seems to me that most of the interesting interpretive work is happening deep in the reader’s unconscious, almost inherently inaccessible to any kind of rationally legible testing framework, and that this is fine and good actually
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also seems to me that the kind of phenomena accessible to exploration via “statistically-significant sample sizes” are the kind where you can assume away differences between people that are exactly the focus of magical or spiritual practice
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perhaps! it's entirely possible to make that error, but also possible to examine those factors. my question is, if a phenomenon resists any attempt to look straight at it, does it really exist?
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here's an analogy: suppose we were discussing ideas about how to have better sex. it's hard to test ideas like that, for a bunch of reasons, not least of which is that knowing that you're having sex as part of an experiment changes how you feel about the sex
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which in no way implies that sex doesn't exist, or that good sex doesn't exist, or that it's impossible to improve the way you have sex
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another reason it's hard to test ideas for having good sex is that they're actually hard to transmit. stuff like "pay more attention to your partner" refers to a pretty complex set of skills and there are lots of individual obstacles to being able to make use of those skills
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and another reason is that scientific testing depends on being able to repeatedly set up "the same" conditions but there's an important sense in which it's impossible to do that for sex. you're never in "the same" position again when it comes to sex, really
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the solution for this is rapid-growth clones in extremely controlled environments.
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are occultists, spiritualists, religionists and magicians not positing the existence of forces that exist outside of ordinary causal relations?
If they could be mechanically duplicated and measured they would be tautologically "natural" - not "supernatural"
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everything i've personally experienced can be understood without positing anything supernatural (so far), but not necessarily in a way that could be mechanically duplicated and measured. there are depths to the human heart and so forth
I am, on the basis of ephemeral experience and the scattered anecdotal evidence of people whom I trust, and the larger body from people I don't even know, willing to go further and say there is an objectively real, subtle spiritual world.
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do you believe that to be distinct from the material world?
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