09-09-2011, 12:00 AM
Just for kicks i used to hang out on a forum dedicated to monsters and people who hunted them. Psychic investigators, werewolves, demon hunters and the like. It had its fair share of fruitcakes and a few casualities of the psychic romance section. In all though it was an interesting place to learn about the recording of altered states.Hanging out with the crazies one friend used to call it. I used to refer to it as an open air lunatic asylum. One that never shut.
What was interesting was witnessing how people spoke about their experiences, how they described them to themselves and others. Demon hunters would talk about liberating victims from possession, werewolves would describe their hunger and awesome shifts, vampires would talk about psychic feeding. What all of them did was in fact describe expereinces according to their over-arching beliefs. They would describe an experience via explanations from their paradigms. That was actually a very important destinction that i learned to differentiate between. I now understand there is a vast difference between a description and an explanation.
Occaisionally on this forum a real fruitcake would turn up and start mixing systems in a wild frenetic smorgasborg of explanatory word salad. It was funny at times but sad when you realised their was a real person on the other side of it all trying to come to terms with some genuinely wierd ****. What hardly ever happened was someone who would reduce themselves to a position of not knowing anything and simply describe what they saw heard felt, sans explanations. For some strange reason what i witnessed over and over again was that people have a need to appear to be in control. In the face of wierd experiences this urge to have an explanatory discourse was overbearing. I know because i have been there myself at times.
Which brings me ironically here. Here the paradigms are much more narrow. The common one is Castaneda. Others include zen, christianity etc. Each of these ways of viewing the world has an accompanying discourse, an explanatory set or words and concepts that we use. Again though what is rare is the individual who describes their experience without resorting to using explanations.
So to stay within the paradigm of sorcery for a moment i just want to look at the idea of 'sorceric writing', what its might be, how it might be done, its benefits and challenges. Its something i get a few ants in my pants over because so much writing on this subject is truly dreadful, and it needn't be. Its truly painful when people murder with words subjects that are dear to me. But enough of my pain and angst.
In the past i have referred to the act of talking about wierd experiences as 'perceptual phenomenology'. Its a long word which sounds very clever and i have no idea if it is correct or not, i am merely hijacking the meaning because it feels right for the purposes i have for it, (a bit like the changed meaning of 'tensegrity'). Basically in its purest form it is merely describing our perceptions during an experience. It is a witness statement. We stay away from conclusions, we stay instead with the unadulterated evidence of our senses and awareness. For me just describing experiences is the purest form of communication possible. It allows us a very clear view of what has happened. In fact it may even be the most rational scientific approach to wierd events that we have.
What is more these records are like open holograms that we as aware witnesses can enter into. They are energetic records of an event. We as readers of such sorceric writing can even help the writer to probe the experience further. Our questions about specific sensations thoughts etc are invitations for the writer to look deeper to recapture even more of the experience, to recapitulate (in a way)
Hey its late and i am being told off for typing late into the night. The first part of this thread is i feel unfinished. I will come back to clean up my mess tomorrow.
What was interesting was witnessing how people spoke about their experiences, how they described them to themselves and others. Demon hunters would talk about liberating victims from possession, werewolves would describe their hunger and awesome shifts, vampires would talk about psychic feeding. What all of them did was in fact describe expereinces according to their over-arching beliefs. They would describe an experience via explanations from their paradigms. That was actually a very important destinction that i learned to differentiate between. I now understand there is a vast difference between a description and an explanation.
Occaisionally on this forum a real fruitcake would turn up and start mixing systems in a wild frenetic smorgasborg of explanatory word salad. It was funny at times but sad when you realised their was a real person on the other side of it all trying to come to terms with some genuinely wierd ****. What hardly ever happened was someone who would reduce themselves to a position of not knowing anything and simply describe what they saw heard felt, sans explanations. For some strange reason what i witnessed over and over again was that people have a need to appear to be in control. In the face of wierd experiences this urge to have an explanatory discourse was overbearing. I know because i have been there myself at times.
Which brings me ironically here. Here the paradigms are much more narrow. The common one is Castaneda. Others include zen, christianity etc. Each of these ways of viewing the world has an accompanying discourse, an explanatory set or words and concepts that we use. Again though what is rare is the individual who describes their experience without resorting to using explanations.
So to stay within the paradigm of sorcery for a moment i just want to look at the idea of 'sorceric writing', what its might be, how it might be done, its benefits and challenges. Its something i get a few ants in my pants over because so much writing on this subject is truly dreadful, and it needn't be. Its truly painful when people murder with words subjects that are dear to me. But enough of my pain and angst.
In the past i have referred to the act of talking about wierd experiences as 'perceptual phenomenology'. Its a long word which sounds very clever and i have no idea if it is correct or not, i am merely hijacking the meaning because it feels right for the purposes i have for it, (a bit like the changed meaning of 'tensegrity'). Basically in its purest form it is merely describing our perceptions during an experience. It is a witness statement. We stay away from conclusions, we stay instead with the unadulterated evidence of our senses and awareness. For me just describing experiences is the purest form of communication possible. It allows us a very clear view of what has happened. In fact it may even be the most rational scientific approach to wierd events that we have.
What is more these records are like open holograms that we as aware witnesses can enter into. They are energetic records of an event. We as readers of such sorceric writing can even help the writer to probe the experience further. Our questions about specific sensations thoughts etc are invitations for the writer to look deeper to recapture even more of the experience, to recapitulate (in a way)
Hey its late and i am being told off for typing late into the night. The first part of this thread is i feel unfinished. I will come back to clean up my mess tomorrow.