lyeh Text, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. Lovecraft's friends contributed De Vermis Mysteriis and von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and Lovecraft named the author of his Cultes Des Goules, the Comte d'Erlette, after his young fan August Derleth. Hovering over all these grim tomes is the "dreaded" and "forbidden" Necronomicon, a book of blasphemous invocations to speed the return of the Old Ones. Lovecraft's supreme intertextual fetish, the Necronomicon stands as one of the few mythical books in literature that have absorbed so much imaginative attention that they've entered published reality.

If books owe their life not to their individual contents but to the larger intertextual webwork of reference and citation within which they are woven, than the dread Necronomicon clearly has a life of its own. Besides literary studies, the Necronomicon has generated numerous pseudo-scholarly analyses, including significant appendixes in the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana and Lovecraft's own "History of the Necronomicon." A number of FAQs can be found on the Internet, where a mild flame war periodically erupts between magicians, horror fans, and mythology experts over the reality of the book. The undead entity referred to in the Necronomicon's famous couplet—"That is not dead which can eternal lie,/And with strange eons even death may die"—may be nothing more or less than the the text itself, always lurking in the margins as we read the real.

Lovecraft's brief "History" was apparently inspired by the first Necronomicon hoax: a review of an edition of the dreaded tome submitted to Massachusetts' Branford Review in 1934.[18] Decades later, index cards for the book started popping up in university library catalogs.

It's perhaps the principle expression of Lovecraft's Magick Realism that all these ghostly references would finally manifest the book itself. In 1973, a small-press edition of Al Azif (the Necronomicon's Arabic name) appeared, consisting of eight pages of simulated Syrian script repeated 24 times. Four years later, the Satanists at New York's Magickal Childe published a Necronomicon by Simon, a grab bag that contains far more Sumerian myth than Lovecraft (though portions were "purposely left out" for the "safety of the reader"). George Hay's Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names, also a child of the '70s, is the most complex, intriguing, and Lovecraftian of the lot. In the spirit of the master's pseudoscholarship, Hay nests the fabulated invocations of Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu amongst a set of analytic, literary and historical essays.

Though magicians with strong imaginations have claimed that even the Simon book works wonders, the pseudohistories of the various Necronomicons are far more compelling than the texts themselves. Lovecraft himself provided the bare bones: the text was penned in 730 A.D by a poet, the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and named after the nocturnal sounds of insects. It was subsequently translated by Theodorus Philetas into Greek, by Olaus Wormius into Latin, and by John Dee into English. Lovecraft lists various libraries and private collections where fragments of the volume reside, and gives us a knowing wink by noting that the fantasy writer R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the monstrous and suppressed book found in his novel The King in Yellow from rumors of the Necronomicon (Lovecraft himself claimed to have gotten his inspiration from Chambers).

All of the Necronomicon's subsequent pseudohistories weave the book in and out of actual occult history, with John Dee playing a particularly conspicuous role. According to Colin Wilson, the version of the text published in the Hay Necronomicon was encrypted in Dee's Enochian cipher-text Liber Logoaeth. Colin Low's Necronomicon FAQ claims that Dee discovered the book at the court of King Rudolph II's court in Prague, and that is was under its influence that Dee and his scryer Edward Kelly achieved their most powerful astral encounters. Never published, Dee's translation became part of celebrated collection of Elias Ashmole housed at the British Library. Here Crowley read it, freely cobbling passages for The Book of the Law, and ultimately passing on some of its contents indirectly to Lovecraft through Sophia Greene. Crowley's role in Low's tale is appropriate, for Crowley certainly knew the magical power of hoax and history.

For the history of the occult is a confabulation, its lies wedded to its genealogies, its "timeless" truths fabricated by revisionists, madmen, and geniuses, its esoteric traditions a constantly shifting conspiracy of influences. The Necronomicon is not the first fiction to generate real magical activity within this potent twilight zone between philology and fantasy.

To take an example from an earlier era, the anonymous Rosicrucian manifestos that first appeared in the early 1600s claimed to issue from a secret brotherhood of Christian Hermeticists who finally deemed it time to come above ground. Many readers immediately wanted to join up, though it is unlikely that such a group existed at the time. But this hoax focused esoteric desire and inspired an explosion of "real" Rosicrucian groups. Though one of the two suspected authors of the manifestos, Johann Valentin Andreae, never came clean, he made veiled references to Rosicrucianism as an "ingenius game which a masked person might like to play upon the literary scene, especially in an age infatuated with everything unusual."[19] Like the Rosicrucian manifestos or Blavatsky's Book of Dzyan, Lovecraft's Necronomicon is the occult equivalent of Orson Welles' radio broadcast of the "War of the Worlds." As Lovecraft himself wrote, "No weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax."[20]

In Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco suggests that esoteric truth is perhaps nothing more than a semiotic conspiracy theory born of an endlessly rehashed and self-referential literature—the intertextual fabric Lovecraft understood so well. For those who need to ground their profound states of consciousness in objective correlatives, this is a damning indictment of "tradition." But as Chaos magicians remind us, magic is nothing more than subjective experience interacting with an internally consistent matrix of signs and affects. In the absence of orthodoxy, all we have is the dynamic tantra of text and perception, of reading and dream. These days the Great Work may be nothing more or less than this "ingenius game," fabricating itself without closure or rest, weaving itself out of the resplendent void where Azathoth writhes on his Mandelbrot throne.

[Gamma Male]

All occult, spirituallity, astrology, and religion is bullshit, and detrimental to the progress of mankind as a whole.
Also, what's wrong with materialism?

[Zenos]

All occult, spirituallity, astrology, and religion is bullshit, and detrimental to the progress of mankind as a whole.
Also, what's wrong with materialism?


As too your remark "All occult, spirituallity, astrology, and religion is bullshit, and detrimental to the progress of mankind as a whole."

well that's just your bullshit opinion.

Well lets see whats wrong with materialism?? ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh yeh how about how so many people that get hooked into materialism tend to end up thinking that's all there is to the point they see others as mere scabs to be picked and tossed aside just so long as they get what they want, so in short materialism alone is detrimental to the progress of mankind! It has to have a BALANCE!


Tell you what you want to deal strictly with materialism fine,but don't be spouting off bullshit saying "All occult, spirituallity, astrology, and religion is bullshit, and detrimental to the progress of mankind as a whole"


I have met plenty of people into the occult and all that that where nicer more well rounded then a lot of staunch materialist.

[Miserabilia]

Hello everyone :)

I'm fairly new, so I apologise if this isn't the best of posts.

I just wanted to ask if anyone is interested in the Occult, Philosophy and various other religions like Buddhism ect.

I've yet to find someone my age who is and I'd find it very comforting to know people are. To be honest I have no freinds so I'm obviously not going to find anyone!

I'm super interested in trying to find a way to revive idealism, as the entire western world is suffering heavily for it's materialistic ways, which breaks my heart.

I'd love to combine it with psychology, science, and quantum physics and some how inspire people to look inside rather than outside.

Thank you.

I'm fairly new, so I apologise if this isn't the best of posts.

That's okay! Welcome :)

I just wanted to ask if anyone is interested in the Occult, Philosophy and various other religions like Buddhism ect.

Philosophy is not a religion. but okay lol.
I think buddhusm is the neatest of religions.

I think some philosophy is interesting.
The Occult is great as story material, but it's mostly BS.

I'm super interested in trying to find a way to revive idealism, as the entire western world is suffering heavily for it's materialistic ways, which breaks my heart.

I don't see what's wrong with materialism. I think there should be more of it :yeah:

I'd love to combine it with psychology, science, and quantum physics and some how inspire people to look inside rather than outside.

I think metafysics are very interesting, which is basicly all those things combined :)

Come discuss it here (http://www.virtualteen.org/forums/showthread.php?t=203344)

[LunaLiuna]

All occult, spirituallity, astrology, and religion is bullshit, and detrimental to the progress of mankind as a whole.
Also, what's wrong with materialism?

I understand, but tell me. Why is new breakthroughs in science telling us what's been said for thousands of years.

I do not believe out and out some of the things I read. I take most scriptures allegorically. But I agree there is some rubbish out there. The same can be said about science and it's apparent carelessness in our planet, it deals in facts based on preexisting dogma. Materialism breeds this idea as Zenos said that the outside world is all there is.

There's a thing a Tibetan monk said ' Most of humanity practice's decorationg their cage, they paint it gold with diamonds and other jewels, but on the inside there's a starving dieing bird, who because he feels so ill, continues to decorate his grave"

There are good and bad things in everything, it's about uniting the two in a balance. Materialism, consumerism, is not about that it's about more more more.

[Hundred Spirited God]

That's okay! Welcome :)



Philosophy is not a religion. but okay lol.
I think buddhusm is the neatest of religions.

I think some philosophy is interesting.
The Occult is great as story material, but it's mostly BS.



I don't see what's wrong with materialism. I think there should be more of it :yeah:



I think metafysics are very interesting, which is basicly all those things combined :)

Come discuss it here (http://www.virtualteen.org/forums/showthread.php?t=203344)

ok,the occult isnt made up,its real,it says in the bible people use to have their daughters pass through fire as occult practice

buddism,im not 100% sure what it is
occult,i would seriously stay away from that stuff,its involved with witchcraft,and when you practice that stuff your asking for demonic possesion

[LunaLiuna]

buddism,im not 100% sure what it is
occult,i would seriously stay away from that stuff,its involved with witchcraft,and when you practice that stuff your asking for demonic possesion

I don't practice it, I merely try to understand why it's everywhere in plain sight.

Buddhism is perhaps the most scientifically backed up religion. Although they still pick and choose what fits their idea of existence.

[Hundred Spirited God]

I don't practice it, I merely try to understand why it's everywhere in plain sight.

Buddhism is perhaps the most scientifically backed up religion. Although they still pick and choose what fits their idea of existence.

occult is everywhere cause kids are fascinated with witchcraft and magic,and most of the time,a lot of people mess with this stuff for power as far as i know,and kids probably do the same,or their just doing it to mess around

[LunaLiuna]

occult is everywhere cause kids are fascinated with witchcraft and magic,and most of the time,a lot of people mess with this stuff for power as far as i know,and kids probably do the same,or their just doing it to mess around

I didn't mean that, kids have always been fascinated with magic to grow their own egos. I mean it's become popular fashion in the UK to wear inverted crosses. No one questions it. There's many other things that are so crazy but people accept them.

I like to try to understand things rather than accept them blindly :)

[Hundred Spirited God]

I didn't mean that, kids have always been fascinated with magic to grow their own egos. I mean it's become popular fashion in the UK to wear inverted crosses. No one questions it. There's many other things that are so crazy but people accept them.

I like to try to understand things rather than accept them blindly :)

so are you trying to understand why i think its evil and everyone else thinks its alright?

[LunaLiuna]

so are you trying to understand why i think its evil and everyone else thinks its alright?

Definitely, you have probably drawn that conclusion from a popular belief. Which is true In some cases as Satanism falls into the 'occult' but other things have also been branded occult and unfortunately get prejudged. Christianity is a shining example of branding things that don't fit into it's system evil, It's done this with Pagans, Hindu's and even Buddhists.

People unfortunately repeat things they hear.

I'm trying to understand everything and nothing :)

Like I said there is good and bad in EVERYTHING.

[Hundred Spirited God]

Definitely, you have probably drawn that conclusion from a popular belief. Which is true In some cases as Satanism falls into the 'occult' but other things have also been branded occult and unfortunately get prejudged. Christianity is a shining example of branding things that don't fit into it's system evil, It's done this with Pagans, Hindu's and even Buddhists.

People unfortunately repeat things they hear.

I'm trying to understand everything and nothing :)

Like I said there is good and bad in EVERYTHING.

oh,i get it,well a lot of things fall into the occult and get prejudged cause in the bible,it states the world is the flesh (the bad),and theres more evil in the world than there is good

[Gigablue]

I'd love to combine it with psychology, science, and quantum physics and some how inspire people to look inside rather than outside.

I wouldn't try to combine the two. Philosophy deals with many issues that cannot be addressed scientifically, such as ethics. It is a worthy discipline, but it isn't science, so to try to make it scientific is a mistake.

