Flipper, Tyger
I appreciate you guys!! After I re read my post I think I was being a bit unreasonable to those who are long typers. I guess I was trying to say that I personally can't return that kind of a response every time. I'm off work today and I have a little more time so I can afford to connect better.
I am in the same boat. There are times I just can't respond. In my early days on this site I would be badgered for not answering at length and not quickly enough.
Not interesting.
In the past on this forum I have been barraged by multiple subjects and arguments as a major distraction by some who I won't mention. I'm not averse to the idea that this was probably a tactic used to win an argument or a point. Skewing the subjects or complicating an issue by adding too much into the discussion just makes the whole thing pretty much useless IMHO. I won't play that game...and this is the kind of thing I was referring to. I will say that in the short time I was away some of my views have changed drastically and I might even more closely align with some of those folks who were trying to have me lynched.
We may have experienced the same person. But doesn't matter who it was, the chat site has changed. I think many here are atheists and very much materialists still - and that's fine - but I think there is more a live-and-let-live attitude now. We can have this conversation now without being dive-bombed with hectoring ridicule - besides which that always mightily puzzled me as this is a chat site about the
paranormal, after all.
I have had to re write much of my " background" fame work lately on belief/religion and spirituality. I am very much a prove by proof person now. And everything deserves to be investigated. The first question I would ask is, What are the tangible results ?
I would say I am, too. In fact, because I have seen the "paranormal" cause so much aberration, I am far more rigorous in how I view all the "noise". It's taken decades of steady investigation to sift through the phenomenon of living.
Tyger your reasoning and interest in the subject of spiritual material interconnect and spiritual manipulation of the material is interesting. It would stand to reason that if the material comes from the spiritual, the spiritual is on a higher more developed plain and is more powerful than the material making the material subordinate to the spiritual.
I would not make that value placement, rather, consider this: the material is the furthest manifestation of the universe. What we see as physical is the final dead-stop of a mighty spiritual event. That goes for everything. Consider the tree - the tree is really existing 'just outside' the very tippy-tips of its branches - that is where it is growing. In that 'place' where the 'spirit' emerges into the physical, the spiritual 'dies' and the physical twig is the artifact left behind.
Always keeping in mind that I speak from an occult framework that I use as an heuristic devise to 'make sense' of what I see and experience, I will answer the second part of your float: the spiritual (at least the spiritual that I am, as a human being) keenly and absolutely needs the physical realm to achieve its ends, its destiny. In this respect the spiritual and physical are lovers, in the most profoundly real and mystical sense. Were this physical world to be no more, there would be a massive tragedy experienced in the spiritual world.
The spiritual world is 'more powerful' only in the sense that it has the final say (we die - spirit is ever present by a breath). We humans do not yet have omnipotence in the physical - though that is humanity's destiny (in a very, very far-flung future).
I would not say that the spiritual is more highly developed as a matter of course. It's complicated. What we see here is a reflection. If one considers that - As above, so below (an occult dictum) - there is much to make one sober. Nothing comes from nothing. But lest we become too broody, the spirit in its purity is love, joy and ecstasy. For myself, I always need to keep that in mind.
Religion in the purest form is an effort to connect and communicate with our higher origins. Religion in its basest form is manipulation and control. Do you agree?
Yes. In the end, religion exists because we as humanity lost our innate connection to our higher origins. The Greeks 'thought' the gods were interested in their human doings because they 'saw' the gods mingling with humans. It wasn't a belief - it was a fact they saw as clear as day. The moment we then needed intermediaries - a shaman or priest(ess) - to make our connections, human error entered the drama: power, greed, lust - the usual.
Tyger if you happen to be an empath, then you will feel certain things from people...you will know if they are genuine or when they're lying. Unfortunately for those people who were lured to a dangerous maniac in a cult, they apparently didn't have the benefit of this perception. If a person knows whats right and true, then they can know what isn't. If a person has no point of reference I guess they can believe anything. I hate to say it....could it have been laziness?
Here we have the benefit of religion. Religion adhered to purely is the probationary path. Religion as I am meaning here teaches the virtues that will be needed on the further path when one steps as a free, independent soul into the bracing atmosphere of one's own discovery. Religion is needed when we are young. If we don't have that, we will seek it out when we are older, in the wrong time.
A lot can be said for love. This will be hard to hear for some but it is clear (to me) that the leader of the Heaven's Gate cult was 'charismatic' - filled with the charisma of a power (like love). He was not necessarily lying. This power was felt by those who came in contact with him. Where the fail happens is with the mind. No matter how much we love - we must still think for ourselves. The warning bell should have gone off for the people when they were being asked to not think for themselves, to accept 'on authority' what was being asked, the first time they were told not to question.
I am not inclined to go too deeply into the Heaven's Gate situation because I suspect a Being was connected to that phenomenon that I do not choose to 'touch'. Heaven's Gate, David Koresh, Jim Jones - these manifestations - like ISIL - all of these 'charged' events have spiritual authorship. Even in UFOlogy there is an element - a tinge.
Wrong about what? And what's 'why are this'? You're losing me, flipper.
