Libraries and the occult
Cecile Dubuis wrote a master's dissertation for University College London titled "Libraries & The Occult." I've only read bits of it, but the challenge she identifies is that occult books are, by their nature, anomalous and hard to categorize, much like the phenomena discussed in their pages. As a result, they are often unsearchable in the context of traditional library classification systems. From the dissertation:
The occult seems to be one of the least considered subjects when it comes to classification. This can often result in materials being divided among other subjects such as philosophy, psychology and religion. This can make it difficult to find occult materials. In such cases, a further difficulty can arise for the user; that of asking for help in locating “occult books”. …reactions may not always be negative or judgemental but it does depend somewhat on the beliefs and opinions of the library staff concerned. Particularly those who eschew the subject from a standpoint of little or no personal knowledge...Link (via Further: Strange Attractor & Beyond)
This subject is ambiguous and marginal in virtually all ways: socially, intellectually, academically, religiously, scientifically, and conceptually. It does not fit in the rational world but this is also what makes it so fascinating and interesting. The imbalance between the amount of interest in the field and the stock within the library system is a result of such dilemmas.
the latest
latest episodes
True in bookstores as well. Books tend to move between psychology and religion without any discernible pattern. Even yoga books can be in the philosophy aisle or next to the gun books in the sports aisle.
Oooo! I'm going to have to read this one! I'm a library and information science student and cataloger myself, but I haven't run across many "occult" monographs yet. I think they tend to get cataloged and classified by a subject expert in our library.
And just as an aside, the University where I work has an excellent occult collection of books and other media:
The Merten J. Mandeville Collection in the Occult Sciences
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/mandev.htm
Under the Library Research page, there is a list of the commonly used call numbers. Yes, we're a Dewey Decimal library.
When looking for R.A. Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy at the used bookstore, I always have to check the fiction, occult, philosophy and new age sections. Drives me nuts.
I used to shelve the zeros through 300s (Dewey) when I was a lowly library page during high school and the occult books were always divided between the philosophy and religion books with a few in reference for good luck. I do remember right before I left that we had moved most of them behind the librarian desk because they kept being stolen or lost.
One of the most amusing things about the occult books was that if I came rumbling down the aisle with my book cart, any one who was reading an occult book would look up guiltily and sneak off as if I was some crazed library employee on the warpath FOR GOD.
and that's why they call it occult...
(secret; disclosed or communicated only to the initiated. hidden from view.)
@AnneK (#4) your comment about the occult books getting moved behind the desk reminded me of Mark's recent post about the most stolen books in stores!
Books my BB patron saint Timothy Leary often end up categorized in a variety of places: psychology, sociology, humor, science, or the dreaded new age.
It is indeed funny how poorly categorized occult books tend to be, particularly at chain book stores. Demonology books like Legemetton/Goetia are often chucked into the Satanism section along with LaVey, while Enochiana is shoved in with the angel/fairy fluff.
That's ironic for anyone initmate with the material, but it also belies the "seriousness" of the subjects.
Nominal miscategorization is just an artefact of imposing a single categorical scheme.
Almost anything can be categorized almost anyhow. The "almost" qualification is really important: reality does constrain our categorizations. But it by no means determines them.
So the same book can be legitimately categorized in dozens of different ways. Any attempt to say that one category is the best is necessarily an exercise in psychology. It's just an attempt to guess the way most people here-and-now would think was the One True Way of categorizing it.
Being aware that most books can be categorized multiple ways makes visits to the bookstore or library always a new adventure. Does The Jewish War appear in world history, ancient history, religion, warfare, Jewish studies, or classics? I have no way of telling, because I have no way of knowing what single category most people would want to impose on it.
I wonder how this compares to books about sex.
some clues to this "special treatment" of occult works can be found in the Dictionary.com definition... pay special attention to #3 and #5a...
1. of or pertaining to magic, astrology, or any system claiming use or knowledge of secret or supernatural powers or agencies.
2. beyond the range of ordinary knowledge or understanding; mysterious.
3. secret; disclosed or communicated only to the initiated.
4. hidden from view.
5. (in early science)
a. not apparent on mere inspection but discoverable by experimentation.
b. of a nature not understood, as physical qualities.
c. dealing with such qualities; experimental: occult science.
etc...
much occult phenomena cannot, by it's very nature be written down. one sufi commentator on el-ghazali puts this well, stating that comprehensive experience "cannot be penned by a bumbling wordsmith anymore than he himself would accept a paper copy of a fruit as edible or nutritious".
while this is the case, much occult material has been made accessible through symbol and gesture, albeit only to those who have the experience necessary to interpret the symbols. this goes a long way towards explaining how some librarians (read: "gatekeepers to knowledge") may dismiss some of this material, judge it incomprehensible or reprehensible. (i elaborate on this concept in the mission statement for my blog)
while i have some fear this may elicit the fundamentalist backlash i have come to expect on tech-oriented blogs, i also harbor some hope that a balanced appraisal can be made of the occult... famous arthur c. clarke quote aside, jabir ibn hayyan, a sufi, is one of the most influential chemists ever and credited as one of the developers of scientific method. charlatans aside, real occult knowledge becomes (through science) obvious truth.
All occult books should be shelved in a dark, dusty back section of the library. They should be draped in cobwebs; creepy knickknacks and candles are optional. A small warning sign may be placed at the entrances, particularly if the books bite, talk, or eat souls. Catalog accordingly.
I don't know anything about occult stuff in libraries, but if you want to find occult books just go to an occult book seller. When the entire store is occult, then you have to rely on the sub-catagories the seller comes up with.
Tom wrote:
(for example)
"Does The Jewish War appear in world history, ancient history, religion, warfare, Jewish studies, or classics?"
With respect to libraries, it appears wherever the original cataloger, usually someone at the Library of Congress, decided to classify it with respect to the Library of Congress Classification System (or Dewey Decimal System). All other libraries then follow suit (this is called Copy-cataloging).
Additional Subject Headings can be added at the local level, but a Classification number assigned my LC is usually retained no matter what, with only minor modifications made if needed for shelf-listing purposes.
In a somewhat related vein, Librarian Earl Lee has complained that atheist and freethought books are sometimes mishandled, badly classified in libraries because they're often handed over to the religion cataloger, who may be hostile to the material. Bad cataloging *can* virtually make a book disappear...but this is a no-no in Library ethics. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it ought not to happen, as far as the professional ethics of Librarians are concerned.
The Dewey Decimal System is heavily weighted towards Christianity in its religion section, reflecting the biases of its creator, Melvil Dewey.
Tom also wrote:
"So the same book can be legitimately categorized in dozens of different ways. Any attempt to say that one category is the best is necessarily an exercise in psychology. It's just an attempt to guess the way most people here-and-now would think was the One True Way of categorizing it."
Library catalogers do know this. The problem is, there's only ONE copy of the book in the library, and it's gotta go SOMEWHERE in the shelving scheme, determined by the call number (which should be semantically linked to the first subject heading) The cataloger exercises her best judgment and PUTS it somewhere that she feels fits best. Nobody claims it's perfect, it just has to work to serve the purpose of making the book findable. It's inherently always a "best guess" at some level for the cataloger, and perfection is not the goal, just good quality description that fulfills that primary function reliably.
We have a truck full of other books we have to get out onto the shelves in a timely fashion. We take our best shot then move on.
Philosophy and Psychology are 100, Religion is 200. Although Occult in my local library is spread out in these two sections, its easy to find titles. I would also say its a rather large, healthy collection compared to the number of mainstream Psychology and Religion books. The number of "Occult" books, including astrology, published each year probably dwarfs the psychology books that insist on scientific peer review, and mainstream religious books which mostly defer to religious authority of some sort.
So I'm supposed to sympathize with nutters who can't get off their butts and find "Divination by Fishbones" on the shelf? No way.
H. Lovecraft
Dunwich, Massachusetts
The main problem with correct placement of occult books is that once somebody reads enough of the book to figure out where to put it, they get eaten by a shoggoth or something.
Well, I know Giles didn't have a problem with this when he was running the library at Sunnydale High.
Bookstore categorization can get pretty horrendous for less mainstream books (speaking from experience working at one guilty chainstore). It was amazing how three different editions of the same Aleister Crowle book could get labeled as New Age/Occult, New Age/Phenomenon, and Philosophy/Wester Philosophy. Already mentioned by Brett Burton at comment #3, the Illuminatus! Trilogy was also horribly varied it where it was placed.
Though I suppose the funniest example of miscategorization I aw was when the Category Change report came out one quarter, and for some reason all of the books about breast-feeding were re-categorized to Sports/Martial Arts.
OF course, the whole problem is that books can only exist in one place at one time. Does an "occult gardening" book go in the occult section, the gardening section, or both? If both, then the library needs to get two books.
The net lets us give categories to things that didn't have them before. Occult may have been more a descriptor than a category - but now that anything can be a tag, we can have different kinds of categories than those we developed to reflect a Victorian or even Greek world view.
