Manifesting Change

Sometime early last year my sister told me that the spirits had been urging her to use the principles from The Secret. She told me what she knew about The Secret, and that was that you had to just imagine what you want to happen, just really picture it in your head, and you don't have to do anything else, and it will happen. She hasn't had any luck with The Secret so far.

When she told me this, it seemed wrong. I mean, I don't know if the whole law of attraction really works or not, it might, but what I mean is, it seemed wrong that you didn't have to actually do anything, it would just magically happen. Yesterday I had my mom buy me a book called Manifesting Change. I found out that I was right about that, that you have to imagine what you want, and then you have to do things that might move you in that general direction, and forces will go to work to make things eventually work out for you.

So anyway, I kept reading. I realized something from reading this book. Now I don't know if the law attraction really works, but if it does, the only thing that is really worth trying to manifest is happiness. Just happiness, which is very general. From what I can gather from reading the book, the more specific you make your requests the less likely they are to actually happen. Or if they do happen, the more likely they are to go wrong some how, and you may get what you tried to manifest, but you might not end up happy so it defeats the purpose.

So I realized that this was true, and it made sense, and I got angry. I was probably angry because I needed a piece of nicotine gum. So I'm sitting here chewing a piece of nicotine gum, and thinking about this. The reason it makes me angry is because I feel like if I just try to manifest happiness I won't get what I really want, which is a published book, and in the end I will just be merely happy, and I don't want to be happy, I want a published book. But this is silliness, because I thought having a published book would make me happy. And in the book Manifesting Change it talks about making attachments, which means being fixated on certain outcomes. Attachments aren't bad if they are about general things, like happiness, or even slightly less general things, like more money or better health or happy relationships. But I think a published book is something that would fall under the category of being something specific, which depends largely on other people, and the more something depends on other people the harder it is to manifest. It says you can imagine specific outcomes, but don't become attached to them.

So now I'm mad, because I realize that if I properly use the powers of manifestation, I may end up deliriously happy, but I won't have a published book. God dammit.

Tarot Cards

Dammit, I wish I could find my tarot cards. I'm at home right now, I thought they were with my old college stuff but I failed to locate them. I have questions I need answers to. Oh well, instead of playing with them I'll write about them. I hope my mom will buy me a new deck.

I first met my deck of tarot cards my senior year of high school. My boyfriend at the time brought them to school. He was reading peoples' fortunes, and let's just say he didn't know how to use tarot cards. Of course, I didn't either, having never used, touched, or probably even seen tarot cards before in my life. But I felt damn sure that I was a hell of a lot more fit to draw cards than he was, for some reason. So I took the deck from him, pulled a random card from the center of the deck (which was what I had decided was the right way to use tarot cards), and handed it to him without looking at it. He turned it over: Lovers. Thus proving I had tarot card talent.

I took the deck from him and held on to it. Now it was my own. Dammit, I wish I could find it. We were at lunch during my senior year, and that same boyfriend wanted me to draw a card to represent the future of our relationship. So I did: Desolation. He got upset, told me I had somehow rigged it, and wanted me to draw again. "Dude, you don't just dismiss the answer and draw again just because you don't like the card you got." Anyway, I did draw again: Change. This one didn't upset him as much. We broke up a few months later, so I guess you could say both desolation and change were correct.

Another time, I was talking to a girl on IM when she started yelling at me and insulting me. So I started drawing cards for her, trying to read her fortune. Except, I think I was actually reading my fortune instead. I drew despair and conflict. I was in a conflict that actually deeply upset me.

So when I went off to college, I took my tarot cards with me. Actually, I think I brought them back to college with me after winter break. At any rate, I had them right before I was kicked out of my dorm. I was worried I was going to be kicked out and I definitely didn't want that, so I was drunk and I was drawing cards. Being drunk may inhibit psychic abilities but it doesn't seem to hinder card-drawing abilities. So I was sitting in my dorm room, drawing card after card after card. Every single card I drew was a card I considered to be negative. I did get kicked out, so I was consistently drawing the correct answer.

Right before I became delusional, I was consistently drawing cards that told me the same thing. Then, when I thought the special event had happened but I didn't know for sure, I was drawing cards, over and over again. More often than not, I would draw domination. I took that as a sign that it had happened. It hadn’t happened, but the spirits wanted me to believe it had. Still, I wanted more proof. The story ends with me going crazy/being taken over by a spiritual influence.

After these events, I would draw cards. Yet, I started to feel that whatever cards I would draw were just purely random, and not influenced by spirits at all. And they probably were. The end.

