Chymical Wedding

Taylor Ellwood brought up a good point in my most recent entry on meditation. [A reference to my old LJ from which this was taken.] Basically, I tend to make the (probably poor) assumption that when I use technically specialized words like “meditation”, it comes with the automatic suffix of “as I define it”. That, of course, should be mentioned now and again just to remind people that I can’t define it anybody else’s way. As has been pointed out time and again, we can’t always get across the subtlety of meaning online that we could in face-to-face conversation, so it helps to periodically remind ourselves of the fact that text-only communication is not infallible, and we do not infallibly interpret it.

My definition of meditation basically is “No-mind”; I use more specialized names for other techniques. That isn’t to reduce the importance of those other techniques, but to place them within context in my own mind and practice.

From now on, I’ll try to be a bit more clear on my working definitions. In magic and mysticism, we have a (fairly) commonly shared vocabulary. We are not, however, a group of physicists so all of our technical vocabulary will be defined differently by each person. Even in the hard sciences there is some room for interpretation for terminology not defined strictly in mathematical terms. I think that if we paid more attention to this phenomenon, there would be many fewer arguments among those of us in the occult and spiritual communities.