"occult books are, by their nature, anomalous and hard to categorize"
Everybody thinks this about their pet subject. *Nothing* fits into a library classification, but people still persist in believing that the system works for every subject they don't knwo anything about. Doubtless the dissertation tackles the whole thing more rigorously, though.
#3: I recently found one volume of Illuminatus! filed under Popular Science. This amused me enough that I bought it to re-read.
Wouldn't someone with occult knowledge be able to locate a book in the stacks?
not at all, though it is understandable that the layman would not comprehend the complex interactions of the Influences.
It is a pain to try to sort through new age/spirituality/etc.. sections to get to what I consider occult books. The real problem is that the occult field of study covers such a vast territory that categorization is probably pointless.
Bookshops don't have this problem, since they are interested in selling books to people, and will place them where they can be found.
Perhaps these confused librarians could talk to the people with a commercial interest in making such books easy to locate to see how they do it?
Always, every time its relevant, someone beats me to the Buffy joke. but at sunnydale, /all/ the books were occult, so there was the opposite problem, if anything.
Arent most libraries using digital catalogues now? so cross referencing potential is there. I must also add that I read english at ucl and the librarians are some of the evillest people I ever met. I wont mention the worst by name, but when I met him he was wearing some kind of poncho and was incredibly rude, two things that when combined do nothing to add to someone's likeability.
If bookshops were interested in selling books they wouldn't carry all of the second books in series and no first books.
Scott, Scott, Scott, Free, Free, Free,... you must be more patient. The poncho is because of the conjoined twin mylexia, something that understandably can make one rude. Tolerance, always tolerance. And an Uzi.
@ paul maurice martin #20:
someone with occult knowledge wouldn't be looking for a book at all... (nice website, btw...)
@ takuan #21:
they actually could, but would probably just use the card catalogue rather than bust out some remote viewing... (which exists, btw...)
@ artistvictoriac #22:
exactly. "occult" describes a much broader scope of study than "science" or "philosophy"...
The author's problem sounds like it might be a) localized to the UK and/or b) more of an issue with public libraries than academic ones, where there aren't reaally "sections."
I'm not a cataloger, but I am a subject specialist and reference librarian at an Ivy League institution. I can tell you that there are two steps to the process of cataloging: assigning a classification number, or call number, so that the book can be physically located, and assigning subject headings, so that it may be found conceptually. Fewer and fewer academic library patrons browse in the stacks, so the key question becomes "How can they find work on the subject of their interest?" This is where the subject headings come in, and I can tell you that there is a very respectable general subject heading called "Occultism" which has over 450 titles associated with it, and that main heading has pages of sub-headings, by more focused aspect or geographical location. The call numbers are all over the place, but the majority appear to be in the BFs, which in the Library of Congress classification scheme is "psychology" or the BLs, which are for "religions, mythology, rationalism."
But the classification is not how a researcher in an academic library is likely to find them. He or she would use the Library of Congress Subject Headings--aided by their smiling and non-judgmental reference librarian, who has been carefully trained not to let any personal prejudices get in the way of the needs of the patron.
But Dubuis is writing in Britain, where they don't use our subject headings, and may well be discussing public library issues, which are entirely different from academic library issues.
Don't tar us all with the same brush!
I LOVE the giant Library we have in Chicago! YAY, GIANT LIBRARY! Over a MILLION books in one place!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Washington_Library
and it's on! The crowd goes wild! One corner, Takuan spits in the bucket and comes dancing out, sequined tights twinkling under the kliegs, spiked gloves up and waving! From the other corner, Jamesegyre somersaults to center ring completely naked except for a thick layer of rancid yak butter and brandishing a jeweled scythe labelled "Truth"! Takuan jabs with:
"Remote Viewing is Bullshit!!"......
Myth Busters said otherwise Takuan.
/me ducks.
Takuan leaps to the top of the ropes and does a full body slam on Noen, just before she can slip out of the ring! Slamming an elbow in to the back of her neck with each word , Takuan grits out: "Mythbusters-is-not-a-legitmate-scientific-authority"
Noen spits teeth and does a backflip, unseating the now greasy Takuan!
occult schmuckult
you still don't know who stole those candles from the church
"Occult" is just another word for obscure. Most occult books should be filed under mysticism. Or humor. Or just: bone headed notions and time wasters.
The problem in categorizing occult books is they're not part of durable subjects. By durable I mean subjects which have an enduring truth and value. As occult knowledge becomes verified, by scientific means for example, then it's no longer "occult" it's "science."
For example, the occult is not science, not peer reviewed or empirical in any way. And yet they make pseudo-scientific claims. When by accident or intuition an occultist gets something right, it's verified by science, ceases to be occult, and becomes science.
The occult isn't Religious is the sense of major organized religions having had an enduring influence on the world. For example, ancient religions of extinct cultures would absolutely be filed under religion and would typically be described in terms of their organized beliefs and what parts survived in other cultures. While occult beliefs are by definition obscure and their influence tends to be transitory.
occult beliefs are by definition obscure and their influence tends to be transitory.
Millions of Tarot decks are sold annually. Astrology is an enormous business. If you put devotees of the occult in one corner of the ring and scientists in the other, well....I wouldn't want to be with the scientists. Is Qabala occult or religious? Yoga? Sufism? I do agree that mysticism would be a far better title since all of my examples fit that category nicely.
Professor Richard Wiseman, psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire
"I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven"
(I'm not really invested in this, I just think it's interesting)
In terms of combating preconceptions, I'd say Cecile has done a marvellous job with her heavy Gothic type. Way to show 'em.
Or, you could just go to the Hay Library at Brown University. World's largest HP Lovecraft collection, huge occult collection... multiple books bound in human skin (!) and quite a few books kept in a vault or otherwise behind lock and key. It's a closed-stack library with its own multitude of classifications thanks to the requests of the various donors of collections, many of them completely insane and therefore resulting in many lost books (I worked there one summer, and thank goodness for the abovementioned keywords). Heck, there's stuff in there that isn't even text - old chairs and swords and whatall - plus lots of not-quite-books - comic books, magazines, old pamphlets, etc.
Actually, the scariest thing in that library wasn't anything in the Lovecraft or occult books. It was a box of Brown memorabilia. None of us dared to open it.
It was marked as containing... old gym shorts!
@#40, Using human skin for covers of books wasn't that uncommon. Here's a news story about it.
#38, Noen:
The Daily Mail* article that contained that quote also claimed that Wiseman does not yet believe in the xistence of remote viewing:
"Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing.
He says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.
"If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me.
"But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you'd probably want a lot more evidence.
"Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence." "
*UK readers will know that the Daily Mail is not known for its high journalistic standards.
The nice thing about online catalogs is that you don't have to file a book in just one place. (And if you've got a decent interface, you can group together works with similar subjects; unfortunately, most online library catalogs aren't particularly good at this.)
Here, for instance, is the "Occultism" section of The Online Books Page, which puts a number of related occult categories together. (And if you click on the "i" icon for many of the books, you'll also see that they're filed under multiple categories.):
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Occultism
Books on occult and related topics appear to be particularly popular online. I'm still in the process of assigning cataloger-created subject headings to my listings, but right now the most common subject heading in my collection, other than automatically assigned "... literature" subjects, is Theosophy, which is basically an occult topic. (Oddly, the Library of Congress subject headings don't directly relate the two, though you can get from one to the other via intermediate subject headings like Religions.)
@ #9:
> I wonder how this compares to books about sex.
"Self-help" section. No, really.
That can't be right, Keneke
/Although, in my case....
:)
...real occult knowledge becomes (through science) obvious truth.
Sometimes, yes. At which point, the books that detail this information are moved to religion, psychology, etc., because the information contained in them is no longer occult (hidden).
Hidden information cannot be cataloged. It's really that simple. Cataloging is not an exact science but it is based on empirical, discernible qualities. There's plenty of wiggle room in determining what those qualities are for any given item. As a Catalog librarian, I deal with the fuzziness of classification schema all the live long day.
But "Occult" is not a meaningful classifier. At best, it's a popular genre term. Libraries don't arrange books based on genre terms or tags (we can have a debate some other time as to whether they should and what the benefits of doing so would be). Book stores sometimes do but, as noted above by many, book stores are notoriously disorganized. .
My library just has a 'weird' section for occult stuff.
@ #18 (hi Doug!): OF course, the whole problem is that books can only exist in one place at one time.
I guess we need to invent the Schröedinger Decimal System. Actually, while working in comic retail, a field with its own yet parallel set of issues with classification and mass market penetration (as you well know), I came up with a concept for organizing comics multi-dimensionally, factoring in title, writer, artist, genre, publisher and sequence. Unfortunately, this would likely require more space than most comic shops have and a clientele that doesn't already get confused by alphabetical order. I can't help the latter, but these days I think the former might make for an interesting online retail portal, perhaps implemented through Second Life or the like.
Is ease of classification really in the best interests of occult books? Sure, perhaps from a commercial point of view, and I understand why for some people, particularly the publishers, the considerations go no further. But to my mind the most useful occult books, and really any other type, too, find their ways into the hands of their intended audiences in roundabout ways, giving them their own wills and lives, rather than as inert commodities waiting docilely on a shelf. Once again, my thrift fu doctrine informs my opinion here. Not that this is a good business model, but anyone in occult publishing for the money has missed the point entirely.
