Americans’ belief in God, the devil and other spiritual entities has fallen to a new low, according to a Gallup poll released on Thursday. Seventy-four percent of Americans said they believe in God…

  • @FlickOfTheBean
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    31 year ago

    Well, not gonna lie, I wasn’t expecting to be insulted. If you’re just going to question my intelligence when I try to engage in good faith with what you posted, you would have done better to have just not responded.

    There’s a “mystical stuff that only I can understand so I won’t bother explaining” air that you have about your reasoning that is very representative of people who have nothing to back up what they’re trying to say. I’m calling you out as ignorant of what you’re saying now, partially because I’m annoyed at you, partially because I’m pretty certain you can not coherently put a narrative together that will make any sense.

    That’s a direct challenge to you to tell your story and theories. If you don’t want to, that’s totally fine, you don’t have to, but don’t insult my intelligence when I’m trying to give you so many benefits of the doubt that you’ve done nothing to earn.

    • @TrismegistusMx
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      01 year ago

      You’re the one who decided to take offense. If you’re so troubled by a quote then you’ll never survive on the internet. I didn’t say I wouldn’t explain, but I certainly don’t want to tiptoe around your sensitive feelings. If you get nothing from this exchange, it’s no skin off my back.

      • @FlickOfTheBean
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        01 year ago

        Oh, I see your reading style now, that is certainly not ideal…

        I told you why I got annoyed with you: because you insulted my intelligence. Do you think the quote was the insulting part? It wasn’t, it was the “check yourself before you wreck yourself” you brought out in your first line.

        Let’s try this again:

        I think your ideas are wrong. I want you to show me how I’m wrong. You are engaging in an argument instead of showing me your ideas. This is not what I want nor what I am interested in.

        I don’t care about this particular conversation, we can stop having it when/if you decide to start telling me why you believe these things.

        Like damn, dude, can you not see I’m trying to get why you have the position you have?

        So you’re annoying to me. Big fucking deal. Does it not mean anything that I’m still trying to engage with your ideas despite you constantly twisting away to say more inexplicably cryptic stuff? Stop engaging with this pointless internet argument and tell me something interesting, please!

        I swear, the worst I have to offer is a “that’s interesting” and then I’ll be on my way.

        • @TrismegistusMx
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          11 year ago

          You don’t have be embarrassed by your ignorance, but if you are then it’s your own doing. Don’t expect me to accept your ignorance as fact, or give it the same respect I would give a person who had done the research. Are we done? Cuz if we’re just gonna talk about how you’re big mad about your deficiencies I’ve lost interest.

          • @FlickOfTheBean
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            21 year ago

            Not quite yet, because you’ve still failed to give yourself a position.

            You’re focusing too much on this argument.

            You’ve yet to have a position which would kick off the conversation I tried and am still trying to have with you.

            You have done pretty much nothing this argument but glom on to key words and completely ignore every request I’ve sent you to tell me anything worth anything, which does not bode well for your reading comprehension abilities, which is probably why you’re bored right now.

            If you’re so bored, then change this into a conversation about what you believe. And not about me, I don’t give a shit about me, which you seem to be overly focused on, I’m talking about demons.

            So I’ll ask you directly: what is your full position on demons? How do they work, how do they operate, what’s their motivation? Are they purely human generated? Are you unable to say because people will come after you? Is that why you keep twisting away and ignoring what I’m requesting from you?

              • @FlickOfTheBean
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                21 year ago

                Ohhh rip,I read this right after I responded lol oh well. Fun enough while it lasted. I do enjoy collecting different theories about how the spiritual world works, that one felt like it could be some feels logic which is why I kept wanting to dig at it.

                There’s nothing wrong with being spiritual but I do think there’s something to uncover if you’re not able to articulate what you believe while professing to know how things supposedly work. I figured they were either completely full of it or had something waaaay different story-wise than most people.

                Given that they were starting to connect demons to daemons, I’m thinking it was likely the second option.

                Tldr; thanks for the heads up! It was fun while it lasted 😆

            • @TrismegistusMx
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              1 year ago

              I haven’t had a chance to give any opinions because you keep nitpicking everything you come across and taking offense at anything you can.

