>>24530922None.
All the magic/occult crap is an exercise in simulated psychosis that, very often, turns into real psychosis: beliefs that you're the chose one; overinflated sense of self; paranoid ideation (the world is full of signs and spirits guiding me); delusions of reference; hearing and communicating with spirit voices, outright hallucinations.
My experience with the occult showed me that the category of mental illness as we have right now is very strict and that mental illness exist on a scale and that is possible to be in extremely deep psychotic states and still function normally.
Here an example: there was a guy in Cultus Sabbati, clearly unhinged, clearly BPD, who got obvious erections at the taught of collecting roadkill and engaging with dead bodies and dreamed of becoming and Aghori Tantrika and even had a kapala and a kangling, which he fondled as gently as a man usually fondles his penis. He got into the occult at age 14, which corresponds with the usual time of the first psychotic break. He believed that spirits of the Cultus Sabbati chose him, that he is special, and that he knows more about the occult than the rest and everyone should listen to him. He abused drugs like a teenager abuses his dick. Yet, he had a Masters in Administration and worked with the government. By all signs, he was someone very close to Dahmer. Yet he held a job and knew how to keep up an appearance of utter normalcy.
That's the only thing occult taught me: mental illness doesn't mean debilitating states that require hospitalization and it's more widespread than we suspect.
My advice of everyone is to treat the occult as fiction of drugged up functional schizophrenics. Don't go too deep because the slippery slope into delusion is very subtle and it's very easy to start with it's all in my mind belief and then turn into OMG Spirits are real need talismans without noticing the shift toward the psychotic perception of reality (which is actually what more or less happens in psychosis, where a sufferer usually has no idea how far out he is). The bottom line is that there are no spirits and you're reframing your perception into perceiving the usual random events in your life as connected to spirits and as visible manifestation of a spirit's will. Remember, if magic were real, there would be far less - far, far less - poor people in the world.