Really, the net and the democratized means of distribution therein has amped up the dissemination of this information to interested parties far better than brick and mortar vessels could ever hope to. There will always be a place and a demand for the physical artifacts as totems of power through knowledge in themselves (that would seem to be the unconscious motivation behind my personal library), but that power is too big to be contained by these artifacts alone now that there's something larger in which to inhabit and propagate.
@takuan...
i admire your stylish challenge (and generally admire your comments) so it is, with the utmost respect, that i ask you move the rest of this battle here. i find it annoying to follow long comment threads, and would like to document this sure-to-be-epic intellectual struggle for my readers. sooo...
jamesgyre immediately sits in bound lotus and pronounces "remote viewing is an ancient and proven practice with some adherents even in mainstream physics. i have witnessed it performed perfectly first-hand. oh, and my yak butter isn't rancid, it's fermented."
let the games begin!
I am now placing an object on my computer. It is a physical object, separate from my person. It has been closely associated with me for the entire length of my physical presence upon this earth. It will remain touching my computer until an answer is given.
Name the object.
Can you sit in baddha padmasana?
a brief(?) musical interlude;
http://www.hamienet.com/midi21317.html
separate from my person.
That's a relief. We were getting into dangerous territory for a moment there.
A small glass globe.
@ takuan...
i am saddened that this conversation wasn't moved, but i will continue here for the sake of an important discussion. so,
note that the question is not whether i am able to remote view, but whether anyone can. that being said, i am not able to remote view personally. i have had flashes of siddhis, but never that one. even the person who has performed remote viewing for me has failed on other occasions. however, the performance for me was so unquestionable (and there are so many other examples...) that i remain convinced it is possible.
@ antinous...
yes. only for maybe 8 minutes, though. i was told by a yogi in india that 30 minutes of bound lotus is sufficient yoga practice, though i doubt that gives the maximum physical benefit that an hour of more diverse poses would...
#42 Beanolini
You know I kind of agree with you but I do think it's a bit odd. The ordinary rules should be good enough I would think. On the other hand the Ganzeld experiments done so far don't really indicate psychic abilities but just that we have these anomalous results.
But then there were those telephone experiments where people guessed who was calling and did so way above what you'd expect from random guesses.
I think we'll probably never know. The reason I think is because (I believe) the boundary between true and false, science and faith, is fractal. The more you try to determine it exactlly the faster it recedes from you. That boundary is what we call the Occult.
But padmasana cycles energy in a way that no other asana does. If you sit in padmasana, fold forward to touch your forehead to the ground and stretch your hands behind you, palms up, as in balasana, it sucks kundalini upward. You should feel it immediately. Instead of just feeling a hip stretch, it's like a slow, warm, fuzzy orgasm.
@ antinous
i have done padmasana (lotus) my whole life, and do love it... i just contend it isn't enough to do just that posture, even if it's the more complete bound version. i tried what you suggested, and it is nice, although i like the hip stretch of lotus and find balasana (child's pose) sufficiently orgasmic on it's own...
@ noen
well said. fractal. receding determinism. yes.
my question is, if we can be convinced enough that something happens at least some of the time, is there some way this can be accounted for in theories or even practices, even without "provability" or "reliability"?
I do lots of poses (being a yoga teacher, I'd have to), but padmasana is still the queen of poses. I also like utthita hastasana for its receptive quality, that feeling that you're hanging from the heavens by your heart chakra. My approach to asana is particularly tantric. I do things for stretch and strength, but I'm mainly interested in creating geometry to run energy. I try to make each asana a little devotional sculpture.
Sure, it's April 1, or at least it was recently, but I'll bite :-)
Libraries have two different reasons for putting books where they do - making it easy to find them in the Card Catalog, and making it interesting to browse the bookshelves to look at related books. The latter function's still relevant, if people go browsing through the stacks (less common in University libraries where occult book collections are likely to be?) But the indexing problem has changed now that catalogs have become computerized; there's no longer a reason to have only one pointer to a given index record, and full-text search on catalog entries and (emergingly) on books themselves means that they can be filed anywhere you want, and the computerized indexes can also provide some of the browse-nearby-books functions.
Some libraries have other concerns with where they file books - creating attractive displays to encourage people to pick up books and read (more common with paperback fiction), keeping people from stealing some kinds of books (whether it's "Steal This Book" or any of the spurious Necronomicons that may be around), or, in some parts of L-Space, keeping the books from fighting with each other or having too much magic concentrated into a small space, and making sure that Things That Mankind Was Not Meant To Know stay occluded in the quieter parts of the stacks, waiting for a susceptible mind on a dark and stormy night...
@antinous
devotional sculpture... nice idea.
BUT the question is whether (bound) lotus is all that's necessary to practice to maintain health, energetic or otherwise. i'd say you could be right on the energetic side, but not on the "strength and stretch side". and i don't know about the royalty of various poses, but the yogis i met spoke of headstand as the father and shoulderstand as the mother of all asanas.
mmm... headstand. if i was forced to do just one pose, that's it... (admittedly, lotus headstand is probably the best headstand.)
Dear Jamesgyre:
Please accept my apologies for declining your kind invitation. I assure you that under different circumstances I would be delighted to continue at your site. Regrettably, I am constrained for several reasons.
As to remote viewing; I would be delirious if someone could name the object. It doesn't have to be you, anyone reading this is invited. The challenge stands.
I can't do full inversions as I'm a nosebleeder. I've heard it said that you're a yogi when you can sit in padmasana for half an hour and stand (or whatever you call it) in sirsasana for half an hour. I tend to believe that if you do your pranayama really well, that you could dispense with asana completely and still maintain health and well-being. Since Bhakti is the most populous branch of yoga, most yogis don't practice asana anyway. Except for the seated poses laid out in the sutras of Patanjali.
@takuan
re: invitation - apologies accepted. oh well.
re: remote viewing - similar to your (accurate) claim about mythbusters above, your experiment isn't "scientific authority". at best, it can only prove that no one on this thread can remote view your object. it does nothing to disprove the possibility of remote viewing globally. do you have (different, more fleshed out) grounds for stating that "remote viewing is bullshit".
note: i've got grounds for believing it's real, but i'll wait to hear your position first, so as to address your specific doubts.
amendment: "bullshit" is stylistic carelessness.
Rather: "remote viewing is something I have heard about, possibly experienced myself - though in a fugue state - am hopeful to believe since it makes the universe more interesting, but, at this time, in this place, cannot accept as a demonstrable,repeatable phenonom due to lack of direct personal observation or confirmation of general social consensus of the experiential paradigm I currently subscribe to."
There can't be any major library that still uses a card catalog. Sheesh.
Unless it's some kind of STEAMPUNK Library!
@ antinous
i can sit in padmasana (lotus) forever, just the bound version makes my shoulder go (uncomfortably) numb after a while. i've never timed how long i can do sirsasana (headstand), although i used to do it upwards of 10 minutes for my iyengar program. i've thought of marathon headstand for charity though...
as for pranayama and bhakti yoga, i agree, those are sufficient, but the question is circumstances. most westerners who practice yoga aren't practicing all eight limbs or anything. they use it as an extension of their workout, with maybe a little meditational bonus. a westerner practicing pranayama (which some teachers forbid to practice in cities at all because of the poor air), and expecting that to make their body harmonious has to do a lot more than pranayama. they have to change their entire lifestyle. same for a bhakti yoga. love and devotion are great, but unless you remove all non-sattvic activity, it's kind of empty.
to sum up... your right, but only in the cases where someone gives their path 100%. in those other cases, choosing just padmasana, or just pranayama or whatever is likely just going to be an attempt at a shortcut, most likely damaging to the student's health. which is why i warn my yoga students against that path unless they have shown total dedication.
Dear Antinous:
baddha padmasana looks tempting, but there is a very real ( I do not exaggerate ) possibility that the release might kill me.
@ takuan
well put. that describes my own position on the topic fairly well up until two important experiences in 2004, notably "direct personal observation" and the of changing my "paradigm subscription"
i described my personal experience in an old thread on boing boing, so i'll copy it here:
"people have tried to find holes in this story since i started telling it, but i assure you it is the truth and that i am reporting it accurately. a friend (who happened to be recently taking some higher level philosophy and shamanism classes at the tracker school) accomplished a successful and detailed remote viewing of my basement music studio. i was lamenting the fact that he couldn't see it because he was 7 hours away and he suggested that he try anyway! i was on the phone with him at the time. i didn't say a word the whole time. he instructed me to try to feel happy and enjoy what i was seeing and that that would help him locate me. he began by describing what i was looking at, including simple, guessable (but correct) things like the hole where the doorknob was to go and some of the complex sound-disrupting angles we used in the wall design. but then the real kicker came. he said he saw "a man that looks like santa claus sitting on a rug with a woman playing what looks like a banjo or a fiddle." i had no idea what he was talking about. i turned my head (important!) and saw on the wall behind me a print that my housemate had just put up the day before of a man in a red coat and hat both with white trim sitting on a rug with a woman playing the saw-u (aptly named!) which is a thai instrument that looks like a cross between a banjo and a fiddle. my jaw dropped. then he said he was seeing blue and white birds. the border of the print featured blue and white birds. at this point i interrupted him to tell him of his great success. he was as surprised as i was. what i think separates this from what could be called telepathy is that i was not looking at the image when my friend saw it. i didn't even know it was there. the closest i had gotten to it was that i dumpster-dived the book it was torn out of two days before. i believe (as much as i ever "believe") he was truly non-local during those moments.
let me quickly dissuade people from wasting our time with these common counter-arguments:
1. he guessed... prints of that very specific type are not a common fixture of sound studios. he also made no "wrong" guesses the whole time.
2. my friend told him about the print... absolutely not. i brought up the studio, if my friend was planning this he would have needed to get an immense amount of specific data for every room. this would have also had to happen in the two days previous to the conversation. my housemate does know the remote-viewer, and they talk, but they didn't have any conversation like that in those two days. my housemate who has no need to lie to me has sworn that he didn't tell him anything. i even woke him up early in the morning to ask him during the hypnotic moments right after sleep. no, no, no...
3. he set up a spy camera... seriously, i've heard this. my friend is not in the c.i.a."
anyway, that's the experience i had. my tracker school pal was as shocked as i was. he had tried it with a skeptical friend and bombed. this fits the pattern of complaints (and jeers) that this cannot be accomplished when the "energy isn't right" or some other such fluffiness. i realize it's a frustrating aspect, but consider this:
demonstrable isn't the same thing as repeatable. while some scientific traditions seem to think repeatable is required to prove a possibility, i don't. i think quite possibly that we may not understand the prerequisite conditions well enough to repeat them. even if my friend and i try again, we might be too invested in a new experiment's success to succeed. but that wouldn't prove it didn't happen, or couldn't happen again.
as for shifting my "subscribed paradigm", i experienced similar stories from other trusted sources, including some that involving non-linear time (wowza, that's a whole other thread), and also encountered some mainstream science that supported these ideas. besides the whole body of quantum non-locality research, one of my favorites is a bit older than that...
stephen m phillips did some remarkable historic and scientific research in which he examined over ten years of physics research done with remote viewing by annie besant and c.w. leadbeater (occult chemistry). basically, they viewed a ton of very detailed, numerically correct aspects of the different elements. the modern research examining this data (by phillips, a cambridge and UC educated physicist) is in a couple of books (i have "anima - evidence of a yogic siddhi" but there are others listed on his website), and is summed up quite well in this quote by phillips:
"the excuses for disbelieving the claim of psychics are irrelevant in the context of their (besant & leadbeater's) highly evidential descriptions of subatomic particles published in 1908, two years before rutherford's experiments confirmed the nuclear model of the atom, fiver years before bohr presented his theory of the hydrogen atom, 24 years before chadwick discovered the neutron and heisenberg proposed that it is a constituent of the atomic nuclei, 56 years before gell-mann and zweig theorised about quarks. their observations are still being confirmed by discoveries of science many years later."
along with my direct personal evidence witnessing remote viewing, finding that data helped to confirm that this wasn't just a story, but happened, at least occasionally.
sorry for the length there, but it's a lot to chew. i have yet to hear compelling evidence either of those experiments show anything other than a positive light on remote viewing, but i'm open too it... (but have hope... if i'm right, and i think i am, the universe IS that much more interesting.)
cheers!
Dear Jamesgyre:
Thank you so much for all that. I sincerely appreciate your effort, experiences and information.
I add it to my pile on the topic for further digestion and integration.
One thing struck me: "demonstrable isn't the same thing as repeatable.". Time. `Repetition needs time to happen.How long a time,how much time? How much time do I get? My lifetime is my infinity, so: is once enough? If I observe something once in the span I am alloted, is that not enough? Science may demand multiple human lifetimes -I think my short span and tiny bubble of space/time might only need once.
Challenge stands. What is the object on my computer? Anyone?
thank you again
takuan.
groovy. let's leave it at that... except...
leave that object on your computer until tuesday. coincidentally, i'm likely going to see my friend this weekend because i'm going to a funeral. maybe we'll take a shot at seeing it...
if you could, post your rough location. it might help. i'm not terribly hopeful we'll get it. i chalk a lot of our earlier success up to my recent receptivity and unattachment and my friend's fresh tuning from his classes. it's almost as if it had to happen that time, to help us believe. it definitely changed our lives, our minds, our path...
and thank you
I am loathe to confirm the presence of my base on your world, let alone a continent.
