That hanging in midair thing is just right. God does provide solid ground. The cost is accepting some wacky shit. Otherwise we kind of muddle along and make a series of commitments that boil down to habits or gambles. (And God is either a habit or a gamble. See Pascal.)

I’m not seeing the part where this is over your head. So far you’re making complete sense to me.

The gamble I like is the one where we trust our senses. And that’s really crazy, which as an artist I’m sure you know. But flying mallets have a certain quality of persuasion.

A lot of this is over my head. I’m just a poor artist who enjoys intellectual wankery on blogs. That’s what they are for aren’t they?

What if there is no sense to be made? Some traditions go out of their way to not make sense.

Your project is really exciting. Just off the hip, a point of reference for me in thinking about environmental conditioning is Sahlins in Culture and Practical Reason, in which he clashes with vulgar materialism by pointing out that pretty quickly cultures become structurally interactive with environments to create complex conditioning systems that are not merely material and not entirely ideal. As I recall, what counts as food was a vivid example. Latour’s arguments about nature/culture hybrids, assemblages and networks are along the same lines. So your observations about the spontaneous emergence of such systems in the WMT and career transition industry are plausible and profound, especially in the way they get at change dynamics and even default/worldview transformation.

I’m curious how you’re leaning on whether the bran muffin is an analogy or a homology. Is there a condition that structures for bran muffins specifically, or is the conditioning for something more general that bran muffin happens to fit? There are actually a lot of ways to get potassium, just as Sahlins notes there are a lot of ways to get protein.

Thanks for the vote of confidence . My mind keeps circling back to the comment you made on the post about “choice”. I’ve been re-reading Bateson’s stuff on the Map-Territory split, and tying that in with some of my own thinking about the nature of mystical / magical systems, and I’m about 95% convinced that a fairly accurate description would be we have free choice” within the limits of the maps we operate with… 19 times out of 20; and then we get hit in he head with a flying ladle going “where did THAT come from?!?!?” .

Back when I was working on my MA, I spent a lot of time looking at the (so-called) Western Magical Tradition (it seems to have been cobbled together from about 1810 to the 1930’s). One thing that really impressed me was the technologies developed using “active symbols” as a way of “neutralizing” default reaction values. What really struck me was that the entire system was designed as a way to overcome cultural neuro-linguistic proramming. Pretty cool stuff, albeit insanely expensive.

While I was doing my PhD fieldwork, I was lucky enough to actually see one of these systems spontaneously develop in a non-religious setting (career transitions; hard to get more pragmatic than that ). What really got me was that the career transition industry was actually replicating, before my eyes, analogs of rituals, tools and symbol systems used by Western magicians, and they didn’t even know it!!!!! I knew I was on to something when I realized that they had even replicated the same “sacred foods” as a number of traditions (bran muffins, anyone?).

That really got me thinking about how our brains worked; especially the bran muffin thing. As it turned out, it wasn’t that hard to track down (high potassium level), but it started me thinking about how our “default” systems are built and structured and under what conditions that wold be selected for and against. That’s what I’m playing with now, trying to describe and define environmental conditions that can select for or against (or are neutral) to each of these meta-epistemologies, and any other ones I can discover.