The Principalities and the Spiritual

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

This is a big topic. There is a learning curve, and a lot of false perceptions. Bear with me, and I will work to get us on the same page of understanding.

The Spiritual is a particular thing, like gravity. There are rules to it. There is cause and effect. It is something that pagans and non-Christians have talked about. It is something that is referenced and inferred in the Bible and Christianity. It all works in particular ways. There is one Truth to it.

The spiritual is “Other Dimensional.” Is that 4th or 5th dimensional? It is other dimensional…like “Stranger Things.” Other Dimensional things work differently than how you have perceived. Prophet Ezekiel in Ezekiel 1, he had a vision of Angels. He was “Seeing” the Spiritual. The Spiritual being other dimensional and complicated, we have understood with allegories. Given someone was saying “The Bible is Allegorical,” in what context were they saying it? The allegorical elements of the Bible are spiritual in nature.

The Veil

In the Temple of Jerusalem, there was a place called The Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies is where God’s very presence dwelt, and the Ark of the Covenant was kept. It was separated from the rest of the temple by a curtain or veil. Only the High Priest was allowed back there, and only once a year during Yom Kippur. He would crawl in on his hands and knees, with a cord tied around his waste. Given he came into the presence of God with sin or gross things in his heart or soul, or in an unclean state, he may have died. The cord was there to pull him out.

Between the physical and the spiritual there has been a veil. An Apocalypse is an opening of the eyes, a tearing away of the veil from hidden things. When Jesus died on the cross, the veil tore. That may be the veil or curtain in the temple. It may be the veil or curtain separating the physical from the spiritual. Spiritual things tend to work parallel with the physical. Man is made in the image of God. The Spiritual is a reflection of something.

What I just explained there, we may be able to find Western Occult people and gnostics use similar words. Satan was a liar and a thief. The Spiritual is a particular objective thing. It works in a particular ways.

The Veil that separates the Physical from the Spiritual is there for mankind’s protection. In a fallen state, given man was in the presence of God, he may die.

2

The Prophets in the Old Testament, working for God, did some things that their contemporaries may have seen as odd.

- Ezekiel laid on his side for 390 days to simulate the siege of Jerusalem. (Ezekiel 4)

- Isaiah walked three years naked. (Isaiah 20)

- Jeremiah walked with an Ox Yoke. (Jeremiah 27)

- Breaks staffs over knees. (Zechariah 11)

In studying the Old Testament Prophets, God was instructing them to give allegories, and do specific things in front of people to be seen. Why?

Man is made in the image of God. What man does reflects. A man working in obedience to God, may be giving God authority on Earth to act, and/or setting something in the principalities. Those particular things “Set,” in the spiritual, they manifest later in prophecy.

3

When I started working for God, I was a normal man. I had been a life long Christian. I had about average Bible knowledge…which wasn’t much. I had hopes and aspirations that didn’t involve Church matters. I received a calling one day, and started working for God. What I have shared with you here is basic. This is the start of something.

The other day, I was writing about Satan in another forum topic. My understanding of Satan started one day with an awareness.

Socratic Paradox - Given all men are doing what they believe is good, or in the their best interest, how can evil exist?

We can answer this paradox with the existence of Satan. Satan was a liar and a thief. He skewed men’s perspectives. The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

I wrote about a lot of deep understandings regarding Satan the other day. The Socratic Paradox and understanding shared was the starting point. I grew in understanding pragmatically. Jesus is the Suffering Servant. (Isaiah 53) I was a servant to my sorrow. I was being taught by God’s Holy Spirit as I had a “need to know” certain things.

A man’s body is a Temple. Jesus lives inside a man through his Holy Spirit. At some point growing in faith, knowledge and understanding was like Socrates. All knowledge was inside me. I forgot. I asked questions, and found answers.

4

Satan, in the Bible, is allegorically called a Dragon. In various mythologies, what do dragons represent? There was a serpent as part of The Cult of Apollo. Said serpent had hidden knowledge.

To Occult - To hide away understanding.

A dragon, he had gold horde. Knowledge is greater than silver and gold. A dragon may have been hiding away understanding for himself, and whomever he wished to share it with. That may be an occult person like dragons in China. That may be like The KKK with their Grand Imperial Dragon, and they were looking to keep people ignorant and fearful, to hide away knowledge. How does someone slay a dragon?

10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down. They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death. (Revelations 12:10,11)

Jesus Christ did the will of the father unto death. Jesus did not love his life. If you love your life you will lose it. If you hate your life, you will find it eternally. We have consistent themes.

