Theory about malevolent spirits

[shadowofwind]

When I was younger I'd sometimes have lucid dreams about spirits which project fear. I wonder why such things exist. One theory would be that they're my own suppressed fears, stripped of context. Another theory would be that they feed off of my emotional reaction somehow. Now I have a new theory. Many people are into affirmations: deciding what they want or want to be, and repetitively telling themselves that they will have or be that. This has always seemed to me like a bad idea. Rather than having a dialogue with one's soul, a person is trying to force it towards a specific end. It is a narrow and authoritarian approach to live. I think that most people tend to feel the same way about it I do, even though they don't think about it, which is why most people don't do affirmations. In many cases spiritual ignorance or disbelief may be why people don't do affirmations, but I think that disbelief is more of a means of responding to their deeper instinct than a cause of it. Everyone does something like affirmations though, even if we're not so extreme about it. We want things, and by wanting we instruct our souls to try to change ourselves and our surroundings in a way that will produce those things. How our souls accomplish this I have little idea, but I think that for the most part it is not by reasoning through strategies about how to get things and then applying those strategies. It is more direct than that. The end is decided, then the conditions that lead to that end arise as a consequence, without having to figure out any of the details. Its like a high voltage discharge across an air gap - the current takes the path of least resistance without seeing it or planning it out. When we want things strongly enough, I think that spirits are created as a result of that wanting. Or rather, they're awakened, or summoned, or enlivened. I'm thinking that's where malicious spirits come from - they exist in relation to us because their existence facilitates someone getting what they want. In some sense the spirit always comes back and claims its 'creator' though, and becomes a part of them. More generally, I'm thinking this is where hatred comes from. People don't start off by deciding they want to be evil. They start off with greed, in whatever form, which becomes a willingness to break rules to get what they want. Then the nastiness ultimately returns home to roost. I think that the desire itself doesn't necessarily have to be one that would be generally recognized as 'bad'. But if the desire is single-mindedly on its object, without regard for means, then a nasty spiritual means will arise naturally if that facilitates the achievement of the desire. The same principles would also apply to 'good' spirits which arise as a result of more humane desires that are more about relationships and right attitudes. Those would come home to roost also, and transform a person into something better. And the same principles apply to the complicated ground in the middle.

[shadowofwind]

"The light that is not light is here, to flush you out with your own fear...." Here's another theory about malevolent spirits: A common pattern for 'demons' in dreams seems to be to intentionally stimulate a strong emotional response. The typical New Age explanation is that they somehow steal some of our vitality that way. This seems to assume that emotions are a kind of stuff that can be eaten in some sense. Maybe another possible explanation is the triggered response provides some kind of opening that enables them to embed themselves more deeply in our brains. They're not stealing something that we shed so much as renting space in our bodies because they lack their own. And there's something about the emotional spasm that helps them do that.

[Sivason]

All of that makes sense. One type that you describe does not honestly get its own consciousness. It is instead imprinted with all the obsessive (creepy?) thoughts/feelings that is a natural result of focused intention/ desire. It goes out and does bidding but returns to you (part of you). Sageous could add something about "Thought Forms" and we might get a conversation started. If these things get complex enough and are not reintegrated with the owner, they can hang around and even develop basic consciousness. They like to try and hook onto humans because they have no sensory mechanisms unless 'looking through your eyes." I know, creepy stuff, how could I possibly know that stuff?

[shadowofwind]

In the Theosophical scheme of things, and in all of its New Age derivatives, all thoughts are unconscious beings as you describe. A criticism I have of the Theosophical view, though not necessarily of your view, is that I think it makes too much of conscious human thinking and too little of other spiritual entities. I think they do this in other areas also, for instance they taught that animals have absolutely zero self awareness, and that the desires which animate them acquired the characters they have entirely when they were parts of humans. And they teach that thoughts and pretty much all other gods, nature elementals, and demons lack self-awareness, and are shaped exclusively by human thinking or by invisible ascended masters. I think this attributes too much to people and the Theosophical pyramid of spiritual authorities. We know that action at a distance is possible, and it seems to me that the existence of genuinely intelligent minds which are dependent on human bodies but which are not tied to any one specific body follows directly as a consequence of that. Experientially, I also think that much of what falls under the category of 'thoughts' in the Theosophical scheme actually has more agency and self awareness than they were willing to concede to them. Following is a different theory about the kinds of reaction-inducing dreams that I had in mind when I started this thread. First here are two examples of such dreams from about a week ago: 1. I'm at some kind of vacation resort. A woman and her husband going the other way in a hall is annoyed with me for not moving out of her way. I'm annoyed with their attitude because I had scrunched up against one wall trying to avoid them, and they were going pretty much down the center. 2. An uncovering of aliens or UFO's transitions from an excited curiosity to a kind of euphoria, and then into terror and what seems like psychic assault. I guess to someone else these might seem like very different kinds of dreams, but to me they're similar. I don't frequently have these types of dreams because I suppress them, and the second dream happened mostly because I was interested in thinking about those types of dreams. In my alternative theory, the UFO dream is a description of the long term effects of conspiracy thinking and/or fascination with psychic phenomena, compressed down to a couple of seconds. As such, it is simply an emotional description of what something is, and might be thought of as a warning. In other words, my subconscious is identifying dangerous patterns in the potential future, and presenting them to me in compressed form. And it does this automatically and by default if I'm not using my dream mind for something else. As with any other mental experience, the quality and reliability of it depends to a degree on my intelligence, internal honesty, and skepticism - it may be remarkably accurate or it may be largely delusional. Although this explanation is very different from the other two I suggested, I don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive.