I just saw someone in the Discord for r/occult reference very old Retro PK experiments. I am very annoyed with people abandoning their skepticism. Objectivity and empiricism tend to get conflated, and they are correlated with each other; however, they are not one and the same. Empiricism is knowledge that you have experienced for yourself, whereas anecdotal is a story you heard. If you were to ask me why I believe in the paranormal stuff that I do, my response would be because of the experiences I have had. When I tried to disprove that it was paranormal, my alternative hypothesis that it was not paranormal did not hold up, and its being paranormal was supported.
Spontaneous paranormal experience is what caused me to seek things out and research things, so my experiences came before someone telling me that magic and psychic stuff are real. Because the peer-review and science journal process haven’t been unscathed by corruption and the insidious reach of capitalism, I do not just accept something because it has gone through the peer review process. I look at the number of times it has been cited by other articles and the reputability of the work that cited it; I look at the impact, I look at the credibility and integrity of the editorial board, I look at the journal’s ranking score. Because of the nature of paranormal subjects, all conventional metrics that journals use are in the toilet. That is why you attempt to replicate what they did. You do the science yourself, and you see if you get your own data.
My cohort of millennial occultists frustrate me. There is a difference in cohorts when it comes to magic. Gen X is more conventionally modern and postmodern, whereas millennials were strongly encouraged by high strangeness, mesmerism, theosophy, new age ideas, energy work, and parapsychology. For example, I’m part of a cohort of psions; though, I no longer practice psionics. The realization that it was built from Dungeons and Dragons role-playing kind of freaks me out and depresses me. Energy is just an abstraction of change, and power connotes the ability to get something to change as a consequence of; therefore, energy working paradigms connote an interest in power. Unlike Gen X, for example, that is more concerned with a normative paradigm, which is part of the reason why many of them are so interested in politics, millennials had a particular interest in power without the authority. There was a particular contempt for esoteric orders we had – that I still have, which is why I said we wanted power without authority.
Modern magic is more or less ontological, unfalsifiable, not testable, and concerned with spirituality and how people should live their lives. Whereas science aims to describe and predict, spirituality is more about giving people a framework for making decisions, what they should do, and how they should live their lives. Normative expressions are ontologically disjointed from reality in that they describe how things should be but do not aim to describe how they are. For example, people should not be fascists; however, the reality is that fascists exist, though, I assert they should not exist. Instead of being inductive and epistemological like science, that form of occultism is metaphysical like Math. Instead of supporting and revising itself, the ontological entities accumulate. There’s a collection of occult texts, for example, that are canon.
Honestly, some days I feel bitter because having the experiences I have had robbed me of my ability to deny the existence of the paranormal and live a normal life. My life is just as messed up as a person without psychic abilities who does not practice magic. Magicians and psychics are not special. In fact, our sensitivity to psychic and magical forces makes us more susceptible to self-destruction, obsession, addiction. I think people have this misconception that magicians and psychics. Technically, magic is more art than science, so magicians are really just artists that use magic through different crafts and mediums. We are just as fucked up as any other artists and just as tragic. We don’t practice magic because we want to; instead, a series of events lead us down this path regardless of our wishes or wants. I find it ironic. The illusion of magic is that of power and the ability to control things and express your agency; however, being born the way I was into this deep ocean of weirdness was beyond my control. I did not have a choice, and that makes me resentful.
My cohort of the paranormal demographic frustrates me because we are approaching our 40s. Many of us, myself included, have been doing this for over 20 years. We have passed the book club and student phase, yet many of us still approach these subjects from the paradigm we developed while in middle and high school. The trope of the magical school, whether that be high school or a university, is still prevalent with my cohort. We are past the age of even being in college. My student loan debt alone tells me that. I’m zeroing in on my cohort because we were the ones especially skeptical. Replication is part of the peer-review process. The research I see people I knew from 15 years ago spreading is literally over 20 years old. Not only have the parapsychology researchers done better, more relevant work, claiming that one has magical powers, psychic powers, psychokinesis, etc., is an extraordinary claim. How does one test the claim? You do the science yourself. At this point, all of us should have a nice lab journal filled with a lot of our results. There is no reference to any data. It is just a bunch of models, diffuse articles with a tenuous connection to whatever it is that they are claiming, and no attempt, at all, to replicate the experiments they are citing.
We call Hard Science Fiction a genre of fiction because while it is grounded in science, it is grounded in speculation. On the other hand, Fantasy in a Science Fiction setting, like Warhammer 40K, is fiction because it is counterfactual; i.e., subjunctive conditionals. We can think of things we extrapolate that do not have measurable instances as conjectural, at best. That means that occultists that do not take the time to fill their models and paradigms with data are, essentially, writing fiction and ostentate fiction – they are LARPing. Ontologically and epistemologically, there is no difference between most of what I see alone about occultism and magic and genres of fiction, such as magical realism. Magical realism is more interesting and novel.
#activism #alien #aliens #anarchism #anarchists #anarchy #animistic #BlueSky #capitalism #ceremonialMagick #chaosMagic #chaosMagick #conspiracyTheories #conspiracyTheory #Discord #divination #DKMU #dnd #dungeonsanddragons #egregore #egregores #energyWork #fantasy #fascism #fascist #GenX #hermeticism #highStrangeness #LARP #magic #magicalRealism #magick #mesmerism #Millennials #occult #occultism #occultist #occultists #occulture #Parapsychology #politics #psychic #Psychokinesis #Reddit #religion #rolePlayingGame #Rosicrucian #rosicrucians #RPG #scienceFiction #sigil #sigilMagick #sigils #Spirituality #supernatural #Thelema #thelemites #theosophy #Threads #TTRPG #Twitter #UFO #UFOs #warhammer #Warhammer40K #wh40k #Wicca #Wiccan #witchcraft
