Like a Prayer

What happens when your external reality is incongruent with your internal desire? When everything that can go wrong will go wrong. When relationships are full of strife and you experience setback after setback. Your perception of life becomes anxious. You watch your reality slip through your hands unaffected by your attempts to mold it. Your life 'happens.' Problems happen to you. Accidents 'happen.' Life is perceived to be directed by fate, by God, by the external. Your reality becomes shaped by your belief in an extrinsic design.

Magick counteracts happenstance by using a psychological spectrum to shape reality. Using the spectral shades of perception, belief, state, attention, and expectation an individual can affect his reality. Normally, the common reality bending magickal procedure used is Gnosis, but Prayer has an ability to utilize the same exact mechanisms.

Jesus Say, Monkey Do

Religion causes behavior. You have the religion, it tells you to to do things, and so you go out and do them. Jesus say, monkey do, or, that's the theory at least.

I don't buy it, simply because there's a difference between a cult leader demanding such sacrifice and sitting alone in a candle-lit basement believing that a stack of thin, leather bound sheafs of paper is demanding it. In one case, there's an actual cult leader, and in the second, well, that guy is batshit crazy and it wouldn't matter the focus of his insanity was a bible, 'religion', or a plastic bear filled with honey.

Karma in Hinduism and Buddhism

When you hit yourself in the eye,
And it occurs through time,
That's a Karma!

This post is a response to the request to clarify a statement I had made -- that the concept of karma isn't the same in Hinduism and Buddhism. I also was giving an example of how metaphors used within some belief systems are meant to be taken in an esoteric sense (in other words, a psychological sense) and not within the frame of the literal supernatural. With that said, enjoy.

First, I found this definition which is a good sketch of karma in both Hinduism and Buddhism:

"the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences"