Bandit, defining fame and drugs as aspects of spirituality is additional proof to me that spirituality has become synonymous with imagination so has no more objective meaning.
At one time it was understood that concern for fame was indulging in the sin of vanity and vanity is the quest to have image take the place of reality including the spiritual.
At one times certain drugs could give indications of possible evolutionary conscious states but being as we are, everything is taken in excess so drugs make us slaves to imagination at the expense of conscious/spiritual reality appropriate for our quality of being.
Being that the conception of spirituality has lost its meaning to imagination, it is no wonder how easily the sacred becomes engulfed by the secular rendering it objectively meaningless in society.
We are in basic agreement. I am sure that all religion has an element of imagination or magic with little fairies living in the yard & things like that.
I also liked your analogy of being IN when compared to father & son while using the log in the pond & the pond(water) in the log. Both maintain their own identity yet are inseperable when being IN, by or through.
The only difference we might have is I see spirit as more than just mind though including the mind. The spirit can travel & detatch itself & actually move from the place it was to another place. Some might call it telepathic, Near Death, or an array of words & definitions.
I dont rely on anything material to get to a spiritual place or state of mind which is probably unique as most people seem to need a ceremony or order of service to get off the gorund. I don't need other people to do it either, though sometimes that is nice to reflect & bounce off of others in the same room.
I have discovered that each spirit has a substance, though it cannot be measured in terms of weight, volume, time or girdth. A vapor, mist-like, substance, able to pass through the material world, able to move in & out & at speeds that cannot be measured... though not always at will, it can be done.
One can send thoughts in the material world, kind of like sending your voice over the telephone or writing it in a paper or manifesting oneself in love
through, in & by sending flowers, this does not make the one (mind/spirit) manifesting itself the actual flowers.
Esoteric Christianity is related to the Hermetic Traditions and as such recognizes both cosmology or levels of reality, one within the other as well as different vibratory frequencies in matter.
The building blocks of matter are known as Ether and the densities of Ether create matter we know initially as involution or the slowing of vibrations in matter. Vibrations is a topic of its own so rather than get into it here, if you are interested, this brief article explains a great deal.
Probably the best & most heartwarming analogy would be knowing someones voice. Then you do not hear them speak for 25 years. At last you hear that persons voice in a different location or perhaps the location you always knew the voice & without actually seeing the face, you know who the person is by the words spoken, the dialect, the tone, and a particular sound, frequency & vibration.
When sonmeone says, "It is good to hear your voice." That is a sign of recogintion...I know you from hearing you & I remember your voice from 25 years ago.
So in a nutshell, the mind & spirit are in essence the same thing & though invisible to the human eye- one spirit CAN see another spirit. it has many parts & many ways to manifest itself, not excluding that it can literally move faster than the speed of light passing through mass & stone and mass passing through spirit (as if it were the same thing though it is not).
Sprits/Souls can also merge with each other & become one (thus your log & water analogy). Though this appears to be within limited reach while still bound to mass & appears to be more or less restircted to be during & after a time of transition. I am sure it can be practiced but have found no real appeal or need to apply myself, as they seem to come to me before I have a need to go to them which makes me curious while being comforted.
Thus, I conclude that even though spirit does yield some type of unmeasurable substance, it is in a different realm of that which can be easily viewed and measured such as body mass, gas, liquid or physical time travels.
Can Spirit be stopped? the same way a penny can be stopped from rolling?
When someone says I do this, this & this when I go to church & that makes me spritual...I put money in the offering plate & drove the church bus- it made me feel spiritual (things like that), -to me that is just the Joel Olsteen, pass out bibles type of feel good religion but no real change takes place. We can be stirred within & the stirring feels good, but that does not mean a spiritual change happens.
Or someone is searching how to enter a spiritual realm, for whatever reason they have no clue where I am coming from. If they have not been there yet then I would certainly not try to explain how to do it as it can only be discovered when that person is in tune with the spirit realm & (this may be where we disagree) NOTHING material needs to be involved
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. The wheel starts turning at that precise moment. Unfortunately it cannot be forced to happen but it can be practiced if one chooses after entering the first time & there is more than one way to enter.
I suppose it could happen & does happen at a time when people are not expecting such a jolt, thus leaving them curious for a long time as to what they really experienced, until
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it happens again.
so there does have to be some kind of search I would think though not everyone is going to like what they find & what we find will not always be desirable...but to try & make something happen again & again is where I get off the boat....because nice things just happen without trying to make it happen
Of course these are only tiny little examples & not limited to these alone. It would become a chore & a bit too complicated to explain or discuss depth in an environment like this.
I am sure there are spiritual realms beyond human comprehension waiting to be discovered.