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Liryen said:
I wasn't suggesting that we ought to continually dwell in the past!
I never said you did suggest that. 🙂 Wasn't criticizing you, was just clarifying what I meant earlier because I felt it had been misunderstood. Please note the part of my post where I said, “Not that anyone here falls into that trap – but that's part of what I mean when I say 'past lives are not THE point' to being otherkin. Part of the point for many people, perhaps, but I strongly feel they should not be the entire 'point'.”
What about the sentimental value of happy memories, though? Again, I'm not suggesting going off the deep end and becoming obsessed with the past in an unhealthy way. What I'm trying to express is more that just because it isn't “useful” to us anymore doesn't make it useless – if that makes sense.
Sure – that gets into building personal mythology and identity, finding meaning in one's perceived history, etc; and that can all be personally enriching and valuable. So long as one maintains perspective and doesn't fall into the escapism trap. 🙂 I can agree with your statement here.
I've never considered pushing to recover memories a negative thing.
What I mean by pushing to recover memories is actively trying to remember things. I understand a lot of people do this, but I can tell you right now that if you push to remember something – even something in this life, and there have been several very solid psychology studies lending evidence to this – your brain will give you something. It will very likely be distorted or even completely fabricated, but you'll have next to no way of telling. This is part of why I'm always very hesitant regarding the factual validity of past lives. More important and more relevant, I feel, is this: Does it have meaning for you? Mythic truth is just as real in its own way as literal fact; but we modern Westerners place so much importance on literal fact that a lot of people in the therian/otherkin communities seem to place a lot of emphasis on their personal, subjective experiences being objectively real.
For more information on the unreliability of memory, check out this article on the Seven Sins of Memory. If you'd like, I'd be happy to look up some additional relevant studies in my psychology textbooks when I get home later today. The “sins of memory” most relevant to past life recall are the sins of commission, particularly misattribution, suggestibility, and bias. Here's a quote from the above article:
The sin of misattribution involves assigning a memory to the wrong source: mistaking fantasy for reality, or incorrectly remembering that a friend told you a bit of trivia that you actually read about in a newspaper. Misattribution is far more common than most people realize, and has potentially profound implications in legal settings. The related sin of suggestibility refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions, comments or suggestions when a person is trying to call up a past experience. Like misattribution, suggestibility is especially relevant to — and sometimes can wreak havoc within — the legal system.
The sin of bias reflects the powerful influences of our current knowledge and beliefs on how we remember our pasts. We often edit or entirely rewrite our previous experiences — unknowingly and unconsciously — in light of what we now know or believe. The result can be a skewed rendering of a specific incident, or even of an extended period in our lives, that says more about how we feel now than about what happened then.
A very serious and dramatic example of sins of commission in memory is detailed here, where a woman was absolutely certain about who committed a crime against her and only discovered she was wrong years later when a blood test proved it. There is no way to tell if your memory is true or false unless you have physical evidence like that. You can't even really trust shared memories, peer-corroborated gnosis if you will, due to the sins of suggestibility and bias.
You can feel complete certainty about a memory, it can be fully realized and very vivid and ring utterly true, and still be inaccurate (see the example about the woman who misidentified her perpetrator but was so sure about him, no doubt in her mind).
Does this mean past-life memories are invalid? Does it mean they are useless? No, of course not! It just means we can't know if they are objectively real, we can't know if they are fact, if they are literally true. (One could argue we can't know that about anything, because of how thoroughly our perceptions define our personal reality.) If we don't get hung up on memories being literally, factually true, I think those memories can be very personally valid, meaningful, mythically real. Look at the difference between logos and mythos – yet both approaches are valid and useful, even if modern Western culture places much more importance (to its detriment, I think) upon logos.
This article is a pretty good explanation of mythos vs logos and the relevance of each. A particularly good summary:
…Consider the Greek words from which our English words “logical” and “mythical” have been derived, logos and mythos.
Both Greek words can be translated as something like “story” or “account”; mythical thinking and logical thinking both provide an account of the world, but they do so in very different ways. Those using logical thinking approach the world scientifically and empirically. They look for explanations using observable facts, controlled experiments, and deductive proofs. Truth discovered through logos seeks to be objective and universal. Those using mythical thinking, on the other hand, approach the world through less direct, more intuitive means. A person might gain poetic insights into the nature of the world by seeing a caterpillar emerge from a cocoon or watching a full moon rise as the sun sets. Truth discovered through mythos is more subjective, based on individual feelings and experiences.
Please, please understand that I am not trying to invalidate anyone's experiences, I'm not trying to say past life recall can't be useful or meaningful, and I'm not trying to criticize. I am merely bringing up points that I feel are too rarely addressed or considered in the community. Also trying to have interesting discussion. 🙂
“This list's purpose is to provide help to those otherkin (be they elf, dragon, were, or any other type) who are aware of what they are but do not have any proof, even for themselves. Our goal is to discover ways to bring these proofs to our attention and hopefully catalog and reproduce the experience in others.” (Emphasis mine)
I understand the urge to seek validation and proof. I think everyone goes through that at some point, trying to prove to others or themselves that this is real, that one's experiences are valid. I went through that, I've seen a lot of people go through that.
