Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just on midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me and the teachers who influenced them in turn. Last week's honoree, Violet Firth Evans aka Dion Fortune, had the great advantage of coming of age when the British occult community was close to its apogee, and she had plenty of teachers. Some of them, such as Moina Mathers, have already appeared here; some of them, such as Maiya Tranchell Hayes, apparently didn't leave any photographs behind -- but there are several others, and this is one of them: Frederick Bligh Bond, who was the official church archeologist at the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey between the two world wars, and discovered a whole series of lost features by digs that just happened to go to the right place. Then it turned out that there was no "just happened" about it; he was using spiritualistic methods to talk to the spirits of long-dead monks, who told him where to dig. The church threw a fit and dismissed him, but he went on to publish several volumes about his experiences, at least one of which can be downloaded for free (here). Dion Fortune studied with him for a while and also did trance work with him; her connection with Glastonbury continued to the end of her life, and in fact she's buried there.

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Temple technology update

[(Anonymous)]

The observability at the moment appears to be detector pendulums, which are in effect little dipole motors, albeit running off a force we haven't even begun to understand.

In terms of quantum physics that wasn't the direction I was going or would suggest going, not the least because no one understands it, let alone me.

I would be going back to the idea of an aether, which has never really gone away, it's just been buried in the concept of spacetime and vacuum free energy. It also got lost in imaginary numbers when Maxwells equations were reformulated as vectors. Physically, it's still there, and I think the Aharanov Bohm effect comes the closest to a outlining what my research says might be happening with these "shape waves". But that's not a mechanism or explanation, it's a word to describe anomalous spooky action at a distance.

Richard Feynman apparently said that he wished he'd learned electromagnetism as potentials, rather than a field. That potential of course has to be measured against a background potential, and it's that background potential I think is back to ye olde ether.

Re: Temple technology update

[(Anonymous)]

Huh. I guess I don't have much advice about that, since I don't think of things in a way where there's really a gap that can be wedged open to fit an idea of aether. My opinions about how space carries phenomena are just the (common) idea that maybe the Kaluza-Klein gimmick that makes electromagnetism a purely "geometric" phenomenon like gravity will probably turn out to generalize further so that all forces will prove to be geometric, and the (novice) idea that it's kind of troubling that the easiest way to learn quantum mechanics involves presupposing space-like slices even though the geometry you're slicing up is different for different parts of the wavefunction with different mass distributions, and the (perhaps overly clever semi-informed dilettante) idea that Wolfram and Goraud don't seem to be doing anything wrong and they might have a fundamental correct reformulation of how we should be conceiving of the relation between spacetime, quantum possibility, and mass-energy density. (For what it's worth, the Wolfram-Goraud paradigm is slightly less confusing than quantum mechanics the way it's normally taught: there aren't any complex numbers, just cumulative curvatures between nearby paths in branching-space.)

I don't have a physical intuition for why the Aharonov-Bohm effect would have to happen (other than following a little of the discussion of monodromy in the Wikipedia article), so I guess I'm not qualified to have a position on what it means about the idea of aether.

I guess I was saying that the meaning of "physics" versus "paraphysics" in this context is kind of awkward. Most of physics proceeds as a tower of in-principle deductions from either the Standard Model or general relativity (depending on the regime, with contradictions between the two at high energies), but the in-principle deductions don't seem to leave space for something like a higher force that blends with electromagnetism, nor does the whole thing easily leave room for adding simple new forces that would produce such observations. That's what Sean Carroll is arguing in the paper, about why certain quantum-mechanical calculations and experimental findings would seem to to pin down a lot of higher-level phenomenology. Results that bypass all of that, without implying any particular direction to try generalizing the Standard Model or general relativity, are sort of automatically "paraphysical" in one sense, especially if they involve seemingly mentalistic qualities rather than quantities or simple geometric entities.

But maybe JMG was making a different distinction between "physical" and "paraphysical". A more commonsense distinction would be that a phenomenon is "physical" if you generally get the same predictable third-party-observable result from the same experimental setup, and the setup and result take the form of something impersonal like the motions of an object or a pattern of light or heat or the composition of a material, and there's an understandable mechanism-like relationship passing through an understandable region of spacetime (or, if it's a quantum thing, at least an understandable region of possibility-space). And a phenomenon is "paraphysical" if the effect necessarily involves some kind of intermediating intelligence (not plausibly built from known matter cleverly organized), or is inherently related to percieved meaningfulnesses and synchronicities, or doesn't particularly relate to any spatially or temporally mediated mechanism (known or discoverable).

Huh. I guess the Wikipedia page on Kaluza-Klein theory mentions that you can get extra fields if you relax the "cylinder condition" that makes the extra geometric dimension not have hard-to-calculate consequences beyond electromagnetism, the condition they usually enforce by supposing the extra dimension is curled down to a 23-Planck-length-radius circle. That's one potential direction for generalization. And it does seem like the sort of thing that would produce phenomena that would fit into some of the same physical scenarios as electromagnetism...

Apparently one Paul Wesson has worked out some things about those fields. I don't know how Wesson's conclusions interact with the implications of Carroll's argument.