Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Post by Gee »

Count Lucanor wrote: April 27th, 2020, 7:13 pm
Gee wrote: April 27th, 2020, 6:10 pm
I agree with you on this. My reason for differing on the assessment is noted in the first line of the quoted information.

The Marx quote starts out: "Man makes religion, religion does not make man." Everything that I have learned says that this is true. The problem seems to arrive when people carry it one step further and believe that man makes religion and religion makes "God". This is not true.

Religion interprets "God". It may seem to be a small difference, but it is a significant difference. We don't actually create "God/s", we interpret something that we are sure exists -- this is why we make religion. imo

Gee
Even at the most basic level of social practice, beliefs in gods is related to some form of organization, which we can generally call "religion". Man makes religions when man makes gods.
Do you see the underlined words "social practice". Those underlined words mean "religion" in that statement, so you are saying religion (social practice) is generally called "religion". Your argument is circular and has nothing to do with who or what "makes gods". This is what I was talking about, the assumption that making religion is making "God". This is not true.
Count Lucanor wrote: April 27th, 2020, 7:13 pm This is most strikingly obvious in religions with a "personal god".
In the above statement, you seem to object to the personal god, or the subjective god. It occurs to me that you have divided your argument into the objective and the subjective, and then attempted to use logic to consider the problem. That may be your mistake. (chuckle)

Have you done any studying on the unconscious aspect of mind? Do you understand any of the logic of the unconscious? I think a person has to study the logic of the unconscious in order to have a hope of understanding "God" concepts, because "God" concepts come from the unconscious, which is not logical. It ignores time, which warps relationships, and it seems to see "the part as representing the whole", so in "God" ideas, this means that whoever you are (the part) represents how you will see "God" (the whole) represented. There is a great deal more, and it is difficult to understand, but I think necessary, if you are going to try to understand "God" concepts.

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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Post by Gee »

Papus79 wrote: April 27th, 2020, 6:19 pm
Gee wrote: April 27th, 2020, 6:10 pm Religion interprets "God". It may seem to be a small difference, but it is a significant difference. We don't actually create "God/s", we interpret something that we are sure exists -- this is why we make religion. imo
My own take/riff on this concept - although some ancient thinkers and philosophers were pantheists or panentheists it doesn't follow that bits of evidence (ranging between high-volume anecdote, statistical suggestions, and strange low-N medical events) which would lead one, or lead various researchers, to similar conclusions are inflicted on us by having had our foreground polluted ahead of time by historical tropes. It's part of why the word supernatural tends to bother me, it shoehorns what should be a search to understand what appear to be non-mythic black swans into a mythic bucket.
Agreed.

I like your "mythic bucket" terminology. I have used that "bucket" idea when explaining instincts, feelings, and other ideas that are related to the unconscious. The "supernatural" is also related to the unconscious, and like the other ideas, it is simply categorized and dumped rather than studied. I think this is partly because it scares the bejeebers out of people.

The only thing that I find mythical about supernatural is the term. In my view things are natural, or they are man-made. The unconscious is natural, but it is also weird. It relates things more (or as much) through bonding of thoughts and emotion than it does through time or matter. So I had no objection to the various "Santa Muerte" representatives that were noted through time and space in the article you quoted. I found the same thing when researching the concept of "Lilith", who was the snake in Eden, or Adam's first wife, or the devil, or a demon, and was represented in many different cultures and countries throughout many years. When studying Lilith/s, I found that most of them had similar names, they all represented the same kinds of ideas and had similar behavior, but there were cultural differences. I suspect the same can be said of the Santa Muerte concepts.

This is slightly off topic, but I think you have done some work on NDE's. Don't remember why I think so. Have you started a thread on that subject? I would be interested to read it as I have done a lot of work on that subject and believe that I finally understand it. Let me know.

