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This is kind of like a journal entry. I've had this idea cooking for a while... It could be called, "Ministry Silos." Not a set name, but that's descriptive enough. Since roughly the covid episode, I've been leaning into psychology pretty hard. Retrospectively, I can see that it started as a need for ministry myself. I had an NDE, along with a spiritual encounter, which changed me from an extreme materialist to a spiritualist, and I went looking for answers in religion, and instead only found condemnation. I continued the search, and found more "esoteric" types of people and practices. I was searching for Truth - I was not yet aware of the psychology driving me or them. Psychology, I must say, is the most fascinating field of study I've yet encountered. Its verifiable, easily testable, and doesn't require expensive equipment. Its exactly the opposite of what I thought it was when I was a nihilistic materialist. I'm not saying everyone should rush off to a therapist - I'd say the opposite, actually. Its just a surprise. If you compare psychology with something like physics, which holds an attraction for intellectual ego driven personalities, its far less prone to fanciful speculation, and far easier to test, and yields useful and applicable insights. Basically, physics is junk. But that's not really what this is about. The problem that enters psychology is the biases of the therapist or minister. I haven't had any training in psych, but I'd bet that's one of the top things they teach about. If not, it probably should be. Wherever you turn, the therapist, knowingly or not, is trying to convert you to their worldview. Even the dispassionate shrink in an office is still pushing for something - in their case, its a clinical atheistic worldview, which they imagine to be clean from such pollutants as sentimentality. To their credit, they don't preach it, but modelling it isn't a small thing. Or, a person who is hurting might turn to a religious organization, like a/the church, and find the help there is transactional - the transaction can be summarized as, "submit to God's power (their power by proxy), and we'll recognize you as a legitimate human being." As egregious as this is, it is actually no different from the dispassionate clinician. Both are trying to inject a meme payload and make you a replicator of the memetic bundle that controls them : on one extreme, they fix you by filling your wound with scientism ; on the other extreme, they fix you by filling your wound with a set of beliefs that are characterized by exclusivity. Neither has any interest in truth, much less a kind of truth which can change form and present as a personality in a human being. But, to give some credit, the patient gave them a job - change me - and they're doing it. So now, my title for this idea might make sense - "ministry silos" is about how one kind of help is exclusive from other kinds, and the point I'm trying to flesh out is that the reason there are silos is that the people giving ministry are actually in need of ministry themselves. I also might be playing a little loose with the term, "ministry." I mean, the effort to heal nonphysical wounds. Its usually a religious term, but I see nonreligious counsel is also a ministry. It was after some time studying the "esoteric" material that I realized that it was all ministry. A lot - **_a looooot_** - of these people are in need of some kind of healing. And some of them have managed to work through their troubles and become healers. A few might even be the kind of healers that supposedly existed before the false church took over. Why do I call them the false church? Because their ministry doesn't heal. There are more historical reasons, too, but the fundamental issue is that they fail at healing. Why do they fail at healing? Its because they don't accept their patient as they are. Their meme package comes with judgement. Now, judgement is a tricky thing. You may think you're right in judging bad things as bad things, but its not that simple. The patient is also judging themselves. Your judgement can only get in the way of healing because it acts as verification for that horrible thing inside them that accuses and accuses and accuses. If you're religious, you should recognize the accuser. If you're spiritual but reject religion, then you might treat individual accusations as demons, and work rituals to ameliorate the condemnation. Is there a legitimate place for judgement? Absolutely... But by the time someone is seeking spiritual guidance or is sitting in front of a therapist, a threshold has been crossed, and adding anything to it can only make the problem worse. So, these are the three big buckets of ministry : clinical, religious, and spiritual. They conveniently map to atheist, deist, and animist. They tend to be exclusive, and they also tend to try converting their patients into spreaders of their own type. True healing depends on meeting the patient where they are. The first thing they need to hear is, its okay and you're not alone. Okay, that's a stopping point. My favorite teaching strategy is : show the scaffolding. And my first student is always myself. Opinions are welcome.

