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\u201cAbsolution forgives the guilt associated with the penitent's sins, and removes the eternal punishment (of Hell) associated with mortal sins. \u2026 Theologians say the absolution of a penitent more than twenty paces away would be questionably valid. Phone absolutions are considered invalid.\u201d\u2014 Wikipedia (2024)

Magic

As I make a last pass, looking for errors in the manuscript of my book Operating Manual for Enlightenment, I\u2019m reminded of how spirit supports mental health.

When I was studying ritual magic, adherents claimed magic had a direct, physical effect. This na\xefve 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.\xa0

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 \u201cGod created man in his image\u201d only if God is a human image. In a world that doesn\u2019t 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.

\u201cPornography 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.\u201d\u2014 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.\xa0

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.\xa0

\u201cCurrently, 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, \u2018Jesus loves you and will return to the earth one day to save us.\u2019... 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, \u2018It is not about religion, it is about love.\u2019\u201d\u2014 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.

\u201cTeosi\u2019s words (the words of the Christian\u2019s God) belong to the white people\u2026 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.\u201d \u2014 Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami Shaman (2013, 204)

Spirit is a personal dimension of meaningful awareness that\u2019s 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\u2019s mood, one\u2019s mental weather. Spirit generates one\u2019s weather.

I can help you find faith in yourself. Schedule a free call: