Question about energy types

[LordArt]

Taking more of a philosophical view here..

If every major event in your life is orchestrated, are they the sort of thing that will happen irrespective of your choices or am I thinking too literally?

I'll use an example:

Singer in a band I love was doing a show, 1000 pound lighting galley fell on him and fractured his skull, broke his pelvis, whole bunch of stuff. Long story short, he spent 4 years in pain that strong he could hardly move.

Is the event in his life that he was supposed to be on the stage at the time to be crushed by that SPECIFIC object or more generally that he was supposed to suffer through the 4 years of pain or...

Depends on what was the intended event. Was it the suffering? Was it simply he was supposed to have an accident? The accident could have been at that stage or a completely different one. If the point was the suffering, then he just as easily could have been in a car accident.

While I would love to say there was a point in the sense of "if he made a different choice, the accident might not have happened or the suffering would have been greatly reduced". My experience is people make their own hells, and their own (rather concious) choices keep them there. As an example, a smart person decides to skip college, so he ends up waiting tables for the rest of his life. It was his choice to skip college. If a person wishes to leave their hell they have to take the oppertunity when it presents itself rather than simply lementing over how bad things are. Taking that oppertunity may be hard, but is sometimes the only way out.

In my experience, I can't avoid major events, but I can drastically limit it's long term negative impact. What I've found is only the event matters, not the reprocussions per se. Ie. You HAVE to have a car accident, but that doesn't mean you HAVE to have medical bills because you are all screwed up, that doesn't mean your car has to be trashed. Admittedly, in many cases the best way to reduce the impact is magical. Sort of do spell work to keep these things to the absolute minimum. I've done other spells for people to get out of their downward spirals. They have to wait for the current cycle of their crap to complete, but once that is over, the cycle is broken and they are MUCH happier. And after a long enough period of time, have no tendency to go back to thier downward spiral (most never look back anyways).

Most of the more impresive spell work I see done by my inner isn't so much creating events but changing event timings so that a different spin comes off of it. Meaning, it doesn't upset the status quo because the event still happens, but he gets his result because the timing changes my (or whoever's) path direction. As a simplistic example, if a guy robs you. The likelyhood is he's robbed before and will again. Which also means it is likely he'll eventually get caught. So you just make sure it is this time that he get nailed. That's an over simplification, and better suttley gives more interesting results, but you get the idea. You'd be surprised how a little timing changing can have DRASTIC results.

I'm just wondering how specifically it's scripted. Like, I'm a musician and I practice 3 to 4 hours a day generally. If that's not scripted in as my 'path', is it time wasted or will I still experience my life's lessons on that path?

There is a lot of free will, but it doesn't seem like it sometimes. You CHOOSE to do what you do. Things are just stacked so you choose the way "they" want. And sometimes it is all your choice and that is the point (but you never quite know when that is...At least without "looking"). The stuff inbetween major events is very maluable. As far as you practicing or not, again, that is something you CHOOSE to do. If you don't practice, then the event you'll need that practice for will either get delayed until you are ready (which may end up being never) or you'll fail when the event happens. Some events are unavoidable, admittedly, no matter what your choices.

And, from your personal view-point, is being able to observe and interact with the destiny web surrounding people something you enjoy or would rather not be able to do? I've heard stories from friends that tinkering with it really got to them mentally and emotionally and that they essentially didn't like what they could do there.

I see the paths directly, but I avoid looking for myself as much as possible. It can change things by knowing too much. Sometimes I'll just filter it so I don't look at things I don't want changed. Other people it's different. It is much easier to decide what to tell them or not, or even what to change. Do I enjoy it? I like being able to do it, yes. Meaning, if I need to I can. However, that doesn't mean I use it all the time or willy nilly. I've heard simular complaints to what you mention from some people I've taught it to. Even one that says it's an abomination to even have such power (he says that about a lot of things that I do, and he's a high level Omni himself so he knows what I'm doing. Half the time I think he just likes saying it. He does simular (but different) abominational stuff, but honestly thinks incarnates shouldn't be able to do such things, but enjoys it anyways.) But in his heart of hearts he understands the real issue. With power comes responsibility. If you can't handle the responsibility then you have NO business having such power. That is usually the issue the bigger things have with lesser things trying to get power. The lesser things (in general) have no respect of the power they have and they want to be able to cause more damage out of ignorance. Wisdom comes with time and experience, and it is something that should be strived for.

