How do gods/spirits exist?

Are they created by the human consciousness or do they exist before they’re even thought up? Do they just pick a name and decide “Yeah I’ll be X god, why not?” or is there something more to it?

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Depends in my opinion, they exist the same way we do they were born. However, there are some occultist who like to think that the Gods are reflections of their own consciousness or they created them which in my opinion is some absurd nonsense. Unless you count the thoughtform definition of Godform which is a concept given form in the imagination, but I don’t consider them real entities. However, some titles like “God of vegetation” were given to them by man that only signified a small portion of the hey they single deity can do, not the thoughtform/godform. Most of them most likely have names in their language but still use and accept the names their respective civilizations that worship them bestowed on them.

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They were here before us, some of them are legends
Most religons have criticized them to be evil
There are some daemons who protect humans
Even the hollywood gives a false message
They dont have a proper name and they do not give the actual information to humans

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This guys question has not been answered yet!

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According to Pythagorean Orphic tradition, and some Esoteric Taoism, they existed before humans as we know them now did. These traditions are Panentheist, meaning that they believe that all life sprang from a single source. In some schools of Taoism this is what Tao is, in Pythagorean tradition this is called One.

The reason they were born gods, and we were born mortal, was most likely, because with each God emerging from the pool, those that would subsequently emerge had less potential, spiritually that is. Daemons were the first humans, born with more potential in what was termed the Golden Age.

Humans from subsequent ages have less and less inherent spiritual potential.

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Topic restored after tidying up a brief derailment by a would-be preacher. :smiley:

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Their existence is quite independent of ours.

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Here’s the thing…no one really knows.

Anyone who tries to claim they hold the objective truth regarding the answers to such questions like these are either talking out of their ass, or are part of a religion/cult trying to sell you something because everyone and their dog will have a different opinion based on their own subjective experiences.

Hell, even the spirits themselves don’t know, which is why, if asked, they will give different answers based on whatever agenda they have or what they think the magician wants to hear. They have a tendency to confirm whatever beliefs are already held by the one asking (this why a Christian will generally get a confirmation of Christian doctrine, and a non Christian will get something else entirely).

People will argue endlessly, each believing their own version of the origin story is the only correct version, but that is just humans being humans, and playing another round of the ol’ “my god is better than your god” on the playground.

Like a lot of the mythology used in the occult, the only real choice we have when it comes to questions like the ones posed, is to decide which origin story works best for us personally, based on our own experiences and beliefs.

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I’ve been picking at this question for a while and there are at least a few different poeple’s thoughts that triangulate into something well.

  • Frater Ashen Chassan mentioned something that came up in his scrying, a revelation from the deities that they are actually all made of the same continuous fabric and that this is a ‘mystery’ that they can’t explain to humanity all that easily at this point but it’s something that we should count as true.

  • Don’t know what familiarity you all have with Martinism but the Universal Table, something like a modified ToL, has a big sphere of faces all conjoined and surrounding that modified tree. For whatever one might think of Elus Cohen and the scholarship of Pasqually’s founding myths they’re quite serious practitioners and to count people like Jean Dubuis and Robert Ambelain in their ranks says a lot.

  • There’s a scientist from western Canada whose made his rounds on both New Thinking Allowed and now Tim Freke’s ‘What Is Life?’ named Bruce Damer. He’s got one foot deeply into Darwinian evolution and making sense of origins of life, his other foot is in mysticism and contacts with what he calls ‘the field’. He said some very interesting and elucidating things about the nature of evolution from basic fungi to prokaryotes, eukaryotes, and the cycle of cognition in these life forms that spun up the capacity for conscious memory (his acronym for the processes is PIM). He mentioned that when he was shown the very first community of cells attempting to stabilize itself he saw a vision something like a guiding hand aiding/assisting the process. He asked the field for an answer as to what it was and after a brief pause he got a reply, it was diffuse consciousness in the entirety of the surrounding star field - ie. the universe itself.

I don’t know how familiar many of you are with the pictures of the webbing of the universe looking like the webbing of giant neurons, aside from that being sort of a hippy’s delight I had to take a look at that against the way slime molds extend themselves to solve mazes, the similarities to how traffic arteries and telecom grids spraul out in very optimized ways, and that’s what neurons seem to do as well. It seems like certain patterns in nature, by their shape, seem to suggest that there is some type of activity happening that’s desiring of optimization and yes, I’d suggest that when it’s like that there’s some type of internal telos or self-regulating activity happening that’s working toward a particular goal. It could be a conscious process or a subconscious one, like neurons on the cerebellum, but whatever the case may be it seems to be a sign of some type of information processing.

One more person to add on top of this - Donald Hoffman. He took a theory that I’ve increasingly come to see and believe as it relates to magical and occult activity, ie. that the theory that best fits magic, invocation and evocation, non-‘physical’ agents and actors, etc. is the philosophy of mind called functionalism. Functionalism with multiple realizability seems to fit the existence of egregores quite well. it also suggests that consciousness ‘is what it does’, sort of goes with Rupert Sheldrake’s idea that any self-regulating system is quite likely conscious in this sense. What Donald Hoffman does though is reifies this a bit more. He’s talking about space-time as sort of a collective hallucination, something that we’ve built for Darwinian fitness payouts. So much of the haggling physicists do over the double-slit and quantum eraser experiments (ie. whether it’s Everett many-worlds, whether the wave form actually ‘does’ collapse under observation), that could demarcate the very place where our collective hallucination of space and time actually begins and there may very well be no such thing as collapse or multiverses spitting out every plank second as a factorial of every subatomic particle in the universe and the possibilities of where it could be.

What Hoffman seems to be saying about the binding problem of consciousness, especially in light of some findings in the split-brain studies, is that each level under a binding contract doesn’t experience the other directly (ie. right and left brain having the corpus callosum cut notice no difference).

I would postulate that most of the mystical experiences we have are of conscious processes or ‘contracts’ higher in the stack of agents than ourselves. Our apprehension of those parts lower in the stack than us (ie. what our bodies are comprised of) often come as urges that weren’t pre-meditated or thoughts that seem to almost intrude with their own needs and similarly, being we can’t see what’s above us in the stack, when that communicates back down toward us it will seem like it’s coming from nowhere and it will seem miraculous when, looking at this from a functionalist perspective, ‘supernatural’, ‘paranormal’, or ‘divine’ isn’t the right term for this - it’s more like the part of the ‘natural’ world that’s subjective, analog, quirky, and it’s the part of nature that reductive materialists jump up and down having temperamental outbursts when they run into it because it breaks their models.

The last thing, about the gods and goddesses themselves and riffing on both Ashen Chassan and Bruce Damer, also the bit about the universe carrying information, it really seems like these could be sub-personalities of Mind At Large, or really big ‘contracts’ or binders in Donald Hoffman’s sense of things. From that perspective all of the gods, goddesses, etc. being of the same united fabric without it necessarily behaving much like tidy Neoplatonism and behaving more like polytheism does seem to make a fair bit of sense.

Hope that geek rant was at least a bit helpful. If anyone has any thoughts to the contrary let me know - it seems like a relatively robust model of things but like any model it needs to be tested to see if it breaks under scrutiny!

I can only hope that through our individual interpretations and focus will be enough. For each person shouldn’t that be what’s important instead of what another sees or experiences? Until I leave the lust current, I hope they’re all hot and sexual in whatever way. Once that wanes, something else I hope piques my interest. I’m really unconcerned about the rest of the universe and what’s important to others in their core spiritual progression. I have myself to look after so others are only as important in relation to my own growth and that’s it. Selfish it is to a degree…