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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Post by Papus79 »

Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:52 am I like your "mythic bucket" terminology. I have used that "bucket" idea when explaining instincts, feelings, and other ideas that are related to the unconscious. The "supernatural" is also related to the unconscious, and like the other ideas, it is simply categorized and dumped rather than studied. I think this is partly because it scares the bejeebers out of people.
I ended up reading Jason Reza Jorjani's 'Prometheus and Atlas' recently and he did a great job on all of the reasons why people are terrified of it - and it's justifiable in a lot of the ways that the authors of the X-Men franchise often touch on.
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:52 amThe only thing that I find mythical about supernatural is the term. In my view things are natural, or they are man-made. The unconscious is natural, but it is also weird. It relates things more (or as much) through bonding of thoughts and emotion than it does through time or matter. So I had no objection to the various "Santa Muerte" representatives that were noted through time and space in the article you quoted. I found the same thing when researching the concept of "Lilith", who was the snake in Eden, or Adam's first wife, or the devil, or a demon, and was represented in many different cultures and countries throughout many years. When studying Lilith/s, I found that most of them had similar names, they all represented the same kinds of ideas and had similar behavior, but there were cultural differences. I suspect the same can be said of the Santa Muerte concepts.
I've noticed that a lot of magicians who get deep into working with these entities, not always but often, give up on calling them distinct entities and end up referring to them as 'currents', for example some might consider many of the western dark goddesses as being of the Tiamat current.
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:52 amThis is slightly off topic, but I think you have done some work on NDE's. Don't remember why I think so. Have you started a thread on that subject? I would be interested to read it as I have done a lot of work on that subject and believe that I finally understand it. Let me know.
I don't think I've started an NDE thread expressly but I've often chimed in on them.

The best short way for me to encapsulate some of my thoughts in short order:

1) They either lead down a rabbit hole into a sort of deep plurality in the universe where the kinds of solidity and sense-making that can be made here can't be made from there because there isn't a solid 'commons'.

2) The possibility that NDE's are something like a gaslighting mechanism by a system that actually has us here for its own biology-like or predatory purposes (a bit like a farm).

3) It could indeed be the case that many people here planned this life out, that this is some sort of garrish school room run by an administration that feels the ends justify the means even if enough people might be put through so much that they end up praying either occasionally or every day to be unmade, to cease to exist forever, even for God to commit suicide, based on the horrors/absurdities they've either endured or seen around them.

I'd add - there's also the whole genre of psychedelic entities, and there's someone I talk to occasionally who vlogs a lot on their experiences. I'm still trying to figure out what to make of the distinctly powerful non-overlap between such psychedelic entity encounters, what they have to say, and that there's no acknowledgment of angelic or demonic hierarchies, gods and goddesses, jinn, etc.. If that's not a sign of deep plurality then it's a signal that these forms of intelligence don't exist in anything like the media that we do and that their closure to other chains of being are a result of that. What some people might think of as the most screamingly obvious solution - that none of them exist and that they're just psychological images running around on human neurons - would be blessedly simple but it runs out of explanatory power when this stuff leaps off the brain and starts doing things in the physical world that it shouldn't otherwise be doing (and if we just care about the simplest explanation for everything - we could hang up the whole scientific endeavor with 'God did it!', I'm personally glad that we weren't obtuse enough to let simplicity get in the way of accuracy on that one).
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Papus79
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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

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Papus79 wrote: April 28th, 2020, 10:05 am I ended up reading Jason Reza Jorjani's 'Prometheus and Atlas' recently and he did a great job on all of the reasons why people are terrified of it - and it's justifiable in a lot of the ways that the authors of the X-Men franchise often touch on.
Three good but brief examples on that:

Telekensis - think of how many murders could be done at a distance untraceably and think of arms races along the lines of movies like Law Abiding Citizen but with TK.

Telepathy - The most perfect surveillance state, even beyond 1984, could be made possible if that were perfected by actors working under lets just call it societal Game A (ie. zero sum rivalrous competition).

Clairvoyance - Minority Report covers this one beautifully.
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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Post by Count Lucanor »

Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 27th, 2020, 7:13 pm
Even at the most basic level of social practice, beliefs in gods is related to some form of organization, which we can generally call "religion". Man makes religions when man makes gods.
Do you see the underlined words "social practice". Those underlined words mean "religion" in that statement,
No, religion is among social practices, but social practice does not entail automatically and only the word religion.
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 amso you are saying religion (social practice) is generally called "religion".
No, I'm saying one particular social practice among many is religion.
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 amYour argument is circular and has nothing to do with who or what "makes gods". This is what I was talking about, the assumption that making religion is making "God". This is not true.
No, as I have just explained, there's no circular argument. Belief in gods doesn't just pop up in people's brains at some time, nor it is innate. When the concept "god" appears in people's minds it is because they have learned it from organized cultural practices. And my point is that you don't need a highly developed social organization with an institutionalized religion for the rise of the conception of supernatural beings, this can appear in very primitive societies. My point is just emphasizing the social construction of beliefs, in response to the argument that knowing what people believed implied psychic abilities.
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 27th, 2020, 7:13 pm This is most strikingly obvious in religions with a "personal god".
In the above statement, you seem to object to the personal god, or the subjective god. It occurs to me that you have divided your argument into the objective and the subjective, and then attempted to use logic to consider the problem. That may be your mistake. (chuckle)
It is quite simple: even those religions who preach about a "personal god", which we might suppose involves a completely private relationship with the deity, establish common dogmas and shared practices, such as the endorsement of a particular narrative about "revelation" and a plan for humanity, in other words, it doesn't get really that personal.
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 am Have you done any studying on the unconscious aspect of mind? Do you understand any of the logic of the unconscious? I think a person has to study the logic of the unconscious in order to have a hope of understanding "God" concepts, because "God" concepts come from the unconscious, which is not logical.
Let me see if I get it: to understand gods, one has to study the logic of unconsciousness, that is not logical? Anyway, a god is a concept, and there's no good reason to believe that there's a brain module for a particular godly creature, or even gods in general. At best, there could be a general brain faculty to make fantastic projections of real lived experiences into imagined experiences. That's why gods, heavens and their related doctrines resemble the problems of the societies in which they appear.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Post by Gee »

Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 am Do you see the underlined words "social practice". Those underlined words mean "religion" in that statement,
No, religion is among social practices, but social practice does not entail automatically and only the word religion.

Agreed. Except that it can mean religion, and it did mean religion in the sentence where you used it.
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 amso you are saying religion (social practice) is generally called "religion".
No, I'm saying one particular social practice among many is religion.

So you are saying nothing that is relevant -- you certainly are not making an argument.
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 amYour argument is circular and has nothing to do with who or what "makes gods". This is what I was talking about, the assumption that making religion is making "God". This is not true.
No, as I have just explained, there's no circular argument. Belief in gods doesn't just pop up in people's brains at some time, nor it is innate.

Are you sure that it is not innate? I don't know, but I do know that the "God" concept is one of Jung's archetypes.
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm When the concept "god" appears in people's minds it is because they have learned it from organized cultural practices. And my point is that you don't need a highly developed social organization with an institutionalized religion for the rise of the conception of supernatural beings, this can appear in very primitive societies. My point is just emphasizing the social construction of beliefs, in response to the argument that knowing what people believed implied psychic abilities.
This is a rationalization that does not match up with historical evidence or causal relationships.
You are asking me to believe that all over the world, "organized cultural practices" started for the express purpose of making up "supernatural beings" so that we could worship them. I would have to believe that all religious people are stupid in order to accept that tripe.
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 am In the above statement, you seem to object to the personal god, or the subjective god. It occurs to me that you have divided your argument into the objective and the subjective, and then attempted to use logic to consider the problem. That may be your mistake. (chuckle)
It is quite simple: even those religions who preach about a "personal god", which we might suppose involves a completely private relationship with the deity, establish common dogmas and shared practices, such as the endorsement of a particular narrative about "revelation" and a plan for humanity, in other words, it doesn't get really that personal.
It is clear that you are again talking about religion, rather than about "God" concepts. I repeat; I don't think that you can separate religion from the "God" idea, so how could you possibly tell which is causal???
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:00 am Have you done any studying on the unconscious aspect of mind? Do you understand any of the logic of the unconscious? I think a person has to study the logic of the unconscious in order to have a hope of understanding "God" concepts, because "God" concepts come from the unconscious, which is not logical.
Let me see if I get it: to understand gods, one has to study the logic of unconsciousness, that is not logical?
Yep. You got it right. In the divisions of mind, there is a reason why the Ego is referred to as "the rational mind". It is because that is the only division that is rational/logical. Freud and Jung, both, learned a lot about the unconscious aspect of mind, but it was Ignacio Matte Blanco, who finally discerned the "logic" of the unconscious. He used math to break it down and give us some understanding of how it works. You can look him up in Wiki.
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm Anyway, a god is a concept, and there's no good reason to believe that there's a brain module for a particular godly creature, or even gods in general. At best, there could be a general brain faculty to make fantastic projections of real lived experiences into imagined experiences. That's why gods, heavens and their related doctrines resemble the problems of the societies in which they appear.
You are one of those people who still believe that consciousness is produced by the brain. That would make most other life non-conscious. You probably should not try to understand this topic, as you will never understand the unconscious.