I'm really enjoying this conversation between yourself and Psychokinetic_Wannabe, I hope it continues and the information keeps flowing. Thanks Art! =)

I think I scared him off since I took a month to reply, unfortunately. It was just that the holidays and end of year stuff at work just killed any free time I had.

[Psychokinetic Wannabe]

It is a general category so I don’t have to go into what actually happened. It involved a lot of energy and in this case, bad stuff happened as a side effect. I won’t go into it on a public forum.

What about a PM? Or is that still the kind of info you wouldn't put in the hands of someone you don't trust?

Cthulhu is fun. Just don’t let him out of the box. Besides, Cthulhu would just eat you, he wouldn’t care about doing something so technical.

On the subject of Cthulhu, is there anything like Cthulhu out there, or are bigger things generally wise enough to have a certain distaste for consuming souls? Because it seems like if the bigger things are as politics-governed as seems to be the case, it doesn't seem too irrational that an entity that generally likes to use lower-level souls for power is tolerated, so long as that soul-consuming entity is powerful enough to make it damaging or harmful enough to the other big things low enough to still care about the souls it's consuming to make it not worth their while to attack it. So long as it compromises with them and doesn't consume too many souls, over too brief a time span, and doesn't interfere in the souls of entities that the other big things are backing.

Umm, yeah. Not in a public forum. No point in giving ideas of what can be done. People are creative enough on that sort of thing.

I agree with your reasoning, though unfortunately it's usually the people who don't readily come up with these things that have the most difficulty with mounting a defense once something like that starts happening. Luckily, I'm creative enough that that by itself isn't really a problem.

I was kinda more curious about what parts of one's astral self could be damaged like that, and what kind of mechanisms could be broken or disrupted in one's internal workings that would do things even worse than the above poisoning case - but of course, your above reasoning still applies, doubly so since in order for you to tell me that you'd have to be willing to tell me stuff from astral biology, and you've stated before you don't want to start teaching that on a public forum.

As far as telling if someone is broken without good senses and an idea of astral biology, I would say can you do surgery without having a good idea of how to use a knife and stitching let alone physical biology?

Well, no, but the question is whether you can tell someone needs surgery, rather than being able to do it. I'll readily admit there's MANY things that require surgery that you can't tell require surgery without the tools to see what's going on in a person's body, but there's other things that are dead give-aways or some things - like internal bleeding of a punctured lung - and for minor ailments, sufficient knowledge lets you be able to say that if the following symptom doesn't go away with all of these other treatment attempts, then probably you're looking at some internal damage that didn't heal right.

Since most of this knowledge involves knowing the astral anatomy, I won't ask for that, but are there ever manifesting symptoms that are most likely to occur (most likely in the experiences of us humans that don't get to observe entire other universes without physically leaving this planet) in individuals with something specific not healed right. Namely in regards to their ability to manipulate energy? Observable difficulty with specific psychic abilities, or full-blown handicaps in them? The ability to produce less 'tendrils' at once from their astral body (speaking of which - is there a limit to how many tendrils a human can extend out of their astral body?)? Perhaps a much greater difficulty in maintaining concentration tethers? Such as being otherwise 'normal' but being able to maintain only 1-2 concentration tethers without strain, while normal people should be able to do a shitload more if they aren't powering the things concentration tethers are maintaining at the same time? 'Leaking' or inefficiently using their soul reactor's energy so that they have less to use, or have a noticeably smaller or 'dimmer'/'less intense'/(however a person perceives it) - containing less energy, basically - aura, energy field, or what-not?

