Neo-American Church

The Handy-Dandy Kleptonian Test of Philosophic Barbarisms (appendix to Rhetorical Strategy in Confrontations with Occultists, Cosmicminders, and Supernaturalists)

(Inspired by a reading of The High Energies of Order by D.J.H. Changes and an interview with Stanley Krippner in The Sun, Sun Pub., Albuquerque, New Mexico)

Instructions:

This method is intended to provide the student with an easy and accurate numerical estimate of the quantity of horseshit in any essay dealing with “mystical” philosophy or psychology.

Starting with a score of 100, deduct 10 points for every attempt to explain a psychological experience in terms of physical mechanism rather than in terms of wishes, fears, love, hate, repression, ambition, vanity, shame, etc.

Add 10 points whenever you find the opposite—that is, a seemingly physical or mechanistic event interpreted in terms of psychology.

Examples:

“There is a Conservation of Energy in every realm, including thought.”
10 points off, for physical reductionism.
“A retrograde Mercury is associated with fuck-ups in communications.”
10 points plus, for giving a psychological meaning to a seemingly physical or “objective” event.
“A retrograde Mercury causes fuck-ups in communications.”
10 points off, for physical reductionism.

As can be seen from the examples, it is very easy to slip back and forth on this dimension of value.

If the subject under discussion is “life” or “thought” or “mind,” deduct 5 points for each appearance of the following words or phrases: energy, force, attracts, substances, frequency, energies, lines, anchorage, emission-absorption, pole, link, girdings, streamings forth, force field, field of space, lines of force, union, stress, attenuated, size, mental substance, emotional substance, physical substance, electron, molecular light, attenuated light, domain of light, wave length, wave number, frequency light, domain size, emission-absorption system, polar, positive pole, negative pole, intuitive substance, intuitive rate, spiritual rate, higher rate of consciousness, per unit time, frontier of science, mental, intuitive or spiritual bodies, metabolism, rate of change, higher bodies, lower bodies, straighten out, all chemical names, mutation, environmental system, outer bodies, evolution, planes, seeds of thought, karma, embodiment, press your mind, aura, distance between body and aura, deformation, discharge pattern, registered upon the substance, ministry of our territory of creation, all cosmic names, masters, testing place, order of magnitude, measured consciousness, potency, territory of care, Holy Breath, wave of unfoldment, substance of our being, et cetera.

If it is apparent that such terms are being used as casual metaphors for psychological relations, do not deduct any points.

Whenever such terms and usages are disparaged, add 10 points.

It may be assumed that if a minus total score is derived from the negative item scores accumulated in a short article or speech that one is dealing with a dangerous paranoid character who thinks that the world is some sort of enormous and complicated cuckoo-clock which he inhabits as a kind of ghostly termite. Such a person should be encouraged to read good philosophy (such as David Hume) and forswear all metaphysical diagrammatics until he has decided if he affirms or denies the externality of relations, and why. He should also take large quantities of LSD. Most importantly, he should stop making generalizations about humanity and start thinking about his own personal experience. He should be modest, and say “I” more frequently than he says “we.”