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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Post by Gee »

Papus79 wrote: April 28th, 2020, 10:05 am
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:52 am I like your "mythic bucket" terminology. I have used that "bucket" idea when explaining instincts, feelings, and other ideas that are related to the unconscious. The "supernatural" is also related to the unconscious, and like the other ideas, it is simply categorized and dumped rather than studied. I think this is partly because it scares the bejeebers out of people.
I ended up reading Jason Reza Jorjani's 'Prometheus and Atlas' recently and he did a great job on all of the reasons why people are terrified of it - and it's justifiable in a lot of the ways that the authors of the X-Men franchise often touch on.
I am not familiar with that book, but my children and grandchildren are enamored of the X-Men, whom I do not find very terrifying -- probably because I don't accept the validity of their "powers" -- or you could say I don't believe the story. Although the X-Men seem to work in a group, the "powers" belong to individuals and are controlled by individuals -- which is not the way the supernatural works. imo

The supernatural works through the unconscious, so there is little control over it, and little power when trying to direct it intentionally. Intentionality is a product of the conscious rational mind. This is why the government agencies and universities that were studying the supernatural in the 1960-70's quit their research. It was not because they found the concepts invalid, it was because they found they could not control it at any power that was useful. Telekinesis is mostly bending spoons and throwing books around; telepathy is more the sharing of emotion than the sharing of thought and is usually between people, who share a bond. Claravoiance requires familiarity with the "spirit" world, so it is most definitely involved in the unconscious. There is little power here, and nothing terrifying.

"Gods", ghosts, angels, and demons -- now that is terrifying. Most people simply deny the possibility of them, but history tells a different story. We have no control over the unconscious and when we reach old age, we start looking back at our lives and wondering about the balance of good and evil in our lives. This is why many rich people have been accused of trying to "buy" their way into heaven. They are trying to balance the scales before they die and lose all control of their destinies.
Papus79 wrote: April 28th, 2020, 10:05 am
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:52 amThe only thing that I find mythical about supernatural is the term. In my view things are natural, or they are man-made. The unconscious is natural, but it is also weird. It relates things more (or as much) through bonding of thoughts and emotion than it does through time or matter. So I had no objection to the various "Santa Muerte" representatives that were noted through time and space in the article you quoted. I found the same thing when researching the concept of "Lilith", who was the snake in Eden, or Adam's first wife, or the devil, or a demon, and was represented in many different cultures and countries throughout many years. When studying Lilith/s, I found that most of them had similar names, they all represented the same kinds of ideas and had similar behavior, but there were cultural differences. I suspect the same can be said of the Santa Muerte concepts.
I've noticed that a lot of magicians who get deep into working with these entities, not always but often, give up on calling them distinct entities and end up referring to them as 'currents', for example some might consider many of the western dark goddesses as being of the Tiamat current.
This is interesting. I don't study religions, cults, or "magicians" for their own sake, but I do end up reviewing them for information that is ancillary to my studies of consciousness. Using the term "currents" to describe a distinct entity is brilliant and shows a true understanding of the "entity" and the unconscious.

The concept of a "God" is difficult to explain to people who do not understand the unconscious, but I will give it a shot. We tend to think of things that are solid as things that are real -- like a rock. A rock is real; a thought may be real. But science tells us that rocks are not really solid, they are made up of atoms, molecules, quarks, particles, waves? and whatever -- which are bonded together to produce a rock. So are all of these little things (particles and waves) real, causal, or does the bonding make the rock real?

Thought and emotion make up the unconscious. Are thoughts and emotions real? What if we bond them together along with millions of other thoughts and emotions over time? Is there a chance this bonding would make the emotion and thought real enough to be an entity? Just as matter is created out of the bonding of particles, waves, and whatever, could spirit be created out of the bonding of thought, feeling, and emotion? Maybe.

If this happened, would they be solid? No, they would not be solid, nor would they be static. The unconscious is analogue, it is motion, so any "entity" that is established through the unconscious would be fluid, motion, and well described as a "current". Anyway, this is my understanding of how this works through the unconscious.
Papus79 wrote: April 28th, 2020, 10:05 am
Gee wrote: April 28th, 2020, 8:52 amThis is slightly off topic, but I think you have done some work on NDE's. Don't remember why I think so. Have you started a thread on that subject? I would be interested to read it as I have done a lot of work on that subject and believe that I finally understand it. Let me know.
I don't think I've started an NDE thread expressly but I've often chimed in on them.

