Nikolai1

So do we have any theories how it happens?

I've voted for you Herr Von K

Who was that heart for? Me I hope.

Ok it wasn't 20 years of testing but 2000 years, what wold the results have shown? Also please tell us more about people influencing the weather, because you a right, that is the gist of this thread.

Hey VK thanks but you didn't vote!

Honestly it feels like on the inside I am ready to die, but the body carries on living, and I haven't the willpower or even the need to intervene.

Oh and you need to say it as the locals do...cockermuth...not mouth

I used to live in Cockermouth, right on the banks of the Cocker myself. Happy days actually. Gorgeous drive to work to Whitehaven. Waking heaven. Ducks dippers and kingfishers outside the window. Kirkstile Inn pub, Melbreak Beer...man this was ten years ago.

+1 Jetsun. I only read him quite recently but I just knew he was a good 'un.

Does anyone know if Campbell considered science to be the mythology of our times? Does anyone have any references where he discusses science? Thanks to you all!

My views are the same as yours Nungali, but I haven't found JC saying the same. He does make the point repeatedly that to take the myth literally is to miss its higher meaning, and to allow sectarian strife with other mythologies, which to him is monstrous. But he never details what he considers the true spiritual message in say Darwinism, or modern cosmology.

All spiritual teachers have the same problem: if you're there listening, then that alone means that you won't understand. A teaching is a misleading falsehood the moment it leaves the teacher's lips. Miraculously, one day, the student suddenly gets this. But they wouldn't have got it if they hadn't first listened hard, practiced hard, and despaired hard.

The English have an expression: thinner than a racing snake. But you're not actually a snake are you?

I started to read Campbell's work and it seemed the obvious direction for his thoughts to go. What do we all believe in today, that future generations will refer to, perhaps disparagingly, as myth? Clearly science is the obvious candidate. But JC does not seem to make the point explicitly at all. He alludes to it, usually with reference to the conclusions of Kant and Schopenhauer about the unknowabilty of reality (and therefore theimpotence of science) but doesn't make it clear. I think something was stopping him from spelling it out. I think he would have faced ridicule and been discredited because people would have thought that he was saying scientific facts are untrue; in the same way as it is untrue that there are Gods on top of Mount Olympus. On the other hand, he often describes one of the functions of a myth as a 'protoscience' which suggests that science is something that may evolve beyond the proto and thereby transcend it's mythic origins. So maybe he thought science was the one thing that was beyond myth. JC gets a lot of credit, now as then, but I wonder just how complete he was as a spiritual authority. Thanks for all the interest guys

Imagine you bought a chocolate bar and then you can't find it. You can search the entire house and no find it. The searching was therefore useless. But...realising its not in the house will make you open to the truth...you already ate it and the chocolate bar is inside you. Practices are useless in themselves, spiritually speaking. They may give you all sorts of new esoteric skills and abilities but these have nothing to with the truth. So many of us cannot accept that we need do nothing at all in order or realise the truth. It sounds easy to accept but it isn't, it's pretty much impossible. We have to go through the rigmarole of searching the house, and coming up blank, before we will finally accept the situation. Prior to accepting we can truly find ourselves in despair. Ten twenty years down the road and still nothing yet. Ten twenty years of activity for nothing. Study the biographies of the masters and they were pretty much all in the same boat. They had to go through the rigmarole of the practices before they could be convinced of the deeply radical truth. This is why they so often realise that their students must do as they did, so they recommend practices, but then in the same breath you here them reminding the same student that actually practices are useless. Like Michael said, practices do bring you all sorts of developments. We tend to imagine these developments are spiritual because we still do not understand the true meaning of spiritual. But we have to attach something to the word, and so all the worthless gains get called spiritual. This is like a rich man imagining he is spirtitual because he can build many churches, go on many pilgrimages and feed and clothe many poor people. Neither inner nor outer development are what's required. What's required is realising this.

This whole thread is the brainchild of Jenny Lamb. It is an advertising ploy that uses clearly vulnerable individuals to promote her own sickeningly expensive 'cures'. I strongly suggest this thread should be deleted.

The way of mastering your empire is to not set up a hierarchy of angels and demons but to see all as passing phenomena of equal significance. Stand aloof and regal, like a King.

