religion

@daggerfella Actually, even if I am not a fan of how you slap things in boxes so you can dismiss them as fast as possible, you've earned a bit of respect with me. I never took you for the religious type, but I'm glad you can at least address the topic without devolving into superstition and fear mongering. Maturity is a breath of fresh air. So what are your actual religious beliefs?

I never fully write off anything or anyone. Hell, as much as I shit on Trump, the dude's really good at branding. I guess I'm kind of like that with spiritual beliefs too. Take this with a grain of salt, I'm not saying it because I want the attention or wanna feel special, just to explain a world view somewhat, but my brother and I were always kind of mediums. So I grew up between the skeptically scientific dad, and the hyper religious mom each telling us one thing or another. Meanwhile I'd turn to my brother and be like "Hey, they're both kind of right." So I'm comfortable exploring different systems and adapting things that make sense with my experiences. Now keep in mind, I've practiced psionics since then, and have a good grasp at just how much of that was placebo and in my head. And I guess when you encounter a real demon, you quickly learn what's real and what's bullshit. But this is an anecdote, and I encourage you not to believe me unless you've actually been out in the field with me. If religion helped you out in a dark time? I'm glad you found it when you did. To me, it feels like someone with the Dunning Kruger effect trying to convince me that he has an answer for everything, and I'm sitting there like "I barley know anything, but here you are trying to tell me the will of god, and you don't even know whats out there." Meanwhile you have those people who treat the paranormal like some kind of game and go out thrill seeking, but the reality is this stuff is a lot more subtle than Hollywood makes it out to be. To them, they're demons. To me, they're just part of the ecosystem beyond most of our perception. I try to keep it all in. It's a lot to process at times. Especially on the night my brother died. But at least he stayed behind a few weeks to haunt us. Funniest ghost ever. Anyway, enough about that sob story, and I'd prefer to get back on topic. I fully agree with your last point. Altruism and service to others is its own reward. It's not some way to get brownie points or whatever. And I see nothing wrong with sticking to your fem boys. Perfection isn't really something that our underlying reality is built to facilitate. And a few vices may give us some depth to understand and help those who are burdened with greater vices.

As a lucid dreamer, I'd say incubation (That's the term my friend circle refers to when a thought form, demon, ghost, or other spirit enters a dream) is more on the rare side. The majority of dreams are just the subconsciousness trying to break down information, and every face you Encounter in a dream is quite literally an aspect of yourself. But things can enter the dream. And unless you have some experience with interacting consciously with your own dream cognitions, most of the time you won't realize it. My brother occasionally enters my dreams, as well as a few friends of his. He was a lucid dreamer in life, and he understands the psychology of the dreamer pretty well. So it's pretty easy for him to convey information in a way where you don't really understand what he's trying to say until after you wake up. He also managed some poltergeist phenomenon, but he didn't really overstay his welcome. We believe in respect for the boundary between the living and the dead. I'd say its a ratio of 80/20 for an untrained medium. With 80% being all in my head, and 20% being somewhat more real. For the average person, might be less. But energy follows thought, and tulpas are absolutely a real thing, so a lot of people end up creating their own demons. Most modern practitioners of the Solomonic arts adopt more of a Jungian model of understanding, believing the demons of the goetia to be internal to the mind, or from the collective unconsciousness. And so the actual point of working with them is to transmute the shadows of the soul into a constructive force rather than destructive. I don't know how much of that I buy, but given my experience with thought-forms, the shoe kind of fits. On the other hand, I don't think everything out there is internal to me. My brother more or less proved that. Still, given how subjective spirituality is, it's impossible to even pretend to know for sure in most cases. So rather than the scientific method, I apply anomalistics. Don't put the period at the end, just make observations and mark it down. Eventually you come up with a very consistent pattern of behavior, even if results aren't repeatable. Lack of transitional fossils in the fossil record? Depends on where, what the geographical history was, and all that. Bio matter breaks down a lot more quickly in deciduous forests, and lots of critters will dismember the body before then. I think that was just as true back then as it is now. We're extremely lucky to even have what we have. I'd have to talk to a Paleontologist to get more of an understanding than that though. I kind of see the bible as divinely inspired rather than divinely written. A lot of good wisdom and understanding is embedded in it. But it is by no means literal to me.