Various symbolism through various belief systems, that symbolism may have had very specific and objective meaning. People’s perspectives were skewed or understanding hidden away. The stone rejected by The Builders becomes the chief cornerstone. (Psalms 118:22)(Luke 20:9-19)(Acts 4:11)

5

When a lot of people mention the KKK, they do so with emotional appeals. That is not what was done here.

The KKK was an Occult Secret Society with ties to, or produced from, Freemasonry. The KKK got together at night, and performed occult ritualism, dancing around fires, and doing other such things. They worked to hide away knowledge and understanding.

Luciferian - Believed that God was the dark, and man or something else was The Light.

Luciferians during the middle ages were said to hangout around a fire at night, worship Satan, and engage in debauchery and other abominations…like a The Burning Man concert. Many Western Occult groups were Luciferian.

Many people may have joined the Freemasons or the KKK for a variety of reasons. At the center or the leadership of the organization, there may have been particular knowledgeable deceives.

6

To be blunt…

I see many religions and religious people copy and paste sections of religious texts into a pre-defined narrative that is less an expression of the religion and more of an expression of the identity of the observer itself.

It is almost algorithmic in nature.

There is a religion: R

This religion contains a multitude of texts: R(T)

These texts contain various other texts: R(T(Tx))

Given the multiplicity of these texts the observer picks a selects few to form a coherent viewpoint:

O → T(Tx → Tx1)

This observer filters the text in accords to their identity thus resulting in the percieved textual fragments as expressions of the observer’s identity:

O(Ox) → T(Tx → Tx1 → Tx1.1)

What remains of religion is an observer effect:

O(Ox) → T(Tx → Tx1 → Tx1.1)

So what is asserted about the religion is merely an assertion of the observer itself:

O(Ox) → T(Tx → Tx1 → Tx1.1) →

(O(Ox) → R(T(Tx → Tx1 → Tx1.1)))

And effectively a loop occurs:

O(Ox) → R(T(Tx → Tx1 → Tx1.1)) → (O(x) → R)

and the observer effectively creates itself as the loop ends back up on the observer:

(O(Ox) → (O(Ox))

Where religion is less of fixed thing but rather an expression of the observer:

(O(Ox) → (O(Ox)) → R(T(Tx))

This applies not just to religion, but political systems, philosophies, etc. …but we are talking about religion.

The backing these people receive is usually out of existential desperation where people either align with something that aligns with a prerequisite set of values or provides an answer that is more convenient than the trials of deep meditation and contemplation.

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7

I like this idea. Selection → individual expression, rather than what might seem like deduced truth or complete truth of the religion. I’d add: here the texts are not just drawn from an already complicated set of scriptures (OT and NT) but also popular culture (Stranger Things), medieval Jewish apocrypha - the High Priest story, Platonic memory theory, and even Gnostic (perhaps) ideas about using sympathetic magic - human rituals can allow God more agency here - an idea also outside of most versions of Christianity, pop science and even the occult. These are postmodern with high and low culture, many media, multiple religions and belief systems.

I mention this because this seemingly ad hoc, bricoleur approach - ironically a postmodern approach - allows even more individualized expression. Not just what one chooses from scripture - which could lead to texts about how to forgive one’s enemies and be close to God, or coaching in dealing with catastrophic adversity, etc. - but pulling from diverse sources in diverse categories.

So, the attitude can be almost any attitude: humble advice inspired by scripture, us/them sermons, self-aggrandizement, even up to messianistic levels, shared exploration with peers, eschatological preparation, confession, hey, let’s _____________appeals and so on. That’s just with scripture. Add in the pulling from diverse belief systems, and it can lead to pretty much any kind of text/attitude under the sun. When someone restricts themselves strictly to a set canon - even as complicated as The Bible - the text will occasionally fight back - the NT tempering the OT. When anything can be brought in, the individual is free to create or be what they want. One could even, ironically again, call these kinds of postmodern texts a form of chaos magick: the art of adopting whatever beliefs or symbols work in the moment regardless of tradition.

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@eodnhoj7

You created a system of understanding for youself. Instead of working to understand what was being presented to you, you projected your understanding. How are you not doing exactly what you described?

Given we compare and contrast different “Mysticism,” honestly, there may be some particular themes. In the themes, God becomes self-evident.

Secular Humanism and Ideology, since at least Nietzsche, it has become ideology as religion. A lot of people have been Utopia or world building. An Atheist or Agnostic may have ended up in a Secularized Mysticism.

9

The following is a Wiki article on Chaos Magic.

