A significant minority of people are, and more claim to be, naturally psychic - spontaneously in touch with the occult world of spirits.
They naturally experience life (at least sometimes) as something the live immersed-in a spiritual world.
This should not be surprising, because probably nearly all children are like this; and it seems likely that some will continue to be - in an unbroken way.
While others revert to natural psychism under stress, or powerful stimulation - and/or when in a altered or clouded state of consciousness (half-asleep, trance states, psychosis, intoxication etc).
The results of this kind of natural psychism are variously interpreted - some people take-up this kind of work "professionally" (whether paid or not) - whether altruistically, or for their own personal benefit.
Others understand their psychic experiences within one or another religion, and so interpret them as religious experiences.
Some try to learn objective knowledge from spiritual contacts and insights of one sort or another; and some of these try to teach others about their discoveries as spiritual insights, or even spiritual systems.
My understanding of natural psychism is that it is a personal attribute, neither valuable nor harmful in itself - the value of which depends entirely on what is made of it.
But I also feel that, and perhaps for exactly this reason, natural psychism is a bit of a dead end.
A "dead end" in the sense that natural psychism is nothing to be proud-of and bragged-about, nor is it something to be ashamed-of, denied or concealed...
Either you have it or you don't; and therefore I regard natural psychism as not something that should be striven for.
Seriously to set-out to on a course of training or personality-engineering, intending to make one-self more spontaneously spiritually sensitive; is the kind of attempt to change oneself away from what one actually is, that (whether effective or not - and it certainly can be effective) is almost sure to be badly-motivated at root.
Furthermore, the fact that so many people are (here and now) not psychic, and utterly lack spontaneous psychism; means that the real problem is neither to try and revert to an earlier cultural or personal stage and phase...
Nor to accept that we are spiritually blind in a world where spirits are really-real...
But instead to work towards a spiritual awareness that is attuned-with (because rooted-in) God, divine creation, and our intent for salvation.
The spiritual awareness that should be sought (i.e. by everyone) is not, therefore, a going back into immersive pre-consciousness and spontaneity; but forward into a freely chosen enhanced consciousness.
3 comments:
It took me many years to realize that natural psychism is inherent and that tinkering with it doesn't change your "baseline" much. We are born in this life with a certain sensitivity that accompanies psychism from birth. There are many ups and downs to this whole thing. Living a sensitive life in a ridiculous world results in lots of downsides, but over time one gains a grip on their life, or at least tries to. Excellent article as usual.
@ag - Yes, that's what I have come to think. Indeed, genuine natural psychism - when someone is "open" to whatever spiritual influences are around - is as difficult and more immediately debilitating than the more common near-total spiritual insensitivity.
Dion Fortune wrote insightfully about this 100 years ago (when natural psychism was much more common) in Spiritualism and Occultism edited by Gareth Knight.
But I don't think her "solution" of (as I understand it, and stated very briefly) making a group-based occult Christian Religion - with rituals, trained meditations, "scriptures" etc - inclusive of Psychism but purporting to make it controllable and safe (from evil spiritual influences) ... I don't believe that this is valid or effective anymore, and its effectiveness was dwindling even during her lifetime.
I have experienced psychic experiences of this kind, but from the other end - having people read my mind instead of vice versa. I think this sort of thing is much harder these days, though, on account of everyone in the West having our consciousnesses hardened and involuntarily turned into lonely citadels by all the psychological warfare of the Western governments, but those of us with unfortunate breeches in our spiritual walls are still susceptible to having our minds read or intuited by others.
The catastrophic penetration and collapse of our spiritual boundaries - the trespassing of the epidermis of our spiritual bodies - seems to be a byproduct of the sexual revolution, of rape, of child abuse, of psychological warfare, and of electronic entertainment and social media etc.
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