I think that "everyone else" is focused on people and phenomena that don't have standard-sounding explanations inside theism, sorcery, or animism. Greg and Roderick seem focused on defining what a _successful_ or "true" mystic is. I think what we need to know is what happens with people (the vast majority, surely?) who attempt mysticism, but have not achieved transcendance. These are "flavors" of mysticism, if you will (since, as we all know, real mysticism transcends flavor).
Greg says about many of the examples:
> they are bad mystics, they are failed mystics,
> they are false mystics, they are deluded mystics,
> they are entangled mystics, . . .
For me, this makes the world too binary -- either they have succeeded or they have failed. To my mind, even those who have failed so far may still transcend the entanglement (or whatever) that caused them to fail thus far. I'd say that they are all people who are attempting to be mystics and have not made it yet. I'd suggest that there will be plenty of earnest attempted mystics who are very aware of their failure.
This is helpful for me because then I can explain some of the weird things they do as being "mystical insights" -- that is, partial and incomplete visions of transcendance. It makes sense to me that someone who has had an mystical insight might be trapped by the power of that insight and be unable to transcend it further. For example, if we say "you are the bow" is a mystical insight, the archer might become more entangled with the bow, and thus be unable to progress further mystically. However, he would have the benefit of this mystical insight, which (since mysticism has no otherworld) must be expressed in one of the worlds we know about. So, "you are the bow" could be a common talent, a theist feat, or whatever. This attempted mystic would have to learn that there is no bow, there is no being, and there is no you; giving all that up would be difficult.
So why would anyone follow a path of known mystical insight, if it also seems that it does not help (and may hurt) in attaining true mysticism? A couple of thoughts:
First, people think of attaining transcendance in material terms -- reaching, journeying, travelling, etc.; even Greg expressed it as "being on the mystical paths". It is natural for them to try to achieve transcendance stepwise, but this attempt has no efficacy whatsoever. They do not learn their mistake until long after they are entangled by it.
Second, people who can show the material or magical effect of their belief are usually more persuasive in Glorantha than those who don't, in terms of attracting followers. So, the Jedi Knight attracts apprentices because they kick ass on a regular basis, not because they know the secrets of the transcendance.
This seems consistent with Greg's insistence that:
> This whole idea is sort of a subset of mysticism,
> whereas mysticism is an excepion to normal rules,
> and it is an exception to an exception. Hence, not
> worth putting into the HQ rules themselves.
To be more express about it, true mysticism (Greg's exception) cannot be usefully expressed by the rules, is primarily a story point for the narraotr to deal with (or better yet, not to deal with), and would terribly boring for most players. On the other hand, any mystically derived insight (the exception to the exception, I think) must be expressed as a common talent, an animist spirit, a theist feat, etc., so we need no other rules to contain or explain mystical insights. Just write down an ability and assign a number to it.
This is, of course, just my opinion; worse still, it is obtained through a mystical insight, so I am limited by the scope of the insight. I must remember: There are no rules, there is no mysticism, there is no digest, there is no Greg.
Powered by hypermail