#psychology of religion

[liberatingreality]

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

[phantom-voices]

A poem I wrote on May 4th 2022. I have Schizoaffective disorder, manic type. It is both Schizophrenia and Bipolar mixed. I also have Borderline Personality Disorder. I wrote this poem after a psychosis episode. I have hallucinations, mainly auditory. In this episode I kept harming myself due to commands and both arms were badly bruised which my psychiatrist saw. I hope you like and maybe will relate. 🙂

Barren

Tired eyes, heartless voices.

Can’t fight off these hellish noises.

Crazy thoughts and countless dreams.

Cannot think through all the screams.

Lots of hatred but also love

If I can just get help from God above.

Just kneel down and get those prayers in

Insanity has left her barren.

Jessica Clingempeel

[boar-cry]

blinding ire

All these foolish religious weepers and overzealous preachers; don't they know the Gods remain indifferent to the plights of man?

Omnipotent beings sitting high atop their shrines, deaf to the screams and sorrows so far below, collecting gold and rot as if offerings owed. And yet still there are those who carve their names in polished silver and iridescent stone; sculpt temples with diamond pillars and weave jewelry out of pearls; not out of desperation, but delusion – that if they worship so called divines, they can somehow remold their spoiled lives.

What good are useless Gods that regard us no more than grains of sand?

[gnosticinitiation]

You have put so much energy into building a prison for yourself. Now spend as much on demolishing it.

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

[mindblowingscience]

An international research team led by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has uncovered in a recent research project that people's beliefs in science and religion are primarily shaped by the words of others, rather than their personal experiences. The study could help enhance public understanding of people's belief formation in important scientific issues, such as climate change and vaccination. The team's findings, realized in collaboration with researchers at Harvard University, Union College, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Conventionally, people are generally more confident about the existence of scientific phenomena, like oxygen, than religious phenomena, like God, as it is thought that people can experience oxygen, for instance, while it is harder to observe religious entities on one's own.

Continue Reading.

[srisrisriddd]

Essence

Q: What's the essence of religion?

A: What's the meaning of this moment?

- Dr Devang H Dattani

Good Morning

Quote / Poem / Poetry / Quotes Of 

Bhagwan Sri Sri Sri

Doctor Devang H Dattani

Infinite SriSriSri DDD

Posted By TheBlissCity DDD Team

See The Media Photo Video For

Quoteoftheday

God Morning

#autumn , #bliss , #TheBlissCity , #philosophy , #mindfulness , #DrDevangHDattani , #nature , #awareness , #InfiniteSriSriSriDDD , #quotes , #life , #art , #zen , #awakening , #quote , #spiritual , #photography , #Video , #meditation , #psychology , #poem , #poetry , #motivation , #inspiration , #quoteoftheday , #love , #words , #thoughts , #joy , #pun , #enlightenment , #health , #mental health , #consciousness , #good , #god , #landscape , #life , #video , #religion , #moment , #thoughts , #nirvana , #tantra , #yoga , #meaning , #essence , #photooftheday , #panorama , #leaf , #river

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[ Source: EPATH Conference 2019. ]

Apparently being a regular teenager is a disorder requiring medical treatment and the removal of body parts. Not only are you "trans" if you don't fit a 1950s Barbie/G.I. Joe stereotype, you're "trans" if you don't fit a 1950s "golly, gee" soda shoppe "Leave It To Beaver" stereotype.

This is the same tactic psychics use to tell you your fortune, and astrologers use to convince you that distant stars reflect your personality. It's called the Forer Effect, or Barnum Effect.

To really drive home the cult programming, any time you're feeling better, that's how you know you've gotten worse.

For political and ideological reasons - for example, one presenter actually claims that children are being "misdiagnosed" as autistic when they're actually trans - they've flipped the symptom and the cause.

This is more accurate:

[a-typical]

Part of the reason that children are afraid of the dark may be that, in our entire evolutionary history up until just a moment ago, they never slept alone. Instead, they nestled safely, protected by an adult, usually Mum. In the enlightened west we stick them alone in a dark room, say goodnight, and have difficulty understanding why they're sometimes upset. It makes good evolutionary sense for children to have fantasies of scary monsters. In a world stalked by lions and hyenas, such fantasies help prevent defenceless toddlers from wandering too far from their guardians. How can this safety machinery be effective for a vigorous, curious young animal unless it delivers industrial strength terror? Those who are not afraid of monsters tend not to leave descendants.