The founding figures of chaos magic believed that other occult traditions had become too religious in character.[7] They attempted to reduce the symbolic, ritualistic, theological, or otherwise ornamental aspects of these occult traditions, to leave behind a set of basic techniques that they believed to be the basis of magic.[8]

Chaos magic teaches that the essence of magic is that perceptions are conditioned by beliefs, and that the world as it is normally perceived can be changed by deliberately changing those beliefs.[9] Chaos magicians subsequently treat belief as a tool, often creating their own idiosyncratic magical systems and blending such different things as “practical magic, quantum physics, chaos theory, and anarchism.”[10]

Scholar Hugh Urban has described chaos magic as a union of traditional occult techniques and applied postmodernism[11] – particularly a postmodernist skepticism concerning the existence or knowability of objective truth,[12] positing that chaos magic rejects the existence of absolute truth, and views all occult systems as arbitrary symbol-systems that are only effective because of the belief of the practitioner.[12] ( Chaos magic - Wikipedia )

@eodnhoj7

Western Philosophy of Aquinas is different than Western Philosophy today. Western Philosophy was rooted in God and Christianity. Since the 1970’s or so, it was taken over. Post Modern Theology would be an Occult practice of Chaos Magic. The questing of all moral truths towards someone working to force their will on an Objective Universe. That was what you were describing and were trying to do.

During Kamala Harris Presidential Campaign, very particular words and tone were utilized. The campaign looked like a “Blind Faith Church” in a Protestant Camp Meeting tradition. That would be Chaos Magic applied. They were trying to force or WILL something into being.

Continental Freemasonry

Protestant pastor Frédéric Desmons, representing the lodge “Le Progrès” of Nîmes, presented the key argument for reform. In his documented speech to the convention, Desmons argued that mandatory religious belief contradicted masonic principles of intellectual liberty and universal brotherhood and that since Freemasonry was not a religion, it should not require a belief in a religious system. The convention adopted his position by a significant majority vote of 135 to 76.[28] ( Continental Freemasonry - Wikipedia )

There has been a Mysticism in Freemasonry. Freemasons started allowing in Atheists. There were Atheists in a Mysticism. Western Atheists have tended to be Secular Humanists. There has been a Mysticism there.

10

Not really. Observing distinct feedback loops is not creating or discovering, it is just a level of awareness.

I did not create cycles.

Nor did I create the event of distinction.

11

Observing feedback loops is not mysticism, it is observation.

Quoting random wiki articles is exactly what the text I wrote predicted.

You are literally arguing against the text while doing exactly what it claims you would do.

That is not mysticism. Just basic reasoning using recursion.

But by all means continue quoting random internet articles if it makes you feel relevant.

12

You created a system of understanding for yourself. Are you really observing what you thought you were, or working to force an outcome based on your system of understanding? You were not looking to understand what I was presented here in the OP.

You have a belief. You created a formula or text for it.

You equated religion and political systems and philosophy all to be the same.

How is your system of understanding any different?

The topic here is The Principalities and the Spiritual. Your system of understanding doesn’t take “Spiritual things” into account.

13

A learned a lot about Spiritual Things engaging in Spiritual Warfare. I learned as I went pragmatically with God.

5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:5)

Part of Spiritual Warfare has been a War of Words, a War of Thoughts. How does man perceive himself? How does man perceive God?

Saint Patrick, he went into Pagan Ireland and engaged in Spiritual Warfare resulting in the proselytization of the Island. Cause and Effect. Given Christians are doing things they are supposed to, and working to build the Kingdom of God, society and societies perceptions should be more aligned with God and Kingdom of God values. Given perceptions were being shifted some other way…where was change or the shift coming from? What was the root of the problem? I found a lot of interesting things with God, following trails back to the root of something.

Every June or so since 2019 maybe…the LGBT crowd starts believing they are righteous and holy in their sin and false perceptions. How did that come to be? Reverend Jesse Jackson, a Freemason, and his Rainbow-Push Coalition was enabling something.

How people perceive has a lot of do with The Spiritual. It is not just biological.

14

The US Government, the Veteran’s Administration, it says I am 100% crazy. They give me money. I heard a voice. I started out asking said voice yes or no questions. I would receive answers. I would check the answers over the internet. The answers were good. This voice has a character.

God is love.
God’s love is fatherly.
God has good plans.

I grew in faith.

Given I received something “Not-God,” it had some other character. I ignored it, and sought God with all my heart and soul and strength and mind till it went away. I worked to explain this to a VA doctor, and now I am 100% crazy, and the government gives me money.

Someone like Thomas Aquinas was a Christian Mystic. He experienced the ecstasies. I have experienced many interesting things, to include the ecstasies. Satan and demons are attracted to authority. Being able to hear the voice of God, I ended up under attack a lot with intrusive thoughts. I would pray unceasingly or sing songs in my head, and ignore “Things Not-God.”