Many of us there would love to recover our memories, no matter what they are about, and are actively trying to do so.
Of course. 🙂 That's fine. Just know that actively attempting to recover memory can very easily lead to false memories that you have no way of distinguishing from truth. If that isn't an issue for you, great! Creation of personal and group mythology can be a very rewarding, valuable process and an important part of identity development, culture-building, and group formation. (I've also seen it go very, very badly, to the point of social/emotional/spiritual abuse or complete dysfunctionality. But again, so long as one maintains balance and perspective, that's not so much of an issue.)
Hrafn said:
1) Most of the time we are operating from similar cultural contexts which invariably biases our results toward what people from our cultural context will remember. This not just works for “true” memories but also for “false” memories, and it isn’t a far stretch to think that we might experience the same thing because we are operating within a similar belief and cultural framework.
I’ll be honest, I don’t really know how to answer this one. You’re right in that, within our little Yahoo Group, our similar cultural backdrop could have an effect on what we remember – and when it comes right down to it, there are many other factors of our present realities that might – but at the same time, I don’t think that this means we shouldn’t attempt to identify what has most consistently worked best for us and distribute those techniques on a list that is, essentially, “by us for us”. This is an imperfect experiment, a series of trials and errors, and not really much more. A crude analogy might be a group of medieval alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold…and we’re dreamers. *grins*.
2) As an extension of #1 It is very, very easy doing this sort of thing to have one’s perceptions contaminated by outside sources. So, for example, Kaldera reports there being a goat and a stag on top of a roof of Valhalla. This goat has a name–Heiðrún–and I knew the moment I read it that it appeared in the Eddas (both in Snorri and in Grímnismál).
So now there is a conundrum. Did he see it because he heard about it in Grímnismál? If I traveled to Valhalla and I saw “something” on the roof I couldn’t identify, would I go back the next time, look closer, and see a goat? If I traveled and didn’t see anything, would I be sufficiently honest to reveal this, and would it mean anything that I hadn’t?
There are protocols that help ameliorate this situation, but my experience is that most people who aren’t trained have trouble implementing these protocols even when they seem like a good idea. I do think that these protocols are a good thing, and to a greater extent it doesn’t matter (I’ll get to this in a minute), but it is very easy to attribute increased confidence to something that is sufficiently flawed that it really shouldn’t generate increased confidence that we are dealing with something truly factual.
What are some examples of these protocols?
3) Emphasis on the Past can interfere with the broader search for meaning. For the most part I believe what matters is Living As We Are, whatever that happens to be, and so I am always far more interested in manifestations and living with consequences (e.g., I have a tendency that I found out a few days ago is shared with many others who identify as Elven or Alfar to develop a need to go walkabout, great, having established that how can I work with it in a modern society?)
I have found that without my memories, it is very difficult to determine what the manifestations are. I can’t tell whether any given trait is a me thing or a ‘kin thing, and scouring lists of “typical traits”, or even the more heartfelt observations of others, in order to “assign” myself a subspecies would be a no-no by just about anyone’s standards. For instance, I already know that I like to travel, and sometimes feel restless or want to go walking for a long time on my own. I have a high need for adventure, and purpose, and channeling my energies, and would be described my most of the people who know me best as a passionate person. If I were in a job/lifestyle that I hated, I would probably just get up and walk away and worry about the consequences later. But is this that same need to go walkabout? I just don’t know. This is where having some of my memories might be useful.
As far as living in the present is concerned, I maintain about a 50/50 balance even without memories. I love being who I am now, but I’ve always been aware, even as a very little girl, that I’m someone else. I didn’t like to be called my name, because I knew I had another one; I had psychic abilities that no one in my devoutly Christian family or circle of contacts believed in, and I believed in other worlds. By 12, I had independently come to the conclusion of being elven, and by 16, while gazing up at the moon, I knew I had come from Elsewhere. I am comfortable in both worlds at once, and speaking for myself I am very interested in the past life experience.
That all having been said: I also believe that there are pretty firm risks. It would not do to be engaged in past life memory retrieval, remember a few particularly viivid fragments from a (the) war, and end up traumatized from it: There are probably reasons why Urd erases our memories, even if that erasure isn’t complete.
*nods*. I hear the truth in this, for sure. I respect the thoughts that you and Meirya have brought to the conversation, and I don’t want to minimalize the risks, in any way. Ultimately, though, I do not feel that this will stop me from trying to find myself. I guess it’s just up to everyone to decide for themselves.
It probably is not a bad idea for anyone engaged in such to be seeing a therapist or at least have an established relationship with one. Regardie recommended anyone engaging in occult work go through a course of therapy first, and both he and Fortune would firmly classify past life memories with occult work.
