Listening to the spirit or letting it in

Those who follow prophecy tend to declare it dead.

For if you don't follow signs, you won't continue to receive any. So, you'll try to protect authenticated signs from imposters and you might also hope to convince God to talk to you again by stubbornly clinging to what you have received.

There are essentially two ways in which God reveals Himself:

• by guiding a person's mind or
• by taking it over.

There seems to be a  preference for the latter method in organised religion and it has its advantages, but it also has its disadvantages. I shall currently discuss the subject.

Letting the spirit in. The process of revelation is decidedly unusual, that is to say shocking, for something occurs that was considered impossible, that is that your mind turns out to be only temporarily let to you, but still very much in the possession of someone else.

The good things about this are:

1. at least you yourself know that this was something else,
2. the communication doesn't require your cooperation.

What are the bad things? For one, there is no underpinning that would allow a logical analysis, and secondly I suspect that revelation cannot occur over and over, because if it did the unconscious would get used to it and able to simulate it in dreams thus destroying the personal basis of its authenticity.

Philip Kindred Dick has claimed to have received revelations from an entity who called herself Diana. I have reason to believe that he made that up, because his account is simply too similar to someone else's, namely that of Bernadette Soubirous, only that in her case the entity called herself the Immaculate Conception. Revelations in the latter case were limited to 18 times, which might still be reasonable.

Both Dick and Soubirous reportedly showed knowledge that they did not possess. So did I. But these examples serve as little more than personal assurances that revelation exists. Nothing much of relevance was otherwise related. But then again we still have detailed accounts of our time handed down to us from John.

Listening to the spirit. The spirit may guide our sensations: emotions, thoughts, dreams (visions). The obvious problem with this though is that so may other factors.

How does guidance thus prove itself? Well, for one, since we are in control of the ideas that we feel we are being led to, we can elaborate on them and our elaborations can be logically analysed, thus filtering out nonsense. Hence, the spirit can be proven to possess sense. But this would hardly convince anybody of its transcendent nature. What does?

In my personal experience the greatest reassurance comes from an almost miraculous tying in of previous questions with current ones. Then again, applicability can never be an end in itself. The aim is to find something useful in the service of revealing the truth.

I had a dream which freaked me out, because I could zoom into it like through a camera. I forced myself to wake up, before any signs with writing on them came into sight - or people. I wrote a post describing it, but deleted it later. But although I'm still not certain of the value of that dream, something has happened which might be significant.

I saw a devastated place in between mountains. There was dried mud on the slopes. It looked as if it had been splashed onto them. There was still a puddle of liquid mud in the middle. Then the view went through a pass towards an extensive pasture with a mountain in the background which was bluish in colour and covered by (vertical) lines of snow. Its skyline was rather smooth, almost like a D lying on its back, but the highest point was to the left of the center. It was also thicker there. It was extremely sharply cut, almost like a giant flintstone designed for scraping meat from bones.

I looked around whether I could find a place like this, but I didn't see anything exact. Still, the bluish colour matches that of parts of the Rockies. Also, the pastures near Stanley are a close fit. When the quake under Ruffneck Mountain happened, it led to a landslide and the clay in the area had the right colour as well. On the other hand the Sawtooth Mountains are far too ragged. But then something happened which might be considered an objection to this dismissal. After yet another quake a boulder called Smoothie rolled down the mountain on top of which it was seated, the effect of which was that the skyline of that mountain became much smoother (tee hee hee). It almost had the right shape afterwards, only the pasture in front of it was different. So, I have a vague feeling of tying in by now. I'd not consider it definite though, until some mud event happens in the area as well. There are hot springs, small ones. If they started to release mud, that would be something. On the other hand, some generic flood would not be very convincing, unless it resulted in a remarkably similar scene.

So, I really consider dreams a rather tricky business, but the principles involved are the same as with hunches.

Well, I hope this provides some Anschauungsmaterial, as we say in German