(January 8, 2018 at 1:00 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Did you actually pray to a dragon? Really? Unless you actually did pray to any of those gods from dead religions and/or pet dragon then it sounds a bit disingenuous to speculate about getting the same life changing results as you could from Christian piety. Maybe you did but I can hardly blame Drich for being skeptical.
No, I've actually never been able to genuinely pray to anything. I've never been capable of generating religious faith because of an inability to perceive anything on the other end of the line.
I have, however, found it useful to temporarily divide my thoughts into "self" and "other," use a fictional character for the "other," and imagine what sort of advice it would give me. "_____, what do you think I should do?" My best guess is that using a second persona opens a channel to my unconscious mind, much as with flow-of-consciousness journalling, and helps me brainstorm solutions that are not obvious to my conscious mind.
And it works very well, even when I know that the other voice is based on a fictional character. As I alluded to earlier, I believe that it literally saved my life when I was confronted with an ex-spouse who was uttering death threats. I was too scared and conflicted to act, but when one of my "advisers" told me to get the hell out of there, STAT, it mobilized me and possibly prevented a murder-suicide.
What this showed me is that for me at least, gods don't have to be real to be effective in people's lives. They just have to be archetypes that I can call upon. This was the very point that I was trying to make before Drich accused me of dishonesty and I went to Defcon 2.
In fact, my method might be even more effective than praying to gods -- Knowing that I am fantasizing, I also know that it's all on me and not up to some supernatural agent to make things happen in the real world.
It's okay for Drich to be skeptical. His rudeness, however, was completely uncalled-for and I am not interested in cutting him any slack on this. I simply do not forgive people who accuse me of lying.
