Discussion split off from ‘Gondolin music’

[Lúthien]

Those posts will haunt me forever! :sorry:

I don’t think it’s that dramatic


Sorry, I haven’t had time yet to move things around. Will do as soon as I have the opportunity.

[Mildir]

Those posts will haunt me forever! :sorry:

I don’t think it’s that dramatic

In fact, I was being ironic...

Sorry, I haven’t had time yet to move things around. Will do as soon as I have the opportunity.

I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank you for taking the time to create the subforum: your initiative was rather unexpected, but I seem to understand it was the result of the coexistence of two wishes: saving my contributions and saving other people's threads from the parenthetic presence of those contributions.
I'm grateful for both these intentions.
I'm writing a sort of report (about real facts, this time), which I would like to become a thread of the new subforum, it's just taking time, but I'll post it sooner or later...
I hope you'll find it interesting.

[Lúthien]

Everything I say in the above message is not factual, but unverified personal gnosis.

It lies in my heart and no one has to believe that anything of it is real.

Oh, it’s not about “real or not”; it is about whether or not it’s (claimed to be) factual (scientifically, objectively falsifiable).

I admit that “factual” is often considered to be a synonym of “real”, so the terminology can be confusing.

For some reason what you wrote came across as claiming to be factual and that’s hard to accept because, well, then you’d be presenting things as facts that are either impossible to verify / falsify, or that wouldn’t hold when verified.

In the gnostic point of view facts aren’t the only truths or even the most important truths.

In that sense, I’m more than willing to accept your account as true - indeed with the designation “unverified personal gnosis”. That doesn’t mean that it’s worth less than “verified gnosis”, but just that it is new and possibly quite unique.

By the way, though Dave has talked about the different sorts of gnosis (verified / unverified), it’s a real long time ago (around the time I had just become a forum member) and we hardly ever used the terms since then. I can’t explain how to arrive at “verified” gnosis at all, but maybe Dave can say something about that or point to a good source?

Also, I'm sorry if my message vexed someone (and you, Lúthien).
I was happy I had sent it, because it contains something I've been wanting to share with you since I began to write in this forum.
I hope you'll be able to understand that I'm not trying to say that what I say is truer than what you (readers) believe or see as true.

No worries. I’d be glad if you can find a good modus operandi.

[Lúthien]

In fact, I was being ironic...

Ah, that explains - I often don’t get irony ...

I'd like to take this opportunity (...)

No need to thank me ... I’d be happy if it works out. It’s sometimes hard to figure out what’s the best thing to do, with people having different temperaments and backgrounds sharing a forum

I'm writing a sort of report (about real facts, this time), which I would like to become a thread of the new subforum, it's just taking time, but I'll post it sooner or later...
I hope you'll find it interesting.

I hope so too

[Meneldur Olvarion]

[...] But, ever since I started to observe scientists, they have seemed to me to be more committed to dividing things into possible and not possible

The technical term for that is greedy reductionism. It's a significant problem in the Modern world. You see, the main problem is that many, including likely many scientists, are rather on unsound mental ground about what science really is (a knowledge acquisition system for data upon which one is able to define a useful metric). So greedy reductionism tends to rear its ugly head rather frequently. See, I lean more towards pure mathematics rather than Physics, et al, so it is easy for me to see these as logical errors, and since I'm also a shaman, I detect them as errors in that cognitive mode also.

I just coined a word for this sort of unified perception in a reply to Luthien, n-furcation [link]. Luthien in general is better at explaining concepts such as gnosis than I am, as she is better able to convey essences than I. My replies are rather heavily encoded in my customary thought-forms, which are rather hard to translate to others, especially to the "Joe Sixpacks" of the world, as I never was one of those peepz, and the older I get the further I move from their customary mode of thought (and the less I care to do so also: Tygers are not hateful, but we are hostile by default (unless we meet a kindly humanoid, of course, but they are somewhat rare these days)).

[Lúthien]

To add to that: what really never ceases to amaze me is the irresistible need that people have to explain things that need no explanation.

I find this especially jarring in just about anything that was ever written about Tolkien. Even people whom I have in very high regard in all sorts of ways have this odd urge to want to figure out on what “real person” the figure of Sauron was inspired by (Douglas Haig, the controversial commander of the British army during WW1), whether or not the Ring is related to Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen and, for crying out loud, if Luthien escape trick by letting her hair grow means that she’s “just” Rapunzel reimagined.

What annoys me to no end in these analyses is mostly the hardly veiled smugness. As if the person writing it can’t stand to leave something unexplained, torn apart, dissected, labelled and identified.

Tolkien actually wrote about this himself. There’s a short allegory in “The Monster and the Critics” where he describes an old man who inherited a field that included an old stone hall. From the stones he built a new house and a tower. When he died his friends just couldn’t stand that they didn’t get why he built that silly tower, and they eventually pulled it down to examine the stones, and were pleased to discover ancient scribbles on the stones that allowed them to figure out where the stones first came from.

But what they never learnt is that the old man had built the tower simply because from the top of it, he had been able to see the sea.

That’s exactly what all those Tolkien-analysts do. Instead of participating in the actual experience which would allow them to see the sea, they stupidly tear the tower down and think they are smart when they find out what the scribbles on the stones tell them.