              Since you asked, I will tell you, although I still doubt your sincerity and integrity.

              You can think of demons as many things on many different levels. The gnostics knew them as archons, which were beings that would not allow one to advance spiritually until they crossed a threshold of temptation. I know them as malicious ideas that gain life of their own by blinding the ego to its own ignorance and rewarding sociopathic behavior. These ideas work the same as they ever did, programming the subconscious into acting out in hostile and antisocial ways. Have you ever heard of a daemon in programming? It’s a program or algorithm that waits in the background for a specific set of circumstances to take over and direct an action. The demons as I refer to them in my very first post are your unexamined thoughts and preconceived notions of who and what you are dealing with.

              • @FlickOfTheBean
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                21 year ago

                Ignorance as a demon? Now we’re getting somewhere!

                How did you come to know them by any entity? Seems you must have a lot of personal experience with them, which, since I already showed my position trying to get here, I would say likely has other explanations, though by your sincerity I would think you would have already explored other options instead of assuming a structure then looking for evidence to support it. Was it primarily thought experimentation that revealed what demons are? Or was it more like a personal experience?

                And I nitpick because that’s how I get to the heart of matters. Some people vibe into it by feel but I like to use my eyes and mind. It keeps me from falling into surface level rhetorical traps that I would otherwise fall for. Sorry for doing that too much at you, I just didn’t know how else to get to your ideas.

                You sure do like to sling assumptions that most people will take as insults though. how do you grok the level of self-examination of my thoughts without being me? Wouldn’t it be more good faith to assume I just have a different point of view from you rather than I’m a self blinded idiot, as you seem to have been implying? Or is this one of those things that seems so obvious that the only kind of person who would miss it must be blind to it in the first place, like how some evangelicals like to reason reprobates can exist in a god created world without knowing god?

                (It may feel like I’m harping on the insult part. I don’t care about being insulted anymore, the initial one was the only mild shock that you inspired, I’m more wondering why you react the way you’re reacting in this realm. I understand being defensive though, so if that’s all it is, I get it.)

                • @TrismegistusMx
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                  1 year ago

                  I want to preface this post by clarifying that when I say “ignorant” I mean it entirely in the spiritual context of one who ignores or denies the spiritual truths of the universe. I mean no judgement.

                  I grew up with ignorant, hostile, angry people. I was a soft hearted child who felt everything intensely, and I was destroyed repeatedly until I learned how to take emotional (and physical) blows without experiencing emotional harm. Since then, I’ve met people who can change lives by virtue of their presence alone. I studied heroes and villains, and I learned the only thing that separates them are their beliefs and the heart that leads them. I learned the nature of ego is a lens by which we observe the universe, but it’s one made of a combination of our experiences as translated by our senses colored by our beliefs about those experiences. A well honed ego is a powerful tool for discernment, but ego doesn’t know its own limits and it seeks to grow and survive at all costs. Believing in threats and reinforcing our fears and adversarial beliefs is how the ego trains us to reinforce itself. It has no concept of its limitations and it will not change unless the only other option is ego-death.

                  After years of research into the psychology of the mind, I came to philosophy. Working back to first principles, I realized that religion and spirituality split long ago, and the original purpose of these symbolic stories was to help people understand the nature of reality. Over time, hierarchies of violence laid claim to these stories and manipulated their meanings to reinforce their own power. The meaning of the word “occult” means hidden. The nature of the occult are those spiritual teachings that threaten authority. Every witch hunt and crusade in history has been motivated by a threat to authority. When investigating into occult teachings you find a lot of magical thinking, but it’s part of the occulting process. Authority uses misinformation, violence, and other narcissistic tactics in order to eliminate the threat. The common themes underneath all of the gaslighting and misinformation is a worldview in which the material world rests within a greater context. Authoritarians and egos all demand separation, categorization, classification, control, segregation. All of these ideas are delusional. There is no real separation between you and I, except that which we believe in, and those beliefs require a physical/mental/spiritual effort to maintain. The gnostic (opposite of ignorant) perspective of reality contains this understanding of ultimate oneness, which I describe in the link at the end. All of history has been a grieving process and a balance between ignorance and gnosis. Those who have passed through the grieving process come out the other side as gnostics, and those who do not remain ignorant. The ignorant in denial are atheists, capitalists, and opportunists. To them, the world is a playground where they can explore their individuation. The angry ignorant are the crusaders, witch hunters, narcissists, fascists, and other ideologies of ego supremacy. The bargaining ignorant are starting to see signs of a bigger pattern. They experience ego crisis, illness, and economic instability. The depressed are no longer ignorant, but they haven’t been able to reach acceptance because the harsh reality of the world can be too much to bear without the underpinning of community and good programming.

