I (M/40) have fallen for someone (F/32) who's very into spirituality, Law of Attraction, and related stuff. I'm a technical person, I'm very much aligned with evidence-based beliefs, atheist, and this is all very new to me. We are best friends, we will likely be no more than that (i.e. no relationship on the horizon), and I am 100% happy with that to be the case.
I would like to better understand some of her interests without being drawn into what I currently view as pseudoscience. I realise this might make me a bad person, but she makes me feel like nobody else I've ever met, and she's so well-read on it all that I can't quite make the jump to have her explain some of it to me as a skeptic…I have a feeling I'll be going in unprepared if I don't have at least a cursory understanding first.
Is there reading material you'd recommend for this? Is there any advice you'd give to someone who's somewhat open-minded but doesn't want to screw up a friendship by blundering in with the wrong thing?
Thanks for reading, and thanks for any advice.
In my experience labels such as spiritual or skeptical obscure more than they illuminate. They are a tool in the ongoing exercise of identity construction, itself an effort to define ourselves that is often strikingly counter factual.
Enjoy her company and observe yourself as much as you observe her. The more important question is: I have fallen for a woman who is not attracted to me and I will settle for friends. What is going on inside me that makes that ok?
Although I don't believe in those as well, I find it fascinating that they claim that god is your imagination. That means, whatever you imagine in your mind, it will become a reality in your future. If you imagine that you are wealthy, then you'll be wealthy soon. But you have to feel it as if it is true and it will reflect to your reality in the future. According to them, it is most effective when you imagine before you sleep. You can prove their teachings wrong by testing it. There's nothing for you to lose. Then you can share your experience with your partner. You won't believe until you experience it yourself. That would be a great topic for both of you to talk about.
One more thing, the old hacking magazine phrack published a topic about out-of-the body-experience or astral projection[0]. For me, the article is a very intersting read. And it's kinda scary but interesting since a lot of people claim to have experienced it. Plus, there are interesting books about it. Again, you won't believe until you experience it yourself.
I hope this will help improve your relationship. Good luck.
Are these claims trying to be scientific in the first place? If not, don't evaluate them as such.
Science (as in scientific method) and truth are orthogonal. I'd start with the problem of induction. Those who are allergic to any non-scientific claims usually consider it to be an uninteresting technicality. Those of us who aren't are more likely to consider it a fundamental limitation.
Let your friend make the case. It's okay if you don't think these beliefs can be proven. If you cannot disprove them or prove that it must be somehow stupid/wrong to entertain an unproven claim, you shouldn't imply otherwise.
I'm not sure what your friend's exact beliefs are. AFAIK new age stuff may like the scientific angle, but even if scientific character is implied, yet the claims aren't scientific in their nature, I'd still say it's more charitable to avoid the charge of pseudoscience.
You're basically looking to rationalize the irrational. This is an exercise in futility.
Spirituality is science done upside down and backwards.
Spiritual people decide to "believe" and then seek justification and confirmation from other like minded people --- all while ignoring any contradicting info.
Group enough of these folks together into a self reinforcing feedback loop and you have a "cult".
If this could be rationalized, it would be called "science" instead of "spirituality". If "spirituality" could be reasoned with, it would cease to exist. Any such attempt is often viewed as a hostile attack on the individual's self awareness and self esteem and usually ends in rejection.
E.g. I will be able to recognize patterns like "aha! (something) -> (something) is just the (something) of the (something)s of the set of (somethings)!" But, while the "form" of the intuition is correct, the actual 'truth' will be like the exact polar opposite. For example like let's say I mistakenly call something a "lower bound" when I really mean "the least upper bound." It's like creating a beautiful painting exactly how you envisioned it, but then after the fact, you realized you swapped all the blue with all the red. The structure is the same, but the meaning is flipped.
In some sense we are the product of our life experience. I've found that when people say something spiritual, it is best to view it like a beautiful painting where you read into the structure of it rather than the colors. Because it conveys the structure of the life that they have lived, condensed from the data of their entirety of experience.
Let's take the law of attraction as an example. Do you believe they are saying something like:
internal mental desire for an object is like a Noetherian current that is conserved, so that the universe has no recourse but to give you what you want
Or is it more like,
"Even though the full model structure of
p(get X|focus on X frequently, want X)
is fully beyond my articulation, I have seen that the Bayes update of
p(get X|focus on X frequently, want X)
appears far greater than just
p(get X|want X)
In general, society doesn't really train us to probe what people mean (instead we recognize out-group people we disagree with as in-group capital exacted at the time of the in-group/out-group showdown), and instead take their word at its least charitable face value, and this is the source of nearly all communication troubles. Not to say that you are doing this - and I commend you for trying to be non-judgmental.
ps:
There's a funny (and fabricated) story about Niels Bohr (turns out it wasn't about him and the origin was about the opposite conclusion..[0] :^) ):
> Above Professor Niels Bohr’s door hangs a horseshoe. The world-famous atomic expert was recently asked if he really believed that it brought him luck. “No,” said Bohr, “of course I don’t believe it—but I’ve sometimes noticed that it works even when you don’t believe in it!”
[0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/8387/is-the-anecdote...