I would say the best way to learn astral biology is use yourself as a template. Look at others that seem “ok”. Then when you come across someone who is symptomatic, do a comparison. See if you can figure out the differences between simply changes between individuals and something that is actually out of place/wrong. That is the best advice I can give you.

I would (and intend to) do just that - my main problem right now is lack of confidence in my accuracy (but lately I've decided to just say screw it - I'll figure out what I'm perceiving wrong as time goes on), and that if I myself am broken, it'll take me a while to notice that that particular form of breakage is a problem as opposed to one of those changes between individuals. I also have a suspicion that I won't be able to accurately and successfully dig that deep into a person's astral body at my level. I really don't know how high-level of perceptive skill that requires. Since you're advising me to do it I'm guessing it must be possible at my level, but you yourself mentioned that often you forget that most people learning from you can't do what you do. So I gotta ask - at what level did you start figuring out astral anatomy? How much of your early knowledge was personal observation, and how much was stuff you learned from others?

You can have pieces obliterated, and while those pieces can be replaced, you’ve lost what essence was in there. In some cases, you simply aren’t the same person anymore depending on how much you’ve lost of yourself.

So, is there an actual 'essence' - an existing 'thing' that is you - or is this more of a philosophical concept? If it's an existing 'thing' - can this essence be swapped, changed from the essence of one entity to another, etc - like if a hard magic piece is blasted out, but I manage to survive long enough to create another, and stick it in, have I lost the essence permanently, or will it eventually conform to the rest of my soul and become in 'essence' indistinguishable from the previous piece? Or is this more of a technical you're not the same person because your body is essentially swapped out?

Which brings up another very important idea: What aspect of your soul's hardware is 'you'? Can any bit of it be said to be more 'you' than another - like with the physical body you could argue that your brain is more you than your limbs? Or is it really more accurate to say that, like what looks like the case with the brain itself - no part of your soul is really the seat of consciousness and 'self' any more than another, and the holistic view of the thing is you? Another question: have you found if there is anything in the soul that stores memories? I personally have conjectured that the entire soul has a certain vibrational pattern and that within this pattern, coded in a very complicated way, there's the entirety of one's experiences. BUT I only conjectured that a few years ago due to the fact that the entirety of my information was very limited in comparison to what I have learned from you - and in so far as I can trust myself to assume you are correct, I have to suspect that it's quite possible every other idea I had about the soul is also wrong.

I agree with the bit about clones of you not being you, just being at best exact copies... I've never gotten that tendency to assume that an exact copy must be you. It makes sense in certain fantasy/science-fiction scenarios where a clone is 'blank' and you can somehow transfer your sentience/soul from one to the other (I think Darth Sidious planned to do this in Star Wars), but other than that, it seems to me to be blatant logical fallacy.

But on the subject of clones, if I make a clone, supposing I was good enough, there's nothing preventing the clone soul from being alive, I presume? So life creation is (in principle - obviously in practice there are difficulties and matters of skill, not to mention possible political issues) possible? How distinct does this clone's signature become? Do they start out having the signatures their creators have? If so, do these signatures change with time (and how much credence does this lend / how much correlation does it have with my above idea of the entire vibrational pattern of the soul encompassing within it the entire contents of your soul's memory? Or perhaps merely reflecting it in a superficial way)? Or are energy signatures more like quantum states - like no particle can ever have all exactly identical properties (spacial position included in the case of particles, but maybe this doesn't count for souls), so no soul can ever have the exact same energy signature, so upon creation of a new soul and it's soul reactor kicking in, it automatically jumps to a similar but in some way (however infinitely small) different signature? Or does the mere act of existing in a different 'space' in the multiverse it automatically has a slightly different aspect somewhere deep in the identification information that its signature contains, which we just don't regularly notice in other matters?