There is one point of agreement here. - namely that the entity is somehow parasitic on the host. It uses the hosts energies to strengthen itself. So how might we withhold those energies? There are exorcisms that are purely intellectual in nature. They are based on the principle that what we believe in most will come to constitute truth. The demon feeds off the beliefs of the host, and will then manifest in the most astonishing ways. Yes, the entity is real, but it is also not real. So for anyone struggling with a possession, help will come if they are able to,by themselves, modify their beliefs. There are also associated anxieties. A person believing in malignant entities in the modern west has a shadow fear of their own psychosis. Were they to speak openly on the subject there are many, many people who would not hesitate for a moment to call it psychosis and advise clinical help. So a helpful first step would be to notice that the entity behaviour is considered by most to be part of the human condition. An everyday feature of the ego. The next step, and this step must be taken by anyone on the authentic spiritual path, is to learn to see the unreality of not only the entity but also the self and God. Probably a third of the talk on this forum is somehow geared towards this aim. The entity is both real and not real. But the solution will only come at the higher level that sees both it's reality and unreality together simultaneously. Then you can move on.

Josama - please don't think I'm unsympathetic. If being possessed leaves you feeling powerless than I can relate to the feeling of powerlessness. All I want you to know for know is that the powerlessness is just an illusion and that one day soon it will simply be gone.

If something is causing you suffering, it is always helpful to question the reality of the cause. I think the OP has allowed himself get too attached to his demon. For another it might be their social status or the their attractiveness, but for this guy it's a demon entity that he's allowed to dominate his reality. Whether his demon is real or not is always underterminable. Best not to invest too much in provisional theories.

You've never experienced your entity - you've simply interpreted reality through entity terms. Same with God. Same with ego. If you learned to view all these terms a little more dispassionately rather than strongly reifying them all, you will find that they lose their grip on you. If you don't like to be possessed, stop believing you are. I think you need to develop your scepticism more.

I'll put it to you straight. Your belief in the demon is the only demonic thing going on. You need to stop, back up, and change your thinking as quickly as you can. Do not externalise your own problems in the form of the demon. Face up to yourself. Look in the mirror and stop being a demon.

May I ask: would the ego without the entity be in a state of spiritual health? Or does the ego itself have to be awakened into some kind of higher self?

I couldn't help but notice that everything you say about the entity I have heard said about the ego. To be ego bound is to be heavy, is to have strong need for psychic resources that you take from others, and most of all, it is the ego that feels most threatened by the awakening of the true self. My point being: maybe we ALL are possessed to begin with?

If we want to exist as if "mundane existence is itself an OBE", we have to first gain a (in my terms) stage 3 insight into the very concepts that make up selfhood. These concepts are time, space and plurality. So time must be seen concretely as also being eternity. We must be able to directly see that this is the case. Our 'hereness' in space must also be seen as the 'only place' which is the same as saying 'nowhere'. Our sense of individuality as one of a plurality of other individuals is based on the subject/object distinction. This is represented as a subjective mental realm of thoughts, and an objective realm of matter. We must be able to see directly that thought and matter are indistinguishable. That everything is therefore object, 'not me', which is the same as saying everything is subject, i.e. 'me'. So we have three pairs of opposites: time/timeless, here/nowhere, individuality/union. If we have the slightest hint of bias towards any of these 6 poles of thought, the level 4 understanding will be denied us. Or to put it another way, the bias is itself ignorance of truth. I'm sure there are many ways of reaching this level of truth, all the yogas are different. If you are very intellectual in your approach to reality then a level 3 understanding into your very own selfhood is highly, highly disorientating. It is the thinking person's 'dark night of the soul'. Your whole identity gets utterly shattered and you are left without any conscious heuristic with which to approach your own life. Your are literally forced before long into stage 4 living. Traditional spiritual teachings, by the way, occur at level 2. They are usually reminders that there is another way of looking at things than the conventional view of individuality in time and space. Some people adopt the spiritual teachings, and some reject them. To adopt and to reject is the same level 2 behaviour. Only when the spiritual teachings are recognised as identical to the conventional do we move to Level 3. Unsurprisingly, this move is resisted because it is highly anxiety provoking.