The occult and religion aren't science either, and are irreconcilable with science. They accept claims based on faith, not evidence. In science, we make hypotheses, then try to prove them wrong. Only if they withstand every possible test do we being to take them seriously. In religion, people make claims, then defend them at all costs, ignoring logic and evidence.

Also, don't even talk about quantum mechanics. You don't understand anything about it. No one on this forum, myself included, has any remotely deep understanding of it. Quantum mechanics is exceedingly complicated, and can only be understood through math. There are some popular oversimplifications of it, but those carry no real wisdom. If you want to even begin to understand quantum mechanics and how we can relate it to life, you embed to dedicate decades of your career to studying it.

Why is new breakthroughs in science telling us what's been said for thousands of years.

Such as?

Buddhism is perhaps the most scientifically backed up religion. Although they still pick and choose what fits their idea of existence.

What in Buddhism has been proven by science? Buddhism may make fewer supernatural claims than other religions, but it is still not supported by the evidence.

[LunaLiuna]

I wouldn't try to combine the two. Philosophy deals with many issues that cannot be addressed scientifically, such as ethics. It is a worthy discipline, but it isn't science, so to try to make it scientific is a mistake.

The occult and religion aren't science either, and are irreconcilable with science. They accept claims based on faith, not evidence. In science, we make hypotheses, then try to prove them wrong. Only if they withstand every possible test do we being to take them seriously. In religion, people make claims, then defend them at all costs, ignoring logic and evidence.

Also, don't even talk about quantum mechanics. You don't understand anything about it. No one on this forum, myself included, has any remotely deep understanding of it. Quantum mechanics is exceedingly complicated, and can only be understood through math. There are some popular oversimplifications of it, but those carry no real wisdom. If you want to even begin to understand quantum mechanics and how we can relate it to life, you embed to dedicate decades of your career to studying it.



Such as?



What in Buddhism has been proven by science? Buddhism may make fewer supernatural claims than other religions, but it is still not supported by the evidence.


I do not wish to get into the typical Science VS Religion argument here, which by the way you entered into this you were most probably trying to do. I have no time for that, and like I said before, it only fuels this divide which is not what humanity needs.

Regarding what you said about combining Science, Spirituality and Philosophy. I think it's foolish to completely ignore the idea as from the way you right your coming from a completely Atheist standpoint. Which in truth you can never prove, the same as a theist could never prove there is a god.

You can not ignore the materialism that surrounds you and what it's causing, the greed and war. Religions cause war as well. science provides the instruments to cause a great help to anyone, including the good things but it's so often used for the bad, like over 1000 civilians being killed by drone strikes in the east.

I'm on about the core values of each religion, the perennial philosophy. I'm not interested in physical gods with 8 arms. I'm on about the very real morals and practice's of shaping the inner self. Which if branched over to science, could in fact decrease suffering. Science has a lack of heart that unfortunately doesn't do the best in bringing us together emotionally.

Philosophy should be a cornerstone to any mans life as it keeps you asking questions, which shapes and inspires. So to add in into the mix would be obvious.

Your right I have no clue about Quantum mechanics except that we are all one so identifying yourself as little you is folly.

Science is proving that everything is interconnected, the ancients especially Buddhism knew this. I was reading something the other day about magnetic tether between each of the planets that sends energy,molecules and other building blocks of life. This is the web of Indra mentioned by the Hindu's a thousand years ago. There are other things, but for the sake of keeping this neutral I shall leave them out.

Core practice's of Buddhism have, and continue to be proven extremely beneficial. Mindfulness has been a revelation here in the west for helping remove stressors from daily life. Yoga is equally as beneficial for the same reasons and more. Buddhism is essentially a guide to not suffering, my psychiatrist says the same he values is greatly as to him it's the source of psychology.

I understand your standpoint, but science is not always the right answer to everything, Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake for believing that the solar system was heliocentric is a shining example of this.

I respect what your saying though, i just prefer to fill my days with wonder than with the metallic souless structure of out and out scepticism.

Isaac newton was a firm Alchemist for example. Darwin attended seances.

"Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as 'conceptual necessities,' etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors." - Einstein

Each to their own though :)

[Tarannosaurus]

Buddhist and pagan! well that's a fairly interesting combination ;)

It actually works really well as a combination. Paganism is nature focused (nature worshipping, protecting nature) and Buddhism is about living simply and not doing harm - so they compliment each other quite well :)

I don't practice it, I merely try to understand why it's everywhere in plain sight.

Buddhism is perhaps the most scientifically backed up religion. Although they still pick and choose what fits their idea of existence.

That's an important part of Buddhism, that you can pick and choose. You're not supposed to blindly follow what was said by the Buddha or written in Buddhist scriptures, you're supposed to experiment yourself and question everything. If it doesn't seem right to you, then it doesn't matter.

[Miserabilia]

buddism,im not 100% sure what it is
occult,i would seriously stay away from that stuff,its involved with witchcraft,and when you practice that stuff your asking for demonic possesion

Look up buddhism then :P

your asking for demonic possesion
So are you kidding or do you honestly just extremely gullable?

ok,the occult isnt made up,its real,it says in the bible people use to have their daughters pass through fire as occult practice

What
occult is everywhere cause kids are fascinated with witchcraft and magic,and most of the time,a lot of people mess with this stuff for power as far as i know,and kids probably do the same,or their just doing it to mess around
Yeah,
I'd love to be a wizard. Who wouldn't?
It doesn't have to be bad, and it doesn't mean you'll get possesed by demons.

[Gigablue]

I do not wish to get into the typical Science VS Religion argument here, which by the way you entered into this you were most probably trying to do. I have no time for that, and like I said before, it only fuels this divide which is not what humanity needs.

I didn't mean to debate religion specifically, since that wasn't the goal of the thread. That being said, I don't think the discussion should be avoided simply decades it is divisive. We need to be united, but we also need to arrive at the truth. If we avoid discussions because they may divide, we will never achieve anything.

Regarding what you said about combining Science, Spirituality and Philosophy. I think it's foolish to completely ignore the idea as from the way you right your coming from a completely Atheist standpoint. Which in truth you can never prove, the same as a theist could never prove there is a god.

I see no evidence for the supernatural, therefore I do not consider it relevant to science or philosophy. I am not saying it is impossible, just that there is, at present, no reason to believe it. I can't prove that a god (or other supernatural entity) does not exist, and it don't claim to. However, the default position with regard to unproven claims should be skepticism.

You can not ignore the materialism that surrounds you and what it's causing, the greed and war. Religions cause war as well. science provides the instruments to cause a great help to anyone, including the good things but it's so often used for the bad, like over 1000 civilians being killed by drone strikes in the east.

Materialism is sadly human nature. We should try to change that, but we shouldn't make up nonsense or compromise the rules of logic and evidence for the sake of uniting people. We can address greed while, at the same time, following the evidence.

Science can be exploited by people with malicious intentions, but that doesn't mean the science is itself bad. Also, science has brought far more benefits than it has losses.

I'm on about the core values of each religion, the perennial philosophy. I'm not interested in physical gods with 8 arms. I'm on about the very real morals and practice's of shaping the inner self. Which if branched over to science, could in fact decrease suffering. Science has a lack of heart that unfortunately doesn't do the best in bringing us together emotionally.

Religion offers no great moral insight. Some of the greatest atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. Any of the good aspects of religious morality are evident from ethical first principles. I agree that we should take ethics into account and use science to decrease suffering, but I don't think we need religion to do that. As for bringing us together, I would rather be divided by the truth than united by lies.

Philosophy should be a cornerstone to any mans life as it keeps you asking questions, which shapes and inspires. So to add in into the mix would be obvious.

Completely agree.

Science is proving that everything is interconnected, the ancients especially Buddhism knew this. I was reading something the other day about magnetic tether between each of the planets that sends energy,molecules and other building blocks of life. This is the web of Indra mentioned by the Hindu's a thousand years ago. There are other things, but for the sake of keeping this neutral I shall leave them out.

The interconnectedness shown by science is not the same interconnectedness posited by religion. Science shows that there is cause and effect. Particles interact based on the laws of the physics. We can observe, replicate, quantify and predict what will happen when particles interact.

Religion, on the other hand, invokes mysticism. It is vague, unquantifiable, makes no predictions, and offers no insight about the nature of the world. To the extent that statements about interconnectedness are true, they are irrelevant. Science tells us more about the world than spirituality ever could.

Core practice's of Buddhism have, and continue to be proven extremely beneficial. Mindfulness has been a revelation here in the west for helping remove stressors from daily life. Yoga is equally as beneficial for the same reasons and more. Buddhism is essentially a guide to not suffering, my psychiatrist says the same he values is greatly as to him it's the source of psychology.

Once again, Buddhism is not necessary for this. The fact the relaxation is beneficial is self evident and not specific to Buddhism or any other religion.

I understand your standpoint, but science is not always the right answer to everything, Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake for believing that the solar system was heliocentric is a shining example of this.

How does that prove that science is bad? He was burned for heresy, by people who valued dogma over evidence.

I respect what your saying though, i just prefer to fill my days with wonder than with the metallic souless structure of out and out scepticism.

I want the truth, first and foremost. I do not want to be contented by falsehoods, no matter how comforting they may be.

Also, science is far more wonderful than anything supernatural. There is immense beauty in the natural world, for greater than anything humans have ever come up with. The phenomenal complexity of everything in the world is astounding. To try to understand even a small amount of it is far more fulfilling than anything spirituality can offer.

Isaac newton was a firm Alchemist for example. Darwin attended seances.

No one said that they were infallible. Newton and Darwin were brilliant in their respective fields, but they didn't know everything.

Each to their own though :)

I suppose, but only to an extent. If you think the supernatural exists, and I don't, one of is has to be wrong, just by logic. People should be respected, but sometimes, people’s beliefs are just wrong. I think it is important to put the truth above all else. While we should be respectful, we should not just hide beefing fixed beliefs, telling others that they have no right to challenge them. Every belief can and should be challenged as much as possible.

I’ll end with a quote by George Bernard Shaw. “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

[Miserabilia]

I do not wish to get into the typical Science VS Religion argument here, which by the way you entered into this you were most probably trying to do. I have no time for that, and like I said before, it only fuels this divide which is not what humanity needs.

Regarding what you said about combining Science, Spirituality and Philosophy. I think it's foolish to completely ignore the idea as from the way you right your coming from a completely Atheist standpoint. Which in truth you can never prove, the same as a theist could never prove there is a god.

You can not ignore the materialism that surrounds you and what it's causing, the greed and war. Religions cause war as well. science provides the instruments to cause a great help to anyone, including the good things but it's so often used for the bad, like over 1000 civilians being killed by drone strikes in the east.

I'm on about the core values of each religion, the perennial philosophy. I'm not interested in physical gods with 8 arms. I'm on about the very real morals and practice's of shaping the inner self. Which if branched over to science, could in fact decrease suffering. Science has a lack of heart that unfortunately doesn't do the best in bringing us together emotionally.

Philosophy should be a cornerstone to any mans life as it keeps you asking questions, which shapes and inspires. So to add in into the mix would be obvious.

Your right I have no clue about Quantum mechanics except that we are all one so identifying yourself as little you is folly.

Science is proving that everything is interconnected, the ancients especially Buddhism knew this. I was reading something the other day about magnetic tether between each of the planets that sends energy,molecules and other building blocks of life. This is the web of Indra mentioned by the Hindu's a thousand years ago. There are other things, but for the sake of keeping this neutral I shall leave them out.

Core practice's of Buddhism have, and continue to be proven extremely beneficial. Mindfulness has been a revelation here in the west for helping remove stressors from daily life. Yoga is equally as beneficial for the same reasons and more. Buddhism is essentially a guide to not suffering, my psychiatrist says the same he values is greatly as to him it's the source of psychology.

I understand your standpoint, but science is not always the right answer to everything, Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake for believing that the solar system was heliocentric is a shining example of this.

I respect what your saying though, i just prefer to fill my days with wonder than with the metallic souless structure of out and out scepticism.

Isaac newton was a firm Alchemist for example. Darwin attended seances.

"Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as 'conceptual necessities,' etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors." - Einstein

Each to their own though :)

Which in truth you can never prove, the same as a theist could never prove there is a god.

Atheism is the first state; Theism is a new state.
Atheistm is the natural state.
Atheistm= not beleiving in a god.

An atheist, therefore, by DEFINITION does not have to proof anything.
The theist says "I beleive X".
The athest says "I don't beleive X, because there is no evidence for it."

