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@Troy astral projection is possible. I did it accidentally when i was about 17. A Princess knowledgeable in Magick schooled me. Also accidentally achieved cosmic conciousness around 19 years of age. Someone also told me this when i was in my 40's. Troy thanks again for asking the question.

Spirituality is the counterbalance to our body, personality and all that is tangible. The body is a ship and spirituality is our anchor in the higher realms. You could exhange spirituality with world view or the existential contemplation of essence. Religion is a lower order manifestation of spirtuality. Analogous to the word apple and the object apple. So your spiritual approach defines and informs your actions personality, thought processes, and emotions. All of the later terms are constructs or a way to embody the intangible essence. These constructs are what makes life feel real. Its easier to argue religion or spirituality. Than the reality of your body. Yet you would have a hard time really believing someone arguing reality. The irony being that it is your mind that rails against this position. Which is ironic because your mond is closer to spirit than your body. Thats a first take will post more later. There's the potential problem of associating the self with our body or our actions. What infotms this the mind. The mond is a function of your life experience and also your spirit. Various people may perceive one or the other in the ascendancy An admixture or perhaps neither. You are relatively unaware if the functioning of the body or your destiny. Spiritual practices can shift your perspective so that you can see both differently. This ability may be real or as indistinguishable as being in a dream. Row row row your boat gently down the stream. Live live life your life. Knowing that it is the spirit dreaming.

@Mel Hopkins inspiration and and respiration are also linked etymologically. So loosely translated it means to breathe in spirit or the breath of God. Which gives new meaning to Genesis. The Bible takes on an entirely siffrent meaning if you know etymologies Astrology Numerology and Symbolism. The Son is the Sun. And Jesus died and rose on the third day. Is a reference to the Sun during the Winter Solstice and Ra's nightly journey to the underworld. Mythology is the basis of religion. Which are divinely inspired text. Hence the similarities amongst and between religions and Myths. @Chevdove this conversation with Mel may be useful for you.

I want to thank Mel Hopkins for her exhaustive review of Severed, A Novel. I am so grateful for her insights. It's fascinating to see how people interact with my characters. It's even more intriguing when they see things I did not see myself. Watch her space. She's up and coming. We need more writers like her who are willing to put the time in, to be thoughtful, critical, yet supportive. Thank you, Mel. You do me the greatest honor, to critique a novel written for Black women.

Mel even the person who conceived of the quark did not "know" it to be true and would never have stated it with such certainty until it was proven, until then it is a theory, usually one of several theories. Even now it is possible some other experiment will change what we know or think we know. I think we have to resign ourselves to the fact that there are some things we simply can not know. Even something as mundane as what happens to "us" after we die can't be known. Of course, people of various faiths will claim that they "know," but this is a function of faith rather than reality. This becomes readily apparent when you compare various faiths and quickly discover they can't all be true. Often some of these "spiritual" people will kill those with beliefs that oppose their own. Even the concept of a state of existence is a function of how we perceive our existence. The concept of time itself is more a function of how we experience the universe, not a complete reflection of how it truly is "really." If you could hop a ride on the back of a photon there would be no concept of time. No past, past present or future.

You can theorize something unknown by the effects it has on the known. Which is how yhe outer planets were discovered. Philosophy, Logic and imagination are useful in navigating the unknown. There's a few questions in philosophy that may be unknowable: Is reality a simulation is one of them. Since it is difficult to think outside of your consciousness. However I like your methodology @Mel Hopkins

I just emailed our latest eNewsletter If you don't get it in your email box please consider subscribing. Below is an email I received in reaction to this mailing. “Troy, I am incredibly proud of all the effort and passion that you have poured into AALBC for all of these years. I discovered your site sometime in the 90s. I was living in my home town which is incredibly small, and at the time, predominantly white. I would sit up until late in the night trying to find a way to connect with literature by my own people. Then, I found your site and enjoyed it so much. I am ashamed that I have used and depended upon your site without ever making a monetary donation. Within the next two months I do want to contribute a little money. I don't have much, but I do want you and your family and associates to know that you provide a valuable service over the vastness of this country and the world and it is appreciated. Don't worry about social media. I am sure that the best is yet to come!” Of course, these messages are highly motivating and remind me that I am reaching people in a way that I hoped. As I created a copy of this newsletter for my blog I discovered several typos and a reader informed me of one significant factual error. While I can always correct these types of errors, editing errors are still a pain in my butt. While the newsletter is much better than it used to be, I hope as at least one reader believes, "...the best is yet to come!"