My experiences with spiritual things brings context to the scriptures. Many people may have read over various Bible verses with no understanding. They may have been blind and deaf. I have been abiding in Christ, living and being something. This brings context.

15

What is my understanding of the Ecstasies?

At times, my heart area feels like warm, watery sunlight. It makes a man want to lay around all day and do nothing but enjoy it.

There isn’t a frame of reference towards leading people to understand a lot of experiences had.

God’s plan is God’s Kingdom. Someone may be loving God by “Doing.” God’s Kingdom has particular values. A man decides to be for God. This may be a step towards something.

16

You created a system of understanding for yourself. Are you really observing what you thought you were, or working to force an outcome based on your system of understanding? You were not looking to understand what I was presented here in the OP.

You have a belief. You created a formula or text for it.

You equated religion and political systems and philosophy all to be the same.

How is your system of understanding any different?

The topic here is The Principalities and the Spiritual. Your system of understanding doesn’t take “Spiritual things” into account.

My system? So your observation takes no part in what you claim?

It is recursion, cycles in everyday terms, and is not a system personally developed. It is quite common, and even biblical; “nothing new under the sun”, “likened in his image”, etc.

And the text predicting exactly what you are doing, and still doing, does not put your work at an elevated status within a hiearchy of knowledge now does it?

Quote where I equated religion, philosophy and politics to be the same. Quote please.

Because what was presented is the same underlying mechanics for each, the expression of these mechanics is distinct…but the same mechanics.

You should know a basic distinction as that is what your texts are making.

What you call spiritual things are personally selected fragments of religous texts that correspond to your observations of reality. You claim “spirituality” and yet you leave it ambigous in definition and use…and if you do not then your beliefs are not the only ones claiming angels, demons, God(s), the Devil, as this is in hinduism, buddhism, jainism, taoism, judaism, islam…

17

If that is the case then by your own standards you are deluded as your ecstasies have only resulted in unfounded accusations and lies about what I claim.

And “my understanding” is exactly what the text predicts.

The fact you need the warmth reveals less a love of God and more of a love of self.

18

Again, interesting. Let me see if my take on what you are saying is actually what you are saying. On the one level we have instrumental reasoning. The religious texts and quotes are being used for distinctly secular or empirical purposes and these in turn are just about marketing the self. One might think there is a spiritual interest, but actually that’s not important. A person has views about other people, society, the world…and so they go to religious texts, in this case, just to find things that support their positions and allow them to express their individual self. There’s actually nothing spiritual going on.

One could also say it is Eisegesis: the interpretive practice of reading one’s own pre-existing ideas, political grievances, or empirical assumptions into a text. A kind of performative non-participation in the religion.

The fact you need the warmth reveals less a love of God and more of a love of self.

There’s no swimming in the lake, just plucking useful stuff off the surface. At best it is being treated not as something with depth but as a mirror.

Selection: An observer seeking validation approaches a massive dataset (history, news, scientific literature, a religion).

Filtering: They strip away nuance to isolate some data points that confirm their identity/reactions/positions.

Recursion: Armed with these ‘justifications’ their identity hardens, altering how they scan the dataset next time.

19

You made a post here: Religion as Observer Effect

I didn’t comment on it because I found it ridiculous. I talk about God online a lot. I have done this for 12-13 years. Every so often, someone like yourself believed he figured something out. There isn’t any correcting them. They won’t take correction, and that is what you are showing. You are not willing to see reason.

The Topic HERE is The Principalities and the Spiritual. I may write about it some more as things come to me, or not.

20

Correction? Please point out where you correct logic (admitting you didn’t bother responding to the post…thus no correction is present) as the majority of what you call correction are not rational nor revealing of anything, they are just assertions…and if assertion is what “correction is” than by default, using your own reasoning method, than anything goes and you justify what you condemn.

So to correct you…quote where I deny God.

But you cannot.

Why?

Because the devil that you preach against, “the father of lies”, is exactly what you embody as what you claim against is purely lies.

You strawman.
You avoid reasoning.
You twist other’s arguments.
You quote scripture to fit your purposes.

And the truth of it is…noone cares that you preached for years. That only thing that it shows is you take pride in your own labors.

And how you treat others?

You lie.
You condemn.

Like your responses show.

Tell me where I claim to deny God existing.

Quote please.

Because the only thing presented is that your belief is just a mechanistic loop.

It does not say God exists or does not exist.

What you do not understand is that your efforts reveal nothing about God but rather your own self-elevation to cope with your feelings of fading into old age and being unappreciated.

Your preaching has everything to do with how it makes you feel…not truth beyond that. You worship what you feel…not God.

But you will disagree…so by all means continue to do so…and continue the loop the text predicts…or stay silent and admit the text is correct.