I’ll definitely keep that in mind, though a lot depends on whether I ever actually start retrieving memories. At this point in time, I’m reading a lot more about occultism than actually practicing it – on a daily and weekly basis I do a lot of divination and some energywork, mainly healing and cleansing type stuff. I don’t feel that it’s necessary to see a therapist just because I’m performing tarot readings or something – I mean, it kind of is therapeutic to me. 🙂
Now, with that in mind, I think there is some value in mythmaking, shared gnosis, and all of that good stuff so long as we recognize that is what we are doing. There’s also value in finding past-life memories, so long as the pitfalls are well understood and all participants are willing to approach the subject with detachment, maturity, humility, and with the mindset that this is about meaning and not about whether those memories are themselves objectively true.
I agree with you here, and I think that this kind of mindset is the one most conducive to initially finding memories. My one objection is this: if one were to recover a memory that they identified with very strongly, wouldn’t it be natural for them to want to know if it were objectively true, or at least to operate as if it were?
I like Dion Fortune’s use of the term “Objective Imagination” for a lot of things in the occult realm, and past life memories certainly fall under that mantle. My theory largely parallels Lupa’s theory on Shamanism and Subjectivity:
But what’s the point of trying to judge the objective reality of the experiences themselves? Sure, I can discuss the conflation of neoshamanisms with indigenous shamanisms, and explain that certain practices found in the former are in no way, shape or form a part of any of the latter. But how can I judge whether someone else’s journey was valid for them or not? And, more importantly, does it really matter whether it’s valid for me if it’s not my experience (and I’m not the client or otherwise involved)?
[…]
So–at this point, my running theory is that spiritual realities are largely subjective, and any objectivity is hidden to some extent by subjective perceptions. The quest for objectivity, in addition, is overrated.
I would agree with this to a large extent as well, though I think that there can be ways to prove the objective reality of some memories. When Jarin was new to the community, he had shared memories with his (past-life) sister, Arhuaine, in England, and I have heard of at least one other person who had their memories corroborated by someone else. It can be argued that this is only a trick of the mind, or perhaps psychic ability in effect, and I’m not saying it couldn’t possibly be, but I’m inclined to believe that (in some cases at least) they aren’t. After all, we believe in reincarnation, don’t we? How is it so much of a stretch to think that we could, for the most part, accurately recall some of those memories, in bits and pieces over time, and “finish each others’ sentences”?
Meirya said:
I never said you did suggest that. 🙂 Wasn't criticizing you, was just clarifying what I meant earlier because I felt it had been misunderstood. Please note the part of my post where I said, “Not that anyone here falls into that trap – but that's part of what I mean when I say 'past lives are not THE point' to being otherkin. Part of the point for many people, perhaps, but I strongly feel they should not be the entire 'point'.”
How is there any “point”? Otherkin == state of otherness…
Sure – that gets into building personal mythology and identity, finding meaning in one's perceived history, etc; and that can all be personally enriching and valuable. So long as one maintains perspective and doesn't fall into the escapism trap. 🙂
Hell, we’re ALL escapists!
. *Laughs*. Or at least, we’re eccentrics, or nerds, or something. 🙂
What I mean by pushing to recover memories is actively trying to remember things. I understand a lot of people do this, but I can tell you right now that if you push to remember something – even something in this life, and there have been several very solid psychology studies lending evidence to this – your brain will give you something. It will very likely be distorted or even completely fabricated, but you'll have next to no way of telling.
Meditation and prayer can help with this. So can certain Reiki symbols, like True Memory. It takes effort, yes, but it’s possible.
This is part of why I'm always very hesitant regarding the factual validity of past lives. More important and more relevant, I feel, is this: Does it have meaning for you? Mythic truth is just as real in its own way as literal fact; but we modern Westerners place so much importance on literal fact that a lot of people in the therian/otherkin communities seem to place a lot of emphasis on their personal, subjective experiences being objectively real.
Eh, I’ve never thought about it much. Of course, it’s probably natural for people to assume that their memories are real – we do commonly assume ourselvesto be real, after all.
For more information on the unreliability of memory, check out this article on the Seven Sins of Memory. If you'd like, I'd be happy to look up some additional relevant studies in my psychology textbooks when I get home later today. The “sins of memory” most relevant to past life recall are the sins of commission, particularly misattribution, suggestibility, and bias. Here's a quote from the above article:
The sin of misattribution involves assigning a memory to the wrong source: mistaking fantasy for reality, or incorrectly remembering that a friend told you a bit of trivia that you actually read about in a newspaper. Misattribution is far more common than most people realize, and has potentially profound implications in legal settings. The related sin of suggestibility refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions, comments or suggestions when a person is trying to call up a past experience. Like misattribution, suggestibility is especially relevant to — and sometimes can wreak havoc within — the legal system.
The sin of bias reflects the powerful influences of our current knowledge and beliefs on how we remember our pasts. We often edit or entirely rewrite our previous experiences — unknowingly and unconsciously — in light of what we now know or believe. The result can be a skewed rendering of a specific incident, or even of an extended period in our lives, that says more about how we feel now than about what happened then.
Memory can be unreliable, yes. But nothing is certain. Does that mean we should put our lives on hold, never do anything because there’s a risk or because it could backfire?
A very serious and dramatic example of sins of commission in memory is detailed here, where a woman was absolutely certain about who committed a crime against her and only discovered she was wrong years later when a blood test proved it. There is no way to tell if your memory is true or false unless you have physical evidence like that.
