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Re: Prayer, hyponosis and BDSM(Score: 1)
by Rogue(Rogue@skew.org) on Jan 11, 2012 - 03:02 PM | Okay, where to start with this one? I find this interesting and amusing because I approached this from exactly the opposite direction, the left hand path. I rejected God from a very young age, probably around seven years old, having read the Bible prior and having had issues with the internal inconsistencies and other problems (like, why were Adam and Eve guilty of the sin of temptation when the thing that tempted them was itself the knowledge of sin?). I decided that if God did not want me to have the tree of life or the tree of knowledge, then God was my enemy because all I want is knowledge and life. I started by seeking witchcraft and other things that were forbidden by this God, because I suspected that he forbade them because they were good and would give me power to equal his, he was basically looking out for job security. I then rejected the idea and presence of God entirely, and just sought knowledge for its own sake, in any shape or form, regardless of how that might change my perception or worldview. That led to ceremonial magic, ritual, psychology/hypnosis/NLP, etc, as I strove to understand the mind as much as possible and exercise as much control over my own mind as possible and, when necessary, those of others.
One concept that I kept though was, that I never knew everything, was never an expert at anything because not only could I not know everything about a topic, I could not know how much there was to know about a topic enough to know if I had most of the knowledge on it or not. That, plus continuing search for any and all knowledge, has served me rather well, at least in that it got me to my present state. I went through the trance states of ritual magic, dissected them, analysed them, and came to more or less the same conclusion that you seem to have reached, with minor differences. People do seem to have an inborn need to derive security from leadership, be that religious or parental or bdsm or whatever. People find peace when they are secure, the wild crazy eyes of the Pentecostals and the snake handlers, the dance of the Dervish. Often security comes with a loss of self. So, it satisfies the need for security to have a higher authority, but also satisfies temporarily the feeling of aloneness that is prevalent, that by being dominated by a thing you are also connected to it, as in Stockholm Syndrome. So, connectedness and safety/security are served by religion and bdsm and other forms of altered mental states.
Now let us loop over the other side, to that which is there when nothing else is there. You could consider prayer to be contact with god, or rejecting god, communing with subconscious, or integrate the two and learn that god is the subconscious, or the other way round, primitive attempts at describing the subconscious have resulted in the creation of religions. So god then, does exist and does not exist, god is not possible and does not exist as so many mainstream religious people consider him to exist, not because there is no thing that behaves like god, but because that thing is not a consciousness separate from the individual. It is part of each individual, and possibly that part of each individual is connected to that part of other individuals at least at certain times. I will not presume to know overmuch about these things, besides what I have experienced. Suffice it to say, I walked the path that Arthegarn walked but in the opposite direction, and came back to the other side wherein god exists but is not god. I believe this is what the alchemists and others, philosophers and such, have been trying to explain but could not for fear of the dogmatic backlash.
Things like magic, we cannot rule out, because we cannot detect it with any provable method or machine like electromagnetism or other known forces. We cannot disprove it, therefore we must allow its possibility. There are anomalous anecdotes and incidents, including some experiments run during the Cold War especially, that give hints that there is more to life, the universe, and everything than just what shows up on our radar screens, yet the nature of these things continues to elude us. It is possible that there is a higher function of mind that we have not yet learned how to use (though those that have studied as we have are uniquely primed to explore such things), that in its function has been described as magic, extrasensory perception, ghosts, god, etc. Remember, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so where others see magic and nonsense, I see unknown technology and seek to understand it instead of bowing before it or denying its existence.
In short, to Arthegarn and others, god has not left the building, he is just where you left him, he just isn't what you thought he was when you left him there. |
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