— The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan (1996)

[that-one-girls-blog-posts]

Nothing worse than getting into a new subject and having no one to discuss it with

[tinglingfuckingsensation]

having (lengthy) thoughts about mental health & religion while writing the final chapter for my baberoe WIP hungry work

In short: reflections about the serenity prayer in the context of ww2, trauma and grief, contains spoilers/musings for Hungry Work and a potential post-war sequel.

Hungry work has overt religious themes, the most prominent ones being religious homophobia (especially in the beginning) and loss of/struggle with faith over the course of the war, because I've been obsessed by how Gene's prayer (the peace prayer of st. francis) informs his character and gives some insight into his otherwise opaque inside life.

I've spent weeks researching other prayers that would fit the narrative arc of Gene relating to his faith, from being deeply entrenched in it & drawing strength from it, to struggling/breaking with it through some of his lowest points to finding his way back to it, because I could not see him completely abandoning the church or god.

Imagine my anguish when I found that one of the most well-known prayers of all time, the serenity prayer, was the one I resonated the most with for this fic, because it's like the hallmark card / live laugh love poem that everyone has stuck on their walls....

Turns out, it was created around the time of the 2. world war (by Reinhold Niebuhr, a german-american theologist), and distributed to soldiers and army clergy via prayer books & cards around 1944, which made it too perfect not to include it in my fic.

I'll put the full text here so I can dissect it:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace. Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it. Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;

That I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen

To start with, I the first part is arguably the most well-known one, since it has been, among others, been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, and for good reason too.

It touches on the concept of acceptance, which is repeated throughout the poem. ("accept the things I cannot change", "Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace", "Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is").

Acceptance is a concept that comes up in mindfulness practice and certain modern therapy concepts such as ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy), and has helped me profoundly in dealing with my personal mental health struggles, which maybe explains why I am vibing with that prayer so much.

Bc this is already turning into an essay anyway, have a quote about it:

Acceptance methods enhance patients’ experiential acceptance, defined as having or allowing private events (including painful ones) free of attempts at regulation —in other words, allowing things to be experienced without needing to change them or push them away. (Goldberg et al. (2023))

Reading the real veteran's interviews, one stuck out to me in particular concerning this concept, it's by Don Malarkey about the experience he had meeting Richard Speight Jr. who played Skip Muck:

"Richard became a great support for me, this kid half a century younger than me. Never made me feel like some sentimental old fool. Told me he understood my emotions. Said it was OK, that I was emotional because Skip and I had meant so much to each other and that was a good thing, not a bad thing. That meant the world to me." (Don Malarkey, Easy Company Soldier)

I think this quote shows how much many veterans would have benefitted from a society that allows them to own and accept their feelings of grief, pain and loss, instead of denying them. And while I don't think mindfulness practice is enough to seriously treat clinical PTSD, I think some of the core concepts would have been incredibly helpful to reduce some of their suffering - and I'm sure a number of veterans did benefit from these concepts, without putting the name to it. While most modern mindfulness practice is adapted from non-western spirituality, I think it's significant that the same sentiments are reflected in Christian Prayers as well.

Why is that significant? Well, throughout and up to the end of my fic, Gene is going through it, he's struggling severely with what he has experienced and I don't see myself writing an ending that glosses over that - instead of a happy ending, I want a hopeful one, and the fact that this prayer existed at that time, in that context, and was distributed to soldiers is exactly what I needed for that to make sense narratively.

Because how does someone cope with all of that in a healthy way? And more importantly, how would someone at the time, with access to resources they did at that moment, get the right idea about what might help them suffer less? There's no way to include modern therapy speak into a ww2 fanfiction without breaking character, so to speak.

The answer, of course, lies in religion. I think many people turned to religion for comfort during & after the war, especially those that were religious beforehand. Since it's already established in canon that Gene turns to the peace prayer of st francis for comfort and guidance, I think it's not a leap to assume he would be able to draw strength from the serenity prayer as well (especially considering it did not have the same connotations and notoriety at the time as it does now).

