From: Arcadia (arcadia@lynchburg.net)
Date: Sat May 11 2002 - 10:01:23 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Archibald Scatflinger" <TransdimensionalElf@hawaii.rr.com>
> like a i said previously- most people are unwilling to believe that
> telepathic awareness is possible.
There are some things one must experience to believe, but before one can
experience them, one has to ... not 'believe' as such, but at least be
somewhat open to the possibilities. This openness can be achieved with
hallucinogens, but I'd recommend other things first: ecstatic dancing,
drumming, role-playing, Tantric sex, all of that... Download the latest
version of Fractint, and explore the Mandelbrot Set as a Mandala.
I'd raise two problems with 'science,' as the term gets thrown around.
First, 'science' often refers to a strain of pop skepticism which bears
little relation to anything found by scientific method, or what most
scientists would state as 'true.' Second, even within the limits of real
science, which is to say, the application of the scientific method, some
things don't work for just everybody, especially for people who are trying
to prove they don't work. SO the requirement of the scientific method that
an experiment be repeatable by all concerned parties is just out. An
individual experimenter, faced with this situation, can either decide just
not to investigate things that, by nature, can't really fit within the
'scientific' consensus-reality, as many do, or one can continue
investigating but be considered a flake, or one can investigate and keep
quiet about it.
One of the premises of Ontological Anarchism (and much social science) is
that 'reality' as it's perceived is a social construct: a web of
programmed/conditioned notions, not so much pertaining to whether the wall
or the tree is 'there' or not, but pertaining to what the wall or the tree
'means' in the world. The wall, for example (I'm picturing an outdoor stone
wall about 2 ft high) is somebody's boundary. Do you respect it as such?
Or do you go right over? Why? And the tree, is it just a wooden post that
inconveniently drops leaves? Or do you choose to perceive it as a living
thing not really all that unlike yourself? Now in the case of the tree, a
real biologist, while aware of the huge differences between plant and animal
life, is also very aware of how similar the structures and functions are
between himself/herself and the tree at the cellular level...
I like what Niels Bohr had to say, in effect, that all we 'know' is what our
instruments tell us. Whatever we think we know about why our instruments
say this, or how it all ties together, says more about us and the structure
of our minds than it does about reality.
Matt
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