Heron's beard: the long-lost counterpart of Occam's razor
Offline I was always thinking about what is missing from the typical rational thinking. I didn't knew what it is, only that it's missing. And finally I found someone who expressed it in words.
It's Heron's beard!
You guys are more than familiar with Occam's razor. Now it's the time to learn about the Heron's beard. I must emphasize, it is necessary to use both, not one instead of another. Credit for this method of thought and research goes to South Pacific Centre for Human Inquiry.
You can go directly to the article, or read a few excerpts first. For the record, the researcheress divides the reality on two worlds, physical and non-physical. For the purpose of her research, that's fine. Because of all this, I hold to one cardinal principle: if you are aware of an ambiguous experience in which it is as if there are other world components, then it is a good thing to foster and elaborate the ambiguity, rather than try to reduce it and eliminate it sceptically.
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My opposite principle is that it is wise to encourage an ambiguous experience to acquire luxurious growth in the direction of the complex and the occult, rather than rigorously cut it down to an awareness of the simple and the obvious. I will call this new principle Heron's beard
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If you are too committed to the use of Occam's razor, you will cut an ambiguous experience short,and rush into a premature,usually reductionist, explanation. Better to indulge the experience a bit, nurture it and foster it with your attention. Postpone explanation until the experience declares itself more fully. Go with what seems, let the immediate phenomena unfold. Elaborate its content, and notice carefully what is going on before explaining it.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
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So... Heron's Beard says that you shouldn't use Occam's razor? And that's... um... why?
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I must emphasize, it is necessary to use both, not one instead of another.
Perhaps you can understand it on a simile. It is useless to shave your face with a razor, when there grows no beard. First grow the beard, and then you decide if you want to shave it with a razor. Details of this process are on the link in OP.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
That's fine to say, but one contradicts the other. So...
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Except that trusting whatever woo-woo feeling you have is an insane way to live. If you happen to feel that there is more money in your bank account than there actually is, you will likely find that feeling falsified. That's not skepticism, that's simple reality. It's amazing how forceful simple reality is in the face of feelings.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
So buy into everything if it makes you feel good and you think you might grow from it, then separate the bull?
That looks more like a way to be a credulous pack rat.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
Please guys, switch your brains on! Seriously, read the article I mean. You wouldn't have the comments you just had, if you would really read it. ( http://www.human-inquiry.com/expsr1.htm ) Misinterpreting it just for fun will not earn you any cookies. Remember, you are the representation of rationality, the only rationalists I currently know. If someone will ever asks me, "Well, and what are these rational people like?", I will have to answer truthfully. You're all deadly serious and meticulous when it comes to stuff like science, but when it comes to hear out the arguments of someone else, you suddenly couldn't care less and sneer more.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
1. I got my opinion of it from this quote (you provided this, remember?)
"My opposite principle is that it is wise to encourage an ambiguous experience to acquire luxurious growth in the direction of the complex and the occult, rather than rigorously cut it down to an awareness of the simple and the obvious. I will call this new principle Heron's beard"
Where does this differ from my statement?
2. An insult! Yay! If buying into all brands of woo-woo instead of using science and reason means my brain has been turned off, don't you dare flip my switch.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
I imagine you're going to say that is why you must use both, but they are mutually exclusive. You cannot, at the same instance, suppose that your deja vu is some kind of in the instant 6th sense foresight and suppose that it is likely some quirk of your memory. Certainly, if you chose to suppose the explanation you got from heron's beard it would not be possible to test it, the very explanation being 'other-wordly' and not penetrable by the scientific method. The use of this 'principle' is not going to result in either a likely explanation or the correct explanation.
By the way, why would anyone deem it necessary to invoke an 'extra assumption of some other kind of world' at all?
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
I did. It's just making shit up. Let's see if I can give it a try, shall we?
The Rubber Soul World
Here are the beliefs in a Rubber Soul World: that we live in this physical reality, and a second, rubber reality, where our rubber souls are kept.
Every night, the tattooed rubber fairies, with their pale complexions, flit around that rubber reality and brush everyone's second-reality teeth. Sometimes, when the second reality has really bad pencil storms (where the pencils come down like staples) the fairies rearrange the Great Desk Drawer, and the pencils can be caught with an organizer.
