Portals & Metamorphosis

sus

sus

Moderator
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"How could the butterfly convince the caterpillar that this change is OK?"

There is a phrase in philosophy, "transformative experience." The idea is that the experience radically reshapes your values and preferences and self.

So maybe a friend offers you a transformative experience. Maybe it's your first psychedelic trip, or a ten-day silent meditation. Maybe it's having kids. They say it totally changed their life and their perspective, they're so glad they tried. But even if you believe them, it's not so easy to reason about whether you should step through the portal yourself. Whether you should metamorphosize. Because the self that emerges on the other side won't be the self that stepped in. The passage will have reconfigured you.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Boring and obvious and I already said it better above but here is the relevant SEP passage
Transformative experiences present several challenges for traditional models of decision theory. First, the epistemically transformative component of the transformative experience involves a lack of “what it’s like” knowledge. Purportedly, this in turn involves a type of uncertainty that is different from the type of uncertainty decision theory is designed to handle. Second, the personally transformative component means that the post-transformation person may be extremely different from the pre-transformed person. Their preferences may radically change in unpredictable ways, and decision procedures must find a way to accommodate these changing preferences. Third, the personal transformation may be so extreme that the pre-transformed person considering whether to undergo the transformative experience can’t make the decision in the straightforwardly self-interested way that’s presupposed in standard decision-making models. Any of these challenges make using decision-making procedures impossible in the case of transformative experience. And if that’s the case, then it looks like one can’t rationally choose to undergo a transformative experience—the choice is either arational or irrational. Given that so many of our momentous choices in life involve potentially transformative outcomes, it would be disturbing if we discovered that these choices could not be made rationally.
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sus

sus

Moderator
Maybe one good intuition pump for thinking about this is puberty.

Puberty blockers already exist and we could imagine a world where everyone's on puberty blockers and you elect to go off them. Which is just to imagine that staying prepubescent is the default, and you had to elect to change the status quo and transform.

The kid says, No way. Why would I make myself all hairy and want to put my genitals in other peoples genitals? That's disgusting. I care about playing soccer with my buddies. Girls have cooties. Why do I want to push a button that makes me abandon all my present passions and hound after tail?

And you talk to some men, sensitive nerdy types, they have clear memories of their prepubescent self, of a time when there were no intrusive thoughts of sex. And then the hormones changed and they turned into a bugman and suddenly any and all aspects of their identity, hobbies, etc were subject to revision pending the opinions of the fairer sex.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
This is a bit related to the "sex as suicide" bit I'm developing.

There are a bunch of related threads on the board about borders, and gates, and breaking through to the other side, and mirrors, and enlightenment vs invasion, but I'll leave those for Version to turn up.

And of course this stuff is very related to the Time Philosopher / Bergsonian flux thing he posted today. The conditions for merger.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
The Tower represents something like the inevitability of transformation.

The Tower seeks desperately to hold itself together and resist change.

The difference—and perhaps the main shortcoming of the Tower metaphor—is that 'clearly' an assembled, standing Tower is 'good,' and a crumbled heap of stones is bad. Whereas real-world transformations are a bit more relative, or value-laden.

Is it better to be a passive stoic monk who is at perfect peace with the world? Or to be an ambitious workaholic who makes a positive impact on his community? This is less clear, but these are the (exaggerated) poles that people are trying to orient when e.g. their hippy friend tries to sell them on opening awareness meditation.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I like the idea of a Portal card instead. You don't know what's on the other side of the Portal. You've heard good things from the people who have stepped through it. But also they're a little strange, it's all a little suspicious, innit? They all coming back out sounding similar.

Jonestown is another extreme example, hence "drinking the kool-aid." You can't really know if there's a Heaven waiting til you get there. Either step through the portal or don't. Cults in general are a bit like this—anything where you sort of need to start believing, start drinking the koolaid a bit, for the magic to work. But then there's not much going back, you've already bought in.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
You get this a bit with acquired tastes. The kid spits out burning alcohol, bitter coffee, etc. Dad says, "You'll learn to like it." A small part of him whispers—But why do I want to train myself into liking something disgusting? Fair nuff.
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
in western Mysticism ( ok, English occultism ) there is the concept of "Da'ath", the hidden Sephira on the repurposed tree of life that could be an abyss or a portal, on entering it you're probably adept but there's a risk that you won't come out as an Ipissimus, instead you're just that old guy who corners you at a party and tells you how wonderful it would be to have a time machine...