Problem is, this essay left out a lot of details about the woman and the circumstances surrounding the crime. Was she face blind? Did the crime happen in the dark? Etc. Without further information like that, it’s impossible to attribute her mistake to a memory slip-up alone. Also, I couldn’t help but notice that the only thing we know about Cotton’s appearance is this:
“Mr. Cotton and I have now crossed the boundaries of both the terrible way we came together and our racial difference (he is black and I am white) and have become friends.”
In those 11 years that Mr. Cotton spent in prison, the only logical rationalization that he could have made for her error would have been that she mistook him for a similar-looking man. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t reveal whether Ronald Cotton bore any kind of resemblance to Bobby Poole or not.
You can't even really trust shared memories, peer-corroborated gnosis if you will, due to the sins of suggestibility and bias.
To avoid being redundant, I’ll just say that I don’t agree on this one and point to what I said in my last reply to Hrafn as an explanation.
You can feel complete certainty about a memory, it can be fully realized and very vivid and ring utterly true, and still be inaccurate (see the example about the woman who misidentified her perpetrator but was so sure about him, no doubt in her mind).
Well sure, there’s room for error in memory retrieval. But if I erroneously thought I was a pink unicorn called Debbie, would it really be all that bad? :))
Chances are, even if I thought something about myself that later turned out to be false, it wouldn’t be much of a problem. I would just explain the mistake and move on.
Does this mean past-life memories are invalid? Does it mean they are useless? No, of course not! It just means we can't know if they are objectively real, we can't know if they are fact, if they are literally true.
Why would it bother you so much for someone to claim that their memories were objectively real? Personally, I don’t care very much what others claim, and I think there can be ways to know if some memories are factual.
(One could argue we can't know that about anything, because of how thoroughly our perceptions define our personal reality.) If we don't get hung up on memories being literally, factually true, I think those memories can be very personally valid, meaningful, mythically real.
Why couldn’t they be equally valid or meaningful either way? Because really, I don’t see why it matters to always consider it subjective, all the time.
Look at the difference between logos and mythos – yet both approaches are valid and useful, even if modern Western culture places much more importance (to its detriment, I think) upon logos.
“The worlds of magic and logic must exist side by side, not destroy each other.” 🙂
Please, please understand that I am not trying to invalidate anyone's experiences, I'm not trying to say past life recall can't be useful or meaningful, and I'm not trying to criticize. I am merely bringing up points that I feel are too rarely addressed or considered in the community. Also trying to have interesting discussion. 🙂
I understand. 🙂
Sorry, Meirya – my attempts to edit are messing up. 🙁
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Meirya said:
My particular areas of interest regarding otherkin is functionality and meaning. How being other affects us now, in this life; how being “other” in some way affects our ability to function, for better or for worse, and how to optimally function in this time/culture/life as otherkin; and what meaning we make of our otherness.
*grins* Or, to put it another way, “What do you know as a hawk that you did not know as a man?” 
(For anyone I just completely lost, I'm quoting as best as I can remember from the movie Camelot.)
I try not to get caught up as much in trying to figure out “real or not real?” because there's no way to be certain; more important, I feel, is to figure out “useful or not useful?”
To some extent I can understand that, but in my experience weeding out the things that are unlikely to be real is a very good first step towards weeding out the things that are unlikely to be useful. When one's memories turn into what I can only describe as Mary-Sue Fanfiction, when you are always the best and always the greatest and all of your problems including what to eat for dinner are solved with magic and a snap of your fingers, there's not much left that is going to be useful.
The same thing applies for kin without memories. If you claim you're a wolf therian, but act more like a pop-culture idea of a wolf than like a real wolf does, then that's not likely to be real nor is it likely to be useful beyond boosting your ego.
Fundamentally, I don't consider self-deception or delusion (in a non-clinical sense) to be useful. So I do consider trying to figure out “real or not real” an important part of working with one's otherness.
Like someone (I think it was Jarandhel) said earlier up: What is the point of identifying as otherkin? I don't think past lives are the “point”. But I do think finding meaning, and the experience, and being impacted by it, is an important component of being Other. If that makes any sense.
I think the point is to work with one's points of relation with the other, whatever they may be. For some of us, that is the memories. And I'd go so far as to argue that memories allow for some of the deepest exploration of one's otherness. Without them, it seems too easy to fall into working with one's otherness as an archetype or worse a stereotype. You end up with carboard cutouts of nonhuman beings, far more often than you end up with something recognizably other.
Memories give you more of a foundation to work with. You're not just a “generic elf” whatever that might be; you're listari or tulari or aloryan or… well, you get the idea. You have a culture, you have a history. More than that, you're not just “generic aloryan elf” either; you're this particular Aloryan elf, with this particular family, and these particular experiences, likes and dislikes. You're a full person, fleshed out and individual, not a short collection of generic traits that may as well have been taken from an AD&D Monster Manual.
Without them, how far can you really go with the idea of being other? How can you work with it?