If you can just make shit up, it's not "research". It's not.
I don't care if your friends think I'm snarky. I'm not buying into unsupported statements just because you do. Saying something like
is pure nonsense. Give me anything that makes sense in the above statement. It's completely pulled from nowhere. How does the author have any inkling -- aside from a deep desire to wax nonsensical -- that such non-places have the non-characteristics of which he speaks? He gives nothing but his feelings on the subject. That's not good enough if we're interested in how the universe actually is.
Consider for just a second that the esoteric tradition has never actually helped out in scientific inquiry. Just think about that. That would mean that the esoteric practitioner can't even see the illusory part of nature clearly. Why, then, would it be more likely that these people would see the non-illusory parts?
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Let it grow, and see what happens, because the earliest assumption may not always be the correct one. Play with the observation a little. See where it leads and be prepared to use Occam's razor in the right moment, when it will lead nowhere. On that page there are 6 possible results of Heron's beard and Occam's razor.
This understanding that HB is used for paranormal observation, is exactly what is missing when a sceptical person tries to investigate it. I believe you guys are what you are, because you don't practice the principle of Heron's beard. Paranormal phenomena are usually fleeting and volatile, specially for you, untrained people. What you do is like going to the forest loudly stomping and shouting "where the hell is that kind of a rare and extra-shy bird we keep hearing about?" In that situation, Heron's beard means going to the proverbial forest searching silently and carefully, which is a more rational approach, playing according to the rules. The rules are, that your training, state of consciousness and other things now can possibly count as a real factors affecting the results. If you want the results, you have to take a responsibility for it, for yourself.
One answer is to say that I will use the hidden comments as a device to check over the validity of my purely human thinking about the issues. And conversely, I can use ordinary rational thought to test the status of the unsolicited hunches. So the hunches can be used to examine my reason, and vice versa. And normally this relation of mutual scrutiny and validation seems best.
As for penetrability by scientific method, there is nowhere said that you need a technology for it. Currently, the human body is the most available technology on this. Through practice and discipline, you can make yourself able to observe the 'other world' sufficiently to apply the scientific method. It's not easy, fast nor perfect, but it is possible and I believe that necessary for a start. It is a good thing that some people, including scientists and me, already have this perception trained to some degree. (the theory says that they trained it for several past incarnations in order to have it less or more prepared in this one) So I believe it's a question of time, before some scientists' own extra-sensoric perception will help them to develop a technically measurable evidence of the invisible worlds. When they get the funds and lab time, which is quite a problem.
Of course, the new, revolutionary ideas are at first laughed off, then vehemently rejected, and finally accepted as a self-evident fact.
People are not all stupid, if they will give it more thought, they will realize, that there is no explanation in current scientifically known natural laws. A possibility that two or more sober people would have a hallucination at the same time, and that it would be an identic hallucination, lasting for many minutes, is so astronomically unlikely, that it is reasonable to consider if that 'hallucination' is by any chance authentic.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
"Oh, squiggly line in my eye fluid.
I see you there, lurking on the periphery of my vision.
But when I try to look at you, you scurry away.
Are you shy, squiggly line?
Why only when I ignore you do you return to the center of my eye?
Oh, squiggly line, it's all right. You are forgiven."
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Are you familiar with Jung's archetypes? People entering certain states have predictable themes to their mental wandering. How would you like us to interpret that, as a portal to a different universe? Or maybe we all have similar structures to our brains? See, we have evidence for one of those.
Just because you're not familiar with the scientific literature, doesn't mean there's no explanation. Modern neurology is probably doing the best job of chasing the ghosts away with more probable explanations than "In a previous life (?) I meditated more, so I'm more in tune (?) with my inner chakra (?) and other worlds."