On that note - soul reactors - how 'creatable' are they? Anything about what makes them tick that you're willing to share? And on that subject - what do they use as fuel? I believe you've mentioned somewhere that even soul reactors don't actually create energy - the '2nd law of thermodynamics' (though maybe we should call it something else, more universal - "Energy Constancy", maybe? It's quicker and it applies more multiversally because technically energy can be moved in/out of universes which, for a being confined to viewing their universe, would appear to be energy 'creation/destruction') still holds, obviously, so what do these universal and presumably ridiculously good energy generators use for their fuel that lets them put out energy in such a specific energy type without being ridiculously inefficient? Or are they actually inefficient in so far as objective standards go, but just 'efficient' relative to their purpose of putting out energy in a very specific and complex energy type?

If I knew the trigger, I wouldn’t be here.

Ain't that the truth... Though I think I'd still be here, just not as a typical human incarnate unless I had to incarnate as a typical 'lower' human to do what I think needs to be done here. Though if I knew how to evolve up and actually did so, the change in perspective by then might honestly be great enough to change how I felt. I don't think so fully, but nothing quite like being a notch higher up on universally mattering to decide that the little things you used to care about the suffering of so much don't really matter, and can and should be left to deal with their own suffering. As their inners may very well want them to be....

I’ve seen it happen in one case, but that is not enough data to say it always happens that way. To put it simply, it’s merging with another entity.

I'm curious what the circumstances were that led you to witness that. Did you just stumble across it, or did something either let you view it as it(formerly they?) evolved, or did a third party (or your inner, which might be prudent to call a 1.5th party, as if that made sense in anything but the dynamics of incarnating) tip you off that this was going on because it thought and/or knew you were interested?

On that note: Did the soul combine into a bigger more complicated soul, using all of the pieces from the original souls, or did they break down and/or fuse all the hard-magic pieces and created something new and better? Did the soul reactors follow the same pattern, or did they do their own thing (for that matter, did different things get done with different soul pieces)? I'm assuming the soul reactors either switched to the same energy signature, or somehow melded into one, but perhaps they were just put closer together or linked somehow, and then became the inner workings for an even bigger soul reactor? Or maybe one expanded and got places around the first, so that the first soul reactor was still taking the original fuel and creating a better 'fuel', which the mechanisms of the first (Edit: second, not first. The idea I was trying to convey was that the second soul reactor would basically become another layer on the first, and then together they would allow for a more complex fuel-processing, possibly resulting in a better quality energy as output) soul reactor could then work into an even more refined 'soul energy'? Actually, even if they didn't layer over each other, you could still do that with 'linked' soul reactors, so long as one is reconfigured. Seems more efficient to layer them, but with fuck knows how many directions and spacial dimensions to work with, you may very well not need to 'layer' them unless soul reactors are so complex they take up all available to them dimensions. In either case, if either of these was the case, perhaps a study of lower level souls is in order, to see if souls incarnate here have 'layers' or 'combinations' of smaller/simpler soul reactors working together, resulting in our soul reactor being what it is. The fractal view of the world that you suggest is the case might imply, too, that we need to look inward. See what, if anything, exists that is smaller than us, and how much smaller. A study of smaller souls may very well be rather insightful into how souls evolve, and such. Especially IF the world is a fractal thing, because then we may very well have nearly infinite opportunities to find evolving souls for observation. Of course, the potential for mind blowing creepiness increases with looking in just as it does with looking out.

But another question - have you ever observed souls 'split', or does it look to you like the souls cannot split after evolving? It seems to me like they wouldn't be easy to split - you say deities around here have similar layouts to the souls of incarnate humans and other entities, so I'm guessing they take the combining-pieces possibility of the above, but it shouldn't be completely impossible for a soul to split, should it for some reason choose to do so.

But I’ve seen other versions that weren’t quite so successful.