Interesting! I can see your point in that. I was never really involved in much of the offline parts of the community, save for the many otherkin I “collected” (ie: someone offline pinged to me as otherkin, I talked to them for a while, and discovered that they identified as other in some way, though usually weren't involved in the otherkin community online) over the years, and House Kheperu's open house for the past several years, which is… vampire/energy work house that is very otherkin friendly. So not an otherkin gather per say.
*nods* I'm familiar with them. I haven't personally attended any of their events, and I don't believe that will be changing anytime soon, but I know others who have. I've been involved both online and off; I attended WtT from WtT 2 in 1999 through WtT 11 in 2008, with the sole exception of WtT 9 in 2006. I also attended CtT in 2007, and have attended numerous mini-gathers of otherkin over the years at various people's homes. Hell, at this point I know so many kin locally that just hanging out with friends in the DC/Baltimore/NorthernVA area might as well be a min-gather anymore.
So most of my experience of the community has been of the online portion – which I would say has become partitioned and oftentimes rigid.
It's always been partitioned… look at the divide there's always been between the otherkin, therian, and vampire communities online. Actually, if anything, that's gotten a little less rigid over the years. And draconity has almost entirely stopped being its own community online and has embraced being a type of otherkin, though maintaining forums with a dragon focus. But new partitions are popping up. The big one, IMO, being with the “psychological otherkin”.
It's interesting to me that the otherkin portion has become more skeptical and critical, while the therian community has gotten a little more relaxed. I'm not 100% sure it's a bad thing or a good thing – but I will agree with the decline in intracommunity connection. It seems a lot harder to find good nifty folk. That could however be exposure bias; I have been rather less active in the community than I once was, and thus am less likely to connect with people.
To some extent that's true for me as well. There are more boards these days than mailing lists that still have discussions on them, and I'm not as active in the forums as I once was on the mailing lists; it's just not as convenient to read and respond to that many different message boards as it was to receive everything via email. I also just don't have the time and energy I once did, and I have more commitments offline that take priority these days. But I've done a good bit of looking around, particularly while gathering links for the otherkin link project, and I really don't see the same efforts towards building community anymore. Here and there I find a few small projects; Orion's Otherkin Timeline, the WereDirectory project, that sort of thing. But there's not many of them, and they can be hard to find in their own right.
The one positive sign I've seen lately is that Otherkin.net seems to be becoming somewhat active again. At least, Malcolm posted an update since the new year asking on input for how he should move forward with the site and any bugs people have found with it. I just found that the other day, and I really need to reply to it. I strongly recommend others do as well. If that site has the spam cleaned out of the kin directory, the bugs fixed so that people can properly update links and mailing list information, and becomes truly active and usable again I think it would be a lot easier for people to find their way around in the community. Though I'll still be keeping the Kin Directory and Links sections here active, either way. Redundancy is a good thing; single points of failure are not.
Just because something is “all in your head” doesn't mean it has no basis in reality. Quite the contrary: What's in our heads defines our reality. Perception and memory are incredibly malleable, changeable things, and they're all we really have to base our concept of reality on.
I would disagree. What's in our heads defines our perception of reality, yes, but I don't believe they define our reality itself. To borrow a phrase, the map is not the territory. As for memory, I personally find the claims of its malleability greatly overstated given the results of the studies that have actually been done. This has been discussed in greater detail, with references, further down in the conversation so I'll explain more when I make it to responding to those posts.
Let's say I have the experience of being wolf (I'm not, but let's go with it as an example). Say my thought patterns, behaviors, and mannerisms could be called wolf-like, or it is useful/helpful for me to frame them as “wolf”. I experience the tactile sense of phantom limbs that correspond to a wolf's anatomy. And so on.
Thus I identify as wolf. But let's say I don't think it's spiritual or energetic or any such thing; I think it's just manifestations of neurons firing, personal associations regarding parts of the human experience – yet it's meaningful to me and helpful to frame those experiences in the context of “wolf”.
Not a delusion at all, in such a case.
That's an interesting scenario. And it would fit my personal definition of being otherkin, I have to admit. That said, I'm really not sure how it would be useful/helpful/meaningful to frame thought patterns, behaviors, and mannerisms as “wolf” if you truly believed it was all in your head. Hell, I'm generally against attributing thought patterns, behaviors, and mannerisms to one's otherkin type in general because I've seen it used far too many times as a way to claim “well, this is what I am so obviously I can't change what I am”. Being a wolf or dragon doesn't automatically explain or excuse your anger management issues. Being an elf or an angel is not a free pass for being an arrogant asshole.
If it was all in your head, and you only identified as “wolf” because of personal associations, then there is no real point of relation with the other for you to work with. Learning more about wolf psychology wouldn't teach you more about your own psychology. At best you might gain some additional mental associations, and it's just as likely that you'd find some of your former mental associations, the very things that you identified as “wolf” in the first place, were wildly incorrect since the popular image of wolves bears little resemblance to actual wolf behavior.
Now, as for myself – I go through cycles of doubt and belief, but even in my doubt cycles – if I am honest with myself, really – I view my personal otherness, and otherness in general, as having an energetic and spiritual component. But I can frame it in a purely psychological context, and I can understand taking a purely psychological approach to it.
