the timboucher experience

Thanks to technorati, I just tracked down a website with a little bit of complaining about my site.

I’ve been reading Tim Boucher: Occult Investigator this past half-hour or so, and I’m somewhat dissapointed. For a site about “Occult Investigations,” there’s very little investigation going on — a scant couple of accounts of paranormal phenomena, and a wanking great lot of essays which could be composed by anyone who’s read a lot about religions and the occult.

When I see something about “occult investigation,” I expect either a skeptical investigation — take a phenomena and then attempt to explain it away through the application of accepted natural laws and physics — or its opposite — the attempt to reproduce a phenomena through the scientific method. Some people might say that the scientific method doesn’t have a place in the occult, but I do.

My first reaction whenever people criticize me is just to tell them to fuck off. Like honestly, who cares if my life doesn’t conform to somebody’s weird expectations and limited definitions about what can and can’t be done. But then I remembered that I criticize people constantly, and I even wrote a post about how important I think it is to “slay other MC’s.” So with that in mind, let’s “battle.”

Actually, I’ve already made all my best points: namely, that I don’t need to conform to your expectations and I’m perfectly happy with what I do. I mean, god forbid that somebody uses their own personal website to express themselves! But where in hell did you get the impression that “investigating the occult” HAS to mean that you use the scientific method? Like, I’m not a fucking scientist in a lab coat dude. My website isn’t called, “Tim Boucher: Scientific Prick.” I’m not here to prove, I’m here to play. I’m here to look, to find, to question, to entertain far out possibilities. In short - to investigate. Just like the name says.

Other people seem to enjoy the style of rational scientific inquiry into the occult that you’re describing. And that’s fine. And there’s actually TONS of it out there, despite your claims to the contrary. In fact, I would guess that’s almost the more common approach in the culture today, and has been ever since the spiritualists and those who chose to prove or disprove their phenomenon in the Enlightenment. In fact, before you criticize me for doing too much reading, maybe you ought to do some yourself.

I am personally bored by that style of thinking and investigation. Like what is there to gain by reducing complex psychological, spiritual and other phenomenon down to a reproducible lab experiment? Can you measure love or imagination with a microscope? No, but you can experience them when they resonate within you. And that’s what I’m into, is finding those things and enshrining them. There’s a Sufi teaching parable where a boy catches a fly and pulls off its wings, legs and separates its body into pieces, and then asks “But where’s the fly?” The only kind of “science” that I’m into based on that metaphor is the type of shit like mating flies and trying to mutate them into like “super-flies” that can travel to other planets and shit. For me, that’s much more worthwhile - and much more FUN! - which is really the most important factor in my consideration.

Anyway, one other thing I’d like to point out about your post. After saying the above about how my work disappoints you, you go off on this big tangent about how the scientific method’s the best way to examine weird phenomenon. But then you jump into this big thing about “spirit orbs” in photographs. And you preface it by saying:

I’ll take a spin with this here, though I won’t use rigorous experimentation at the moment because this is a spur-of-the-moment thing, and I’m lazy.

So, it’s okay for you to not use the scientific method if and when you don’t want to, but for some reason my work is invalidated because I do that. For trying to build a case about how rational you are, you’re not doing a real bang-up job.

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