The best short way for me to encapsulate some of my thoughts in short order:

1) They either lead down a rabbit hole into a sort of deep plurality in the universe where the kinds of solidity and sense-making that can be made here can't be made from there because there isn't a solid 'commons'.

2) The possibility that NDE's are something like a gaslighting mechanism by a system that actually has us here for its own biology-like or predatory purposes (a bit like a farm).

3) It could indeed be the case that many people here planned this life out, that this is some sort of garrish school room run by an administration that feels the ends justify the means even if enough people might be put through so much that they end up praying either occasionally or every day to be unmade, to cease to exist forever, even for God to commit suicide, based on the horrors/absurdities they've either endured or seen around them.
It appears that we study different aspects of the NDE problem. You seem more interested in the purpose of NDE's, whereas I study what causes NDE's. I look at the mechanics of the experience, or why we have it, and have concluded that NDE's are part of most deaths, we just are not aware of it because few people can tell us of the experience.

People do not often consider that death, like birth, is a process -- there is no off/on switch. Birth is nine months after conception, and most people believe that one of those events is what starts a human life. But a baby is six to eight months old before it realizes that it is physically separate from it's mother. It is two years old before it starts to refer to itself as "I". It is seven years old before it has a fully developed rational aspect of mind, which is supposed to be what separates it from other "lower" species. When does it physically and mentally become a human? At seven years old? We can argue that till the end of time, but the truth is, birth is a process. So is death.

Most of us assume that when the breathing and heart stop, the body is dead, but often this is not true. We now know that we have six or seven minutes, maybe more under some circumstances, before the brain dies. Then there can be hours or days, again depending upon circumstances, when the rest of the body dies -- each cell dying and giving up it's need to survive or its consciousness. Since the discovery of pheromones and a better understanding of hormones, it is entirely conceivable that since consciousness is stimulated by chemistry, a breakdown of the chemistry in the body might have to happen before true final death occurs.

The time between brain death and true final death is when NDE's happen. It is interesting to note that many religions that believe in an afterlife, heaven and hell, try to preserve the body in death -- to preserve its's spirit? But religions that accept reincarnation are happy to dispose of the body -- to release it's spirit?
A person can argue the above points till the end of time, but I don't think many will deny that death is a process. We are more aware of NDE's because we have learned to interrupt the process.
Papus79 wrote: April 28th, 2020, 10:05 am I'd add - there's also the whole genre of psychedelic entities, and there's someone I talk to occasionally who vlogs a lot on their experiences. I'm still trying to figure out what to make of the distinctly powerful non-overlap between such psychedelic entity encounters, what they have to say, and that there's no acknowledgment of angelic or demonic hierarchies, gods and goddesses, jinn, etc.. If that's not a sign of deep plurality then it's a signal that these forms of intelligence don't exist in anything like the media that we do and that their closure to other chains of being are a result of that. What some people might think of as the most screamingly obvious solution - that none of them exist and that they're just psychological images running around on human neurons - would be blessedly simple but it runs out of explanatory power when this stuff leaps off the brain and starts doing things in the physical world that it shouldn't otherwise be doing (and if we just care about the simplest explanation for everything - we could hang up the whole scientific endeavor with 'God did it!', I'm personally glad that we weren't obtuse enough to let simplicity get in the way of accuracy on that one).
Well, I don't know how to respond to the above. You are apparently talking about a lot of different things, but not dealing with any of them specifically. Since they are indeed different things, there is a distinct possibility that they are caused by different things and have different properties.

Generally speaking, these questions are usually addressed to religion. I don't know why you would expect that science can answer these questions. Most scientists honestly believe that consciousness comes from the brain; and therefore, it is not possible to have any other "entity" without a body and brain. Most scientists are clueless on this subject.
Papus79 wrote: April 28th, 2020, 10:05 am People aren't fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, we're fundamentally trying to survive. It's the environment and culture which tells us what that's going to be.

Fundamentally, this is true.

