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Mindhacking without dogma?

  • Feb. 7th, 2007 at 2:40 AM
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Are there any books that cover meditation and self-editing techniques, but without a bunch of unsupported woo or religious dogma?

I find it fairly sad / annoying that it's so bound up with both - either the utter bullshit (sorry, "unproven and unsupported speculation") about crystals and whatnot, or the clearly religious dogma about past lives, rebirth, karma, Buddha, God / 'holy spirit', etc.

For that matter, I find that most things that are attributed to "ki" or equivalents seem to fail the Ockham test; it's really unnecessary to postulate such a thing, since you can explain all related phenomena as either unsupported / confabulatory, synaesthesis of subtle (5-sense) perceptions like heat and smell, or various known physiological effects.

The problem here is that almost everyone conflates the real / supported / core elements and the unreal / unsupported / dogmatic ones, and:
a) people who are logical, or who don't want to be enmeshed in various religious beliefs that may conflict with their existing ones, find meditation and related techniques repulsive; and
b) people who aren't very logical, and learn meditation, make huge false attributions, are easily cult-ified, and easily springboard from the real to the unreal
... and without separating what's true from what's false, neither side can make good, convincing, or accurate arguments.

So I wonder if people have actually tried to write a clear, well-supported, non-dogmatic, non-single-technique (e.g. TM...), non-indoctrinating (e.g. 'the Holy Guy sayz...') book on the subject? Anyone tried and succeeded?

If not, maybe I should try someday.... flooded market, though, so it'd have to be seriously damn good to succeed. Not sure I could pull that off.

Comments

[info]jaeelle wrote:
Feb. 7th, 2007 11:29 am (UTC)
I'm an editor for a webzine dedicated to magicians. That kind of topic would be an article we'd love to have. If you ever got the urge to write an essay on the topic, send it to us, would you? The zine is here:

www.rendingtheveil.com
[info]saizai wrote:
Feb. 7th, 2007 01:26 pm (UTC)
I'm not going to submit something separately to you.

However, if you see something that I post that you'd like to republish elsewhere (eg on your zine), tell me so and we'll see about it.

I'm planning on eventually expanding the post about my meditation techniques...
[info]trinsf wrote:
Feb. 7th, 2007 11:49 am (UTC)
Well, I think of NLP as in part "self-editing", and it doesn't seem particularly dogmatic, except in a sort of meta-dogma way.
[info]ogam wrote:
Feb. 7th, 2007 03:15 pm (UTC)
Sai,

Perhaps Daniel Helminiak's Meditation Without Myth: What I Wish They'd Taught Me in Church About Prayer, Meditation, and the Quest for Peace.

Less about meditation per se but which you might find interesting are David Batchelor's Buddhism Without Belief and his Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism.

I hope this helps.
[info]saizai wrote:
Feb. 7th, 2007 11:21 pm (UTC)
Thanks for the recommendations. Interesting - but from the reviews, they don't seem to be quite what I'm looking for. The first one seems to be mostly meta, with very little about technique; the latter two are about one particular theology and extracting the less theological aspects from it. They may however still be interesting reads.

What I would like is a simple, practical, and comprehensive manual of techniques and effects, that is theologically neutral and doesn't make any unsupported claims.

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[info]saizai
Sai Emrys

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