1 hour ago
(This post was last modified: 30 minutes ago by Magical Realist.)
Aliens, ghosts, cryptids like Bigfoot and skinwalkers and shapeshifters and djinn, demons, higher spirits, shadow people, poltergeists, egegores, tulpas, thought forms, yokai, and the Fae consistently seem to resist easy objective identification. The first thing exorcists like Jesus did when encountering a demon-possessed person was ask the demon its name. There was something powerful in acquiring its name--its identifiability as an objective "who" localizable in space and time. But their non-physical reality may not be like that. There's a slipperiness to their being semantically predicatable as a static "who" or "what", as something nameable, as if the rules of discrete and objective existing don't apply to them.
Indeed, if humans themselves belong to some higher non-physical plane, the whole spiritual agenda of shedding one's selfness found in both Christian and Buddhist mysticism suddenly makes perfect sense. It's the learning to be what we really are, not enduring material bodies in spacetime but consciousness itself whose only essence is in its own phenomenal self-knowingness. We thus will never truly understand these mercurial otherworldlings until we dispense with our habitual need to conceptually project on them the ontic state of being absolutely localizable and in-themselves things.
Indeed, if humans themselves belong to some higher non-physical plane, the whole spiritual agenda of shedding one's selfness found in both Christian and Buddhist mysticism suddenly makes perfect sense. It's the learning to be what we really are, not enduring material bodies in spacetime but consciousness itself whose only essence is in its own phenomenal self-knowingness. We thus will never truly understand these mercurial otherworldlings until we dispense with our habitual need to conceptually project on them the ontic state of being absolutely localizable and in-themselves things.
