[MD] New Age++

[gav]

> 
> On 1/9/06, ian glendinning <psybertron at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Gav, Ant and Mike, et al,
> >
> > This is interesting territory. I made the link
> between "New Age" and
> > Mike's "New Objectivity" in the EDGE thread.
> >
> > As Ant points out the issue here (with which Gav
> is totally
> > comfortable, ironically at least) is the
> pejorative rhetorical use of
> > "New Age", forever consigning its advocates to
> being seen as weird
> > hippie types, way off the
> socio-politico-intellectual (and academic)
> > mainstream.

i would have thought being way off the
socio-politico-intellectual mainstream would be a good
thing.

> >
> > Conscious dreaming (and similar "myths and
> legends") 

"myths and legends"....? myths and legends engender
subtler, higher truths than the prosaic truisms of
science, dogmatic religion/philosophy etc. they are a
reflection of the underlying order of the universe. an
order that is impossible to grasp intellectually: tao,
Quality etc. if reality is quality and quality is
something you feel, rather than conceptualise, then
reality can be known directly only through the
aesthetic nature of a particular experience. therefore
reality, or the more refined apprehension thereof is
suited to the arts (and singularly metaphor itself)
and the finer appreciation of all aesthetic
experience, which is of course to say all experience.

reflect the
> > endurance of the concepts, and suggest the grain
> of truth somewhere,
> > even if it's largely a psychological truth.

what other truths are there?

 Whilst
> I'm sympathetic, eg
> > I called myself New-Age+++, I still believe 99% of
> what is written
> > about new-agey ideas is 99% bullshit - the powers
> of pyramids,
> > chrystals, astrology, etc.

this would seem a blanket dismissal and perhaps a
little irrational, if i may say so. 'science' is a
group of interpretations of phenomena based upon
certain metaphysical assumptions. given the same
metaphysical assumptions many different
interpretations can be *created* to fit observed
phenomena. given different metaphysical assumptions
the number of different interpretations increases much
further. which interpretations are true? well i would
say the ones that work better, cover more
eventualities, have more predictive power. these are
'truer' than the others.
what if there were new scientific paradigms that were
created that accomodated phenomena hitherto either
ignored or ridiculed, in a coherent framework? maybe
this is already happening, maybe it has already
happened and we are just finding out about it again
now.
astrology: why is it practised in such a variety of
cultures and for so long? maybe it had value? 
crystals:  they grow. are they therefore alive?
conscious in some way? again used for eons by many
different cultures. again i just think it is a better
bet that people all over the world practised stuff for
thousands of years because it worked, rather than it
didn't. 
pyramids - try reading 'pyramid power' by pat
flanagan, an engineering PhD. 


 What I do not discount
> though, is the
> > reality of some aspect of consciousness beyond the
> single human brain.
> > (My favourite Nobel-prize winner, Brian Josephson,
> about whom I've
> > blogged many times, similarly defends against
> those "scientists" who
> > 100% consign the 99% bullshit to the scientific
> trashcan, as a reflex
> > move prior to any kind of analysis.)

everything *is* because of consciousness.
consciousness is the 'space' things exist in; the
awareness that is a prerequisite for anyting to 'be'.

> >
> > Talking of conscious dreaming, recall that the
> closing lines of my MoQ
> > Conference paper were a quote from T E Lawrence
> "All men dream: but
> > not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty
> recesses of their
> > minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity:
> but the dreamers of
> > the day are dangerous men, for they may act their
> dream with open
> > eyes, to make it possible."

hear, hear,

> >
> > My interest is, of course, to rescue the grains of
> non-GOF-objective
> > truth (New-Age+++) from the new-age trash-can and
> hippie-communes, and
> > rehabilitate it into the new-objective mainstream.

aaaaaaaaaaah! i won't assimilate

> >
> > Finally, by coincidence, my wife Sylvia, bought me
> everything
> > available from Bill Hicks on CD for Christmas. I
> didn't recall
> > dropping any hints - honest :-)

nice one.



> >
> > Ian
> > moq_discuss mailing list
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