probably not what this thread is about, and I should be off to bed
 
version

version

Well-known member
sus said:
The difference—and perhaps the main shortcoming of the Tower metaphor—is that 'clearly' an assembled, standing Tower is 'good,' and a crumbled heap of stones is bad. Whereas real-world transformations are a bit more relative, or value-laden.
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The crumbled heap of stones can also be a site of potential, mind you.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
You can never find your way back to the person you used to be. So to change is to murder yourself essentially. And you may well regret it. Or at least fee a very profound ambivalence
 
version

version

Well-known member
luka said:
You can never find your way back to the person you used to be. So to change is to murder yourself essentially. And you may well regret it. Or at least fee a very profound ambivalence
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I remember when I was younger thinking things like how depressing it would be if I ever stopped skateboarding or whatever in the future, but obviously by the time it happens you're a different person and it isn't necessarily depressing at all.
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
Not quite sure where to put this - I have just finished Critchley's book on mysticism and have been looking at Martin Shaw's stuff after meeting him in a pub after a podcast recording. There does seem to be a growing modern interest in mysticism, maybe it's always there and just gets called different things, maybe there is always a yearning amongst some to feel the need to commune with a godhead, step into ecstatic states?

I had a conversation with my wife about how a book could be prophetic - how in some way Moby Dick seemed to contain hints, clues, signals that are picked up now in the future. She just thought that was daft however i do think it's possible and may even be what makes great art great.

Anyway - if this should go in another thread let me know

 
sus

sus

Moderator
jenks said:
There does seem to be a growing modern interest in mysticism, maybe it's always there and just gets called different things, maybe there is always a yearning amongst some to feel the need to commune with a godhead, step into ecstatic states?
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Absolutely. It seems like the psychedelic revolution plus the astrology/magic resurgence are both movements in this
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I posted a thread a while back on here and deleted it because I didnt like the concept. But the comment text was relevant I think

Everyone is talking about how magic is the next big thing, everyone is writing books on magic. I have two magician friends, one just got an arts residency at MIT working alongside a cognitive scientist. I have in my lap Poets as Spellcasters and The Secret Occult Teachings of Jim Morrison, both gotten from my local Barnes & Noble where they're featured new releases.

There's been pretty widespread activism & protest culture the past decade. Lots of unrest over 60s-era issues: womens lib, race relations, big resurgence in socialism. A wave of recent assassinations. Cannabis and psychedelic use are at all-time highs. Sense of moral corruption in/betrayal by government. The Internet has become an underground press. There is a sex revolution happening around dating apps, polyamory, queer/trans stuff. Back to the land movement, online communes, group homes, a thousand whacky ideologies and AI x New Age religions.

Astrology and tarot have never been more popular, it's really crazy actually, whether you're in the arts or just a normie horse girl you're into astrology, even computer science engineers are into astrology. I have two friends who read tarot for a living. There are astrology-themed bars in Bushwick. I go to a West Coast coffeeshop they have horoscope-themed lattes.

I guess much of this stuff is connected. I was thinking, reading the Morrison book, how the existential fear of the Atomic Age is kinda like the existential fear of AI and climate change today. There is an apocalyptic tone infiltrating everything. And in The Master thread we talked about how new religious movements come out of periods of dissatisfaction and unrest, such as post-war. Periods where young people are questioning whether the ruling order/their parents/the ruling order really has control, whether its prescriptions of true and false, rational and irrational are worth listening to.

I was talking to a friend recently he said that the only magic anyone talks about is, more or less, hyperstition. It's edged out all the other kinds, it's the only kind of magic we understand anymore, we are all very fluent in hyperstition. (Or in manifestation, which is very similar. Belief becoming real, map changing territory, reflexivity.)

I do think there are other kinds though, some of the ones I've observed are:

- frame control: setting the implicit terms of discourse, or controlling its form (e.g. its pace)
- implanting voices: songs are really good at this, you get tags stuck in your head, but poetry does it too. also implanting voices in the freud introjection sense—the way parents implant voices in you guilting you telling you what to think and do
- mimetic contagion, transmission or production of emotional states, mental illnesses, preferences, stances; inciting or turning on or enchanting
- transfer phenomena, e.g. frame transfer, style transfer
- ability to imagine new equilibria, new ways of being in the world that work; neologism is tied up with this, new words changing the language.
- altering the connotations of words, objects, the way that advertising/marketing works to build up or alter reputations of products; manipulation of the public symbolbank
- ability to nudge groups into coordination equilibrium—ability to get things done socially, instigate mimetic cascades, play confidence tricks, make common/mutual knowledge cascades happen a la Emperor's New Clothes
- channeling of ancestors, in a secular historical sense: aligning yourself with tradition, in a ts eliot way; establishing historical vectors and teleologies that people believe in
- vibework: this is similar to mimetic transfer stuff—but setting the tone in a room
- energy healing? people say this is real but I have no experience/theory of how it works

Probably all are rationalized forms of what past generations have called subliminal messaging, mind control, demonology, spellcraft (language altering landscape).

I think music is very magical too, maybe the most magical artform along with poetry. See the Pied Piper, or Dionysus for music, and the schizo stuttering shaman poet spellcaster for language.
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