There's one part in particular that lends itself to exploring how one could approach that, namely "Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time;" - this is something Gene has been doing in the fic, in part, by enjoying his time with Babe, and it's how he's kept himself together enough so he doesn't get discharged.

So this is what has been floating around in my head for a post-war fic that gives his struggle justice without being a complete downer - I want to explore him finding joy in his life after the war, of finding the things that bring him comfort and relief, even while he struggles with what he's seen.

So I think the goal for Gene is, to quote that prayer again, to try and find a way to "be reasonably happy in this life" - which will include, of course, finding ways to be with Babe despite all the obstacles of that time, but also find things that are just for himself, and trying to live each day instead of incessantly worrying.

[gnosisofthedualrealms]

I'm not a fan of summoning spirits with a specific intention.

Everyone has their own approach to summoning spirits, but I do not like the practical approach. I don't like summoning angels and demons with a specific request utilizing a specific power associated with them. For instance, you'll never find me summoning Bael to make me invisible, but if he wants to, then that's cool.

When I summon spirits, I focus on what they tell me. Whatever information I need to know at the time will be shared with the spirit I summon. I strongly believe that all things happen as they're supposed to, meaning if I happen to summon a spirit today, it was synchronistically set to happen.

When I focused on this approach to ritual work, I found that I opened myself up more to unique situations that my unconscious would focus on during the day. For instance, I might read some piece of text that I feel I need to pay attention to, or some conversation would happen that would make me feel overly emotional. These feelings would translate to the ritual. It feels like they were the ones to draw my attention to that specific thing, which would then be expanded on in the ritual.

This has been happening almost daily, which has shifted me away from considering their powers completely. The demons and angels don't need to be commanded to use their powers. You just need to give them the space to work with it, and they'll give you exactly what you need.

This was a problem I observed in religion as well. Christians talk about faith in God, but so few of them understand its depths. If you truly abandon yourself to faith, you shouldn't have to ask God to fix your stuck situation. God is the one who put you there, and God will be the one to pull you out at the right time. For those who truly mastered faith (certainly not me), they can go through unimaginable torment, like loved ones passing, and understand that it was just meant to be. It's not different with Magick.

Magick won't work well if you don't believe, and in my opinion, if you have to be so specific as not just to ask but command a result, you lack the faith necessary for magick to really flourish.

Sometimes, it's not about getting rid of bad energy around you. The bad energy may be actually needed for you to grow. Many people see demons as evil, but what if they're actually helping you to see yourself as you are? Can't they be considered instruments of justice?

So, instead of asking for change, why not do a ritual to appreciate what you have? Make your attention one of gratitude and glorification of your life, exactly as it is, with every good and bad happening you're going through. I wouldn't be surprised if it opens you up to a change you actually need.

Additional thoughts:

I want to clarify that I'm not opposed to people who practice magick with specific asks. If you feel that's what you need to do, then who's stopping you? I certainly hope my words don't! I used to ask for things all the time but realized that it was hindering my growth, hence why I stopped.

I know that some people need to ask for things to grow properly, and what I said may be met with a lot of frustration and anger. I understand if it makes some of you feel that way, and I'm sorry if it does. The whole point of me saying this is to share my experience in hopes that it'll resonate with some of you who read this.

If your magick isn't working, maybe it's worth trying to be less specific and performing a ritual to express appreciation!

[liberatingreality]

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

J. Krishnamurti

[hisenemy]

Spiritualism is the death of the ego, not the projection of it.

Ego is a deep dark void that’s lonely and cold.

Narcs are a great example of ego dependent blackholes of people.

Acceptance and stability.

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy…even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

C.G. Jung

[gnosticinitiation]

"Unquestionably, light and consciousness are two aspects of the same thing. Where there is light, there is consciousness... Only through psychological self-observation do we allow light to penetrate within our own darkness."

-Master Samael Aun Weor from his book The Great Rebellion

[darkgodcomplex]

The Lord’s Child

Wally X Reader

CW: ABUSE, EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION, YANDERE, RELIGIOUS GUILT, NON CONSENSUAL TOUCHING

AO3 Link

Here’s the story:

Your hands clasp in prayer as the congregation around you mutters a collective "amen" and starts to shuffle out. Despite the service ending, you don't budge from your pew, continuing to kneel as people pass by until the church is empty.