Interference With Free Will

The question of whether or not we have free will is one of them philosophical questions that has been widely debated. I'm not going to discuss that in this entry. Today I'm going to tell you that you have free will, but it is tampered with by spirits. I know this, because I have all the answers, of course, being the spirit girl and all.

I have been told and I have read that spirits/angels/whatever are not allowed to interfere with your life unless you ask them to, via prayer. Not so, not so. No, I don't have all the answers, but I believe that that statement is false. Spirits have the potential to influence you in ways that are massive and huge, without you asking them to.

I don't want to get into book info in this entry. But, part of the reason I believe that I was influenced by spirits is the way in which things fitted together. How, I've said in the past, one spirit-induced event led to another spirit-induced event (when my mom read the entry where I said that, she asked me if by "spirit" I meant alcohol, haha). Actually, I'll give a vague, small example of this from my book. Spirits can tell you to look at things. Sometimes, they tell you to take certain fortune cookies. This happened, I took the fortune cookie, it got me thinking, led me to do something, and that led to other stuff. If I had never done this, I would never have become delusional, never have gone to Innercept, none of that shit would have ever happened. So I felt influenced to do something, and later I was able to see why I was influenced to do it.

The thing about when spirits influence you is, sometimes you notice, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you are able to look back and see that when you did something in particular, it was unnatural. Most of the time, you don't notice. You think it's coming from inside of you. It is coming from inside of you actually, but that's because the spirit has gotten inside your head. Most of the time it's subtle, and you don't notice. Then, it tries to get you to do something you really don't want to do. This is when it screams at you, and it is obvious now that you are being influenced. It convinces you it's on your side, and that something good will happen as a result. And you trust this spirit, because you think it's your friend, and that you were somehow blessed with this special friend inside your head. Then, it leads to badness, and magically awesome supernatural messianic experiences. Dammit, I've gotten into too much book information. And I know to a lot of people I sound crazy. If I cared about sounding crazy, I wouldn't have even probably started this blog.

Anyway, they can tell you to do something harmless like merely look at something, and you don't even think before doing it because what harm can come from looking? They can suggest things to you, put ideas in your head, and usually you think they are coming from your own brain. They can affect your emotions, which in turn affects your actions. They can affect what you say and write and the exact way you word things. They can make you hear things. When I heard things though, it was always very obvious to me that they were inside my head.

But that's all I'll say about my personal experience. Now onto more theories. It's because of the power that spirits can have over you that prayers have the ability to work. You can pray for something, and as a result a spirit/angel may take action, devising a plan through influencing people to do things that lead to a  specific outcome. Prayer isn't just magic, and spirits aren't all bad. A lot of times people pray for things that require action on someone else's part. That person never asked to be influenced, but they can be influenced. So, it kind of interferes with their free will.

Ssss.... pirits.

The Supernatural

Oh, dating websites. This is where I am reminded that most people bore me. I see the same thing over and over and over again: "I'm a pretty laid-back easy going dude. I want a real relationship no drama no bs no headgames. I like to hike, fish, spend time outdoors." Everyone in Northern Idaho/Spokane likes to spend time outdoors. I'd like to see something a little more original.

My profile is original. I basically copied and pasted what I said under about me on facebook onto my POF account. Yeah, stuff about spirits. Some people think it's cool. Some people think I'm joking (I'm not). One guy told me: "You're too cute to believe in stuff like that."

This is the kind of comment that would piss me off if I cared about what other people said. I don't, but I'm going to say what I think anyway.

Some people think it's naive to believe in stuff like psychic abilities and spirits. I think the people who don't believe are naive. First, let's discuss what naive means. It means you lack the experience to understand how the world works. It's not the same as immature, which is an emotional state. Naive is more about knowledge gained from experience. These people have not had experiences like me any many other people have, the experiences that make you realize that there are forces at work in your life beyond those you can see.

Now I know what a lot of skeptic types would be thinking now. They have probably encountered people who are overly superstitious in their thinking and resort to the "it's a spirit" or "it's something supernatural" conclusion too quickly. I feel these people on this. I remember this one time, I was looking at some sort of metaphysical website. There were some photographs some people had taken of supposedly supernatural things like orbs and shit. In this one picture, there were two kids, one with their hand out and then some massive "spirit" thing coming out from their hand. The person who had submitted the picture had written that the lady who took the picture just had this talent for capturing "special things" or whatever in her pictures. Well, I know what it looks like when a strand of hair gets in front of the camera lens, and I can tell you, that "spirit" looked an awful lot like a strand of hair. I was thinking this lady probably had frizzy hair or something and that's why she was able to capture stuff like that in her photographs. I don't know if that's true, but that was the conclusion I came to. Anyway, my point is, some people are too quick to label things as supernatural, and that's where I think a lot of the skeptics are coming from.

