This article is a good argument for certain kinds of writers being modern spell-casters, able to conjure attention out of a little over a hundred paragraphs of incantations.
You could make the same argument for a huge amount of human creative and technical endeavors. Many of the things humans do in general are amazing, and even magical when you step back and really consider the amount of cumulative knowledge and technique that go into them. The simplest story is backed by a lifetime of personal experience, generations of family experience, pools of cultural context, and thousands of years of language development.
Often, as a programmer, the things that I do strike me as profound and mystical. I make incantations that affect the physical world around me. It quite is real world wizardry.
Interesting article, but I found the ending unsatisfactory. Like the author, I went in wanting my perceptions to be challenged and my beliefs to be undermined, but after it all, I'm as steadfastly atheist and nonspiritual as ever. I was hoping for something more than vague, soft divination, and pondering about the hypothetical nature of demons in our world.
This article was fairly good, all things considered, but you need some background in order to get the most out of it. The kind of magic King does not eventually perform (goetic magic) falls under what's called "ceremonial magic". Key to this sort of magic is time/resource-consuming preparatory work (which besides constructing expensive seals, may include fasting / ritual cleansing).
When King says at the end, "the key unlocks the door but you are the one who has to walk through it", he's partly referring to the preparatory but also imprinting process. The fact that one has to spend a lot of precious personal time and money (if one follows the directions of the grimoire to the letter) means that one becomes invested in the process with many changes happening in the psychological realm. Think of the whole preparatory process as ritual, acting it out strengthens and imprints the work. Or stated another way, one is constructing a new model of reality and simultaneously imprinting it.
When the time for the actual conjuration comes, which could be years after one first sets foot upon the path, the mind has been adequatly prepared to open the doors to the unconscious. Again, King seems to possess an understanding of this when he talks about the brain being the medium for the work. So, ultimately one can say that there's nothing supernatural here and people who have stayed at the supernatural level are either charlatans or deluded fools.
There's a good movie one can watch about ceremonial magic, called A Dark Song. Even though it does have some elements that can be superficially described as supernatural, it's -smartly- playing with the interpretation and does not rigidly impose a supernatural causality.
That sounds supremely fascinating. I love the idea of the blending of psychology with the supernatural, and the blurring of the lines between. I'll have to check out that movie, thank you for the recommendation.
It won't be what you expect to change your worldview that will actually do it. Actually it will be unlikely to be something you read. It's also probably not even going to be seeing a ghost or something that makes you drop an atheistic, nonspiritual worldview.
I would say that the more likely route into such a thing will be a profoundly shifting personal experience. For example, some kind of psychedelic experience (although for some it is just "fun" and doesn't trigger any spirituality), or more commonly, immense personal suffering and a desire to escape from it.
The shift from atheist and nonspiritual, to religious or spiritual is a dramatic shift. It's unlikely to be pleasant or comfortable. For me, it only developed as a coping mechanism because I was unable to accept the world from a nonspiritual point of view. As such, it probably isn't something you should desire.
> For me, it only developed as a coping mechanism because I was unable to accept the world from a nonspiritual point of view.
Yeah, I found that after some point, after I realized that a strict linguistic (formal) outlook was rigid and unflexible and started to relax about it, that I started to reach into a wider pool of concepts to allow me to make sense of the world.
Also accepting that some beliefs which are not testable by science can still be judged in terms of what do they do for me; do they make me feel good? or bad? do they allow me to engage in actions with postivie outcomes? and so on...
There is also a sense in which some people have a strong belief in some ephemeral "the Science" and only want to make decisions based on that. For example, as you say something might make you feel better, but they entirely reject it and want nothing to do with it because it hasn't been "scientifically proven" yet. Obviously science is a very powerful tool (I'm a physicist myself), but we shouldn't expect every corner of our life to need to be accounted for by it to live properly. It has become a new kind of religion for some people, and they don't even realise it.
The article in question (quite short), has this passage, which reminded me of your comment here:
>> Positivist dispositions can lead to the acceptance of claims because they have a scientific form, not because they are grounded in robust evidence and sound argument.
> I think what they are saying is that empiricism is not robust. Yeah, sure, facts are great, and all. But it’s easy to cherry-pick facts and find whatever conclusion you want. I guess if you only follow the branches that you like, you can convince yourself that reality is whatever you want it to be.
> I think that’s a fair point. In my opinion, the majority of non-fiction books are an exercise in finding some exciting-sounding thesis and then cobbling together random scraps of evidence to support it.
Well it's very easy to explain it using the same idea that for me is a very spiritual idea: your senses lie to you about the state of the world. But, they also do not think to extend that to their sober perception of physical reality. There is an assumption that our sober perception is completely accurate.
My impression has been that such people are precisely assuming that their sober perception is not reliable, and that's how they discount all reports and even personal experiences of the supernatural.
As one who's had a few encounters with what I'd historically call God and is currently unsure what exactly happened in those situations, I can empathize with their perspective, even if it's not the explanation I'm leaning towards.
I think that they have no other option than to assume that human observations are at least reliable enough to work with, even if sometimes they go a little crazy.
I think that's actually why they focus on reproducibility - that's their tool for reaching something approximating a consensus reality in the face of experiential subjectivity, human unreliability, and the strong limits on individual human knowledge.
Me, I think that reproducibility is really useful, but I'm not so willing to say that if it's not reliably reproducible it must be coincidence or delusion.
I didn't go in wanting my atheism to be shattered, just challenged. I enjoy being challenged, and I really enjoy demonology as well.
On a simple level, I was hoping for something more profound, entertaining, or interesting on some level. In all, the article was a prologue in somebody's journey of discovery where nothing really actually happened, spiritual or otherwise.
Atheism/secular materialism is usually pretty strong, it often permeates every perception to a basic level. Have you found something that has ever challenged it before? I've never seen a difference between a shattering of secularism and a challenge of it. It seems to be contingent on the latter not having happened. As soon as there is a crack in the foundation of secularism, the whole thing tumbles. That's why almost all secularists say they've never had a spiritual experience, or a challenge to it.
I've never found something as neat and easy as a singular event or story that challenges it. I've felt it challenged by the profound feeling of human connection, though. The very rare chance meeting with my wife that set up the rest of my life and led to my children existing, the feeling of absolute selfless love for other human beings. All of my life as it exists hinges on the difference in actions of maybe a couple of seconds. If I had done things one or two seconds earlier or later, my life as I know it and who I am entirely would be completely different.
Nonetheless, I am atheist, but if there's one thing that challenges that regularly, it's the profoundly spiritual experience of powerful love.
I'm not an atheist by choice, or because I've resolved to be, it's just the only thing that truly makes sense to me. The beautiful, magical things in life are more beautiful and magical to me if they just exist for their own sake. "fate", "destiny", and "a greater power" feel to me like cheapening the beautiful, profound, steady nature of reality. I'm open to other ideas, and I love entertaining the thoughts, though. I'm a regular reader of theology, because it all fascinates me.
Generally spiritual traditions aren't concerned with the beautiful or magical parts of life though, but rather the darker and bleaker parts, such as suffering or the nature of life and death. I also wouldn't call love a spiritual experience in any way, it's just a normal experience like any other. Spiritual experiences are at a much deeper level than something like love. It is often more like waking up and seeing all of reality from the outside
