From news.scruz.net!kudo20!tyagi Sat May 3 11:05:21 1997 Path: news.scruz.net!kudo20!tyagi From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nagasiva) Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.pagan.magick,talk.religion.misc Subject: TMaroney: Magick and Psychology Date: 3 May 1997 03:20:18 -0700 Organization: KudoNet On-Line Services Lines: 36 Sender: tyagi@bjt.net Message-ID: Reply-To: maroney@apple.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 165.227.52.9 Xref: news.scruz.net alt.magick.tyagi:10973 alt.magick:95240 alt.pagan.magick:3517 talk.religion.misc:266781 [from thelema93-l@hollyfeld.org: Tim Maroney ] >Further, as Magick is the *art* , as well as the science, of causing >change in accordance with Will, I'm not sure that a *complete* replacement >of poetic, religious or mystical metaphor with scientific and >psychological terminology is automatically a Universally Good Thing. Whether it's possible to model mystical and magical phenomena in psychological language is a different question from whether we will be able to get good results by using that bloodless language in our practices. I don't believe in deities, but I use them in ritual because I just can't work up the same emotional dynamic towards a statement of psychological or philosophical principle as towards an anthropomorphization (or at least, I have not succeeded in doing so yet). I regard the declarative content of a ritual as fiction but the critical and psychological description of a ritual as a separate and non-fictional domain. In traditional occultism these two domains are mixed, which has led to a great deal of confusion. Ritual on the face of it often makes direct assertions about the nature of the universe and about the entities populating it, and exegesis has served to reinforce this by treating the statements made in ritual as if they were factual. I think we can only make progress here by embracing the fictional as such. For instance, we should not ask "is the HGA the metaprogrammer?" but "what psychological phenomena could give rise to the experience characterized as K&C of the HGA?" Perhaps we'll arrive back at the metaprogrammer through exploring this question, or perhaps not, but starting with the HGA as an entity and looking for another entity with which to correlate it is jumping to conclusions. Tim Maroney -- see http://www.hollyfeld.org/~tyagi/nagasiva.html and call: 408/2-666-SLUG!!! ---- (emailed replies may be posted) ---- CC public replies to author ---- * * * Asphalta Cementia Metallica Polymera Coyote La Cucaracha Humana * * *