Bouncing Pings
Bouncing a TrackBack back to Alex again after he responded to my response to his entry on the subject of a religious experience taking place in, of all places, a church.
Yeah yeah, I know the location’s not a shock.
So Alex had some things to say about the things Carl said in his response to Alex’s entry, and Alex also had some things to say about the things I said in my response to that same entry. Now I have a few things to say about the things Alex said in response to both the aforementioned responses to his original entry.
Gosh I love this, it’s amazing how convoluted the sentences can get when you’ve just got a few levels of TrackBack. Imagine what it’ll be like when we’ve been at this for a few more weeks.
And now to the point.
To quote Alex: “Matthew’s comments on the feelings we have during an encounter with “God or Gods”, slightly worry me.”
He said a bit more than that but I’m not going to reproduce the entire thing, I’ll respond to it instead.
Alex appears to be worried by my suggestion (based on real research, incidentally) that sensations he’s always seen as spiritual effects with apparent physical symptoms are in fact physical symptoms caused by spiritual stimulation of part of the brain. Personally, I don’t have a problem with this at all. If this is how it works, I can see two explanations for it. Either $deity comes along and thinks ‘ah, I’ll let this human know I’m here’ and pokes out a finger and tickles the right bit of our brains, or a God turns Their awareness on us and part of our brain responds to that attention through some kind of non-physical means, and that response, that recognition perhaps of the presence of Divinity, causes an interaction within the brain which causes such physical sensations.
I find the second more likely. It seems to me that such ‘encounters’, or maybe those moments when we move temporarily closer to the Divine, are accompanied or perhaps characterised by an opening of the mind, a point where some of our unused potential is tapped. This would be one possible explanation for how the invocation of the Goddess and God may empower the magical workings of a Witch, for in the presence of the Goddess and God they temporarily gain the additional capability to focus and channel a greater amount of energy. That would characterise the Goddess and God as passive enhancers, increasing and developing everything around Them.
That’s assuming a Deity can have a physical location, which in the normal sense of things (Jesus would be an exception) wouldn’t really be true. I do suspect that the Goddess and God, while capable of being in more than one place and responding to more than one person at once (or intervening/meddling with more than one person at once, if that’s what they’re doing at that particular point in time), don’t devote the same amount of attention to everywhere at once. When a Christian prays, it seems likely that God might turn a greater amount of attention to them, and cause such effects as described above in the process of doing so.
Alternatively, it could be a sense of deliberate physical reassurance, a trigger set off by God to let you know that yes, He’s really here.
A similar effect would be observed within the magic circle used by Pagans. When the circle is cast and the Witch or Witches within it stand between the worlds, they’re like a finger poked into the bottom of a fairly taut bedsheet - it pokes upwards into the part of the world above. Combined with the invocations of the ritual, this more or less ensures that the Goddess and God will pay attention to the circle and its occupants, causing once again the same effects.
Yet another possibility is that the sensation is caused by the mental/magical activity required by the human mind to contact God/Goddess in the first place, but I find that particular possibility somewhat unlikely. I don’t know why, it’s another one of these intuitive things.
This hasn’t been very coherent. To make some kind of conclusion to this point…
What I was trying to say might have been what Alex interpreted it as, but it’s not really the intent of what I was trying to say. The way Alex mentions a ‘purely physical thing’ implies that I don’t believe this is a ‘real’ spiritual event, but I believe it is — I’m merely attempting to explain, justify and find common elements in both our described experiences, for I believe as a Pagan that all religious experience can be characterised by similar or identical things.
And perhaps it’s a throwback to living with Christians at Uni that I feel a continual need to justify my own beliefs developing so differently (or perhaps not so differently), and perhaps I shouldn’t feel that need because it isn’t really necessary — certainly many other Pagans I’ve met don’t seem to share it (but then some of them seem to feel a need to attempt to disprove Christianity at every point, which strikes me as pointless and unnecessary).
I shouldn’t do that really.
And the other thing Alex said that I wanted to respond to:
“I don’t know the pagan position on evil spirits and stuff, but if they have the ability to stimulate our lobes as well, then we could be walking on dangerous ground.”
Yes, I suppose we could be, but I’ll suggest that most Pagans at least are not, because within the magic circle we are explicitly protected from all entities, spirits and other things which might do us harm. All the circle casting rituals I have read and done include a purging of the space and the establishment of a barrier through which only things which will not cause harm to those within (or some variation on the same theme) may pass, and in fact that prohibition often lies both ways, preventing harmful things being cast out of the circle, which effectively prevents that circle being used for harmful magic, in line with general Pagan morality.
So the general position on evil spirits is that yes, there are things out there which are bad and which you don’t want to tangle with on a psychic level. Guidelines for dreamwalking, astral projection and other such out-of-body activity all include the necessary things to do for protection from roving unpleasantness, some of which may be seen to come from other humans, although some authors are noticeably more worried about this than others. Dion Fortune wrote an entire book on the subject of psychic defence after suffering an attack herself when she was relatively young; I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but intend to as it’s probably very interesting. Other authors such as Rae Beth speak very explicitly about protective barriers before attempting anything which might leave you vulnerable, such as moving to the astral plane. I’ve often thought of it as going out and leaving your front door open - you might be okay, you might come back to find a cat’s wandered in and peed on your sofa, or you might come back and your computers have been stolen. Not really worth the risk.
Oh, and I think Christians are probably walking fairly safely too, at least in a church… it seems to me that the effect of consecrating a church and then using it as a church on a regular basis would be similar to that of casting a magic circle. The church differs mostly in that it’s a permanent installation, whereas the circle may be cast anywhere, and the nature of this is down to the characters and relative sizes of the religions in question. There is no point building a place of worship just for Pagans in a village of four hundred people where virtually all of them are Christians, but there is a lot of point in building a church for them to go to.
I think that’s about it for now, I’m tired and you’re probably bored stiff by now anyway.