Do you honestly expect that we won't object to that? None of it is clear. It's more likely that you're experiencing the same thing that woman who had left-hemisphere brain damage was experiencing. It might be possible to focus our attention on the right hemisphere, and thus, tap into something common to all human beings. But that doesn't mean that there's a parallel non-universe! I'm surprised that you find these jumps in logic so easy to make.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Ah yes, words from the famous sage who goes by the name ....Stewie Griffin. Awesome.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Ok, so if I understand correctly we need to take all the possible explanations (I guess these are the individual beard's hairs) for a given phenomenon and then and then shave off all but the most likely? Isn't that just Occam's Razor? All the beard is, are the possible explanations, of course you need those or there would be not point in Occam's Razor. Maybe I just don't understand what you're getting but right now you're making absolutely no sense.
Yep. It seems you have to accept all the woo-woo then decide later what doesn't work.
Luminon, wouldn't it be easier to evaluate it first without resorting to trial and error?
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
The use of 'Heron's Beard' may be of great use to a psychiatrist, but it certainly won't do anthing for genetics or physics.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
By the way, the research of astral realm was already quite well done by people like Robert Allan Monroe. General map and rules of this world dimension are well known, thanks to multiple such a travellers and confirmed by ocassional spontaneous astral travellers or lucid dreamers.
Seriously, you with all the education think that you can understand something that complex without studying it at all? It starts to give sense, when you gather a necessary amount of knowledge, but not in the beginning. In the beginning, diffcult things usually doesn't give sense. And I suspect that you will never understand some concepts until you try them on your own skin.
Fortunately there were always individuals who were faster in their development than others, and they conveyed the most precise (and mutually compatible) teachings to people. This forms the healthy core of esotericism. Now the problem is to recognize the quality when you see it. Not everyone can do that.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
The point is, that Heron's beard applies to investigation of possibly paranormal things, where you can't assume in advance what is possible or not. Special circumstances require a special method. There are 6 possible outcomes described in that article, it's good to keep them in mind when evaluating the experience.
For example: let's say you close your eyes, and you very vividly imagine that you walk around the room you are in. Using Occam's razor, you could assume that it is obviously an imagination.
But using Heron's beard, you would not assume anything, but keep imagining, you in the room, and then you would try to imagine that you go out of the room to the nearest newspaper stall and imagine that you're looking at the titles of newspapers there. If you can do it, try to remember the titles, stop imagining and then go to that newspaper stall for yourself and check the newspaper titles. Now it's really the time to use Occam's razor. If the newspaper titles are completely different than you imagined, then it was all just an imagination. If the newspaper titles matches your imagination (and you haven't seen them before), then it is clearly something paranormal going on. But without Heron's beard, you would probably never try to walk out of the room in your thoughts.
Is it more clear now?
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Yeah. I sure did.
And that's the problem. My beliefs rest in testable, consistent behaviours that don't rely on a person's ability to judge the quality of an experience. It's simply too unreliable (to me) to form a belief system based on that kind of thinking. In your case, it might be enough for believing, but for me, it isn't. I need to actually know, rather than having a kind of vague knowledge of vague terms of truly undefinable concepts.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I really don't know how or what all these New Age believers out there are testing. Probably nothing. They just believe what they're told by their leaders or what is written in their books.
But here we have pretty high standards and we put everything to practice to see if it works. Our members and co-workers have been everywhere and tried everything, good and bad. This is why we can recommend (or not recommend) things like books, therapies, practitioners, kinds of alternative medicine, cultural movements, and so on. We organize various therapy sessions and lectures in cities around. We also provide a life style counselling and on some days all the phones are ringing by people calling for advice. Many of them found us very helpful and recommended us to their friends and relatives. Some call after years to thank us and confirm that our predictions were true. Maybe this knowledge is not as precise as mathemathical equations, but it is suited to be used in real life by common people with real problems, who want to solve them and improve themselves.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
So you must have the secret knowledge to properly test the magic?
Is there really such a mystery around accepting everything with alacrity?
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
This is bordering on the intentionally stupid.
The best use of Occam in my experience is to remember to be very cautious when calling for the involvement of any causal agents that are not strictly needed. My preferred example is walking into a carpenter’s workshop and seeing a newly-crafted chair. The judicious application of Occam will steer you toward ‘carpenter’ as the creator rather than ‘invocation by Druids and the assistance of gnomes’.
The gibberish I quoted, based on no good sense, is not an intellectual principle of any merit but just the advice of some dunderhead to relax and not think too hard. I read the article and everything, but all this boils down to is that if you want something to stay in the realm of the supernatural, call it ambiguous and then use this ‘principle’ to leave it alone.
