Comte de Sats Germain on Nostr: This is kind of like a journal entry. I've had this idea cooking for a while... It ...

This is kind of like a journal entry.

I've had this idea cooking for a while... It could be called, "Ministry Silos." Not a set name, but that's descriptive enough.

Since roughly the covid episode, I've been leaning into psychology pretty hard. Retrospectively, I can see that it started as a need for ministry myself. I had an NDE, along with a spiritual encounter, which changed me from an extreme materialist to a spiritualist, and I went looking for answers in religion, and instead only found condemnation. I continued the search, and found more "esoteric" types of people and practices. I was searching for Truth - I was not yet aware of the psychology driving me or them.

Psychology, I must say, is the most fascinating field of study I've yet encountered. Its verifiable, easily testable, and doesn't require expensive equipment. Its exactly the opposite of what I thought it was when I was a nihilistic materialist. I'm not saying everyone should rush off to a therapist - I'd say the opposite, actually. Its just a surprise. If you compare psychology with something like physics, which holds an attraction for intellectual ego driven personalities, its far less prone to fanciful speculation, and far easier to test, and yields useful and applicable insights. Basically, physics is junk. But that's not really what this is about.

The problem that enters psychology is the biases of the therapist or minister. I haven't had any training in psych, but I'd bet that's one of the top things they teach about. If not, it probably should be. Wherever you turn, the therapist, knowingly or not, is trying to convert you to their worldview. Even the dispassionate shrink in an office is still pushing for something - in their case, its a clinical atheistic worldview, which they imagine to be clean from such pollutants as sentimentality. To their credit, they don't preach it, but modelling it isn't a small thing. Or, a person who is hurting might turn to a religious organization, like a/the church, and find the help there is transactional - the transaction can be summarized as, "submit to God's power (their power by proxy), and we'll recognize you as a legitimate human being." As egregious as this is, it is actually no different from the dispassionate clinician. Both are trying to inject a meme payload and make you a replicator of the memetic bundle that controls them : on one extreme, they fix you by filling your wound with scientism ; on the other extreme, they fix you by filling your wound with a set of beliefs that are characterized by exclusivity. Neither has any interest in truth, much less a kind of truth which can change form and present as a personality in a human being. But, to give some credit, the patient gave them a job - change me - and they're doing it.

So now, my title for this idea might make sense - "ministry silos" is about how one kind of help is exclusive from other kinds, and the point I'm trying to flesh out is that the reason there are silos is that the people giving ministry are actually in need of ministry themselves.

I also might be playing a little loose with the term, "ministry." I mean, the effort to heal nonphysical wounds. Its usually a religious term, but I see nonreligious counsel is also a ministry.

It was after some time studying the "esoteric" material that I realized that it was all ministry. A lot - **_a looooot_** - of these people are in need of some kind of healing. And some of them have managed to work through their troubles and become healers. A few might even be the kind of healers that supposedly existed before the false church took over. Why do I call them the false church? Because their ministry doesn't heal. There are more historical reasons, too, but the fundamental issue is that they fail at healing. Why do they fail at healing? Its because they don't accept their patient as they are. Their meme package comes with judgement.

Now, judgement is a tricky thing. You may think you're right in judging bad things as bad things, but its not that simple. The patient is also judging themselves. Your judgement can only get in the way of healing because it acts as verification for that horrible thing inside them that accuses and accuses and accuses. If you're religious, you should recognize the accuser. If you're spiritual but reject religion, then you might treat individual accusations as demons, and work rituals to ameliorate the condemnation. Is there a legitimate place for judgement? Absolutely... But by the time someone is seeking spiritual guidance or is sitting in front of a therapist, a threshold has been crossed, and adding anything to it can only make the problem worse.

So, these are the three big buckets of ministry : clinical, religious, and spiritual. They conveniently map to atheist, deist, and animist. They tend to be exclusive, and they also tend to try converting their patients into spreaders of their own type. True healing depends on meeting the patient where they are. The first thing they need to hear is, its okay and you're not alone.

Okay, that's a stopping point. My favorite teaching strategy is : show the scaffolding. And my first student is always myself. Opinions are welcome.