                  Those who can reach acceptance can see reality for what it is, without judgement or fear. The brain isn’t the source of consciousness. The universe is consciousness and the brain is a lens. The ego is one facet of that lens. The grieving process is how that lens is honed. When the lens matches reality, we understand things as they are. When it’s warped, we understand things as reflections of ourselves. The other facet of that lens is the right brain perception. According to Iain McGilchrist in his book, “The Master and His Emissary,” The left brain is ego, logic, language, individual mind. The right brain is a different kind of perspective. It sees the universe in a holistic sense, without judgement, without ego, without language. It is an unfiltered perspective, aligned with the true nature of the universe. There’s a possibility that it contains a perfect picture of the universe, but at the very least it contains all of the information encountered by the individual. The left brain often doesn’t see the value of the right, but it’s a powerful tool for discernment if used correctly. Most of us have egoic beliefs that we enforce on the world, and think we’re victims of our emotions. What we should be doing is using the ego to hold up beliefs against our right brain perception and take note of the quality of our emotions. Modify those beliefs until they progress through the grieving process until we reach acceptance of reality. If your beliefs cause you to have discordant emotions, they’re half true. This is the core of egoic delusion and psychosis. It is always a case of clinging to a half-truth at all costs, for the preservation of the ego. The unhoned ego cannot tolerate nonduality and spectrums, but the universe doesn’t deal in binaries. The highest understanding of any dualistic concept is a nondual union of apparent opposites.

                  I know it sounds like I’ve drifted from your questions, but this underpinning is important. I’ll describe angels and demons then I’ll explain why it’s important to grok them as external entities

                  Angels and Demons are abstractions of fundamental truths of the universe. They’re reflections of thresholds of consciousness one must cross before expanding into higher levels. Even in mythology, demons are angels. The difference between them is their orientation to the highest truth of the universe, which was the original meaning of God. The gnostics knew them as archons, because they recognized that despite their manifestations, they’re working towards the same goal; the purification and enrichment of the individual soul. Giordano Bruno developed a technique for understanding reality. He would imagine a palace and populate it with symbols for ideas. He would fill these rooms with great detail until they became real in his mind. Any time he needed information, he would go into the relevant room and interact with the things inside, which would allow him to answer confidently and correctly about a vast number of fields. He described the nature of angels and demons and he would invoke either at will in order to imbue his consciousness with their qualities.

                  Compare the worldview I’ve expressed to that of individuals like Kenneth Copeland, Donald Trump, or Ron Desantis. They see themselves as kings, with the right to use violence or coercion for to accomplish their goals. They’re surrounded by pretense and justifications, protected by other ignorant individuals, exploiting the weak and sucking up to the strong. They see themselves as winners, but in fact they’re completely mired in delusion. When their brains inevitably fail, their consciousness will expand into the whole, and in the process they will come to encompass all of the suffering they’ve caused in this world. The collapse of a life is the same as the collapse of an ego. It can be an epiphany (appearance of the divine) or it can be torture. Even before the moment of death, could you imagine the life of Marjorie Taylor Greene? Every thought dripping with hatred and paranoia, surrounded by ill gotten gains and a family that despises you, routinely humiliating yourself on the altar of public perception. She doesn’t really believe in demons, but she’ll demonize everyone to protect her ego. As a result, she’s as demonic as a person can be.

                  https://lemmy.world/comment/1565796