It is not a method of discovery or examination it is precisely an avoidance of discovery and examination.
I can posit literally anything as existing and with not a speck of further information, invoke the dreck in the quote and never have to question my assertion...ever...
This is the opposite of useful.
All such a comments show how people don't know what HB is really about, and how much they need it. It seems that nobody here can actually read, they look at the letters, but the message coming to the brain is different, taken ad absurdum. If there's written "indulge the experience for a while", you guys read "never question it, ever". Sometimes it's here like at a madhouse.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Luminon, I would be interested to hear what criteria you used to reject the things you rejected. For me, they have exactly the same value as the stuff you accept.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
Luminon rejects things?
But... how?
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
And you’re saying that someone else has missed the point?
The beauty of Occam’s Razor is that it applies equally well to the seemingly mysterious as it does to the blaringly obvious. When you say ‘unusual and ambiguous’ you seem to be saying that you have already prejudge the event to seem supernatural. Occam does not allow us our personal preferences because we must construct a line of cause and effect based on what is apparent and go from there. Occam limits the scope to the probable by steering us back to what can be demonstrated to have had a genuine causal effect.
Heron’s Beard is a trite, specious bit of non-thought that seeks to elevate non-examination to the same level as careful scrutiny. Occam doesn’t need this ridiculous supplement because sticking to logical examination covers all instances, not just the ones we skeptics like.
The beard is gibberish.
But there is nothing about Occam's razor that says one can not explore the possibility of any explanation. It is not about what one imagines, but what one believes. A rational atheist is allowed to have an imagination for anything and theorize any explanation.
So if the beard represents false beliefs or beliefs without evidence or rational explanation, why would you ever have one? Occam's razor allows me to imagine the possibility of any god. But it forces me to shave off this belief before it ever grows out and becomes a belief that I base my decisions upon.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
But there is nothing about Occam's razor that says one can not explore the possibility of any explanation. It is not about what one imagines, but what one believes. A rational atheist is allowed to have an imagination for anything and theorize any explanation.
So if the beard represents false beliefs or beliefs without evidence or rational explanation, why would you ever have one? Occam's razor allows me to imagine the possibility of any god. But it forces me to shave off this belief before it ever grows out and becomes a belief that I base my decisions upon. The person that wrote this article is peddling woo-woo religion, so they misrepresent Occam to sell this.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
Science is NOT a rejection of imaginative or speculative thinking - it incorporates, relies upon, and builds on such thinking, which is crucial to the generation of new ways of thinking about things.
Such thinking is vital to the generation of fresh hypotheses, but it is the insight of the scientific mind to add the vital step of testing and verification, to sort out the gems of truth from the inevitable bulk of nonsense, recognizing how easily the human mind, even that of the rationally inclined, is to fall in love with an appealing notion.
It is the woo-woo thinker who gets stuck in the fascination of 'what-if' and the myth-making and story-telling, and imagines that 'it feels like it could be true' is sufficient justification to take an idea seriously, avoiding the next step, perhaps fearing his pretty idea will not stand up against reality.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Rational thinking is having or exercising reason, sound judgment, or good sense. If it could be put into a box labeled "only rational thinking", no thing not deemed as rational thinking can be put into this box and everything outside this box would be called "irrational thinking".
It follows that, no thing considered to be rational can be "missing" from the rational thinking box.
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
I suspect that rationalists tend to ignore important details in order to get an easy, simple explanations. The most simple explanation is considered the most probable, and the most probable is considered the only possible. Also, for identic phenomena there are considered different explanations in every case. And finally, in the rationalistic worldview, the world is full of liars, madmen and those pathologically greedy for attention, of whom somehow nobody is in the ranks of rationalists. I don't say that it is necessarily so, but I say that the state of things makes an impression of it to some people.
I live among those you consider to be liars, madmen and attention cravers, and I have to say that there are various people and groups, rational and irrational, and that our group knows the difference between them very well.