I will think upon that. The object remains.
My sincere condolences on your bereavement.
good night
My mother worked at the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature at Senate House, UCL. She had to invent new categories within the (I think Dewy Decimal but I might be wrong) system they were using pre-computerisation. It was often commented on how helpful her categories were such as a unique number for 'Ectoplasm'.
JamesGyre, reading over your comments, I'm just floored. You have such an open mind, it's a wonder your brain hasn't leaked out your nose.
Remote Viewing is third degree hokum.
Statistically, it's as likely to produce the same results as simple guessing. The CIA spent decades trying to see if there was anythings to it. What they discovered, after thirty years and who knows how many millions of taxpayer dollars, was that people sitting in a room in Langley trying to remotely view a Russian Nuclear Power Plant were startled to discover that it contained... Russian Nuclear reactors.
Being able to guess the details of a room is not occult or mysterious. It's simple extrapolation form cultural clues. If your a spy conducting a remote viewing test and go looking for imaginary terrorists in a secret bunker, guess what you'll find? That's right, unicorns.
Your friend was able to "see" your room so well because he's your friend and knows you and your tastes. You probably told him details previously which you forgot you told him. Your remote viewing experience was nothing more occult than the sort of Cold Reading psychics have been scamming people with for ages. Only, since he's your friend, it was more of a Warm Reading. And since he's your friend, he didn't send you a bill.
Though someone who pays money to take a Shamanism class sounds like he's on the wrong end of an entirely different and far more common scam.
I realize that I'm wasting my time. But damn it, someone on the Internet is wrong!
"Remote Viewing is third degree hokum."
You don't know that.
"Statistically, it's as likely to produce the same results as simple guessing."
Not true. The results were statistically significant and well above what one would expect from random guesses. The ganzfeld experiments yielded anomalous results. Some people then leap to the conclusion that it proves remote viewing but given there is no known mechanism for RV I think the leap is unjustified.
"I realize that I'm wasting my time. But damn it, someone on the Internet is wrong!"
You're not wasting your time if you are willing to listen to others and challenge your received view. Everyone constructs their own model of the world. Some however cling to their first one and demand everyone else conform to theirs. We call those people Authoritarians.
Still, with all these remote viewers around. You'd think someone would have taken Randi up on his challenge (just like Takuan's) and collected their million dollars. Their silence and poverty does speak volumes.
no need for any bickering. The object on my computer is still there. Anyone can try. No penalties,no rewards.
@74 keith
noen did a good job of replying to the tone of your argument, but as for the points you bring up... i'm just going to have to requote some things for you from my post...
"let me quickly dissuade people from wasting our time with these common counter-arguments:
1. he guessed... prints of that very specific type ("a man that looks like santa claus sitting on a rug with a woman playing what looks like a banjo or a fiddle!!!") are not a common fixture of sound studios. he also made no "wrong" guesses the whole time."
i hadn't seen the print the last time we spoke. i didn't forget describing a print this print to him because i hadn't seen it yet...
also, what about remote viewing correct atomic masses before atomic mass is even a concept yet? (my second example...)
also, when i first heard you say i had such an open mind it's a wonder my brain hadn't come out my nose i felt it was a compliment. take some cues from takuan for how to disagree (or be skeptical) with style...
i will happily continue this conversation with you if you do as takuan did and actually respond to the two retorts i raised above...
@74 noen
i'm inclined to agree with you, although as i've pointed out, one persons standard of proof is another's hokum. i'm inclined to think that people like randi probably wouldn't pay anyway, but it's odd no one has collected.
perhaps it's that whole thing about necessary conditions... siddhis aren't supposed to happen for profit or glory, according to the most ancient texts on the subject.
perhaps it's that those who could do it for profit see a benefit to widespread skepticism. many sufi teachers are famous for allowing people to think of them as charlatans. it keeps the greedy away.
perhaps it's that remote viewing only happens for flashes, and never behaves as reliably as other tools.
@ #70 takuan
no sweat... although i am even less confident he has a good shot at it... i'll still see if he will try. i think that if remote viewing exists, my friend has to have some beacon... he says he had to aim at me. (he had been to my house before, pre studio, pre print...)
and buenas noches to you as well, thinker...
I suspect trying is wrong. Things like this just happen - or work - as they will. I do nothing to prejudice, nothing to encourage. No fear, no expectation, no desire. Open on all eight sides.
A beacon? I concur. Do you have a suggestion?
Well Jamesgyre:
Tuesday is upon us, the object remains. I hope to hear from you tomorrow