Cerber wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 1:42 am
I thought exactly same thing before I started "going out". And in years after, my experiences forced me to re-evaluate my prior believes.
And now in my current gnosis, human - resource to be exploited, or taken advantage of whenever opportunity arises.
Many "magical" things we do - works not because we are special, blessed by some gifts from gods, but just because we have physical form, there's not much else behind it. And our "power levels" will swiftly drop well below 9000 once we divorce with our fleshy exoskeletons.
Or at least so it seems.
Why else things like banishing rituals work, pretty much on any entity/spirit? There is nothing special about words we say, or things we do during. But the end result is always to our advantage, if we just focus on it. Result of any magical work always is to our advantage, for no good reason, except that perhaps we have some kind of innate, fundamental "authority of matter over spirit". Perhaps. At least I've not found any other reasonable explanation, through all my experiences and experiments.
Well, I mean, it depends on the entity. It's like any ecosystem.
If you're an antelope, wolves might find you pretty interesting, and if you go around where there's wolves a lot, that might make you feel pretty interesting, but the sparrows and field mice and flatworms and dolphins aren't really taking notes, ya know?
I think it can be that "most" entities don't care about humans, while simultaneously having enough be interested that it causes a fairly substantial amount of interactions.
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I have thought about this idea of some kind of fundamental authority of matter over spirit a lot. Not sure that's exactly the right term for it, but I don't have a better one, and I get exactly what you mean
My thoughts on this get into fairly theoretical territory fast. Mostly because it criss-crosses a lot of different ideas, which additively build up some fragility in the larger model. I mean, I don't like to cling to 'absolute facts' to any large degree, but I do kinda rate various ideas and concepts as having varying thicknesses of ice under them, this topic gets onto a little bit thinner ice (in terms of my confidence of ideas).
Basically, my idea on this is that the physical brain provides a sort of structural framework, which is more robust than many etheric equivalents ('many', not all).
if you want to move 'energy' (not the physics version of the term, but the mystical one) then you're not going to move it very well with a bulldozer. Similarly if you want the grass in the lawn to be shorter, your effort will be infinitely more efficient with a lawnmower than with an energy manipulation.
things have varying degrees of robustness, in both arenas of existence. So... if your nonphysical aspect is as delicate as a flower, then being in a physical body is like being a flower in a block of resin, from the nonphysical side of things anyway. Not indestructible or immutable, but drastically more reinforced. I think it works the other way too (to a more limited degree). Basically the body is a hard copy. So, a consciousness thread which is a bit fragile, can be fairly robust in a living body (for as long as the living body works anyway).
Um, I feel like I'm drastically oversimplifying things though. Since energy patterns can also have a great deal of robustness, though the robustness is different. UH... ok, you know Wolverine? the comic character? lets call his biological regeneration ability the etheric aspect, and his adamantium endoskeleton the physical aspect. Now the biologic is very resilient, it would be difficult to completely eliminate it, since it can regenerate from just a little chunk remaining. But without the endoskeleton it's "squishy", and may have trouble holding it's form. Actually taking this analogy further, if he regenerated from a pinky finger, all memory would be lost, but an adamantium cranium really helps protect that aspect. I feel like this is all sounding terribly geeky and fanciful, hehe, but I'm just grasping at metaphorical straws to outline what I'm thinking. (in this paragraph everything is metaphor, biological is metaphor for the nonphysical, which may be overly confusing)
So in simplest terms, the physical channeling a consciousness has a sort of overlapping 2-mode structural integrity. Each to some degree shoring up (some of) the weaknesses of the other. A symbiosis I guess, even though most would regard it as all one being.
Now the physical aspects of humans are all pretty similar, because we're all the product of a self-replicating physical pattern. But I don't think the nonphysical is necessarily so much of a carbon copy. To wax poetic, I think souls vary in nature and form far more than bodies. I also think that souls, or threads of consciousness in energy patterns, are more mutable than bodies.
So it could well be that relying on a body for structural stability of a consciousness thread for years, may cause a kind of atrophy of that consciousness pattern's structural integrity. Like someone's soul spending 50 years in zero G (cuz the body is handing the gravity issue), they may have a rough time adapting to supporting their etheric structure without the body. Being physically manifest by hiding out in a brain may make us strong, but ultimately makes us weak also, if that protective shell were to cease working. heh, I guess I'm picturing humans as kinda atrophied weaklings in mighty powered exoskeletons hehe.
Just to complicate things, there's a lucidity and memory issue. I think we tend towards relying on the brain to maintain lucidity and memory to such an extent that we're just kinda pathetic in those areas without it.
I don't think we're necessarily all atrophied to the same degree, getting out and exercising helps. But it's a lot of atrophy to overcome. Which kinda leads into some of my ideas regarding the permanence of the individual consciousness, as well as how reincarnation may work, as well as memory & identity. I don't think reincarnation is a given, or that it's systematic, just that I think it does sometimes happen, and I think when that happens it kinda portrays to what extent our individual identity is able to withstand going without our physical structural support (which is to say, "poorly").
So being kinda like clams whose shell eventually cracks, may kinda make humans a bit of a bit of a low-tier food-chain being in a spiritual ecosystem. But simultaneously, a pretty robust being, with some advantages, for a time. And some entities with more long term perspective, might take an interest in operating a clam farm.
Or something like that, kinda, ...ish (assuming you can grok what I'm trying to say through the clumsy metaphors and awkward wordsmithing)
As for the efficacy of banishing... I mean, really I think that just boils down to a contest of wills. With a firm shell for support, we can push pretty damn hard if we hone our will to do so. But it's FAR from some absolute force. Try banishing another human. Also there's an aspect to it kinda like a 2-D blockade on a 3-D chess board, where it only really works on entities who think they're playing 2-D chess. This gets into the 'work smarter not harder' facet of things. 19 years ago, I ran a website dealing specifically with shielding & banishment, as a stand-alone topic, explored in great depth. What many use when they call it banishment, is something akin to 'bug repellent', and what many use when they call it shielding is something akin to a window screen. There are other approaches... arguably better ones I think. But they all have some utility.
I don't use any of that anymore myself (or more accurately I don't use it as a safety or defensive measure, there are other utilities). I find that vs. myself, if astrally traveling, they all have about as much efficacy as a barrier made out of wet tissue paper. So if I can stride through such things with ease, I tend to assume most things which actually pose a threat could do so as well. But it's all relative to what you're expecting to encounter.