I think we all go through cycles of doubt and belief. And sure, one can frame the experience of being otherkin in a purely psychological context, but what benefit does that provide? Ok, it's all in your head: now what? Where do you go from there? Do you research your kintype, learn more about it in reality or mythology? Do you hang out with others who identify as the same thing, even though there may be no resemblance at all between you? Where does the psychological approach actually lead, save to a community of people whose only connection with one another is essentially the images they have chosen as their mental avatars?
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Hrafn said:
I tend to like the title of Lon Milo DuQuette's book Low Magick: It's All In Your Head… You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is.
I haven't read it; in what context does DuQuette mean that? Is he referring to “as above, so below” or is he talking about the creation of thoughtforms, or something else altogether? I doubt he's speaking in a purely psychological context.
Does identifying it as a delusion help in any way?
No, that was kind of my point. I don't see how identifying it as being all in your head helps in any way, and I don't really see a way to treat it as all in your head that doesn't essentially make it a delusion, even if you choose to embrace that delusion.
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Hrafn said:
Specifically I know I've previously corresponded with technobushi and ViridianElf (who hasn't been around in about a year, but still), the latter of which is who I originally got “elf is a gender” from.
Cool. 🙂 ViridianElf is an awesome person, and I consider technobushi family.
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Liryen said:
That's even less than I expected; still, it's not exactly as if there are tons of people claiming to be elves to begin with.
Actually, I left one off who has left: Arhuaine is no longer around either. And comparatively, there are a lot more elves of other types around. The otherkin directory lists 363 elves, 43 of them specifically stating they are Elenari. The Elenari livejournal community has 32 members and I believe the mailing list had even more when I was last a member. Even the listari livejournal community has 13 members.
*Nods*. I'm trying to remember as much as possible, but some of it will (no doubt) only come with time. Or not at all. I prize every little bit that I can get, and hopefully it'll all fit together someday.
*nods* Good luck. 🙂
Some of the remembered language is definitely very familiar; the memories, while lovely of course, are your own – is there any way to describe the 'feel' of the place, or the spirit?
Verbally, I wouldn't know how. It is possible to charge an item with the feel of Alorya, but that's been another method we've used to help verify people. I still have, among my ritual tools, a piece of driveway gravel that Eyovah charged with the feel of Alorya when we were first trying to figure out if we remembered the same place.
Are we you technically considered Elenari at all? I've heard at times there's a connection, other times there isn't.
There's definitely a shared history, language, and culture. Some of us have even remembered contact with the Tulari during their lifetimes, though I'm not one of them. I've gone through periods where I do apply the term Elenari to myself, and periods where I do not. Currently, I do not. I also am not a fan of the term Eldari which some Aloryans have used for themselves.
…Yes and no. I've seen that, but to be fair there are also some memories and other writings at http://elvenportal.weebly.com/. There are many places where my own opinion differs from that of the authors of both sites, and I know how you feel about Ahril's stuff, but even so I've never seen it refuted by any of the main group calling themselves Elenari – in fact, Adrastai.com is featured along with TirNanOc and Otherkin.net on the homepage of the Elenari Nexus, as one of its 'sister sites'. My assumption based on this has been that there must be grains of fact, at least, where her statements about the Tulari and their culture are concerned.
I think you might be surprised to find out there was no discussion of Ahril's site or her claims on the Elenari mailing list prior to Adrastai.com being added as a sister site. There hadn't even been a post to the list for several months prior to that, nor was there one until a month after. Hell, going through my old mail as far back as May of 2005, I can't find any posts on that list by or about Ahril or her website. I believe her site was unilaterally added by the webmistress of Elenari.net. As such, I'm not sure to what degree it was actually vetted by the community of Elenari as a whole. I left that list in mid-2008, though, so I can't tell you to what extent it may have been discussed since then.
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Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:
I haven't read it; in what context does DuQuette mean that? Is he referring to “as above, so below” or is he talking about the creation of thoughtforms, or something else altogether? I doubt he's speaking in a purely psychological context.
DuQuette is being rather tongue-in-cheek about his use of the terms “high magic” and “low magic.” He refers to Elphas Lévi as a great “esotericist” continuing that “Even though Monsieur Lévi is universally lauded as the father of modern high-magick, he was not a practicing magician. He was a brilliant scholar, a holy man, a teacher, a magical philosopher, but, with the exception of one curious necromantic experiment he confessed was not at all successful, he did not practice magick.”
He continues to say:
“I do practice magick. In fact, I now view my entire life, waking and sleeping, to be a continuous magical operation. And so, gentle reader, for the duration of this book, the stories I shall tell of magical operations that I have actually done rather than just read about, performed rather than just discussed, experienced rather than just fantasized, and executed rather than merely mused upon–I will affectionally and unapologetically call acts of ‘low magick.'”
As to the remainder of the title of the book, this is what he has to say:
“Can I truthfully say… that all this magick, all these experiences have merely taken place ‘in my head’? Yes. I am saying that. ‘It’s all in your head.’ But please do not forget the second part of this outrageous statement, ‘you just have no idea how big your head is!’ As I observed earlier, mind and consciousness transcends the boundaries of the brain, transcend the boundaries of time and space. That’s how big my head is! Nothing can happen outside of it because there is no outside of it.”