Any details on what the unsuccessfulness resulted in? Is this a screwed up partially melded soul, something broken and only marginally more 'evolved' than the original, or something that stalled out or even broke their/its soul reactors and temporarily (or permanently) died? Or were the failed and/or partially successful versions not results of attempted fusing?

So I’m sure there are many ways that I have no clue of.

Why would I not be surprised if one of them is permanent upgrade amps + understanding of the world's workings + wisdom? (Though I might be meaning 'amps' in a more broad sense than just energy working ability. Perhaps figuring out a way to 'amp' the soul's concept-processing/'thinking' abilities, memory storage/recall, and 'RAM' and processing power - I get the impression from some of your other statements that you know a decent amount about computers, but in the event that that requires clarification, I mean the ability of it to simultaneously contemplate, pay attention to, and do multiple things. I don't know if our souls can do that - or even if the other things you interacted with can - but it would certainly help being able to 'understand' complicated multiversal physics and, no doubt, other things (like psychology in so far as souls are concerned. I'm assuming you have some sort of research into this field, but perhaps not. It is something to consider though - how do souls learn their lessons, are there any constants to soul's learning/thinking abilities, can they be taught through other ways than first-hand-experience, etc).

Politically, I doubt they would be able to do much. If a person was able to kill the mage, it is considered a clean kill.

I'm guessing, however, that if a mage is able to kill a 'muggle' or another mage by blasting the soul out of their body(bodies, hypothetically?), or by otherwise using magic as an aid, directly or indirectly, that would not be a 'clean' kill?

You are thinking too inside the box. You can’t think like a person, you have to think like a god. Every major event in your life is orcastrated by something (normally yourself but it isn’t always that simple). Something like death certainly isn’t coincidental. Life isn’t always for your benefit, it could be for someone else’s, so sometimes you are just a bit part for someone else’s event. It’s like work, you have to work all day, but after hours you can play LAN games on the hardware while you wait for the next event.

I do think 'like a god' quite often. The problem is I live the life of an incarnate entity. And I don't think I am ever going to let myself switch over to an entirely 'greater purpose/meaning behind everything in your life' mentality. I certainly realize that's the case. I have no doubt that if you look hard enough, you could probably find that a fart I subconsciously decided to hold for a few seconds had consequences years down the line for someone. And I have no doubt that every fight I've been in (there were very few, but that's neither here nor there - I just realized saying "every fight I've been in" suggests many to the average reader) and every other thing I did were either for my benefit, the benefit of another person (not necessarily the other party in the fight, or whatever). I'm sure me being meek and lacking in willpower earlier in my life, despite resulting in what it resulted in multiple times, either served lessons for my inner or for other people's inners.

The difference is I'm not always going to accept that that's the right way to view the world. Is it really the wiser outlook that everything that happens at my level serves a greater purpose and I should be okay with it? Or is it in realizing that just because there's lesser souls whose lives we can fuck with doesn't mean we should extend to them the same moral rights as we extend to ourselves, presuming they can experience equally exquisite degrees of suffering, etc? Perhaps any exquisite suffering for an incarnate is a minor discomfort for the inner, and maybe there I am wrong, but until it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that that's the case, I'm not necessarily willing to accept that things like years of physical or psychological agony, rapes, murders, loss of loved ones, or other forms of suffering are 'necessary', for learning lessons or otherwise. Nor would I accept it as a bigger soul's moral right to teach lessons by interventions that cause such things, until it's proven that that's the only way for a soul to learn certain lessons. I may never have the power to do anything about bigger souls doing just that, but lack of power, or the possession thereof, should have no bearing on how much burden of proof rests on your moral right to do something to another entity. (I'm thinking there's about a 49.5%/49.5% chance that this little paragraph of mine either really boosted or severely damaged my chances of ever getting accepted into either Omnimancy group.)