Well, almost empty.

Still dressed in his priest attire, Wally watches you silently for a moment, wondering what on earth you would want to pray for when you’re already perfect.

He approaches and you’re startled by his voice as he speaks, “Why are you kneeling, child?”

You turn your head, looking up at him. Your sweet, innocent eyes look up at him.

You blink at him, “I-I was just praying, Father.”

He smiles, “You’re the picture of godliness, my child.” He reaches down, index finger hooking under your chin and tugging it up higher as his thumb ghosts over your soft cheek, gently petting you. “I can tell your heart is pure.”

“How can you tell?” You almost demand, voice desperate for his praise. He nearly trembles from the tone. There’s nothing he loves more than the world breaking you down and him picking up all the pieces.

Wally kneels down next to you, clasping your hands in his own. “I can feel you.” He leans in to whisper in your ear. The two of you are so close now that he can feel your hot breath on his neck and hear your heart beat in your chest.

He leans even closer, lips close to brushing your ear, and you flinch away. Wally smiles.

That. That is what made you pure. The way you’re so desperately wanting his affection yet also so afraid of it.

Wally pulls back, keeping his cool. “What did you come to pray for today, my child?”

Your cheeks turn a beautiful shade of red as you look away. “It’s nothing.

“My dear, don’t go lying to a priest.” Wally pushes.

Your cheeks turn even redder as you shrink into yourself. You very clearly don’t want to tell him, which makes him want to know even more.

“Father, it’s just stupid troubles-“

“I want to know.” He puts the pressure on you by waiting in silence.

“It’s just…”

Wally watches you intensely, head tilted to the side as he waits for you to explain.

“I just…” You fidget nervously. “I don’t fit in anywhere.”

Wally can’t help but grin. “Of course you don’t fit in anywhere.” His tone is sweet but his words are cruel. “You’re too pure. The world outside will never accept you.”

Your lower lip begins to tremble and the sweet, guiltless eyes he loves begin to tear up.

“But that’s okay.” Just as he’s cruel, he’s sweet. “You belong with the church. You belong with me.”

Wally runs his hand over your cheek. As tears fall, he doesn’t wipe them away. Instead, he presses his thumb against them, dragging the wetness down your cheek.

“You don’t have to cry.” Wally whispers. “I know you need me. I know you want me. This is all god’s plan.”

This doesn’t stop the gentle flow of tears down your cheeks. That’s okay though. He’ll take you broken.

As he comforts you, Wally slowly gets closer and closer, hand sliding up your thigh to massage circles into the muscle and hot breath trickling over your neck.

You freeze, slowly beginning to realize what’s happening. Took you long enough.

His mouth attaches to your neck, at first sucking and then biting. He can feel you start to tremble beneath him and he pulls away, pressing gentle kisses to where he drew blood and touching you with soft hands.

“Do not be afraid.” He presses another kiss to your wound. “This is what faith is, loving other people. God blessed us with the ability to give and receive love.”

Wally brings his lips up to your ear, wiping blood on it as he kisses it. “I love you, my child.”

“I-I-“ Your terrified voice speaks up, a surprise to him. Your timidness had always been to his advantage.

“I don’t want this!” You shove Wally off of you, scrambling back.

Wally lands back on the pew, nearly hitting his head in your sudden struggle. He blinks at you.

“By rejecting my love you’re rejecting the lord.” Wally spits. “Nobody loves you except me. Nobody could ever love you except me. You’ll go right back to not belonging.” Wally’s breathing is heavy as he finishes.

You start to cry again, “No, I don’t reject the lord.” The years of religious guilt he’s built up in you is paying off.

Wally sighs, “Then let me love you. Stop this nonsense and come here.” He points in front of him.

Slowly, you crawl over to him and he heaves you into his lap. You bury your face in his neck, still sobbing as he rubs your back.

“You belong to god and so you belong to me.” Wally says sternly. “Listen to the lord and you will set yourself free, my dear.”

You nod into his neck and he grasps you tighter.

God is not in this church.