Hah, "thorough" indeed! If there's one thing I do, it's wordy.
2) Yeah, this is an area that I have in the past found extremely interesting, but have somewhat backed off from more recently, at least for a time. I've always been interested in historical linguistics, archaeology, and other ways of pushing our knowledge back past the fuzzy boundaries of recorded history, and so it was natural to me to apply it to religious questions as well. When I was coming at religion from a more material/archetypal point of view, looking at comparative mythology seemed like a good way to get at what I was "really" trying to get in touch with. One of the main reasons I've backed off is that I intellectually arrived at the notion that Freyja and Frigg were just hypostases of a single earlier Goddess, and so I ought to just worship that Goddess. Well, as I began praying and worshipping, I got the impression that nope, they're different, I really ought to worship two different Goddesses. Now, are these two "really" two different astral vehicles for the same greater spiritual Being? No idea, maybe. Either way, at least at my current point of development, it seems like it's helpful to treat them as different.
3) Heh, I might be able to guess which blogger. My current thinking on this is that it's reductionist to think that religious experience is only manifestations of your subconscious, but that it is naive to think your personal subconscious plays no role such experiences. It seems to take a lot of hard work to even recognize what your subconscious is doing, much less to get it out of the way when you're doing things like praying or meditating. So, at least right now, I think it likely that when you pray or otherwise interact with "the Gods" (or daimones, or emissaries, or astral vehicles of incomprehensible intelligences, or whatever they might truly be), much of what you experience is coming out of your own subconscious, especially early on, but that hopefully your subconscious is getting nudged in certain directions by the Being(s) you are reaching out to. To use another personal example, if I make an offering to Thunor and imagine a burly red-bearded man telling me to be a more responsible family man, did I "really" have a conversation with the God Thunor? Maybe, maybe not. But maybe that Being did nudge me to recognize something I knew deep down.
4) Definitely. I bring this up because too much time with various editions of the D&D Monster Manual has made me a bit taxonomy-happy when it comes to non-mundane beings, and I have to remind myself of that when I get into thinking about the spiritual.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-12 06:29 pm (UTC)2) Yeah, this is an area that I have in the past found extremely interesting, but have somewhat backed off from more recently, at least for a time. I've always been interested in historical linguistics, archaeology, and other ways of pushing our knowledge back past the fuzzy boundaries of recorded history, and so it was natural to me to apply it to religious questions as well. When I was coming at religion from a more material/archetypal point of view, looking at comparative mythology seemed like a good way to get at what I was "really" trying to get in touch with. One of the main reasons I've backed off is that I intellectually arrived at the notion that Freyja and Frigg were just hypostases of a single earlier Goddess, and so I ought to just worship that Goddess. Well, as I began praying and worshipping, I got the impression that nope, they're different, I really ought to worship two different Goddesses. Now, are these two "really" two different astral vehicles for the same greater spiritual Being? No idea, maybe. Either way, at least at my current point of development, it seems like it's helpful to treat them as different.
3) Heh, I might be able to guess which blogger. My current thinking on this is that it's reductionist to think that religious experience is only manifestations of your subconscious, but that it is naive to think your personal subconscious plays no role such experiences. It seems to take a lot of hard work to even recognize what your subconscious is doing, much less to get it out of the way when you're doing things like praying or meditating. So, at least right now, I think it likely that when you pray or otherwise interact with "the Gods" (or daimones, or emissaries, or astral vehicles of incomprehensible intelligences, or whatever they might truly be), much of what you experience is coming out of your own subconscious, especially early on, but that hopefully your subconscious is getting nudged in certain directions by the Being(s) you are reaching out to. To use another personal example, if I make an offering to Thunor and imagine a burly red-bearded man telling me to be a more responsible family man, did I "really" have a conversation with the God Thunor? Maybe, maybe not. But maybe that Being did nudge me to recognize something I knew deep down.
4) Definitely. I bring this up because too much time with various editions of the D&D Monster Manual has made me a bit taxonomy-happy when it comes to non-mundane beings, and I have to remind myself of that when I get into thinking about the spiritual.
Cheers,
Jeff