I never looked closely into tarot and I didn’t know about the inverted thing. Based on my experience with psychotherapy and pedagogy, having a bunch of concepts paired with their near enemies sounds incredibly useful, actually.
A lot of people I talk to have very poor interoception. Due to limited variety in their theory of mind, they wind up believing that people giving energy descriptions are just imagining things and making a big deal out of random phenomena. But interoception is a trainable skill, and probably varies by two orders of magnitude in experienced strength. People who lean woo are generally towards the upper end of this scale and were drawn towards woo because it’s the only place they found people taking about their experiences in a way that makes any sense at all. Standard social polarizing effects then kick in to enhance those beliefs.
One thing that occurs across lots of woo is the assumption of discovery rather than creation. As mentioned above, I think one can train skills, explicitly or implicitly, that makes you more the sort of person these things apply to by conditioning the nervous system into certain expected patterns of activation. I see spiritual traditions as bundling claims about how it is best to organize a human nervous system, along with a bunch of free parameter claims about what those configurations and resultant experiences ‘mean.’
I enjoyed reading this.
I never looked closely into tarot and I didn’t know about the inverted thing. Based on my experience with psychotherapy and pedagogy, having a bunch of concepts paired with their near enemies sounds incredibly useful, actually.
A lot of people I talk to have very poor interoception. Due to limited variety in their theory of mind, they wind up believing that people giving energy descriptions are just imagining things and making a big deal out of random phenomena. But interoception is a trainable skill, and probably varies by two orders of magnitude in experienced strength. People who lean woo are generally towards the upper end of this scale and were drawn towards woo because it’s the only place they found people taking about their experiences in a way that makes any sense at all. Standard social polarizing effects then kick in to enhance those beliefs.
One thing that occurs across lots of woo is the assumption of discovery rather than creation. As mentioned above, I think one can train skills, explicitly or implicitly, that makes you more the sort of person these things apply to by conditioning the nervous system into certain expected patterns of activation. I see spiritual traditions as bundling claims about how it is best to organize a human nervous system, along with a bunch of free parameter claims about what those configurations and resultant experiences ‘mean.’