Re-Learning How to Learn
Aug. 21st, 2023 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
degringolade
Latest thoughts are about how not-easy it is to teach an old dog new tricks.
The tarot is turning out to be a slog in the same way that poli sci, philosophy, psych, and sociology classes turned out to be back in the day. Now, this “sloginess” of learning in these field have to do with the nature of the subject. I want to talk about that sloginess and the ways that I have to deal with such things.
First thing that I want to get out of the way is stating openly that this ain’t science. Science is ever so much easier to learn than soft sciences. There are rules of evidence (mostly ignored), specific procedures to march through on the way to what can be considered a “proof” (currently being deprecated), and a vast dataset of previous results that can be used to develop and support new work (this is currently in need of a weeding in order to root out spurious results put forward by MBA’s with visions of riches).
But science, performed in the manner in which it was designed, can lead to a lot of physical truths that can be nailed down to physical phenomenon and reproduced. Sweet way of doing things if you do things correctly.
But the fields that I wrote of earlier (philosophy et cetera) don’t have the luxury of being able to effectively use the tools of science. Simply put, what these folks are trying to do cannot be measured and validated, the best that they can do is explain.
"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."
Ernest Rutherford
Now, learning the tarot seems to be more like the social sciences than the hard sciences to this humble correspondent. There really isn’t a way to perform reproducible, falsifiable experiments with either the social sciences or tarot.
Even worse, there isn’t a way to take a poll or come up with questionable “data” so that you can fuck around with the numbers using statistics and claim some kind of significance because the equations and methods you used look pretty.
Unfortunately, tarot seems to me to be all about trying to change the way that you structure your thoughts. It is probably more akin to what I refer to as “literary” psychology (Freudian or Jungian, et al) than to sciences. Even more appropriate is its seeming relationship to philosophy.
Now, at the risk of seeming like the old Gomer that I am, my memory of the approximately fifty years since I started reading is that philosophy has been progressively denigrated during this period of time. Interest in philosophy has been replaced by worship at the twin altars of science and capitalism. Discussion of underlying conditions and motivations and initial conditions have been subsumed and covered over by the imperatives of the academy and the market. So this whole project that I write about on Mondays is an exploration of thought outside money-grubbing and experimentation. Nothing will be proven and no money will be made.
So, just to be clear to myself and to you gentle readers, I am doing everything in my paltry mental powers to not let the twin evils of scientism and capitalism into whatever it is my “mind” consists of (and whatever constitutes that quoted entity my friends, is yet another subject of considerable and vitriolic discussion and pseudoscientific claptrap) while I try to look at the way that I think and the way that I structure the world around me and my place in it.
So studying the Tarot is just my way of trying to break long-held patterns of organizing my sensory inputs and trying on a new way to structure how I perceive my place in the world. It might not be perfect, It might even be wrong, but I can’t know unless I go in and work with it myself.
Tangentially, I am thinking about Eliphas Levi’s quote:
“Everything is possible to him who wills only what is true! Rest in Nature, study, know, then dare; dare to will, dare to act and be silent!”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual
The last three words are probably the most important, not because I am keeping a secret from everyone and hoarding the truth like Gollum and “my precious” but because the odds are that I am not nearly as smart as I think I am and I probably don’t have it right anyway.
Look, the reason that science and capital are so popular is that controlled falsifiable experiments and the amount of money in your bank account are tangible. They are the “precious” and they convey physical power in the world.
Nothing that I will be talking about on Mondays is verifiable or bankable. I can offer no truth to you. I am just trying to find my way through a pathless land.
Finding my way through the pathless land
Date: 2023-08-21 03:29 pm (UTC)PS being honest is not raining on the parade, it is showing the holes in the umbrella.
OLfromNC
Re: Finding my way through the pathless land
Date: 2023-08-21 03:38 pm (UTC)Through the pathless land
Date: 2023-08-21 05:35 pm (UTC)"The Mystical Cat Tarot"
Because I am free to form my own conclusions. I do not play well with others, either they want to make the rules or they expect the wise ones to think for them. I prefer to use my own thinking processes, though I am more than willing to listen to those wiser than I. This is why I am glad to see what you are reading and thinking about. (Hint: that was a complement).
OLfromNC
Re: Through the pathless land
Date: 2023-08-21 05:40 pm (UTC)I was a bit taken aback when I saw the pictures on the web. But, you know, maybe that is the way to go. Cats are sacred animals to many (I consider them co-owners and equal partners).
Let me ponder this one.....There may be lessons to be learned here.
The pathless path
Date: 2023-08-21 06:15 pm (UTC)OL
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-22 06:40 am (UTC)Unfortunately? Isn't "trying to change the way that you structure your thoughts" the process of most learning? Including the 'hard' sciences? My past experience of teaching young people suggests to me that the linear logical process of what passes for rational thought is a learned (as in taught, not as in scholarly, though it probably is that too) way of thinking, and that most people can't remember what it was like before they learnt that approach. My early university studies in Economics were very much an indoctrination in a way of thinking.
Lenses
Date: 2023-08-22 02:35 pm (UTC)Anyway, the one phrase that stuck with me all these fifty some odd post-college days was from a Poli Sci professor (Stetson): Ideological lenses.
I think that I will be writing about that phrase pretty soon. A lot of what is discussed in the hippy-dippy back-alleys of the internet that I frequent is all about that phrase. What I am wondering is: Can you have differring ideological lenses for different purposes?
Re: Lenses
Date: 2023-08-26 09:28 pm (UTC)JMG stresses the "being silent" part t oopen up different perceptions, maybe that is one goal ther too?
As for me: I´ve learned a bit of Fledenkrais and less on Accupressure - the first teacher of the first method stressed that whatever it does it shouldn´t hurt and the second stresses that only if it hurts you´ve hit on the right spot - and if one suddendly treats hurt hands its a fine tangle on how much pain to inflict to not trigger the apparatus that measures the stretching of the muscle and signales with pain but still stretch enough to gain proper range of movement.
On other topics:
hubby and kid are fine if tired, we went rowing on a little lake.