Because of all this, I hold to one cardinal principle: if you are aware of an ambiguous experience in which it is as if there are other world components, then it is a good thing to foster and elaborate the ambiguity, rather than try to reduce it and eliminate it sceptically. Apply first of all a principle opposite to that of Occam's razor.
I think that this is better than searching for a cause in something which you don't understand how it works and are unable to verify it. Explanations like "That was only a phantasm, hallucination, coincidence, overwork, or simply nothing at all" are usually left to be without verification. If this is a rational approach, then Occam's razor is misused and Heron's beard is needed to correct it.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Claims of authority or exclusive truth are very suspicious. The best sources are usually very modest and respect the free will and reason of a reader, even if a reader should reject them. But also claims of exclusivity of a nation, territory or ethnic group are a bad sign, unless they're logically explained.
The good sources are independent across space and time, yet they correlate with each other significantly (or entirely). In this way we can reject sources which come out of nowhere and claim something entirely different and contradictory. We can also determine a degree of the source's purity. Clinging to only one exclusive source often causes a lack of information and narrowness of worldview.
A good source must be not only coherent with other sources, but also internally. It must also cover and logically explain the widest range of known phenomena. Also, it should not be totally contradictory with scientific facts, like evolution or the age of Earth.
Emphasis on pure motivation is important. It must be focused on universally beneficial, yet actual and concrete principles. For example, helping to change the self-destructive activity of humankind into constructive. But motivation like obtaining unusual experiences, or craving for "information" (which is usually doubtful) is not very pure. The motivation determines a quality of the group itself.
And finally, there is of course the evidence. The students of the sources are eager to perform observations and experiments whenever the opportunity arises, and then they compare it with the teaching, and share with their colleagues. Of course, in this time they use their brains and laws of logic, just as they use it for other tasks in their life. Obviously, this requires to evaluate a lot of data (including global events amd news) and compare it against a lot of theory in numerous books, but at least in our group the results are good.
There are some groups in which AFAIK at least the first 5 criteria are not met and it results in no intellectual or moral benefit for the people involved.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Quoting from the article:
"Actually, Aikido people today simply use the word 'chi', rather than 'chhi', to refer to subtle energy. " But I say Ki is not a mystical energy that people access. It is subtle but not mystical. It is intention. The moment when your attacker is about to attack he is susceptible to interference. There is also a small moment when he has finished his attack and missed before he attacks again that it is possible to break his intention. It also has to do with having correct posture using physics to your advantage. Thats it. No mystical energy flowing. If you catch him not in those two moments you can still blend with the attack and redirect his force. On another note, I think people misuse Occams razor in that all things are rarely equal. We rarely get two choices with all other things being equal and one simpler. One question I always had with the razor is how do you know when its necessary to add an entity. Simple models are helpful but they usually aren't right. Wouldnt the most complicated model you can think of be more likely to be right? (when combining the principle of parsimony with the razor like most do)
I've attended aikido for children for a while, and there was not a word about chi, but a lot of other japanese words. Furthermore, chi is quite tangible to me, at least my own. I can confirm that, it's subtle, but not mystical.
And I've heard of cases when it was used to stun the opponent or make the fighter's stance immovable. I have also seen in TV various tricks of Shaolin monks. For example, they pushed a sharp spear against their throat, and they broke the spear's pole by pressure, instead of impaling their neck inside out. (someone got this rationally busted?) It seems that in ancient China they needed to use their chi to protect the monastery from a hundredfold numbers of bandits or soldiers. But they used Kung-fu, not Aikido.
But I know nothing about that intention. Maybe there is some truth to it, but my impression is, that intention is a form of energy as well, just more subtle. And I'd say that self-defence technique for women works with the intention more than Aikido. Aikido is pretty much about using the opponent's force against him, for example, when he punches, he hopes to be stopped by the target and to restore his balance in this way, but a good Aikido fighter will pull him in that direction even more.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
you say its mystical and not mystical in the same breath. Intention is a form of energy? What do you mean...you can picture it like fire in your belly or going out your arm but its just a means to get your posture correct. There is no energy. There are no forms of energy. Those are meaningless concepts that you are throwing around in this context. That was my point. And if your posture is correct you can hold a lot of force on your skin...like a spear....no magic.
