Entities: To Believe or Not to Believe

The Teafaeire asks, "Do you believe?"

The Teafaerie does not believe in discarnate entities. This is my official stance. It’s the stance that I absolutely have to take at this point in order to maintain what I’m still pleased to call my sanity. The last thing I need, insofar as my tenuous and tempestuous romance with consensus reality is concerned, is to think I’m some kind of god damned Faerie Ambassador. I get the irony of my name (Teafaerie is actually a title, like Doctor or Professor, rather than a proper name) but in fact I don’t believe in faeries, demons, lizard people, or self-transforming machine elves. Clap all you want, it won’t do a lick of good. Or rather, I should say I don’t Believe in them, with an emphasis on the capital “B”. I’ve taken enough ayahuasca that I can’t deny the compelling intensity of some of these experiences, nor dismiss their relevance, but I don’t think I know what they are anymore than I think that I know what I am, myself. To label such a phenomenon as “entity contact” is to attempt to box it into a metaphor that is perhaps not large enough to contain it...

People are of many minds about the entity thing. It’s difficult to gauge what the general consensus is, if there even is any. Religions seem to prefer having an immunity to ontological analysis. Some of this stuff is maybe a little bit embarrassing for them, but it’s too central to their basic mythologies to just sweep it under the rug, so they kind of have to go with it. It’s perfectly normal to believe that (pick your favorite religious superhero) had all kinds of weird-ass entity contacts. You know, they cast out devils, and they talked to the Creative Principle as a personified entity, and they were harassed and helped by angels or devas or whatever. Not only that, but the followers of most of the popular religions are asked to believe, nay, commanded to believe, that they are players or pawns in some sort of a spiritual war or game between a number of disincarnate entities, and that they must guard themselves scrupulously against supernatural attack, and that they must perform rituals to please or appease certain deities and demigods who might come to their aid or intervene for their salvation. Really stop and think about this: it has been absolutely impossible to get elected president of the United States without at least professing to believe that intelligent demons are out to corrupt your soul. Variations on this theme hold true all over. Millions of people believe in ghosts, too, and most believe that their consciousness continues on in some manner after death. Don’t tell folks that you hear voices in your head, though, or they’ll lock you up!