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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Post by Papus79 »

Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 3:18 am I am not familiar with that book, but my children and grandchildren are enamored of the X-Men, whom I do not find very terrifying -- probably because I don't accept the validity of their "powers" -- or you could say I don't believe the story. Although the X-Men seem to work in a group, the "powers" belong to individuals and are controlled by individuals -- which is not the way the supernatural works. imo

The supernatural works through the unconscious, so there is little control over it, and little power when trying to direct it intentionally. Intentionality is a product of the conscious rational mind. This is why the government agencies and universities that were studying the supernatural in the 1960-70's quit their research. It was not because they found the concepts invalid, it was because they found they could not control it at any power that was useful. Telekinesis is mostly bending spoons and throwing books around; telepathy is more the sharing of emotion than the sharing of thought and is usually between people, who share a bond. Claravoiance requires familiarity with the "spirit" world, so it is most definitely involved in the unconscious. There is little power here, and nothing terrifying.
It seems like there could be one of two ways of getting under that, one would be technological in which case we're able to 'hack' our way into the unconscious, and then the other that some people have suggested would be enough collective attention shifting toward said beliefs and that somehow changing the environment. I tend to have some trouble with the later because even today reductive materialism is only a commonly held belief in some places and magical worldviews have tended to be the norm throughout human history (ie. if that were the case science would look nothing like it does today). In some ways it has been good news that people don't really get a choice to force open the filter on their unconscious minds or integrate with the full bore of the data stream flowing in from behind them because I can think of enough people even in my own life who'd use it to burn down everyone they don't like.

The other thing I'll suggest in a minute, part of why human potential with such things hasn't worked all that well or at best has just been something like a psychological / spiritual digestive aid for people's relationships to themselves and their lives, is that we've been expecting a much smaller universe with a far more accessible set of causes than what's actually there when it's much more likely to be a universe every bit as vast as this one with organized forces every bit as overpowering.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 3:18 am"Gods", ghosts, angels, and demons -- now that is terrifying. Most people simply deny the possibility of them, but history tells a different story. We have no control over the unconscious and when we reach old age, we start looking back at our lives and wondering about the balance of good and evil in our lives. This is why many rich people have been accused of trying to "buy" their way into heaven. They are trying to balance the scales before they die and lose all control of their destinies.
Assuming their existence I'll say this - we probably have it formulated entirely wrong. I do think Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash's Conscious Realism is probably the best contender for what we might be dealing with, ie. reservoirs of conscious mathematics that we may occasionally trip over or which may occasionally trip over us, and it's a bit like discovering neighbors of a sort that we didn't know we had (and I'd add - I've had certain overpowering experiences that lead me to the notion that they are indeed there in the backdrop). The only thing it would seem to have in common with religious belief is vast minds in a media that's not immediately available to our senses, and after that it seems like most similarities proceed to break down.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 3:18 amThought and emotion make up the unconscious. Are thoughts and emotions real? What if we bond them together along with millions of other thoughts and emotions over time? Is there a chance this bonding would make the emotion and thought real enough to be an entity? Just as matter is created out of the bonding of particles, waves, and whatever, could spirit be created out of the bonding of thought, feeling, and emotion? Maybe.
So one thing I'll add to this - while a lot about Kabbalah/Qabalah is starting to wear thin for me and if anything it just seems like a filing cabinet for ideas that fits western psychological and cultural motifs of the seven planets (in that way you can spot things in the world around you more easily that are inspired by it much like you can more readily identify psychedelic-sourced ideas after you've dosed once or twice) there is one way in which I think there's something to its structure of unconscious proliferation to self-aware consciousness. It's a bit like, as conscious entities, we are something like the terminus of a firehose and it seems a bit like one could almost look at their own self-aware activity as the penning of a fractal or mathematical monster of some sort. In this sense it seems like consciousness is almost rotated 90 degrees to physical reality and is hitting it perpendicularly. That lends conscious experience to feel a bit like the asymptote one gets if they're plotting a y = a/x graph and get to x = 0, and it's a bit like conscious experience is akin to that division by zero, perhaps that's to say that it heats up as the culmination of some variety of positive feedback loops.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 3:18 amIf this happened, would they be solid? No, they would not be solid, nor would they be static. The unconscious is analogue, it is motion, so any "entity" that is established through the unconscious would be fluid, motion, and well described as a "current". Anyway, this is my understanding of how this works through the unconscious.
I'd be curious as to what your thoughts are on mathematics and the unconscious. I'm just beginning to read Sir Roger Penrose 'Road to Reality' and he brought up an interesting thought from his own accrued sense that you have a circle of causation something like the physical => the mental => the platonic / mathematical which then bends back around to the physical. I'm clearly going to read that slowly because I want to get my head around the current state of mathematical physics better but I also want to get my thinking at the right level of resolution on these ideas rather than having as many areas where I feel like I'm stuck swimming in the shallows.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 3:18 amIt appears that we study different aspects of the NDE problem. You seem more interested in the purpose of NDE's, whereas I study what causes NDE's. I look at the mechanics of the experience, or why we have it, and have concluded that NDE's are part of most deaths, we just are not aware of it because few people can tell us of the experience.