Beautiful!!!!

Michael! Man you were one of the first people I put your information on this website--at least 15 years ago. I moved you up in the queue of pages to be updated: https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Michael+Taylor It looks like your career has progressed nicely. It is good to see you are still doing your thing. What took you so long to come back through? @Coach Michael Taylor, Here is a question for you: Do you know what happens to us after we die?

That is the reason I write and speak. I share my truth with others to allow them to come to their own truth and understanding. People who reject my ideas and philosophies are entitled to their opinion, however, as an author and thought leader I make it a point to share my beliefs with anyone who is open minded enough to listen. I truly enjoy engaging with people who disagree with me because I am so grounded in my own truth that I cannot be swayed from what I deeply believe in my heart. This doesn't mean that I'm not open to being wrong, I am definitely open, but I know who I am and I'm comfortable in my own skin which insulates me from a lot of the negativity and hatred that pervades our world and I am armed with facts to go along with my inner truth.

contemplation allows us to "know" a thing. It's the nature of that thing that is not yet known or as you put it, tested, proven or observed... But lack of these things but especially observation doesn't make a concept or element unknowable. For example, before the quark was a concept - it was an unknown. Then it became a known because of what existed along with the particle - but still no one knew the nature of the particles. Now physicist have figured out its nature but guess what? No one has ever observed it! So how do you know that you aren't observing the very thing you are contemplating. It's like existing in 4th dimension, until you can see it, you can't. What is unknowable may be your perception of the thing. Therefore, the concept of "unknowable" is a mental construct... So my question as always "who does it benefit to create a construct for "unknowable" elements? " I know right? These effing people with their politricks I have another one article that blew me away... It's a subculture , I had no clue existed but is a society unto itself.

One of the problems I had with "Heaven" from a very early age was the concept of eternity. An eternity of anything would become a hell for me. So I figured surely whatever the afterlife meant it had to mean more than what my mind could possibly conceive (again one of those unknowable things). In fact why the did afterlife have to mean that my personality, experiences, and even my friends as I know them here on Earth had to persist in the afterlife in exactly the same fashion? This seems very limiting--unnecessarily so. The physics of our bodies prevent us from perceiving and perhaps understand much of what the universe contains. Today 95% of what makes up the Universe is unknown. We know just about the same amount about the working our own brains. I hear there are people who can astral project themselves. I'm not convinced that is possible, but if it is true that would be a neat thing to do--especially if you could share the experience with someone else.

ARGGGH... the imagery!!! LOL! This is an awesome cautionary tale that there are no shortcuts...Thank you for sharing!

@Troy cool will do. @Mel Hopkins visualisations is one of the keys to magic. You'd be a natural.

Troy, this is the overall issue with using third party platforms. As I told you I went from making 30-50K a month with Amazon and one change in the system and now I'm driving Lyft as I redesign my website and build it in a way to garner some of the major money being floated around in the sneaker industry right now. People have integrated third party sites so thoroughly into their lives that it's very hard to overcome without considerable consumer education. The consumer/user is the only person that can stop the bleeding and unfortunately comfort and ease of use rules the day. I need to explain how I was wiped out, but I have done videos discussing how I was setting myself up, but I couldn't stop like a junkie and I eventually was forced into rehab. I probably already talked about this, but it has to be presented again. Amazon a month ago decided to make all items over 35.00 bucks require free shipping. If your items did not meet the requirements for how they wanted free shipping presented, your listings were removed. I went from having almost 1000 listings available on Amazon to zero listings showing up. I contributed slow sales to post holiday hangover and I didn't check my inventory. After a week of zero sales I looked into my dashboard and realized that the listings were Active but not active in the buying area. Every listing had to be deleted and recreated. This would take countless man hours and I realized that I'd waited too long to build my website up because I was mainlining Amazon so hard I was shooting up between my toes and in my dick; which I had been cutting off by using third party platforms to reach my customers all of these years. When you talk about being hijacked by Google, it's the same thing Amazon has done by mining data provided by third party sellers and then releasing their own private labels to sell what is hot. Amazon and Google are genius business models and pure capital engines. They exist as a medium providing no inventory of their own until they have mined the data to make sure that success is a certainty. Once they make the decision to replace you or change the rules, you are doomed if you haven't been building up your platform first. I commend you for taking the time to rebuild. It inspired my current work and while the benefits aren't 30000 a month, I will drive Lyft until I work through the process of garnering the revenue that is flowing through the sneaker biz at this moment. My website growth has been tremendous since I've started the work which shows that people are looking for information. In February of last year my ARCH site had 2000 Unique visits. This Feb 2017 my site got over 17,000 Unique visits. I'm selling a few shoes through the online store and the checks are coming faster from Adwords. Ultimately the goal is to garner media sponsorships from Verizon and other sites as I push the Uniques towards 100,000. You know like I know one endorsement could do this overnight, but more than likely like AALBC I will be working towards this on my own.