Another more recent time this came up, and instead of trying to cure the illness, I changed the individual’s destiny. Playing god rather than playing doctor. He survived alright for another 2 years until I pulled the spell by request. Why? Because while he survived, the illness didn’t disappear so he ran out of medical insurance (because the survival rate was like 3-6 months max), it fucked up his family both financially and especially emotionally.

I know things are always easier to see in retrospect, but any reason you didn't do both? God and doctor, to run with your metaphor? It seems like it would have been within your power to change his destiny, then cure the illness. Or did you try and something (perhaps his own inner) get in the way?

Changing events have longer term repercussions and you have to account for that, and just because you want your way, doesn’t mean everything else is idle and will let your change affect their agendas if it’s important. (Yes, I knew better than to do it, but I had reasons to do it anyways)

I'm sure this is private, but if you're willing to share, I'm curious what the reasons in question were. On another note, did anything bigger become particularly irritated with your changing of destinies?

I'm really enjoying this conversation between yourself and Psychokinetic_Wannabe, I hope it continues and the information keeps flowing. Thanks Art! =)

Until LordArt tells me everything he knows and is willing to share on a public forum, or gets fed up with my questioning, or unless something interferes with my life, there's no reason for this to not continue.

As an example, a smart person decides to skip college, so he ends up waiting tables for the rest of his life. It was his choice to skip college. If a person wishes to leave their hell they have to take the oppertunity when it presents itself rather than simply lementing over how bad things are. Taking that oppertunity may be hard, but is sometimes the only way out.

What I know of psychology and from observing people is that unless a person's psychological development takes certain turns, there will always be situations were a person cannot choose to face a certain difficulty, because even though it would take a conscious set of actions to make something happen, their psychological workings are such that internally, they don't get a choice. There are such things as insurmountable fears or insecurities - they aren't permanently insurmountable, but it takes psychological growth to get over them. And in the right circumstances, with ideal upbringing, a person can be prepared to face all their internal conflicts and triumph - but this world is hardly that perfect and often people do get to a certain point where they have the chance to make a choice and get themselves out of something - yet if they mentally haven't been given the opportunities to grow in certain ways, they won't actually be getting a choice in what happens to them, no matter how easy it is for a person on the outside to say it was entirely their fault they didn't get themselves out of something.

Of course, if a person's inner has a hand in such psychological phenomena, then you're probably right, and it's a different matter entirely.

You HAVE to have a car accident, but that doesn't mean you HAVE to have medical bills because you are all screwed up, that doesn't mean your car has to be trashed.

Makes me wonder about my own circumstances - I crashed my car rather epically (epic in the sense that it would make a good ending for a bad guy's car in a chase scene) - I went off the road due to personal stupidity and poor split-second decisions combined with on-road circumstances, hit a guard rail, and had my car roll (though maybe full-blown 'flip' is a better term) over at least twice. I then came out unscathed aside from superficial wounds (some heavy bleeding from gashes on my calf and scalp, but nothing health-threatening of even inconveniencing, beyond having to sit for a bit so make sure my scalp bleeding stopped). My car, on the other hand, was nice and completely fucked up. Now, since then I've thought of a few reasons why this could've happened. There's certainly a shitload of minor circumstances that have happened sense then, both in the lives of people I can no longer visit as often, and in my interactions with folks that I ended up interacting with as a result of time freed up from what would've been traveling/visiting (oh, and I never got an oil change I was planning to get that weekend. That may have had an impact on someone somewhere down the line - or maybe someone cast some spell some 10-20 years from now, and this was just one element of how reality shifted around the future status quo to make room for the effect he/she/it/they was/were aiming for). Even my interactions with people at the crash scene may have been influential. If nothing else, the fact that I kicked my way out of my windshield to get out of the car right after it came to a stop, then remained utterly composed during the process (I knew if I didn't act calm people would be that much more tempted to assume I am in shock or am otherwise not fine. Also, the more I conveyed calmness and composure the more autonomy I would be able to afford myself when the medics showed up, etc.) DID noticeably effect a few of the people who stopped to help, so maybe I helped someone else down the line, perhaps as indirectly as by making one person have a specific psychological predisposition when interacting with that someone, resulting in them being able to do something during a critical moment. Of course it could've been a tool for my own growth, giving me a mix of +self confidence and -arrogance. Or to increase my carefulness on the road. Or perhaps to force me to make other changes in my life to compensate for the lack of a car (it pushed me to come here [among other things], because I was more motivated to learn rifting [again, among other things], and I figured if there's any place where I am most likely to learn such things in this life, it's here. Which in turn pushed me to be more proactive again in my other magical areas of development). And of course any combination of that and any other possible end result.

