If I may (and I've calmed down a lot): I was looking into some pretty woo stuff. Rituals, affecting reality by will, etc. This whole thread started with psionics, the development of psychic powers through focus and meditation. Then after a week skepticism took over (see below) and I gave it up, almost. I tried looking into Magick, which seems rather similar, and as I was listening to some speech on it, I kept thinking how impossible it sounds. At best I thought, maybe I could just think of it all as symbolic, focus on using it as representative of inner change, and such.

But it's all to easily explained away. The real feats can be explained naturally, and the subjective experiences? Tricks of the brain, biases, fallacies, all of it. There's nothing special there, you're just too stupid and emotional to see it and instead think some magic energy is balancing out or whatever. So if there's nothing to it, why bother?

Much of it applies to more mainstream spiritual stuff too. Tricks of the brain and meaningless appeals to things that have been empirically proven not to exist. It's not even a placebo effect (doesn't actually exist) or anything mind-body related. It's just ignorance.

I admitted I'm vulnerable. The other day when I posted this I had found a few people discussing experiences with OBEs or astral projection (something I've wanted to try just to see what would happen), and someone comes and points out to one poster that, based on her posts, she'd be incredibly easy to manipulate if he had no conscience. If you admit you believe in spiritual and new-agey stuff, you're basically a walking target. All a person has to do is talk to you, act as if they agree to build trust, then the person could get the spiritual individual to do something crazy or stupid because they'd believe the ******** reasons it would work.

That last paragraph served no point.

Regardless, I ended up combing the internet for "spirituality and skepticism". Most all rational, scientific, thinking people agree that it's nonsense for people with no critical thinking skills. Which is what I am, but still. A real intelligent person only needs the inspiration of Reality, and the magic of existing the feel spiritually fulfilled, instead of nonsense like prayer, meditation, rituals of any kind, or any ******** beliefs.

(I don't really buy the whole magic-of-reality thing, like I mentioned in a previous post. Fiction inspires me far more than material reality does; it always has as long as I can remember. And seeing as I read so much fantasy...is it any wonder I began, as I disintegrated emotionally, to wish something as amazing like that was real, and jump at the possibility that it is? Then my brain killed it...).