If I tell you right now, that somewhere in spacetime there is a magical unicron that shits chocolate,
who is the one that needs to provide proof?
I can't say the unicorn exist just because you haven't scanned every piece and particle in the universe and didn't find it.

GET IT????

You can not ignore the materialism that surrounds you and what it's causing, the greed and war. Religions cause war as well. science provides the instruments to cause a great help to anyone, including the good things but it's so often used for the bad, like over 1000 civilians being killed by drone strikes in the east.

"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" - Wikipedia

A drone strike =/= science
Predicting and organizing knowledge = science

"Science" can not cause war , by definition.

Science has a lack of heart that unfortunately doesn't do the best in bringing us together emotionally.

Do you even know what you're talking about right now, or do you just not know the proper terms?

"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" - Wikipedia

Ofcourse, science has "lack of heart."
Science is not a belief.
Science is a practice of predicting and organizing.

Science is proving that everything is interconnected, the ancients especially Buddhism knew this.

Once again, no!
"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" - Wikipedia

I was reading something the other day about magnetic tether between each of the planets that sends energy,molecules and other building blocks of life. This is the web of Indra mentioned by the Hindu's a thousand years ago. There are other things, but for the sake of keeping this neutral I shall leave them out.

Actually, no.
People have tried linking actual science to ancient books and writings, and always fail.

What you are describing is an interpetation of some vague old text; it never directly said that.
You are just linking it, the same way HistoryHD links anything older then 500 years to aliens.
It's total nonsense untill you provide some sort of actual proof.

Core practice's of Buddhism have, and continue to be proven extremely beneficial. Mindfulness has been a revelation here in the west for helping remove stressors from daily life. Yoga is equally as beneficial for the same reasons and more. Buddhism is essentially a guide to not suffering, my psychiatrist says the same he values is greatly as to him it's the source of psychology.

This I can aggree with,
buddhism, yoga, and mindfulnes are relaxing for the mind,
just like essentialy any type of meditation is.

I understand your standpoint, but science is not always the right answer to everything, Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake for believing that the solar system was heliocentric is a shining example of this.

Once more, folks!

"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" - Wikipedia

Science = not an answer,
Science = the practice of predicting and organizing knowledge.

Also, your example is actual the EXACT opposite of what you are trying to say,
so that's basicly hilarious.

It's actually a shining example of actual science being oppressed, and the scientist being burned.
Funny.

metallic souless structure of out and out scepticism.
Or you could just take time to see the actualy beauty of the world, instead of just seeking refuge in any old beleif people said when they didn't even know the earth was round and revolved around the sun.

[LunaLiuna]

I didn't mean to debate religion specifically, since that wasn't the goal of the thread. That being said, I don't think the discussion should be avoided simply decades it is divisive. We need to be united, but we also need to arrive at the truth. If we avoid discussions because they may divide, we will never achieve anything.



I see no evidence for the supernatural, therefore I do not consider it relevant to science or philosophy. I am not saying it is impossible, just that there is, at present, no reason to believe it. I can't prove that a god (or other supernatural entity) does not exist, and it don't claim to. However, the default position with regard to unproven claims should be skepticism.



Materialism is sadly human nature. We should try to change that, but we shouldn't make up nonsense or compromise the rules of logic and evidence for the sake of uniting people. We can address greed while, at the same time, following the evidence.

Science can be exploited by people with malicious intentions, but that doesn't mean the science is itself bad. Also, science has brought far more benefits than it has losses.



Religion offers no great moral insight. Some of the greatest atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. Any of the good aspects of religious morality are evident from ethical first principles. I agree that we should take ethics into account and use science to decrease suffering, but I don't think we need religion to do that. As for bringing us together, I would rather be divided by the truth than united by lies.



Completely agree.



The interconnectedness shown by science is not the same interconnectedness posited by religion. Science shows that there is cause and effect. Particles interact based on the laws of the physics. We can observe, replicate, quantify and predict what will happen when particles interact.

Religion, on the other hand, invokes mysticism. It is vague, unquantifiable, makes no predictions, and offers no insight about the nature of the world. To the extent that statements about interconnectedness are true, they are irrelevant. Science tells us more about the world than spirituality ever could.



Once again, Buddhism is not necessary for this. The fact the relaxation is beneficial is self evident and not specific to Buddhism or any other religion.



How does that prove that science is bad? He was burned for heresy, by people who valued dogma over evidence.



I want the truth, first and foremost. I do not want to be contented by falsehoods, no matter how comforting they may be.

Also, science is far more wonderful than anything supernatural. There is immense beauty in the natural world, for greater than anything humans have ever come up with. The phenomenal complexity of everything in the world is astounding. To try to understand even a small amount of it is far more fulfilling than anything spirituality can offer.



No one said that they were infallible. Newton and Darwin were brilliant in their respective fields, but they didn't know everything.



I suppose, but only to an extent. If you think the supernatural exists, and I don't, one of is has to be wrong, just by logic. People should be respected, but sometimes, people’s beliefs are just wrong. I think it is important to put the truth above all else. While we should be respectful, we should not just hide beefing fixed beliefs, telling others that they have no right to challenge them. Every belief can and should be challenged as much as possible.

I’ll end with a quote by George Bernard Shaw. “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

I agree with everything you said, I made one or two mistakes.

Like you said truth is what needs to be put in place and valued perhaps the most. I used the Giordano Bruno example because he was ahead of his time in what his studys showed. Equally could the ancients not have learnt the inner world more? as they didn't have the know how to perfect the outer world.

I think I may not have made myself clear, my interest is on the INSIDE world, consciousness, emotions ect.

I'm also not claiming that the supernatural is beautiful. I'm claiming that life is beautiful which to me feels spiritual, which I want to share with people. But their materialism gets in the way as they prefer to watch TV.

I want to make this clear, I hold NO religion, I just feel that the good things in them can be applied to other things, and the same can be said about other subjects. Like I said before people are too busy in their outward lives.

I read scriptures and they've changed my inward life far more that anything on the outside.

Wasn't this thread about me asking if people liked the subjects in question?