@Mel Your definition of spirituality is very profound and provocative. As for how I define spirituality, I agree with the idea that the spirit is the intangible essence of the tangible individual, and I am in sync with the cliche that spirituality is about getting in touch with yourself. To me, this includes listening to your inner voice which is your guide through the external world and a channel for the instincts that remind if it does not feel right to you, it is not right for you. (Which is why I appreciate Shakespeare advising: " this above all, to thine own self be true".) I also think that spirituality is about acknowledging your own divinity and realizing that "god" is comparable to your higher self divested of the ego that reduces you to being human. This is my belief and something I contemplate on my current spiritual journey to seek the truth, keeping in mind what The Prophet Khalil Gibran warns: "say not that I have found the truth, say rather I have a found a truth while walking along my path." Again I can only resort to cliches when I concur with the idea that "the truth will set you free".( Even if it hurts, it is a spiritual wound that heals itself as you meander through a world of deception.) BTW, I do appreciate the necessity and the beauty of language, but on a spiritual level I think words are some times inadequate, and the closest they come to adequacy is when they defer to "reality" and say that "it is, what it is".

You can derive a proof that no one understands. Versus something that is unknowable. What ishe nature of consciousness may be unknowable. Since we have to use consciousness to answer thr question about itself. Unprovable may be because currently the technology is non existent. The difference is one is a matter if time or knowledge. Although I may have to give it some more thought.

I wrote in the other thread about spiritual enlightenment. Maybe that's a misnomer because it's more like spiritual re-enlightening. Spirituality, for me is simply remembering the ancient energy that animates all things, also resides in me. If I had to describe it, it would be like one eternal flame that lights all the candles on a birthday cake... I honor that flame in all living things. As far as the spirit is concerned since I'm fascinated with the etymology of words, I believe spirit is exactly how its defined: spiritus which means breath. From the Latin word "inspirare” from which we get the word inspire means "to breathe life or blow into"... I like to believe that the spirit is that ancient energy that's not created or destroyed it just changes form and it is that breath which animates our bodies with what many call the soul. When our bodies are worn out or destroyed, the energy that is “us” continues on. The spirit is that thing that's omniscient and has a small voice but speaks with temerity and speaks first in all matters of our daily life.

Not sure what others mean by "spirituality" because it's such a fluid term..... But when I say spirituality I'm talking about those OTHER REALMS (because I believe there are many) beyond the physical, beyond time, and beyond space. Some believe believe that even the physical realm (reality) that we're living in is also PART of the greater spiritual whole but just on a slower vibratory plane. 　 Troy But there are people who consider themselves spiritual, who do not believe in a human soul or spirit. I've met people who held similar seemingly contradictory beliefs, but when you really drill them on what they believe you find out a lot of what they object to are the commonly held perceptions of these subjects in Western thought. I've met people who claimed they were atheist, but after interrogating them over a few weeks I find out that it's the Western concept of "god" as an old man with a beard riding a cloud that they object to....not the idea of a Supreme Force or Forces in the universe.

Who knew the question would be so deep. Please; the question is not just for Del, anyone can answer. Google define spirituality as shown below. The answer presumes that to be spiritual you have to believe in the human soul. But there are people who consider themselves spiritual, who do not believe in a human soul or spirit.

Interesting discussion. Delano, you remarked I was becoming a "magnus". All I can say, is that I would not read something about spirituality or metaphysics or extra sensory perception and come away thinking I had been informed. My reaction would instead be that reading about such things didn't enlighten me, but rather confirmed what I always believed. And, actually, I haven't done a lot of reading about all of this paranormal stuff, especially lately but I am stimulated by discussions about these subjects, and I say things off the top of my head which I think may be a conduit for my brain/mind.This kind of plays into the idea that humans already know the answers to life's mysteries which are just waiting to be discerned and people should go with their instincts and gut feelings. This is not to declare that what I contend is factual or true. But it is to say that there are no definitive answers to these deep spiritual subjects, so who is to say what's true or real? .