selfAdjoint said:
The mystagogues who produce these texts have always used the buzz words of the current science, whatever it was. Once it was "magnetism", then "The fourth dimension", and so on. There's nothing that can be done about it.
It doesn't seem like it's getting worse? The more certain questions are resolved by "big science," the less tangibility there is for people. It used to be that cutting edge scientific experiments could have been replicated by anyone with a little money and equipment. Now you need the finances and equipment of entire nations - but not the involvement of many of their people, which is convenient for economics but not for learning.
Since as you say you are investigating the phenomenology of your dreams why not look for associates among the phenomenologists. There's an enormous literature of that, going back to Husserl.
Certainly, the amount of literature is ridiculous. There is so much that I could actually be disappointed by them
ad infinitum.
Please note I used the word "phenomenology" specifically for dreams and not for all experience. Once that distinction is made much of phenomenoligcal literature is moot. It's interesting because there is a minor but important rational ontology to lucid dreaming --> in order to recognize that one is dreaming, one deduces from certain unusual phenomena into a conclusion, "this is a dream." But further ontological questioning, like "what is a dream really? are you a spirit? am I out of body?" is aimless and verboten, as far I'm concerned. The entire experience is encapsulated by the questioning, releasing a torrent of confirmation bias, which is phenomenally difficult (pun intended), but not impossible, to overcome, leading to just incredible results. I wish I could be more specific, but I'd never stop writing.
To date there is no developed "philosophy of dreaming," that are not completely dependent on something larger - psychology, religion, occultism, spiritualism, etc. Talking about dreams means inescapably forwarding a contentious philosophy. And that's unfortunate because it makes defining within philosophy of science extremely difficult. The intense and apparently natural subjectivism is what mostly stands in the way. There are many mysteries to study and questions to pursue and there must be a reliable framework through which that can be done.
I actually feel bad for the systemic phenomenologists. They seem so close to procuring a great deal of wonderful experiences, and yet they never seem to escape theory. I recently read a book by a Japanese philosopher who had a sort of out-of-body experience during WWII and went on to expand on Husserl and Heiddeger into a reformulated monism. I already forgot his conclusions because they were so boring. For the rest of his life this man apparently never tried to replicate or experiment with similar experiences.
Getting back to the issue of popularizing science, a similar story seemed to happen to the physicist Joachim Wolf who runs the website quantum-metaphysics.com... I won't even hot link to it because I find him and his awakened readers so regressive. I've corresponded with him and it's worth noting that he completely agrees with Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra, the two monoliths of modern New Age spirituality who rely on science for their many books and speeches.
See, I keep editing this post and adding stuff to it... Deepak Chopra was just on that new channel owned partly by Al Gore, "Google Current." It looks like there is a daily meditation with him, complete with waterfalls and allusions to science. When it was over the twenty-something host said, "Wow, a spirituality with a basis in science, isn't that amazing" or something... the sentiment may be way more common than either of us think.
