Crowley on Religious Experience

Can you please quote the source?

This seems like a well-sounding anecdote, which I appreciate. But I would like the facts.

Personally I doubt that Jobs learned only just that in India. I'm willing to find out just what he found there.

Dawkins and Dennett don't seem to understand, anyway.

Certainly. It's also a mistake, though, to treat actual QM as a serious matter because the general understanding of it is so flaky.

Quite a few "interpretations" of quantum mechanics, even those held by actual (and even great) scientists, are nonsense. Perhaps one of the reasons why we find it so hard to understand is that we take it too seriously.

Ten bucks say that sometimes in the future some religious person will use this post (or a followup) as evidence that rationalists worship Satan.

I believe this essay, despite being written by a mystic and involving mystical theories and little formal scientific evidence, is likely true and of value to rationalists.

But every crank or New Ager believes that their pet theory, despite being mystical and lacking scientific evidence, is likely true and of value to rationalists. So from the Inside View, I think the essay is valuable, but from the Outside View I'm forced to admit it might not be.

I chose to post it after people reacted positively to the comments I made based on it, but I still feel uncomfortable transgressing the general principle, hence the guilt.

"Enlightenment" and "nirvana" are probably ways of hacking the brain to enter certain states at will rather than because of external stimuli. I suspect as our understanding of the brain increases we will eventually have "meditation machines" that simulate this effect.

Stroke?

I assume you figured out Yvain meant this, but you may not have seen my warning: watch out for the quotation marks. Don't let Crowley lull you into ignoring them.

Also, the site I linked has the vast majority of Crowley's writings for free (in html form).

In the OP's post, they mention that they previously produced a number of quotes from said essay.

That link points to http://lesswrong.com/lw/57/the_sacred_mundane/3jj#comments where Yvain does extensively quote Crowley.

That done, it is trivial to run a Google search on substrings, like: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22In+the+course+of+our+concentration+we+noticed+that+the+contents%22

Google instantly turns up at least 3 citations to Crowley's Magick: Book 4.

There are some real risks, but also some sources of tremendous fear that turn out to be illusory. Here I'm not talking about fear like "I imagine something bad" but fear as in "I was paralyzed by heartstopping terror and couldn't go on".

The most fundamental point is that our bodies have layers and layers of homeostasis and self-organizing that act as safety nets. "You" don't have to hold yourself together or make sure you identify with your own body -- that's automatic. You probably could identify yourself as a hamburger with the right meditation techniques or drugs, but it wouldn't last. The lower levels would kick in and re-establish your survival oriented awareness of your body, etc.

On the other hand, undermining the stable mental organization we all identify as "me" produces extreme terror and disorientation. Henk Barendregt describes this in more detail than Crowley, with less rhetorical decoration. Again, however, the self-organizing processes in the body and brain regenerate some locally stable sense of "me" even if the previous "me" is completely disrupted. Apparently we can't function without some temporarily stable "me", but with enough practice we get used to dissolving the current "me" and letting a new one form.

The real risks from drugs are probably greater than the real risks from meditation, just because drugs can get you into states without developing commensurate skills and self-perceptions, so you may have a harder time regrouping. Persistent problems aren't due to e.g. identifying with arbitrary outside objects, but rather getting into some internal more or less stable state. Paranoia is an example of the kind of state I mean, but too vague to be really useful for analysis. Unfortunately I don't know of any good vocabulary for analyzing the set of states that are possible.

My sense is that getting "stuck" in in an inconvenient state via meditation is extremely rare. Much more common is that this sort of discipline expands the range of states accessible.

I cannot believe on a site supposedly devoted to rationality, you appear to be seriously discussing the English occultist, Qabalist, heroin addict, and "ceremonial sex magician." Are you seriously suggesting we begin reading Tarot cards, and invoking angels with Egyptian names with "magic wands?" Forgive me, but Yvain, are you recruiting for the OTO here? This is crazy talk. I mean, seriously deranged. You are NOT accurately describing who Crowley was or what he believed.

they cannot impart any novel knowledge apart from themselves

It's not knowledge, it's skill at self-control and self-awareness. And like most other skills (riding a bicycle, driving a car, etc.) you can't acquire them by reading about them or simply thinking that you already know how to do them.

One of the most pernicious biases of the human brain -- pernicious because it interferes with self-improvement -- is that your brain believes it can always intuitively predict its own responses to mental and physical actions that it has never actually taken.

This means that, even when a self-improvement book includes a technique that produces some useful, novel result, most people will never actually try it, versus just reading about it and imagining that they know what it would have been like if they'd tried it... and concluding that it wouldn't do anything!

And meditation is absolutely in this category. There's a world of difference between intellectually "knowing" how much dreck your brain is putting out, and the practical experience of sitting there and listening to it, day after day, and realizing just how utterly stupid you are... it's also an active discouragement from listening to your own crap the rest of the day, too.

We could also get into health benefits, improved concentration, and all that sort of thing. From personal experience back when I was regularly attending the Dallas Zen center, it also makes you calmer, friendlier, and more confident, although alas those effects are not permanent if you stop. It's sort of more like exercise that way, I think.

Anyway, enlightenment is hardly a requirement for doing meditation, and Zen masters routinely discourage students from paying attention to any exotic or "spiritual" experiences they may have, precisely because the practice is an exercise, not merely a way of getting to some particular destination.

It might not provide a lot of knowledge to the subject who practices mysticism. It does provide the best experience in his or her life.

For the time being, this might not provide a lot of value in the grand scheme of things. However, as we advance into posthumanisty, we do want to explore the state-space of possible conscious experiences in a systematic way so we can design ourselves in such a way that we inhabit the best regions of conscious experience. Mysticistical practice, therefore, has a tremendous long term potentintial; having practicioners and scientists interested is crucial if we are indeed to find out more about these states of consciousness.

I think, after all, there is a very pertinent parallel in the community of lesswrong: it is called fun theory. The fact that mystical experiences can be so outsandingly great and sublime beyond words is a very strong indicator that we will never run out of fun.

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Accepting that I am just guessing and don't have any empirical evidence, I do see a worthwhile overlap between Buddhist techniques and rationalist aspirations.

On Hulver's scoop site I offer a definition of enlightenment.

My apologia for my faith also suggests a large overlap.

For this comment I'll try to give a conrete example. I've noticed that when I ask for advice I have a tendency to accept it if it agrees with what I want to do anyway, and to reject if it warns against what I want ot do. That is pretty useless. Why ask for advice if one is going to reject any that is contrary to ones original plan?

I'm trying to discipline myself to decide in advance whether I really trust the opinion of the person I'm asking, and if I do ask for advice, taking it without demur. This is hard. I think it is hard because my main motivation for asking for advice is so that I can feel good about plans that I have devised that may be foolish. That uncomfortable feeling, that I want to feel better about my planned course of action, is a pretty strong hint that I should abandon the plan if my chosen advisor is reluctant to endorse it.

Well, that is all very good in theory, but how do I follow through? What I hope to gain from meditation techniques such as the Metta-Bhavana is a degree of unconditional happiness. Strangely it is not the happiness that I'm after. What I really what is to sate the gnawing emotional need for happiness that I blame for biasing my judgement.

If I were happy I could straightforwardly ask a friend for advice and take it. I would be free of the nonsense of rejecting advice to meet subconscious emotional needs. How is this working out? I had a handful of successes; it is not a complete failure. Also it fits with having a sense that more is possible and striving for it.

Regardless of value, the experiences Crowley reports are very far from a free lunch -- they take a lot of time, effort, and careful arrangement.

Don't think of them as knowledge, think of them as skills -- like learning to read or do back of the envelope calculations. They enable certain ways of acquiring or using knowledge. We don't know that the knowledge is at all unique to the mode.

Practice

Actually, we lose whenever we think the abbreviated map we have is significantly closer to the territory than it actually is, because then we have less motivation to look at the territory.

One reason that marketers sometimes make a point of listing all the things their product is not, is specifically to overcome people's default setting of "I already know what that is" and "A friend of mine already tried something vaguely resembling that and it didn't work".

So, attempting to summarize difficult-to-accurately-summarize things isn't necessarily doing anyone a service.

The Zen center I sat at for a while when I lived in Dallas, didn't do any proselytizing that I noticed. As I understand is the general practice, if you tell the Roshi what purpose you're meditating for, he'll assign you an appropriate practice. If you're seeking "bompu Zen" -- i.e., purely material benefits like concentration and willpower enhancement, you'll generally be assigned a practice like counting your breaths. Enlightenment seekers are more likely to be assigned following the breath, a koan, or shikan-taza.

the emphasis is entirely on posture, with nothing that the practitioner is supposed to think or do

What do you mean? If you're concentrating on, for example, counting the breath, then that is something you're supposed to think/do. From what I understand of zazen - which comes mostly from the Three Pillars of Zen - good posture helps, but it isn't the main point.

As to the benefits to someone interested in thinking clearly, one of the things I find worth mentioning is that it showed me something about the way my mind works. Until I tried zazen I had no real idea of how ridiculously hard it is to actually focus on something I've chosen to focus on. (Crowley writes well about that problem, too, but actually trying it is different than reading about it). Catching the distracting thoughts "in real time", as they arise, was interesting and instructive.

There's a certain persistence I learned from this, the ability to avoid frustration and refocus on a goal time and time again despite distraction or temporary failure. When you are supposed to be following (=paying attention to) your breathing, and you catch yourself thinking about something else, then you're prone to be dismayed or angry or otherwise generate more thoughts and emotions. This makes it even harder to refocus. Eventually though you learn to respond -only- by returning your attention where you meant it to be, without wasting unnecessary thought/energy on the fact of having been distracted. This is a useful skill.

what method are you using to ''correct for such a bias''? how do you ''correct'' your associational networks or the preferences that define who you are?

the only method that comes to mind is perspective-shifting or play-acting. trying to imitate the thoughts and (verbal) behaviors of someone who's attracted to spiritual ideas like ''nirvana'' and ''enlightenment'' might give you an appreciation for values that you do not typically use to define yourself.

I think this is it:

http://hermetic.com/crowley/book-4/aba1.html

As has been previously pointed out.