I guess at this stage I'm curious how much of that was meant to be, and how much of it was my spell-casting/lack-there-of. I may very well have kept myself perfectly safe. OR it was just Honda's wonderful engineering. Similarly maybe my car was totaled in the process because it was meant to be, or maybe just because I lack the power/skill/whatever to have kept the car safe too.

You'd be surprised how a little timing changing can have DRASTIC results.

Well, how surprised a person would be would vary with how much they spend time contemplating this, and/or how much such things/ideas have been brought to their attention, but fair enough.

The stuff inbetween major events is very maluable.

Are these major events ever pre-set or determined by something greater than the things interested in events on our level? Is there any indication that they are set by anything even bigger, by spell-work of entities that make the events of galaxies play in their favor long-term, or no? Is that something indeterminate, or does there seem to be indication that that is not the case?

I see the paths directly, but I avoid looking for myself as much as possible. It can change things by knowing too much. Sometimes I'll just filter it so I don't look at things I don't want changed.

Seems to me that what was inevitable ultimately varies with whether or not you were going to chose to look in such cased. But, actually, inevitability is a matter for us to discuss in depth much later, ideally when my own abilities to perceive these things is a lot more defined an precise, rather than a bunch of vague and wispy concepts. I tend to try to do things like this on a lower level to get rid of things like cops - but I suspect that when I do it, what I'm perceiving aren't paths that are actual 'fates'/'destinies' but rather more lower-level 'possibilities', and I'm just screwing with the malleable, in-between areas, not the bigger stuff. So ultimately I don't really consider myself qualified to comment.

Do I enjoy it? I like being able to do it, yes. Meaning, if I need to I can. However, that doesn't mean I use it all the time or willy nilly.

That's pretty much a perfect way to express my views on all the prowess/power/abilities/etc, psychic/magical and/or physical (and for that matter, mental/psychological), that I've gotten myself to develop. I seek these things out because there will always be circumstances, or at least possible circumstances, where you'll need to do such things. And I don't know how altruistic or specific your motivations are, but for me whether or not I'm able to do something or not in such a situation ultimately determines whether entities that don't need to suffer end up suffering or not, and/or whether the cause of that would-be suffering is prevented, temporarily or permanently.

The rest of the paragraph from which I quoted is also essentially things I agree with, for that matter.

I think I scared him off since I took a month to reply, unfortunately. It was just that the holidays and end of year stuff at work just killed any free time I had.

Oh LordArt, perhaps I haven't made it clear just how much I appreciate and love getting knowledge from you. Sure, there's always bigger fish, but for me you are a much bigger fish, and here you are telling me stuff. Stuff about the world that's way beyond my abilities to sense. When was the last time one of the deities around Earth Astral dropped down to my level and conveniently put their knowledge into words that my lower incarnate mind can understand without having to astral project? I'm sure they wouldn't really mind telling me things if I could reach them and understand them consciously - but I can't do that, at least not yet.

Nay, the reason I delayed was because not only is there a bunch of things eating up my time now just as you had things back then eating up yours, but... well, actually that covers everything in a broad and general explanation. But to be more specific I have collegiate education, a job search I'm doing, and one other forum as well as an e-mail exchange that currently both also require just as long of posts as this one. It'll take a lot more than a month of not replying to get me to stop coming back here.