What is the the chi or "vital energy"? Besides of circulating in the body, it exists in streams, vortexes, clouds, shapes and fields, or whatever. It's quite tangible to me (even now) and visible to certain individuals I know. Our nerve and endocrine systems are largely influenced by it. It's very well known by many young people who practice the 'psi-ball', 'psi-sphere', or 'energy sphere' technique. Just learn it (it's not diffcult, much easier than learning a language or playing an instrument) and you will have a tangible evidence of the invisible worlds. Then you will have a phenomenon to which you can assign the concept of energy, without that you can hardly know what I'm talking about.
The concept of "mystical and not mystical" relates to worlds composed of a matter equivalent to ours, but which have a different properties of particles. A common matter behaves to this subtle matter as two radio waves of different frequency, they don't interfere, except of rare cases, like in living organisms. There is a complex theory based on this multi-dimensional model of the world. For example, emotions and thoughts have their origin in these worlds, which are naturally composed of them. (or better said, this is what kind of influence have these worlds on us)
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
its only tangible to those who believe it. It doesnt work if you dont believe it. Acupuncture doesnt work if you dont believe it does. If they do it to you while you are asleep it doesnt work. Something that is real or tangible should work even if you dont believe in it. Aikido works even if you dont believe in ki. It doesnt work any better if you believe in ki. Its just technique and posture. I dont know what else to say. The reason you cant feel the energy but others can is that you are not deceiving yourself. Ive had energy work and sometimes it feels like they are doing something. Sometimes it doesnt. It would never be detectable by science. Its just us hypnotizing ourselves into believing things work that really dont. Belief is infectious. It doesnt mean its real.
Sounds a lot like Christianity. This God who wants all to love him only reveals himself to those who buy into the magic.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
Anyway, I can feel the energy and I have seen how others learned it as well. There is no place for belief or disbelief, either you feel it as you feel anything else, or not. Of course, you may be unsure, if the feeling is weak.
As for acupuncture, it worked on me surprisingly, even if I didn't believe, and I didn't want the doctor to stick needles so close to my eye. I can personally say that it works, but I don't know how about other people. There is too much of unknown variables, that it's hard to say how it works. Anyway, a serious health problem puts everything aside. If you are sick, you don't care if it's placebo or if it doesn't work when you sleep. The result is all that counts.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I like how your woo-woo is more rational than most New Ager woo-woo because your group is more 'experienced' and intelligent than most woo-woo believers.
I'm going to pretend, just for a minute, that you are right. In theory, using Heron's Beard you should be able to come to rational conclusions that the un-Bearded cannot. Something real, that isn't woo-woo, or show a consistent ability to produce woo-woo. So...can you show me the money? Can you demonstrate true magical thinking, or levitation, or legitimate prophecy (not cold reading/horoscope stuff)?
I also think you misrepresent Occam's Razor. Let's make an ambiguous situation...I walk into my house, and all my furniture is on the ceiling.
Beard: It might be woo-woo, let me get my EMF detector and call my group together so we can take some LSD and have a dream quest. If that does not work, maybe we can check to see if someone nailed the furniture up there as a prank, but we have to keep an open mind because even if it is nailed up it might have been a poltergeist with a hammer.
Occam: I bet someone nailed the furniture up there as a prank. Let me get my ladder and check. If it is not nailed/glued/magnetized I will get my EMF detector and call my study group so we can take LSD and go on a dream quest.
Occam does not rule out outrageous explanations, it just talks about probability. Using Occam's Razor tends to find answers, and it tends to find answers for woo-woo as well. To make the claim that it is insufficient at that task you either have to claim that the non-woo-woo answers for woo-woo are wrong, and show how you are right, or make up some BS woo-woo rationalization about how there are alternate realities that co-exist with our reality and so woo-woo can be wrong, but not wrong, and there can be a physical explanation for woo-woo that contradicts the woo-wooness of woo-woo without actually invalidating the woo-woo because woo-woo is outside of what we consider physical, and so cannot be tested for. Except, you know, by 'experienced' groups of intelligent New Ager woo-woo believers.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Hahahaha!
