“Absolution forgives the guilt associated with the penitent's sins, and removes the eternal punishment (of Hell) associated with mortal sins. … Theologians say the absolution of a penitent more than twenty paces away would be questionably valid. Phone absolutions are considered invalid.”
— Wikipedia (2024)
Magic
As I make a last pass, looking for errors in the manuscript of my book Operating Manual for Enlightenment, I’m reminded of how spirit supports mental health.
When I was studying ritual magic, adherents claimed magic had a direct, physical effect. This naïve belief in the power of faith is reflected in most religions. I was studying this because I wanted to see what a belief in magic amounted to when stripped of all the religious trappings.
Belief in magic is pre-scientific. From a scientific standpoint, magic is ridiculous. Yet a majority of the world's population believe in magic in its religious form. Many serious scientists have and are religious, and accept the magic of religion in some form. Many careful, thinking people see physical reality as different from religious reality.
The paradox can be resolved if magic applies to people, while causality applies to everything else. I can accept that “God created man in his image” only if God is a human image. In a world that doesn’t have humans, God is irrelevant. If you disagree, then you live in an imponderable world.
What is moral behavior? This is an important question we need to ask. Religion approaches this unscientific questions with an unscientific answer that fails in many regards.
Absolution
According to Webroot (2024), 35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography but there is no open discussion of this.
“Pornography hinders the development of a healthy sexuality, and among adults, it distorts sexual attitudes and social realities. In families, pornography use leads to marital dissatisfaction, infidelity, separation, and divorce.”
— Patrick F. Fagan (2009), psychologist and former Deputy Assistant at Health and Human Services
Religion is designed to hide moral failure. It fails because we must address moral failure ourselves, an institution cannot do it for us. Yet, most people cannot do it, so religions are created to absolve them. In this way, we accommodate immorality within communities and ourselves.
False endorsement is a blank check written on an empty bank account; an evasion that obscures insight, erodes resilience, and damages mental health. Religious absolution is an illusion.
Religion requires instructions and a protocol, asserting that words convey spirit, but this mistakes incantation for insight and ceremony for understanding. The closest any religion comes to spirit is possession.
“Currently, when I attend my psychiatrist appointments, I often run into the same young man who stops me in my tracks and tells me flat out, ‘Jesus loves you and will return to the earth one day to save us.’... I have met others who have started entire organizations because of their experiences of a God in a psychosis. One woman, in particular, is proud to share the love that she experiences from her own beliefs. She always tells me, ‘It is not about religion, it is about love.’”
— Andrea Paquette (2014)
Unwritten religions are not religions in the Western sense. These typically indigenous frameworks are social systems. I was not raised in such a system, nor in any religious system, so what I know now comes from watching and living with people of other cultures.
Spirit
Indigenous religions are experiential while the Abrahamic religions are intellectual. Experiential traditions focus on spirit, while intellectual traditions focus on behavior. Experiential traditions claim spirit must be experienced internally, while intellectual traditions claim it can also be written. Does intellectual experience prevent spiritual experience?
It is a mistake to equate experiential and intellectual religions. In the tradition of the Kwakwaka'wakw of the Pacific Northwest, a spirit dancer does not dance like an animal, they are the animal. The experience is an altered state of being. You are not a person speaking to a God, you are channeling a divine force. Is being possessed the same as having spirit?
Even though the experience of possession cannot be contradicted, it provides no tool for argument. In contrast, intellectual constructions can be righteous, obliged, pious, guilty, and absolved. Thoughts are not states of being. Intellect lacks spirit. The question is whether intellect can lead to spirit.
“Teosi’s words (the words of the Christian’s God) belong to the white people… No one had pronounced them before the missionaries arrived with them. This is why we do not really understand them. Our thought cannot open them out in every direction as we do with those of the spirits. If we go on following them for no reason, we will eventually forget the words of our elders. Then we will be called believers, when in fact our minds will simply have become as forgetful as those of the white people who know nothing of the forest... The xapiri (spirits) continue to let us hear their songs, which are our true language.”
— Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami Shaman (2013, 204)
Spirit is a personal dimension of meaningful awareness that’s different from being healthy, stable, and normal. It does not cure disease, but it can foster mental health. Catalysts for spirit, like ceremonies, religions, therapy, and psychedelics, are not medicinal, though they can be used like medicines.
Because spirituality is not a commodity, it does not fit Western culture. Western culture seeks consolidation and condensation; spirituality seeks evolution and ethereality. Western culture encourages you to seek happiness, which depends on one’s mood, one’s mental weather. Spirit generates one’s weather.
I can help you find faith in yourself. Schedule a free call:
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