Letters to the Living

The Baba lovers reject Baba's explanation in God Speaks of where the Avatar goes when he dies, i.e. State 2B. They contact me just to object. They replace it with either time travel or 19th century Theosophical Society ascended master teachings.  It's useful to know that these ascended master teachings do not come from the teachings of any Avatar, but are a descendent of folk religions such as ancestor worship, which were indigenous to the countries that became Buddhist long after Buddha, not from the teachings of Buddha. The Theosophists likely discovered Buddhists in southern India performing these practices and took them to be part of real Buddhism.  So this is where I believe the Theosophists, reading Buddhist texts recently translated, got their notion of ascended masters. Some of the names for talking to the dead in pagan and folk religions include: Goetia : a European magical practice that involves invoking demons or angels.  Theurgy : the art or technique of ...

In philosophy, phenomenal means anything you can experience, both mentally or physically.  Ordinary people are interested almost exclusively in the phenomenal – things you experience in your thoughts or with your senses. They think about these things. They desire or fear these things. And when they become self-declared “seekers,” they seek something that they assume is also phenomenal. And when they see or read about something out of the ordinary, they get excited because they think they're on to something important. A “spiritual” phenomenon. And because of this equating abnormal with spiritual, they are very likely to perform practices or take drugs to have ‘out of the ordinary’ phenomenal experiences. Again, they think this is a sign they are really ‘getting somewhere.’ There are countless anomalous phenomena. This web page talks about 'light orbs,' that may be genuine things that clairvoyants can see.  https://www.quora.com/What-can-small-orbs-of-light-do-to-you-Is-this-...

I don't have anything to add to what I have already said. Anything else I write is just curating and clarifying. But also, I have learned that people don't understand most of what I say, no matter how hard I try to come down to their level.  Here I've listed some of the mental habits I have come to think may be responsible for them not getting me. 1. Intellectual laziness -- most people find thinking hard to be painful and imagining things enjoyable. So they make things up or believe in made-up things without checking, and often without even knowing how to check. 2. Not being taught about the subject of epistemology, or even worse taught an absurd post-modern relativism. 3. An almost inexplicable love of magic and woo-woo concepts. Why magic is so appealing to people is not clear to me.   4. Thinking in non sequiturs, i.e. leaping to conclusions that don't logically follow from the previous statement. 5. A complete lack of understanding what "evidence" means. ...