To be honest, I guess you became inspired by science whereas I got inspired by spirituality. It's been really interesting to see the reactions from you and Cheese. Either way, I'll reiterate that I'm not a blind believer in anything. I'm just simply trying to express the way I feel, and from what I've read. Many others have felt.

Mahalo to you :)

[Miserabilia]

I agree with everything you said, I made one or two mistakes.

Like you said truth is what needs to be put in place and valued perhaps the most. I used the Giordano Bruno example because he was ahead of his time in what his studys showed. Equally could the ancients not have learnt the inner world more? as they didn't have the know how to perfect the outer world.

I think I may not have made myself clear, my interest is on the INSIDE world, consciousness, emotions ect.

I'm also not claiming that the supernatural is beautiful. I'm claiming that life is beautiful which to me feels spiritual, which I want to share with people. But their materialism gets in the way as they prefer to watch TV.

I want to make this clear, I hold NO religion, I just feel that the good things in them can be applied to other things, and the same can be said about other subjects. Like I said before people are too busy in their outward lives.

I read scriptures and they've changed my inward life far more that anything on the outside.

Wasn't this thread about me asking if people liked the subjects in question?

To be honest, I guess you became inspired by science whereas I got inspired by spirituality. It's been really interesting to see the reactions from you and Cheese. Either way, I'll reiterate that I'm not a blind believer in anything. I'm just simply trying to express the way I feel, and from what I've read. Many others have felt.

Mahalo to you :)

But their materialism gets in the way as they prefer to watch TV.
Not all materialists are dumb lazy a**holes.



I want to make this clear, I hold NO religion, I just feel that the good things in them can be applied to other things, and the same can be said about other subjects. Like I said before people are too busy in their outward lives.

I read scriptures and they've changed my inward life far more that anything on the outside.

Well spiritualism is basicly the same as religion to me.

But it's good that you're open minded, maholo to you to :P

[LunaLiuna]

Atheism is the first state; Theism is a new state.
Atheistm is the natural state.
Atheistm= not beleiving in a god.

An atheist, therefore, by DEFINITION does not have to proof anything.
The theist says "I beleive X".
The athest says "I don't beleive X, because there is no evidence for it."

If I tell you right now, that somewhere in spacetime there is a magical unicron that shits chocolate,
who is the one that needs to provide proof?
I can't say the unicorn exist just because you haven't scanned every piece and particle in the universe and didn't find it.

GET IT????



"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" - Wikipedia

A drone strike =/= science
Predicting and organizing knowledge = science

"Science" can not cause war , by definition.



Do you even know what you're talking about right now, or do you just not know the proper terms?

"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" - Wikipedia

Ofcourse, science has "lack of heart."
Science is not a belief.
Science is a practice of predicting and organizing.



Once again, no!
"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" - Wikipedia



Actually, no.
People have tried linking actual science to ancient books and writings, and always fail.

What you are describing is an interpetation of some vague old text; it never directly said that.
You are just linking it, the same way HistoryHD links anything older then 500 years to aliens.
It's total nonsense untill you provide some sort of actual proof.



This I can aggree with,
buddhism, yoga, and mindfulnes are relaxing for the mind,
just like essentialy any type of meditation is.



Once more, folks!

"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[1]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" - Wikipedia

Science = not an answer,
Science = the practice of predicting and organizing knowledge.

Also, your example is actual the EXACT opposite of what you are trying to say,
so that's basicly hilarious.

It's actually a shining example of actual science being oppressed, and the scientist being burned.
Funny.


Or you could just take time to see the actualy beauty of the world, instead of just seeking refuge in any old beleif people said when they didn't even know the earth was round and revolved around the sun.

A debate on words is not what I started this thread for.

if you re read what I said I clearly stated that science provides the tools to cause harm, which relates to the overall thing that this has some how spun into. which is that science could be a little more thoughtful, not everythings black and white.

And to prebase your whole post in a negative manner is interesting. I never meant for that.

As I said, I used the Bruno example to show that people are often refuted and laughed at when their ideas are outside of the box. By no means am I saying I'm right though.

Now can you calm down brother? I only asked if people liked the subjects I listed :)

P.s I know materialists aren't always dumb and lazy, there's just that lack of an inside that bothers me!

Also Religion to me is 'Do this, Do that or else you'll go to hell' Spirituality is just enjoying the ride.

[Miserabilia]

A debate on words is not what I started this thread for.

if you re read what I said I clearly stated that science provides the tools to cause harm, which relates to the overall thing that this has some how spun into. which is that science could be a little more thoughtful, not everythings black and white.

And to prebase your whole post in a negative manner is interesting. I never meant for that.

As I said, I used the Bruno example to show that people are often refuted and laughed at when their ideas are outside of the box. By no means am I saying I'm right though.

Now can you calm down brother? I only asked if people liked the subjects I listed :)

P.s I know materialists aren't always dumb and lazy, there's just that lack of an inside that bothers me!

Also Religion to me is 'Do this, Do that or else you'll go to hell' Spirituality is just enjoying the ride.


A debate on words is not what I started this thread for.


Then why is it in the debate subforum?


if you re read what I said I clearly stated that science provides the tools to cause harm, which relates to the overall thing that this has some how spun into. which is that science could be a little more thoughtful, not everythings black and white.

I think you should reread that definition of science I already had to post about 4 times.

Science =/= a view on things (black and white, not thoughtful)
Science = the practice of gathering knowledge and making accurate predictions.

And to prebase your whole post in a negative manner is interesting. I never meant for that.
I'm simply showing you that your definition of science is not right, so you are not right in calling it all these things, like "not thoughtul" and "black and white".

Also Religion to me is 'Do this, Do that or else you'll go to hell' Spirituality is just enjoying the ride.

"Religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence."- Wikipedia

Sprituality seems to be this, so I'll keep viewing it as a religion.

[Gigablue]

I agree with everything you said, I made one or two mistakes.

Like you said truth is what needs to be put in place and valued perhaps the most. I used the Giordano Bruno example because he was ahead of his time in what his studys showed. Equally could the ancients not have learnt the inner world more? as they didn't have the know how to perfect the outer world.

I think I may not have made myself clear, my interest is on the INSIDE world, consciousness, emotions ect.

I'm also not claiming that the supernatural is beautiful. I'm claiming that life is beautiful which to me feels spiritual, which I want to share with people. But their materialism gets in the way as they prefer to watch TV.