A good way to put it might be that I've wanted to square my accounts with reality as well as I can and I've wanted to explore all of the narratives from various places because I realize you can get one or two foundational assumptions wrong and act in a completely different manner. I think having grown up the way I did, some combination of all sorts of things but also dealing with the alienation of the autistic spectrum, strongly suggested to me that my conclusions on ultimate reality shouldn't be taken lightly and that there were myriad consequences both in my own behavior and where my life could drift off to for getting that wrong.

The more I look at NDE's they seem to just be an excellent illustration of both how little we know about our world and the nature of consciousness. My best assumption is that the stuff that happens while people are seemingly popping in and out of places in the physical world and able to tell people things that they weren't there to observe, that's particularly interesting, the rest of it like the tunnel and heavenly realms, that's where traceable reality seems to go out the window and where whatever objects are being encountered get clothed in the imaginative, symbolic, and archetypal world created throughout the course of a person's life.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 3:18 amWell, I don't know how to respond to the above. You are apparently talking about a lot of different things, but not dealing with any of them specifically. Since they are indeed different things, there is a distinct possibility that they are caused by different things and have different properties.
It can be quite difficult to discuss for precisely that reason, ie. that it's such a vast space and it lacks that smallness or single-factor or two-factor set of mechanics that lends itself to narratives people can easily grasp (part of why Abrahamic monotheism and dualisms like Zoroastrianism have been such the rage in the west). My guess would be, considering such entities conscious and self-aware in their own right rather than something we ourselves are animating, is that any narrative that would profess certainty is attempting closure for psychological needs when more likely it's the case that we're seeing the end result of a very long cascade of divergences that we can barely pick at the local details of let alone trace back to origin. For all of the circumstances on the ground I'm quite certain that if our culture has it broken down at some point that reductive materialism's explanation for consciousness weren't true and that the universe were brimming with conscious agents it would be every bit as discomfiting/disorienting as our findings that even our galaxy, let alone our solar system, is barely a speck of dust in the cosmos.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 3:18 amGenerally speaking, these questions are usually addressed to religion. I don't know why you would expect that science can answer these questions. Most scientists honestly believe that consciousness comes from the brain; and therefore, it is not possible to have any other "entity" without a body and brain. Most scientists are clueless on this subject.
A couple reasons to bring science into this - the first is that it's a good astringent for ideas and getting rid of what sorts of assumptions are just straight-away false, and the other is that I'd have to think there's some fundamental relationship between the laws of the physical universe as we know it and the laws that would govern deeper levels of being which we might (regrettably in my opinion) tend to refer to as 'non-physical' but which are ultimately part of nature in an extended sense and from that perspective I really prefer to think of it more like a 'deep physical' from the perspective that there's a significant gap between the low-hanging fruit that we have for scientific examination at least at present and it can feel like we're anywhere from standing on a 2nd floor fire escape trying to get to the 5th with no 3rd or 4th between or it could be as distant as us trying to get to the moon from that position. To that extent though I can't see this being a situation where there's a complete break or impasse in physical and/or mathematical relationships between our world and such zones of activities, and if there were it seems we'd have no experiences about them to discuss and indeed all we'd have is speculations based on either ancient animism or cultural well-poisonings from our childhood where we were taught to believe in such things. To the extent that people can have such unusual experiences in ways that violate the known lines between the subjective and outside world strongly indicates both the existence of such a layer of reality and that it has exchanges with the physical world that we'd be better informed in our analysis and decision making if we had a better handle on.
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Count Lucanor
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Re: Santa Muerte and 'The Other'

Post by Count Lucanor »

Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 2:45 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
No, religion is among social practices, but social practice does not entail automatically and only the word religion.

Agreed. Except that it can mean religion, and it did mean religion in the sentence where you used it.

