Heh, yes, I predicted reincarnation would come up eventually. No psychic powers necessary ;)
I'm agnostic on that subject. When it comes to the minutiae of what exactly happens to us after death, the answer is generally something like: "We don't need to know that". And, you know, experience, anecdote, and actual religious practice in Orthodoxy all strongly suggest it isn't quite as simple as "go directly to heaven or hell and stay there permanently". So... I don't know. I don't theorize. And I can't rule it out. It's above my pay-grade. I pray for the dead. Sometimes that keeps them from following me ;)
In a more general sense, if having a broader than average range of perception is a sign of having made progress toward some desirable goal, in a previous life... why is it so maladaptive in this life? You'd expect it to have some practical benefit, no? Or is that just the dumb movie version? I do appreciate the advance danger warning and don't wish to play that down, but it's just one aspect of many-- most of them utterly useless. That's a shallow way of looking at it, I know. We are not really utilitarians. Still. What good is it? AFAICT it mostly just gives me migraines. If we're gonna go the reincarnation route with that, I'd peg it as a problem of negative karma I need to work off! Far from feeling special, it feels like a handicap, tbh.
On the other hand, when I treat the migraines themselves as my religion bids me-- Accept the gift, say thank you, and see what it can teach me-- I do in fact learn, grow, and (waves hands incoherently for lack of words) stuff. God grants us what is needful for our salvation. Some of us are perhaps more hard-headed than others and require a mallet to get through. If that seems like a tangent, my apologies. It really isn't-- I don't pretend to know all the mechanics of it, but the migraine thing is intimately connected with the larger problem of irregular perception.
There's stuff to support the idea that there's a concept of multiple planes in Orthodoxy, but it's unclear to me if/how it corresponds (or doesn't) with the ideas commonly found in this community, wrt material/etheric/astral/mental/etc. I do not think it is a simple problem of vocabulary. Some stuff just doesn't translate. Certainly that's a thing I'd love to get clarification on, from the religion side. One of the fun things about this community is, of course, that it self-selects for people open to such ideas, and actively interested in it, whereas the church takes all sorts-- as it should (wouldn't be much of a church if it only accepted avidly curious intellectual types)! Which means asking about it on the church side requires careful consideration and some effort to feel people out on where they're at, religion-wise. And I'm lazy and kind of a hermit, so I avoid it. Oi. Will get around to it sometime, but it takes a while to frame the questions in a brief and coherent way, without running down the rabbit-hole for half an hour trying to cram some poor innocent sod into my headspace! Your forays into neoplatonism have been helpful in this respect-- I've at least gotten closer to formulating questions in a vocabulary that someone who's done philosophy101 and knows a little Greek, can probably follow.
Your witchy friend... I have a theory on that. Still working it out-- will probably be a wall-of-text journal entry at some point. Like, does it have to be past lives? Why not a simple equation of living on the more-sensitive end of the spectrum, and also hanging out in a bad mental/spiritual/astral/whatever neighborhood? There's a thing in the Sayings (wish I could find the chapter number, now) where they say that a father who is very close to God, only sees good things. Why is that? How can that even be, when we also say that the blessed elders see all that is in the heart? Surely there are bad things in hearts too? Doesn't advancement let you see truth? But maybe it is like our "banishing" example above-- enough light comes through you, maybe nothing else can bear to be around when you are! Result: all you see is good ;) No, I think it's more complex than that, in the saying. But I think that's part of it. If you're a black hole, then dark things gravitate to you, neh? This tells me I have a long way to go. I see more dark things than good ones. The good ones show up more when I enter the church-- not because of me, but because of what the place gets used for, I reckon.
It's not just a problem of "this doesn't make you special". I think it's almost exactly like the problem of there not being a correlation between intelligence and virtue. Being smart doesn't make you good. Being dumb doesn't make you good either. It's unrelated. Ditto for variations in... whatever that other thing is.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 09:51 pm (UTC)I'm agnostic on that subject. When it comes to the minutiae of what exactly happens to us after death, the answer is generally something like: "We don't need to know that". And, you know, experience, anecdote, and actual religious practice in Orthodoxy all strongly suggest it isn't quite as simple as "go directly to heaven or hell and stay there permanently". So... I don't know. I don't theorize. And I can't rule it out. It's above my pay-grade. I pray for the dead. Sometimes that keeps them from following me ;)
In a more general sense, if having a broader than average range of perception is a sign of having made progress toward some desirable goal, in a previous life... why is it so maladaptive in this life? You'd expect it to have some practical benefit, no? Or is that just the dumb movie version? I do appreciate the advance danger warning and don't wish to play that down, but it's just one aspect of many-- most of them utterly useless. That's a shallow way of looking at it, I know. We are not really utilitarians. Still. What good is it? AFAICT it mostly just gives me migraines. If we're gonna go the reincarnation route with that, I'd peg it as a problem of negative karma I need to work off! Far from feeling special, it feels like a handicap, tbh.
On the other hand, when I treat the migraines themselves as my religion bids me-- Accept the gift, say thank you, and see what it can teach me-- I do in fact learn, grow, and (waves hands incoherently for lack of words) stuff. God grants us what is needful for our salvation. Some of us are perhaps more hard-headed than others and require a mallet to get through. If that seems like a tangent, my apologies. It really isn't-- I don't pretend to know all the mechanics of it, but the migraine thing is intimately connected with the larger problem of irregular perception.
There's stuff to support the idea that there's a concept of multiple planes in Orthodoxy, but it's unclear to me if/how it corresponds (or doesn't) with the ideas commonly found in this community, wrt material/etheric/astral/mental/etc. I do not think it is a simple problem of vocabulary. Some stuff just doesn't translate. Certainly that's a thing I'd love to get clarification on, from the religion side. One of the fun things about this community is, of course, that it self-selects for people open to such ideas, and actively interested in it, whereas the church takes all sorts-- as it should (wouldn't be much of a church if it only accepted avidly curious intellectual types)! Which means asking about it on the church side requires careful consideration and some effort to feel people out on where they're at, religion-wise. And I'm lazy and kind of a hermit, so I avoid it. Oi. Will get around to it sometime, but it takes a while to frame the questions in a brief and coherent way, without running down the rabbit-hole for half an hour trying to cram some poor innocent sod into my headspace! Your forays into neoplatonism have been helpful in this respect-- I've at least gotten closer to formulating questions in a vocabulary that someone who's done philosophy101 and knows a little Greek, can probably follow.
Your witchy friend... I have a theory on that. Still working it out-- will probably be a wall-of-text journal entry at some point. Like, does it have to be past lives? Why not a simple equation of living on the more-sensitive end of the spectrum, and also hanging out in a bad mental/spiritual/astral/whatever neighborhood? There's a thing in the Sayings (wish I could find the chapter number, now) where they say that a father who is very close to God, only sees good things. Why is that? How can that even be, when we also say that the blessed elders see all that is in the heart? Surely there are bad things in hearts too? Doesn't advancement let you see truth? But maybe it is like our "banishing" example above-- enough light comes through you, maybe nothing else can bear to be around when you are! Result: all you see is good ;) No, I think it's more complex than that, in the saying. But I think that's part of it. If you're a black hole, then dark things gravitate to you, neh? This tells me I have a long way to go. I see more dark things than good ones. The good ones show up more when I enter the church-- not because of me, but because of what the place gets used for, I reckon.
It's not just a problem of "this doesn't make you special". I think it's almost exactly like the problem of there not being a correlation between intelligence and virtue. Being smart doesn't make you good. Being dumb doesn't make you good either. It's unrelated. Ditto for variations in... whatever that other thing is.