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About six months ago I got a random message on reddit in reply to a comment I'd posted in some metaphysical thread somewhere. The messenger was the creator of this work: https://t.co/dmibqiYDof
I can't tell you how important this was for me. A lot of people may look at that and see incoherent ramblings - I know, because I've tried to share it with various people and nobody else really sees what I see in it. But what I see is sort of mind-blowing to me.
This person has taken some of the same ideas that I was working with in tech and pulled them out entirely into philosophy. The concept of self-organizing processes capable of generating arbitrary state at query time? That's not a database feature, that's process metaphysics!
Reading this stuff let me recontextualize a lot of my own reasoning, and has in fact provided some of the tools that I needed in order to discover connections between ideas that I had no idea were connected. All of this is preamble, though, because I want to credit them.
I want to talk about Spirit. We talk about spirituality, we talk about the spirit world, we talk about spiritual people, we have this general sense that we need spiritual health in addition to physical health and mental health, right? But like, what IS spirit? Spirit is stories.
This concept is really, really alien to anyone who grew up within the literalist western religious tradition, where spirit is implicitly defined as something "more real" than physical reality. Your spirit is the _essential_ part of who you are, it transcends your body, etc, yeah?
I think we got that wrong. (Interestingly, I think we got it wrong in a way that consolidated a lot of power in the hands of the people telling us how to think about it. Huh, how about that.) Your spirit isn't contained by your body - it's generated from your lived experience.
Your spirit is the story you tell yourself about who you are. Western tradition is right in that your spirit is more deeply linked to your sense of identity than your flesh is - but they're wrong in assuming that the spirit is somehow external. It's a subprocess of your flesh.
You can absolutely be haunted by ghosts - we call this trauma. The haunting changes the nature of the stories you're capable of telling yourself about yourself and about the world around you. Trauma is literally a narrative disorder.
Places can absolutely be haunted. You ever go to the Air Force Museum in Ohio? They've got the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on display. You're not supposed to, but you can touch it. I did. And it cursed me - my story was entwined with its story for a while.
Would touching a random old airplane have caused me any kind of distress? No. What fucked me up was knowing that I'd touched a device used to kill countless innocent people. A part of the plane's story became a part of my story.
The "Spirit World" comes up often in various myths and folktales all over the planet. What is it? It's the narrative canon. It's the set of stories that determine how a society talks about the world. We can reason about these things: https://t.co/laOdI5tcQs
Quick thread on coincidences, synchronicity and magic. I think it was Gordon White who defined magical practice as working to maximize the number of meaningful coincidences in life. Coincidences are powerful, in a way that's hard to understand at first.
The Spirit World is utterly unconcerned with the laws of physics, because they don't apply there unless they're narratively useful. Instead, the Spirit World is defined by laws of narrative. We still get things like cause and effect, attraction, etc. But they're narrative.
"If you're too proud, the Gods will bring you down." "If you are unkind to strangers then you will reap divine retribution." "If you make a sacrifice you will receive a blessing." "If you keep these laws you will earn your divinity's love." "If you sin you will go to hell."
None of these are "scientific" claims, and yet they're clear and unambiguous as narrative constructs. This matters because the human experience is _fundamentally narrative_. We have to come up with stories about our selves and our world that make sense to us. We can't not.
When the ancient greeks talked about Apollo, were they talking about him the way fundamentalist christians talk about Jesus? I think maybe no, at least not all of them. They talked about him the way we talk about Superman. It's not an accident - they're the same sort of entity.
The fact that so many ancient mythological gods were gods "of" something speaks volumes about their primary function - these are _stories_ our forebears told each other to make sense of lightning and thunder, or the seasons, or love. The spiritual is grounded in the narrative.
Even our current religions work exactly the same way. Jesus was a radical because he had the audacity to preach a fundamentally different narrative than what came before. Judaism, as practiced by many, is about using stories to focus attention in ways that help the world.
This is a bad rambling, unfortunately, and I obviously need to go back and build a more nuanced, more structured case explicating all of this. But I hope I've been able to communicate a bit, in this thread, about why the Spiritual and the Narrative are the same.
So by all means, pray to your favorite video game characters. Gather with friends to make myths out of the memories you share by retelling them in some ritualized way. Some days in the calendar remind you of certain stories - make them personal holidays, or mourning days!
Spiritual Health is Narrative Health, and spiritual freedom comes from understanding that only you can decide which stories you tell, which stories you accept, and which stories you stand up and challenge. Ceding that authority, whether to churches or corporations, is a loss.
(btw "faith" in this context is directly relevant. Faith is the choice to accept a given narrative/spirit. That's all.) https://t.co/I6sfGOJUvV
You know that Voodoo concept of being "ridden by a Loa"? How is that different from allowing your behavior to be informed entirely by the narrative identity you associate with that being? This doesn't make it any less real! But these mechanics exist and can be reasoned about!
"Narrative" is tricky to reason about until you understand the nature of "meaning", too - there's a whole fractal system here. So I've written this up, too, as a companion piece to this thread: https://t.co/PJkwQR1JVf
What the hell, let's do one more thread today. I want to talk about the concept of "meaning". What is meaning? What _is_ semantics? How does it work? Is meaning a meaningful idea, or an abstract term around a vaguely defined space? I have an opinion about this.