Shit, if it IS nailed to the ceiling, you're still calling up your friends! Guys, win or lose, we're getting high while my furniture is on the ceiling. Because that's what Jesus would do.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
2. Apply Heron's beard to what only seems to be other world content but really isn't, and as a result it becomes quite obvious that it is nothing but an illusion. In which case apply Occam's razor and strip the illusion off the physical world content.
However, there are things like a furniture is still on ground, but it changes place mysteriously, while nobody but one person is in the house. This phenomenon happened recently to my aunt and various people on the internet also describe such a things. It is probably not a prank, because such a person may have the only keys of the apartment and none of his/her friends or relatives will start talk about it by themselves. In that case, the result of Heron's beard may be different.
Anyway, I don't know if you noticed, but Heron's beard is mainly used for an introspection, for finding out if your vision behind closed eyes is something real/unreal and normal/paranormal... Not for obvious things where you can actually check if the furniture is nailed to the ceiling.
Yeah, probability. But it's curious how you and other people only pick examples, which have a highly probable physical explanation. This is not something that I mean.
What about something "unexplainable"? Let's say that you're in a group of people and talk with a man, who suddenly disappears? Everyone see it. What then?
Esotericism has a complex model of the universe, composed of different "dimensions". A matter in each of them is different from our "dimension" by a different characteristics of elementary particle frequency and also by their different orbitals. In that model of the universe, it is possible to suggest an explanation - a person, who is able to convert all matter of his body, on the level of elementary particles, from one "dimension" to another, thereby disappearing from our sight...
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Is that kind of like this ?
No disrespect intended. Just wondering.
So only those who are in on the trick can see the trick?
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
But the example you use first...come on. You should know as well as anyone that if something cannot be done reliably and consistently then it is probably a lie. You should be able to demonstrate a reliable way to show woo-woo. When you say things like, "requires specific training that not everyone can learn" you make it hard to swallow, because that is exactly what a huckster would say, isn't it?
In my example though, I am trying to point out that things we see always have a "natural" explanation...or at least they have so far. It is more rational to investigate all "normal" explanations for an event before you dig into woo-woo, because you will find a "normal" answer every time. At least, we have so far. If something totally defies existing convention, then you can try woo-woo. When you approach it like the beard, backwards, you will naturally find that there is a woo-woo explanation for any ambiguous event because your definition of woo-woo is horribly nebulous. Using the beard, you would find that it was indeed woo-woo even even though there was also a physical explanation (which you obviously do, because you claim things like OOBE which are explainable using 'normal' methods.). I don't see how a 'normal', reproducible/testable event can coexist with a woo-woo explanation that is not consistently reproducible/testable. Your entire outlook on this stuff is designed to make sure it is ambiguous enough to accept anything you can dream of as a valid explanation.
In the case of someone disappearing in the middle of the day...well geeze. If stuff like this really happened, skeptics would see it and it could be tested. But again, you make up a situation where you can explain why your hallucination/gullibility (no offense) can be validated, but something like a video camera would spoil it, or not record the woo-woo because it is on a non-material plane of existence or something. It is the very definition of the pink unicorn idea, it is designed to be non-falsifiable.
Although, I imagine I have not said anything you have not heard from anyone else here. You know you can't prove anything, otherwise you would have. And I imagine you have plenty of objections to the scientific method, otherwise you would be on meds instead of going to woo-woo meetings.
(Edit: And if you even find yourself able to control an object telekenetically again even 1% of the time, please let us know because it doesn't get much easier to test than that!)
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Mellestad: Damn my keyboard, what I wrote got lost. I'll get back to it later.
Hopefully I will find someone with whom I could perform a systematic experiments or play psi-basket-ball
I have met a man last year who was able to see it, but he was quite an exception. There are some photographs, but it's obvious that it would need some highly photosensitive material (Kirlian's photography, perhaps?) and preferably someone able to pump the psi-ball with energy as much as possible. Then the results may be scientifically interesting.
Anyway, that page features several videos of psychokinesis, which prove that it is possible do do paranormal stuff and have it filmed at the same time. Some of the objects being moved are non-magnetic and too big to be moved by a hot air, so I think it deserves some attention.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Sensei ! Oshiete kure !! Teach me, oh wise one !
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.