You are now entering the HARMONIC DOOR....

Oh hay, I'd forgotten about this. A shame really - I don't actually think very often, I just dull myself with computer and shit. Bleh.

I read Slaughterhouse 5 recently, a good book which I recommend. It got me into a nice weird slo-mo state where I was considering things quite strangely. A good idea I got out of it was, to quote from my notebook; "A circle needs no explanation." It is a very nice figure, the circle, and in my mind resolves the big question of where we came from. We have simply come from ourselves somehow. But I went over that in my last post, so anyway.

Two other random things to say - one, I think my mind has been rather dulled by computer addiction and anti-depressants. Any suggestions for some spiritual activities I could do to get back to myself?

Two; I'd probably be counted as otherkin. This means, if you were to look it up on Google, that I consider myself to have a spirit of some mythical creature, and possibly be reincarnated from one. But that's not it, or I would have just let you look it up. Really it's just a figment of my imagination, but one that helps define my sense of self. Quite stupid, but it's not hurting anybody or impairing my knowledge, so why not?

But why am I mentioning this exactly? It's a nice segue (do you pronounce that seeg or segway?) into the ramble for today - subjectivity. Otherkin are a prime example of this because their whole belief is a completely subjective experience - it happens within their own heads, and thus is rather hard for others to prove or disprove. Obviously people will respond to such a subjective absurdity with disbelief; often the people having the experience as well. When it comes up with something that cannot be proved or disproved, you just have to go with the intuitive validity or not of it.

But that's not going anywhere. I've just thought of a new, random point anyway; magic. Magic, and its more common counterpart in astral projection, seem to be among the most subjective of experiences. This pretty much kills them in a scientist's eyes - when it's all based on feelings, intuition, dreams and visions, then there's nothing to test; nothing to make it more than self-delusion. But this dismissal is slightly unfair. Perhaps magic and the like is only ever a subjective thing, to be done within your own sphere; without experimentation we cannot know, and scientists won't go near it, failing the test as it does.

So basically we need more scientists performing magic. We need them to do the subjective things, and take them apart, looking for other explanations even as they continue. If we find those explanations then we know why it's a fraud, instead of dismissing it out of hand; and if we don't we may find something interesting.

This conclusion can apply to your life too. Don't dismiss things out of hand because they seem ridiculous from your perspective; try them, get immersed in them, and then dismiss them again, this time from an informed viewpoint.

And a shout-out to my first commentator, bob001 (very generic name!) and Ramses IV, a watcher on the XKCD forums. That's one of the two places this is linked, along with DreamViews. I should link it a bit more...