And in doing that they completely miss what it was about.

[Meneldur Olvarion]

What annoys me to no end in these analyses is mostly the hardly veiled smugness. As if the person writing it can’t stand to leave something unexplained, torn apart, dissected, labelled and identified.

Yeah, that gets me rather riled as well: peepz like that tend to think that everything is some sort of intricate puzzle that when exposed to their (they believe) vast intellects will quickly crumble to show the 'true' sources. And you know that once you've explained a thing, why then you've essentially captured it and now can perform whatever "death by vivisection" procedures you want upon it.

If they only knew that their belief it that regard is pure delusion, it might go some way towards setting them straight (although in the Trumpian 'post-Truth' world, I doubt it). Or to use that famous Sigmund Freud quote, "sometimes a cigar is really just a cigar."

I love JRRT's tower analogy, BTW, especially the last line, "But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea." There's a rather profound n-furcation right there: when viewed from the factual side, it an analogy; but when viewed from the Imaginal, it generates multiple imaginary vistas (at least it does for me as a visual thinker) some of which will be automatically selected according to one's mythological preferences to create the start of a guided meditation, essentially. And that can lead anywhere...

[Lúthien]

If they only knew that their belief it that regard is pure delusion, it might go some way towards setting them straight (although in the Trumpian 'post-Truth' world, I doubt it). Or to use that famous Sigmund Freud quote, "sometimes a cigar is really just a cigar."

I get your point of course, but I would rather say that “their belief is very limited by the notion that fact == truth”, and that therefore the only truth they get outbid that is a shovel full of uninteresting little facts that don’t have anything to do with the imaginative power of the story.
The method works when doing chemistry or physics, but not on this area

I love JRRT's tower analogy, BTW, especially the last line, "But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea." There's a rather profound n-furcation right there: when viewed from the factual side, it an analogy; but when viewed from the Imaginal, it generates multiple imaginary vistas (at least it does for me as a visual thinker) some of which will be automatically selected according to one's mythological preferences to create the start of a guided meditation, essentially. And that can lead anywhere...

Exactly, yes!

[Meneldur Olvarion]

[...] By the way, though Dave has talked about the different sorts of gnosis (verified / unverified), it’s a real long time ago (around the time I had just become a forum member) and we hardly ever used the terms since then. I can’t explain how to arrive at “verified” gnosis at all, but maybe Dave can say something about that or point to a good source?

I decided to take this up now, sorry for the long delay. Basically, unverified personal gnosis is something that is unique to one individual, and cannot be verified by either science (if it's gnosis about the physical world) or with reference to a body of lore, which in our case is the Legendarium, but for a Druid may be Roman historical accounts of Celtic tribal peoples, etc.

The more interesting, and more difficult, variant is verified personal gnosis, with reference to the same body of knowledge/data-set as the unverified variety. It's probably easier to give an example in this case, so I present my "New Stellar-based Arda Timeline (** rough drafts **)" (hopefully, everyone interested can view that link). It's 'verified' because of the large number of congruences between my gnosis and the Legendarium data-set as a whole. There may even be more that I discover when I begin writing this paper again (hopefully, this Spring).

There can also be what we might call "Individual verified personal gnosis" when it refers to a different data-set for the same person. For example, one morning in April of last year, my Salvia-friend began commenting on an email Luthien had sent me about an ancient ruin called 'Brittenburg' beneath a beach in the Netherlands:
===

It's interesting that there doesn't seem to be a way to examine the ruins of Brittenburg now. Is that because you have a pebble beach instead of sand?

No, it’s a sand beach. As I’ve understood it, the reason that they think the ruins are lost is because the sea moved inward during the late Middle Ages which caused the ruins to end up first on the beach, and finally in the sea itself - maybe a few hundred metres out of the coast. As long as the ruins were in the soil on land, they were quite safe. But in the shallow water close to the coast the remains must have been scattered all over the place because of the tidal streams that move in and out all the time, I suppose.

The precise location is also not known. I found a video that covered a project to secure the mound of the old Rhine river - to deepen it somewhat and make it more resilient. During that project there ware archaeologists assigned to examine all the sand that they dug out in case there were some remains of Brittenburg - even if the ruins were scattered, there might still be many fragments of pottery and other artifacts there. But they found very little (as expected), so that was apparently not the right place.

Maybe they will find more some day, but even though the possible area where it could have been is not all that large (maybe a 5 km error margin) it’s still quite a lot of sand to check.

I'm just thinking that a strong radar beam would probably work for sand (like ground penetrating radar) but would just give a combination of scatter and absorption with pebbles, giving mostly noise as a signal.

That would work if the ruin was still somewhat intact, but that is probably not longer the case.

Why not use a neutrino beam?

I thought he was bullshitting, but I just searched and found these early experiments using neutrino beams (muon neutrinos) in archaeology:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1 ... /02/P02015 {active emitters}
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/articl ... le-physics {passive detection of solar neutrinos + cosmic rays}

Wow, I’d never have thought that possible given the non-interacting nature of those neutrinos!

===
Now in this particular case, it was verified personal gnosis, but it didn't have anything directly to do with the Legendarium as such. These are the basic ideas behind unverified and verified personal gnosis. Q.E.D.