Comment by ryandv
1 day ago
> It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…
You see this idea echoed in Hermetic Qabalah as the "Four Worlds" - the world of action & physical materiality, the world of psychology, thought, feeling, & egoic consciousness, the world of creativity, and the world of archetypal abstraction.
The Hermetic influence comes from the assertion that the three immaterial worlds of the "soul" or "mind" (synonyms with the same referent) are in some sense equal to, or at least intertwined with, the material body, in a mutually reciprocal dance: "As above, so below; as below, so above."
For some 20th century texts in this neighbourhood: The Three Initiates' primer on occult studies The Kybalion, Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah, and the classic Qabalistic reference: Liber 777 by Crowley (or its updated, more legible version, Liber 776 1/2 by Eshelman). The works of Israel Regardie such as The One Year Manual or The Middle Pillar are also good for grounding occult studies in more psychological or psychotherapeutic language which is a good moderating influence when experimenting with pretty out-there material.
Be careful with the meaning of words in this field.
This is one step removed from swinging a crystal from a piece of string and using it to divine the stock market. Absolute nonsense the lot of it, and a waste of good printing paper that would otherwise have better use as a instruction booklet for a TP-link router.
The same could have been said of Galileo studying cosmology at his time. "Better spend time taking care of his garden".
Don't read it if you dont like it but don't discourage people asking questions and making funny theories. Most of human progress wasdone that way about aspects of life that was not yet understood. Your attitude is nothing but nihilistic and it never built anything.
You're holding it upside down. Nobody earnestly believes in soothsaying, prophecy, or "magic missile" in this field - nobody worth your time anyway.
Most of the problem with the occult is that people have no idea what the fuck the words and vocabulary are actually referencing.
Would you have posted this in a article about digitized christian bibles?
No, because one built a civilization and the other is actual nonsense
6 replies →
Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).
Well as long as there are words for it then it’s probably true.
It doesn’t actually predict or fix anything, even after thousands of years. But it’s hard enough to pin down that you can’t disprove any of it.
It's turtles all the way down.