I didn't believe in anything supernatural when I was younger. I thought the whole idea of someone being psychic was a joke, and everyone knew that, I didn't think that anyone took it seriously. Because, obviously, you can't look into someone else's mind or someone else's life, how the hell is that supposed to work? Supernatural stuff goes against what one would think would be correct. But here's what I don't get: Who are these people to think that they understand the world, existence, and consciousness SO WELL that that kind of shit just could never possibly happen? These things aren't understood very well at all. But while I do believe in psychic abilities, I don't recommend spending money on psychics, because they are unreliable. That's why psychic abilities haven't been proven.

And the thing about spirits is, if you lived my life, you too would believe in them. It used to drive me crazy because when I would talk to people, no one understood how crazy stuff from my life was, they would just brush off everything I told them. Then I realized something: these were just the doctors, therapists, and my parents. When I talked to other people about it, they seemed to think it was pretty crazy as well.

Me: The Master of Manipulation

So, I have plenty of things on my mind right now. The trick is finding something I can write about that I wouldn't mind anybody in the world reading.

I was once told by a doctor at a hospital who barely knew me that I was the master of manipulation. I honestly don't know why he said that, as I didn't do anything manipulative at the time. But had he really known what he was talking about, I would have taken it as a compliment.

Being manipulative to me means you know how to use human psychology to get your way. "Your way" isn't necessarily bad. You could manipulate someone in a way that ends up being mutually beneficial. Being manipulative means you are good at influencing people. You've got to be smart to be manipulative. Stupid people rarely successfully manipulate others. So when someone tells me I'm manipulative, to me they're telling me, "you've got brains and you know how to use them." Really, that's what I hear.

I remember one time when I was in junior high, I was shopping with my mom, probably at the Gap. I was trying on an article of clothing. I wanted her to buy it for me, but she was leaning toward the no side. Then I said something along the lines of: "but I like it." It wasn't what I said that was important, it was the fact that when I said it, there was a very slight amount of whininess in my voice. I noticed a sudden change in the manner in which she acted, and she said fine and she turned around and bought it for me. What a great discovery!

I tried it again another day, with a different article of clothing. I let that slight whine creep into my voice when she was leaning toward the no side, and again she changed and bought me what I wanted. Then another day, I got overly confident and tried to use my tactic again, but this time let too much whine slip into my voice. She immediately said "No!" very firmly. That was the last time I tried that trick.

Anyway, my interpretation of this is that when I only used a slight amount of whine, the effect was subconscious, and reminded her of childhood tantrums. Subconsciously she sensed a tantrum coming on, even though she would have known I was much too old to throw tantrums, but it was on a subconscious level so she didn't think of that. On a conscious level she had decided not to give into whininess, so when the whine was strong there was a firm no.

But anyway, in conclusion, manipulation can be useful.

Moral Relativism

So, the other day I was looking for a speech topic and I came across an article on philosophical questions. One of them was the idea of moral relativism. Moral relativists basically believe that there aren't any absolute rights and wrongs when it comes to moral questions, but rather morality is subjective. So of course, I have to say what I think about this.

The article gave the example that one guy thinks hitting people is morally wrong while another guy thinks it is an appropriate way to assert dominance. Their differences are based on their cultures. The article suggests that they are both right.

I believe that morality is absolute and not relative. Morality is a code of conduct that works best in an ideal society. There aren't any societies on this planet that are truly ideal, in fact I think a perfectly ideal society is incredibly unrealistic, but some societies are more ideal than others. The two guys in the hypothetical situation who expressed their opinions on hitting people had opinions based on the code of conduct in their respective societies. Just because a practice is considered acceptable, doesn't mean it is morally right.

If you are a moral relativist, you could argue that slavery is morally okay. There was a time when it was considered an acceptable practice in our society. The south needed slave labor. Without any absolute morals, there is no basis to say that it is wrong to oppress other people, it just depends on the opinion of the society that a person is from.

In an ideal society, everyone is equal, no one oppresses anyone else, and people behave in a way that doesn't create distance between them and other people. That is because the only thing the soul truly desires is unity and connection with other souls. Since people tend to resent people who hit them, that would create distance between people and therefore hitting others would be morally wrong.

The desire to assert dominance in an evolutionary desire, because in nature animals have to compete for survival. In an ideal society, people overcome their evolutionary desires because the soul is more powerful than the programmed-in instincts. While the instincts might want to distance you from some other people, the soul desires unity with everyone.

Some subjects, like abortion, do have a definite answer but humans don't necessarily have that answer, because we don't really know when personhood begins.

But anyway, that's what I think. Maybe I don't understand the discussion about moral relativism that well.