I want to make this clear, I hold NO religion, I just feel that the good things in them can be applied to other things, and the same can be said about other subjects. Like I said before people are too busy in their outward lives.

I read scriptures and they've changed my inward life far more that anything on the outside.

Wasn't this thread about me asking if people liked the subjects in question?

To be honest, I guess you became inspired by science whereas I got inspired by spirituality. It's been really interesting to see the reactions from you and Cheese. Either way, I'll reiterate that I'm not a blind believer in anything. I'm just simply trying to express the way I feel, and from what I've read. Many others have felt.

Mahalo to you :)

What exactly do you mean by spiritual? If you don't mean it in a religious way, what does it mean? The problem with the term is that everyone uses it differently, and as a result, no one know what it even means. It isn't really possible to have a discussion without first making sure everyone is using the same terms to mean the same things.

[LunaLiuna]

I agree with everything you said, I made one or two mistakes.

Like you said truth is what needs to be put in place and valued perhaps the most. I used the Giordano Bruno example because he was ahead of his time in what his studys showed. Equally could the ancients not have learnt the inner world more? as they didn't have the know how to perfect the outer world.

I think I may not have made myself clear, my interest is on the INSIDE world, consciousness, emotions ect.

I'm also not claiming that the supernatural is beautiful. I'm claiming that life is beautiful which to me feels spiritual, which I want to share with people. But their materialism gets in the way as they prefer to watch TV.

I want to make this clear, I hold NO religion, I just feel that the good things in them can be applied to other things, and the same can be said about other subjects. Like I said before people are too busy in their outward lives.

I read scriptures and they've changed my inward life far more that anything on the outside.

Wasn't this thread about me asking if people liked the subjects in question?

To be honest, I guess you became inspired by science whereas I got inspired by spirituality. It's been really interesting to see the reactions from you and Cheese. Either way, I'll reiterate that I'm not a blind believer in anything. I'm just simply trying to express the way I feel, and from what I've read. Many others have felt.

Mahalo to you :)

Then why is it in the debate subforum?



I think you should reread that definition of science I already had to post about 4 times.

Science =/= a view on things (black and white, not thoughtful)
Science = the practice of gathering knowledge and making accurate predictions.


I'm simply showing you that your definition of science is not right, so you are not right in calling it all these things, like "not thoughtul" and "black and white".



"Religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence."- Wikipedia

Sprituality seems to be this, so I'll keep viewing it as a religion.

It's obvious now that we aren't reading from the same page, this is also in the General DISCUSSIONS forum right?

Yes science gathers knowledge of things it can measure, it then makes predictions on what it's learnt. BUT as this thread shows, it's become a venomous enemy to anything outside of itself, whilst all the while saying it strives to be open minded, I think it would help if it wasn't used as a lap dog for major corporations which is where morally it should be better.

Your generalising my words when I'm using them specifically for certain things. Again, I'm not saying science is bad... I'm saying it could be used more ethically. I'm also saying science doesn't know everything, neither does religion. They're both systems to explain different things.

I'm NEUTRAL on the matter. I'm not here to endlessly go back and forth. I'm looking for likeminded people interested in the subjects I listed, how many times do I have to say this?

Gigablue - What I mean by spirituality is reading esoteric and exoteric works, exploring and cultivating myself, finding beauty and love in nature, seeing everyone as the same and loving them, remembering that no one has any idea what we are doing here, and just generally enjoying the drama. Whilst always remaining aware without any attachments or judgements unless needed at the time, and constantly striving for all things pure. There are many other things but as you can see some are fairly typical of a 'normal' perhaps curious person.

I have no problem with you guys criticising what I'm saying, but I'm not trying to invoke that. All I wanted was to ask people whether they liked the subjects!

If you wish to carry on then please feel free to PM me, have a great evening both of you :)

[Gigablue]

Gigablue - What I mean by spirituality is reading esoteric and exoteric works, exploring and cultivating myself, finding beauty and love in nature, seeing everyone as the same and loving them, remembering that no one has any idea what we are doing here, and just generally enjoying the drama. Whilst always remaining aware without any attachments or judgements unless needed at the time, and constantly striving for all things pure. There are many other things but as you can see some are fairly typical of a 'normal' perhaps curious person.

I think those are all good goals. I wouldn't really call it spiritual, but that just comes down to a difference in the use of language.

I think we have fairly similar goals in general, but very different methods. You mention exploring and cultivating yourself, which I also think is a good goal. I would go about it differently, mainly be reading more about the world to understand it better, but I think the end result is similar. I think we can both agree that finding beauty in nature is a good thing, though I prefer to find the beauty through science.

[Hundred Spirited God]

Look up buddhism then :P


So are you kidding or do you honestly just extremely gullable? no im not kidding, demonic possesion is 100 % real,theres been reports on the news where this woman had 2 kids,dropped them off at her uncles,then killed herself


What

Yeah,
I'd love to be a wizard. Who wouldn't?
It doesn't have to be bad, and it doesn't mean you'll get possesed by demons.

christians like me
yes it is,it states in the bible that the occult is evil,and its possible that you could be demon possesed

[Harry Smith]

christians like me
yes it is,it states in the bible that the occult is evil,and its possible that you could be demon possesed

Doesn't the bible also say that slavery is good, a man should rape his wife and that gays should be killed?

[Hundred Spirited God]

never heard of of those in the bible,but i do know killing is a sin,its also one of the ten commandments: "thou shall not kill"

[Harry Smith]

never heard of of those in the bible,but i do know killing is a sin,its also one of the ten commandments: "thou shall not kill"

Have a look

Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death.

Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death

When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property

[Hundred Spirited God]

Have a look

what kind of religion are you in?

[Harry Smith]

what kind of religion are you in?

I'm not religious.

This is all stuff from the old testament

[Hundred Spirited God]

I'm not religious.

This is all stuff from the old testament

i dont know,i mean,gays shall be put to death? theres over billions of gays and with laws these days you would be charged with murder,and im not sure,but i dont think your suppose to follow those in the old testament

[Harry Smith]

i dont know,i mean,gays shall be put to death? theres over billions of gays and with laws these days you would be charged with murder,and im not sure,but i dont think your suppose to follow those in the old testament

I know-that's the point I was making. I was trying to show how you shouldn't really follow much of the Bible because it comes up with such out-dated and stupid statements

[Lovelife090994]

For some reasons the ideals and histories of world religions interest me even though I know little of many. It is striking how many similarities some beliefs have to Christianity and it is amazing how spirituality and religion can be two different things. I never did study in the occult.

[Miserabilia]

christians like me
yes it is,it states in the bible that the occult is evil,and its possible that you could be demon possesed

The bible states all sort of s**t, alot of it contradictory.
And do you honestly beleive in demons?
/:

never heard of of those in the bible,but i do know killing is a sin,its also one of the ten commandments: "thou shall not kill"
The bible encourages murder, too.
It's very hypocritical.

i dont know,i mean,gays shall be put to death? theres over billions of gays and with laws these days you would be charged with murder,and im not sure,but i dont think your suppose to follow those in the old testament

Lol!
THe three religions (Christian, Hebrewism, Muslim) are descendents from the same religion;
and look at the strict muslim countries;
there, by muslim law, gay people are wipped and stoned to death.

It's so midieval, but it's the type of stuff the old religions encourage.

[Hundred Spirited God]

The bible states all sort of s**t, alot of it contradictory.
And do you honestly beleive in demons?
/:


The bible encourages murder, too.
It's very hypocritical.



Lol!
THe three religions (Christian, Hebrewism, Muslim) are descendents from the same religion;
and look at the strict muslim countries;
there, by muslim law, gay people are wipped and stoned to death.

It's so midieval, but it's the type of stuff the old religions encourage.

well im a christian so i dont go by the muslim laws,my mom told me killing is wrong,so i go with what she says

yes i do believe in demons,and what religion are you in? im not sure if i asked this already

[Harry Smith]

well im a christian so i dont go by the muslim laws,my mom told me killing is wrong,so i go with what she says

But the Bible also says killing is right-such a dilemma

[Hundred Spirited God]

But the Bible also says killing is right-such a dilemma

where in the bible does it say that?

[AgentHomo]

I'm interested in origins of some occults and beliefs, as well as the ridiculousness of their practices. For example, the story Harry told about the burned cross. Also I find the mythology behind Scientology as well as that of the Necriconmicon quite fascinating (as well as ridiculous on all levels). I'm mostly into secret societies and symbols, much like portrayed in National Treasure, etc. also I'm reading Seven Deadly Wonders which involves Ancient Egypt, Rome, and other kingdoms of the past covering up a mythological artifact using the seven great wonders of the world.

But the Bible also says killing is right-such a dilemma

where in the bible does it say that?

Oh let's not forget the usual kill homosexuals, stone people, and force rape victims to marry their rapists. Oh gotta love the ignorant beliefs of religion.

[Harry Smith]

where in the bible does it say that?

then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not: Matthew 11

shows how God is happy to murder an entire city because they didn't worship him

He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death

[sqishy]

HELLO? Was this meant to be a debate/argument thread? No.

Anyways, yes I am philosophical, open-minded and have had some experience with occult and spiritual things.

[Miserabilia]

well im a christian so i dont go by the muslim laws,my mom told me killing is wrong,so i go with what she says

yes i do believe in demons,and what religion are you in? im not sure if i asked this already

I follow no religion.

[Hundred Spirited God]

I follow no religion.

so what does that make you then

[Miserabilia]

so what does that make you then

Atheist,
even though the "eist" part (Or "ism" in Atheism) is not correct, because it is not a beleif.

[Hundred Spirited God]

Atheist,
even though the "eist" part (Or "ism" in Atheism) is not correct, because it is not a beleif.

i know,atheist is a person who doesnt believe in god,and did anything bad happened in your life? just cause bad things happen,doesnt mean that there isnt a god,you cant live a sinless life,thats just not how it works

[Miserabilia]

i know,atheist is a person who doesnt believe in god,and did anything bad happened in your life? just cause bad things happen,doesnt mean that there isnt a god,you cant live a sinless life,thats just not how it works

No, I just don't beleive in a god because there's no logical reason for me to beleive in a god besides seeking comfort, which I can do in all sorts of things (like fiction)

And I sin all the time, but I don't care! I don't want to live in fear :yes:

[Hundred Spirited God]

No, I just don't beleive in a god because there's no logical reason for me to beleive in a god besides seeking comfort, which I can do in all sorts of things (like fiction)

And I sin all the time, but I don't care! I don't want to live in fear :yes:

i hate to break it to you but if you try and take the easy way out,theres going to be more pain in the end :(

[Miserabilia]

i hate to break it to you but if you try and take the easy way out,theres going to be more pain in the end :(

What?
Are you talking about hell?
I don't beleive in a hell, as I don't want to live my life in fear.
There is no proof or even theoretical possibility of an afterlife, so untill someone does proove it I have nothing to fear.

[Zenos]

But the Bible also says killing is right-such a dilemma

only thing I had ever seen where killing was right beyond enfoircing antiquated laws was if it was in justifiable defence of yourself,your family,others and your nation!


Those justifiable reasons are justifiable under anyt religion I can think of

[Zenos]

Matthew 11

shows how God is happy to murder an entire city because they didn't worship him

Oh yeh you quoted:

Quote:
He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death


You have to remember this was back in a harsh time though,and respect for ones parents was considered important,for among other reasons they made you,one of them carried you and the other insured you had food,clothing shelter etc etc

And I think this was just away to weed out those offspring that turned out to be unthankful!

personally while I don't suggest stoning your off spring to death,I do think there should be a return of the youth to respecting their parents,most youth today couldn't give too hoots about their parents are what their parents say.

Which is a stark contrast to way I have been raised I have respect for my parents and what they say even if I do not always agree with it or them,and because of that I have had to put up with jabs and pokes and jokes from my fellow teens

[xxdrakeTxx]

personally i follow an idea over religion i took buddhism spirtual satanism wicca and multiple philosiphys mixed them into a spirtuality i could understand because i dont belive that u have to blindly follow a god . i belive intruth we are the gods we hold the keys to our own fate . i think pretty much all intelectual things art music and philosiphy is effectivevly dead in the united states and id like to see it brought back hope this helps sorry for my really bad spelling