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fubarobfusco comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: MrMind 20 July 2015 06:55AM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 21 July 2015 03:38:15PM *  2 points [-]

It sounds parodistic yet comes accross as weirdly workable.

Two quotes come to mind (emphasis added) —

He therefore said: "Let me declare this Work under this title: ‘The obtaining of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel’", because the theory implied in these words is so patently absurd that only simpletons would waste much time in analysing it. It would be accepted as a convention, and no one would incur the grave danger of building a philosophical system upon it.

[...] The mind is the great enemy; so, by invoking enthusiastically a person whom we know not to exist, we are rebuking that mind.

— Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice

ROSE: I have no comprehensible path. There's nothing to overcome, no lesson to learn, no cathartic light at the end of this preposterous tunnel.
ROSE: Not for me, at least!
ROSE: I seriously have the DUMBEST arc anyone could conceivably imagine.
DAVE: rose we dont have fuckin "arcs" we are just human beings

— Homestuck

Comment author: [deleted] 21 July 2015 03:49:03PM 0 points [-]

I am not sure about Crowley's point - the mind being the great enemy as in the mind making all sorts of excuses and rationalizations? That is almost trivially true, however, I think using other parts of the mind to defeat these parts may work better than shutting the whole thing down because then what else can we work with?

It is similar to taking acid. Why do some, but only some people have really deep satori experiences from acid? Acid is just a hallucinogen. It is not supposed to do much. But sometimes the hallucinations overload and shut down big parts of the mind and then we pay attention to the rest and this can lead into the kinds of ego-loss, one-with-everything insights. However, isn't it really a brute-force way? It's like wearing a blindfold for months to improve our hearing.

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