packshaud
Devoted Cultist
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2018
- Messages
- 200
- Location
- Brazil
What happens is that you start to notice things related to the subject, because you know about it. A lot of what we experience every day is filtered out. It is like skipping unknown words while reading a book.anything... odd? And I'm not interested in orbs!
I'm a believer in the idea that the more you get into this stuff the more the stuff happens in your vicinity. A sort of selective perception plus.
And to the extent that whatever you are interested on can react, your interest will be noticed. This actually is a huge problem. We will never know to what extent John Keel actually believed in all of what he said, but I believe he had real issues with the infamous men in black. A more scholarly example is Gustav Davidson, a poet. He wrote a book called A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels (originally in 1967), collecting information on the subject. Here is a long excerpt from the introduction (in my copy, at pages xi to xii, typed by hand, errors might abound), with his comments on the information gathering for the book:
Gustav Davidson said:All of these goetic tracts yielded a boundless profusion of angels (and demons), and I soon had more of the fluttering creatures than I knew what to do with. In order to keep my work within more sizable limits, I started weeding out (Heaven forgive me!) what I considered to be the less important names, or the ones about which little or no data could be found.
At this stage of the quest I was literally bedeviled by angels. They stalked and leaguered me, by night and day. I could not tell the evil from the good, demons from daevas, satans from seraphim; nor (to quote a poem composed at the time) "if that world I could not hope to prove,/Flaming with heavenly beasts, holy and grim,/Was any less real than that in which I moved." I moved, indeed, in a twilight zone of tall presences, through enchanted forests lit with the sinister splendor of fallen divinities; of aeons and archons, peris and paracletes, elohim and avatars. I felt somewhat like Dante, in the opening canto of The Divine Comedy, when, midway upon the journey of his life, he found himself astray in a dusky wood. Or like some knight of old, ready to try conclusions with any adversary, real or fancied. I remember one occasion--it was winter and getting dark--returning home from a neighboring farm. I had cut across an unfamiliar field. Suddenly a nightmarish shape loomed up in front of me, barring my progress. After a paralyzing moment I managed to fight my way past the phantom. The next morning I could not be sure (not more than Jacob was, when he wrestled with his dark antagonist at Peniel) whether I had encountered a ghost, an angel, a demon, or God. There were other such moments and other such encounters, when I passed from terror to trance, from intimations of realms unguessed at to the uneasy conviction that, beyond the reach of our senses, beyond the arch of all our experience sacred and profane, there was only--to use an expression of Paul's in I Timothy 4--"fable and endless genealogy."
Logic, I felt, was my only safe anchor in reality; but if, as Walter Nigg points out, "angels are powers which transcend the logic of our existence," did it follow that one is constrained to abandon logic in order to entertain angels?⁴ For the sake of angels I was ready to subscribe to Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." I was even ready to drink his "milk of Paradise." But I was troubled. Never a respecter of authority, per se, particularly when it was backed by the "salvific light of revelation," I nevertheless kept repeating to myself that I was pitting my personal and necessarily circumscribed experience, logic, and belief (or nonbelief) against the experience, logic, and belief of some of the boldest and profoundest minds of all times--minds that had reshaped the world's thinking and emancipated it (to a degree, at any rate) from the bondage of superstition and error. Still, I was averse to associating myself with opinions and creeds, no matter how hallowed by time or tradition, or by whomsoever held, that were plainly repugnant to common sense. A professed belief in angels would, inevitably, involve me in a belief in the supernatural, and that was the golden share I did not wish to be caught in. Without committing myself religiously I could conceive of the possibility of there being, in dimensions and worlds other than our own, powers and intelligences outside our present apprehension, and in this sense angels are not to be ruled out as a part of reality--always remembering that we create what we believe. Indeed, I am prepared to say that if enough of us believe in angels, then angels exist.
[...]
4. Walter Nigg's article "Stay you Angels, Stay with Me," Harper's Bazaar, December 1962. The phrase derives from Johann Sebastian Bach's "Cantata for Michaelmas Day."
The poem Davidson mentioned may be Ambushed by Angels & Other Poems (1965), written by himself.
All I can I say about this is that you start like Keel, writing Jadoo, and you might end like... Keel, neck deep in this stuff. I've been there, and I still will refrain from commenting on the time I was gathering books on demons and possession. That part had a happy end: the problems stopped after I concentrated in other areas (those also brought their weirdness, but of course it was not on demons level, most of the time). But possibly there is a point of no return. Forteans, beware.
For all the skeptics here, I must say that these experiences feel very real. The emotional imprint from them can't be removed saying "it didn't happen" the same way PTSD can't be cured saying "this was in the past."
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