No, that was kind of my point. I don't see how identifying it as being all in your head helps in any way, and I don't really see a way to treat it as all in your head that doesn't essentially make it a delusion, even if you choose to embrace that delusion.
Put simply, my point is that just because it is “all in your head” doesn’t mean that it must also necessarily be “delusion.” Or, to the extent that it is delusion, I do not necessarily think that is a bad thing in and of itself so long as you retain function, grow as a person, and find meaning through it.
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Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:
To some extent I can understand that, but in my experience weeding out the things that are unlikely to be real is a very good first step towards weeding out the things that are unlikely to be useful. When one's memories turn into what I can only describe as Mary-Sue Fanfiction, when you are always the best and always the greatest and all of your problems including what to eat for dinner are solved with magic and a snap of your fingers, there's not much left that is going to be useful.
The same thing applies for kin without memories. If you claim you're a wolf therian, but act more like a pop-culture idea of a wolf than like a real wolf does, then that's not likely to be real nor is it likely to be useful beyond boosting your ego.Fundamentally, I don't consider self-deception or delusion (in a non-clinical sense) to be useful. So I do consider trying to figure out “real or not real” an important part of working with one's otherness.
I would certainly agree with that. I think there's a certain balance that needs maintained – as with anything. I personally have a natural tendency to fall into “is it real? is it fact? how do I know? I could be wrong about this, after all – I can explain all my experiences through psychology so maybe they're not real/true/valid” – and then I go round and round in circles in my head and get too locked up in “real or not real”. So for me, in order to really keep moving forward and accept my otherness, I have to take a viewpoint of “useful or not useful”.
Now, I do feel it's important to apply reasoning, research, and scrutiny to one's beliefs on a regular basis. There are a lot of people in the community who don't really do that, and go all “mary sue otherkin”/”elven princess syndrome”/etc. (I had a former roommate like this. She was also terribly dysfunctional though, so it was a bit of both.)
And I'd certainly agree that self-deception and delusion is not particularly useful either; nor is senseless ego-boosting and escapism. (“Well, I'm an average high school student/office drone/don't have much power in my mundane life, but it doesn't matter because I'm REALLY a cool/sexy/powerful/otherworldly wolf/elf/vampire/whichever!” …Yeah, not so much useful.)
I think the point is to work with one's points of relation with the other, whatever they may be. For some of us, that is the memories. And I'd go so far as to argue that memories allow for some of the deepest exploration of one's otherness.
As someone who doesn't feel hir otherness is sourced in reincarnation, that's not the case for me; but I can see it being the case for others. Memories provide context; experience without context can often be meaningless.
Without them, it seems too easy to fall into working with one's otherness as an archetype or worse a stereotype.
Stereotype is certainly undesirable as it lacks complexity and tends towards superficiality. But what is wrong with working with one's otherness as an archetype? Archetypes are powerful, heavily symbolic, often very complex things.
Without them, how far can you really go with the idea of being other? How can you work with it?
By exploring your experiences of being “other” now – behaviors in yourself, quirks of perception that you associate as “other”, ways of thinking, ways of relating to others. Therians do this all the time to good effect; it is far less common for therians to identify their otherness as sourced in a past life, and so all they have to go on are mental shifts, phantom limbs, behavior, mindset, etc. Here-and-now. Why can't non-therian otherkin do the same thing? I would love to read about what it feels like to be elf, now. An elven friend of mine has briefly described what it feels like when he feels more distinctly “elf”, how elf manifests for him, and it was utterly fascinating and I want to hear more, and hear the experiences of others. I'm curious how it affects you now, yet most of what I read about from non-animalistic 'kin is about past lives.
Hell, at this point I know so many kin locally that just hanging out with friends in the DC/Baltimore/NorthernVA area might as well be a min-gather anymore.
Hah, yeah, I hear you on that! I co-facilitate an energy workshop here in Denver on a monthly basis. For the first year of it, just about everyone there (10-15 people) were otherkin or vampiric or therian. It was rather entertaining. Less so now, we've gotten a lot of different folks cycling through, but still.
But new partitions are popping up. The big one, IMO, being with the “psychological otherkin”.
I think that's partially due to some bleed-over between the therian and otherkin communities… it used to be a lot more separate between those two communities, and now you'll see a good number of therians in the otherkin community and vice versa. The therian community has long had a number of people who identify as “psychological therians” (though they're a minority), so I wouldn't be surprised if that cross-pollinated.
That said, I'm really not sure how it would be useful/helpful/meaningful to frame thought patterns, behaviors, and mannerisms as “wolf” if you truly believed it was all in your head. . . Being a wolf or dragon doesn't automatically explain or excuse your anger management issues. Being an elf or an angel is not a free pass for being an arrogant asshole.
Agreed. I have utterly no tolerance for people using otherness (or, well, anything really) as an excuse for maladaptive behavior, and especially an excuse to not work on their maladaptive behavior.