Replies (13)

Like the people who are always there for everyone else and never seem to need help. They aren't immune to struggles, they are just eating it. All their problems and all the problems of people who call on them for support. I got sick and cut out a lot of people who were one way because I was busy with myself. Not many people left. I won't be calling those same people back, rather make new friends with that lessons learned.
↩ replying to Bill Cypher
It sounds similar to myself... I've let most people go. I'd like to become the kind of person who keeps them despite everything, but it's hard. Its also really hard to recognize that what people need is empathy, but being empathetic would require changing their expectations of you. Its easier to play the part they expect, and they probably do that too, and the result is we all suffer silently and pretend we don't see it.
↩ replying to Bill Cypher
It would be nice if we could have a community of people who have all their material needs figured out. I think there'll be more of that after bitcoin has demonetized shit like real estate and reasserted real property rights. Fewer people will be in a desperate state, barely feeding themselves and dependent on a job and security guarantees from a criminal state. Bitcoin is a huge part of healing people.
I loved reading this 🥰 and agree very much. Some adjacent/tangential thoughts: I think as each area you mentioned heals (clinical, religious, and spiritual) then they actually become more interconnected. For example I started as an atheist, began developing spiritually a lot, and now very much feel the presence of the divine in all things. But I don't think that's mutually exclusive, I think they can simultaneously exist as a spectrum with the presence and absence of the divine as the two polarities. Some psychologists are self-educating in the area of spirituality and I think it's a wonderful development for the field and for people who most need help from both. I was very lucky to find my doctor, who eventually told me that every time I demanded to be evaluated for schitzo I was actually right about something that I wouldn't have known otherwise without the guidance I was receiving. He's the one who vetted a bunch of people and found me the psy-gym because he said he thought what I was having trouble with was uncontrolled skills that they could help me with. They have, it's been a really remarkable year for me. One of the things we worked on was on judgement exactly. Most mental health issues arise as a result of judgement. Rather than tell myself that I was experiencing the "bad crazy" we pivoted the language to discernment. A big part of knowing I wasn't schitzo was my ability to discern the difference between material reality and my guidance. In psy-gym a huge part of the work is discerning the difference between my own "voice" or energy signature and something else. To me I understand it like tuning into different radio frequencies. Discernment is important, so that we can tell which direction along the polarity we're going. But even demons as you call them, even they are part of God's design because my understanding of God is that of an all inclusive field of energy from which all creation springs. In order to experience their creation they must separate from themselves, and that is what I believe material existence is. So the absence of the divine is part of the divine plan too, and these demonic entities are doing their job so to speak. It's not correct to judge them as bad, but it is important to discern when one is feeding off you so you can shake it off and reorient yourself towards the divine presence. My doctor's PhD student centered his thesis around incorporating shamanistic practices of soul retrieval and entity clearing into their clinical practices. Both my doctor and his student are in Peru right now being trained by shamans and I can't wait to hear from them when they return! 💖
↩ replying to Kip Ashlynn
Oh wow, I would love to go learn from shamans in Peru, or anywhere. I guess one of my demons is that I didn't seek out that kind if thing while in China, and there's definitely a lot of it there in the form of qigong and their own form of shamanism under the umbrella category of taoism. But then, I was a materialist then, so I would've experienced it differently. This concept of demons is really well developed in esoteric thinking. The purpose of their rituals is often to alchemize their demons - transform them from demons into angels, and then keep them and love them as helpers. An accusation can be helpful, if handled differently. You have to change yourself to convert demons into angels. The idea of demons being fallen angels isn't about them being angels before becoming demons - the one who is "fallen" is you, and your demons are demons because you're in a low state. The guilt, condemnation, and accusations which you experience as an entity are pointing towards your failings - in other words, sin - and those failings are basically because you have an independent consciousness, which is great but its separate from God or the flow of the unconscious stream that somehow you got pulled out of (seems to always be a traumatic experience). After finding a way to be a new person, the way to stay a new person is faith - and yeah I'm leaning a lot on religious terms, but the religion crowd doesn't know what these terms mean. Faith is inseparable from fellowship because fellowship is half of what faith is ; the other half being knowledge (self knowledge for the present purpose). A demon that you've made peace with and made into an angel can be a partner in fellowship, and in that way support your faith, which fills the void from self recognition.