You are confusing "meaning X" with "being part of X". Math is among schools' teaching programs, and one can refer to a particular teaching program called math, but the meaning of "schools' teaching programs" is not math. Social practice in the statement above obviously referred to the abstraction of many social practices. And so, when talking about the basic level of social practice, one is talking about the most elementary human associations, such as the ones you would find in primitive societies.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 2:45 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
No, I'm saying one particular social practice among many is religion.

So you are saying nothing that is relevant -- you certainly are not making an argument.

It is perfectly relevant to correct the tautology that you falsely claimed I made when I presented my initial argument. My initial argument stands as it was presented.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 2:45 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
No, as I have just explained, there's no circular argument. Belief in gods doesn't just pop up in people's brains at some time, nor it is innate.

Are you sure that it is not innate? I don't know, but I do know that the "God" concept is one of Jung's archetypes.

You certainly can believe in Jung's archetypes if you want, but Jung has nothing to do with science, although I grant him that he tried.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 2:45 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm When the concept "god" appears in people's minds it is because they have learned it from organized cultural practices. And my point is that you don't need a highly developed social organization with an institutionalized religion for the rise of the conception of supernatural beings, this can appear in very primitive societies. My point is just emphasizing the social construction of beliefs, in response to the argument that knowing what people believed implied psychic abilities.
This is a rationalization that does not match up with historical evidence or causal relationships.
The history of religions and their gods is pretty well known, and it has been obvious that as culture has evolved, so have evolved the religious conceptions.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 2:45 am You are asking me to believe that all over the world, "organized cultural practices" started for the express purpose of making up "supernatural beings" so that we could worship them. I would have to believe that all religious people are stupid in order to accept that tripe.
That's your very own free interpretation, but I haven't said anything like that. I never said that all cultural practices had the same purpose and that the purpose of religion is to worship supernatural beings. Religion was one way of filling the gaps in our knowledge, a primitive way of dealing with the forces of nature and also a way to soothe the emotional conflicts brought by the fragility of human existence. Worship comes along with the beliefs and other practices of religion, as the forces of nature become personified and in need of some control mechanism.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 2:45 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
It is quite simple: even those religions who preach about a "personal god", which we might suppose involves a completely private relationship with the deity, establish common dogmas and shared practices, such as the endorsement of a particular narrative about "revelation" and a plan for humanity, in other words, it doesn't get really that personal.
It is clear that you are again talking about religion, rather than about "God" concepts. I repeat; I don't think that you can separate religion from the "God" idea, so how could you possibly tell which is causal???
If there's a "god concept" that does not come from a religion, I mean: from a distinct, historical, socially constructed narrative, I would like to know where it has been hidden all this time. Even if you took Spinoza's god, that is hardly one embraced as the typical god, as it actually dismisses this possibility. And Jung's god archetype simply takes the tales of Christianity as an everlasting essence in our psyche. It certainly comes from religion.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 2:45 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm
Let me see if I get it: to understand gods, one has to study the logic of unconsciousness, that is not logical?
Yep. You got it right. In the divisions of mind, there is a reason why the Ego is referred to as "the rational mind". It is because that is the only division that is rational/logical. Freud and Jung, both, learned a lot about the unconscious aspect of mind, but it was Ignacio Matte Blanco, who finally discerned the "logic" of the unconscious. He used math to break it down and give us some understanding of how it works. You can look him up in Wiki.
First, no reference to psychoanalytic theories will transform a contradictory statement into something coherent. Unconsciousness, whatever that may be, cannot be logical and not logical at the same time. Secondly, Freud and Jung's theories, although somehow interesting and cutting-edge at their time, are already phased-out, completely useless, in terms of the study of mind.
Gee wrote: May 2nd, 2020, 2:45 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 28th, 2020, 6:39 pm Anyway, a god is a concept, and there's no good reason to believe that there's a brain module for a particular godly creature, or even gods in general. At best, there could be a general brain faculty to make fantastic projections of real lived experiences into imagined experiences. That's why gods, heavens and their related doctrines resemble the problems of the societies in which they appear.
You are one of those people who still believe that consciousness is produced by the brain. That would make most other life non-conscious. You probably should not try to understand this topic, as you will never understand the unconscious.
Actually, it is more than a "belief" that sentience is inevitably tied to the physiology of living creatures, that is well attested. Evidently, not all animals have a central nervous system, but at least they'll have a nervous system, and one can argue which one along the biological spectrum qualifies as brain and consciousness, but the fact remains undisputed that human consciousness is tied to the central nervous system of the human species, in which the brain plays a fundamental part in cognition.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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