[CLIP
> > One Hermetic Order source [Phillip & Dennings(?), "Creative
> >Visualization"] openly states that any 'divination method' can be
> >reverse-engineered into a active-alteration method (of equally dubious
> >verifiability....) I am reminded of two things:
>
> Denning & Phillips, BTW, were never connected with the Golden Dawn --
> they were members of a Greek-based group called the Aurum Solis (the G. D.
> was primarily Egyptian). The methods were only superficially similar, and
> this only in two rituals that I have seen (one being the "Wards of
> Adamant," which bears resemblance to the G. D.'s "Lesser Banishing Ritual
> of the Pentagram.")
Thanks.
> > Larry Niven's comment that (paraphrase) "If magic and psi powers
> exist,
> >they're weak and almost useless. Otherwise, we'd be using them in place
> of
> >technology."
>
> Technology must be tested, and the more intricate (ahnd effective) the
> technology, the more training is required to use it (as a rule of thumb).
> Most magicians and psychics are people who do no hard research, don't
> practice their work other than reading, and are generally malcontents (a
> criminal record usually comes along with an occult record). These are
> _hardly_ trained individuals... which goes right back to my point about new
> tests.
There may be an aversion to hard research. Watching my Tai Chi
instructor go into social shock as I explained to him a formal
"metaspell" from which the one in the book he had loaned me for 24 hours
could be derived was impressive. There was also the time I wrote up how
[comparing normal walking to controlling the center of gravity]
inefficient walking could cost about 0.1 as much power [in glucose, etc.] as
the brain itself uses. He liked the RESULT, but the methods were a
little extreme--raw computation.
Of course, Tai Chi is an extremely exoteric martial art, and one of the
slowest to learn. It may not be closely related to the conventional occult.
> Toward the accumulation of useful information,
> Noctem
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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
/
/ Kenneth Boyd
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