However, I would say it can be useful to frame thought patterns, behaviors, and mannerisms as something. For instance – I associate a certain type of high-anxiety panic that I sometimes experience with bird. Is it because I'm hawk? Maybe, maybe not. But in that state of anxiety, I bird-shift, I am hypersensitive to environmental stimuli, I start losing the ability to form words (in my head or aloud), I feel like a panicked bird.
This is actually useful because, by framing this anxiety state as a bird-shift, I have a clear tool to use to get out of it: focus on human-thought, words, fingers, manual dexterity, the limits of my physical skin, the contours of my physical human body. Consciously focus on shifting back towards human. Now, this is essentially just a body awareness exercise, and body awareness can be a useful therapeutic tool in relation to anxiety issues; so is it still useful to frame certain psychological quirks like the birdpanic as hawk?
I would say that for me, yes it is, because it helps me remember to use those body awareness techniques when I feel that high-anxiety.
At best you might gain some additional mental associations, and it's just as likely that you'd find some of your former mental associations, the very things that you identified as “wolf” in the first place, were wildly incorrect since the popular image of wolves bears little resemblance to actual wolf behavior.
At which point you would reject the identity of “wolf” because it doesn't fit. How is that any different from any other type of otherkin who discovers, after additional research, that what they thought they were was inaccurate/doesn't fit with lore or reality?
I think we all go through cycles of doubt and belief. And sure, one can frame the experience of being otherkin in a purely psychological context, but what benefit does that provide? Ok, it's all in your head: now what? Where do you go from there? Do you research your kintype, learn more about it in reality or mythology? Do you hang out with others who identify as the same thing, even though there may be no resemblance at all between you? Where does the psychological approach actually lead, save to a community of people whose only connection with one another is essentially the images they have chosen as their mental avatars?
Furries! XD
Again, in the therian community, we have a number of people who identify their animality as purely psychological, but they find value in working with that identity and comparing experiences. They still experience mental shifts and sometimes even phantom limbs and all these things; they just identify the cause as purely psychological.
Liesk is someone who was fairly active in the community for a while and identified his animality as psychological. Here's his article on it, and it's rather an excellent read. One point he makes is this:
The fact is that therians know they’re animals. They know they’re animals because they are animals, and if they didn’t know they were animals then they wouldn’t be animals. Maybe they don’t know it on the surface – oftentimes they don’t.
But their brains know. A therian ultimately identifies as an animal.
They identify so because their minds interpret their existence so. And
identity implies their existence; as individuals, animal-people,
consciousness, words, non-words, flesh, spirit: they are animals.That’s all therianthropy is. Identity. And that’s not what it is at all:
it’s smells and tastes and fur and noises and thoughts and mindstuff
that doesn’t match humanstuff. But it ends up as identity, because it’s
why the brain tells itself that it is an animal and knows this to be
true.
Just because one identifies something as rooted in brain and neurology and psychology doesn't invalidate it at all, doesn't make it any less real than if it's rooted in reincarnation or energy or spirit.
Personally, I believe that everything is multicausal – the subtle (energetic, spiritual, etc) reality/realities affect the
psychological and spiritual, just as much as the mind affects the subtle
and the physical, and just as the body affects the mind and the subtle. There are multiple explanations for any experience, and all
can be true simultaneously. Are you tired
all the time because you are depressed, or are you depressed because you
are tired all the time due to improper nutrition, or are you tired and
depressed because of an energetic blockage, or do you have an energetic
blockage because you are not eating right and you are depressed? I am
more likely to believe you are tired because you are depressed and you
have improper nutrition and you have an energetic blockage, and all these factors must be addressed for optimal health/improvement.
Similarly, I feel that my experience of being “other” is energetic and spiritual and psychological, and it can be all of those at the same time.
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Meirya said:
What I mean by pushing to recover memories is actively trying to remember things. I understand a lot of people do this, but I can tell you right now that if you push to remember something – even something in this life, and there have been several very solid psychology studies lending evidence to this – your brain will give you something.
I've seen these studies before. Frankly, I find the claims made about the malleability of memory based on them to be overstated. They usually involve fairly minor errors in memory that are then extrapolated to include wild confabulations. And our daily experience of memory shows that, for the most part, it is reasonably reliable. You're not going to wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly remember the childhood of George Emily Mallory, a little orphan boy with three brothers, two sisters, a crazy aunt Wanda, and a pet frog instead of your own no matter what you've read or watched the night before.
Even the Lost in the Mall study developed by Elizabeth Loftus, which purports to explain how ordinary people can remember improbable experiences, uses as its basis a fairly common experience (being lost in a mall) and was based on actual family shopping trips they did take, using plausible details provided by relatives. Further research showed both that adult memory was less malleable than children's memory, and that even children were less likely to report false memories of an enema that never happened than the mall scenario.
It will very likely be distorted or even completely fabricated, but you'll have next to no way of telling. This is part of why I'm always very hesitant regarding the factual validity of past lives.
I've found it pretty simple to tell when a memory is fabricated, personally. The basic questions to ask are: is this memory internally consistent, does it make sense by itself and in conjunction with other things I have remembered from the same life, and is this memory generally consistent with external reality? A bit of critical thinking takes you a long way.
For more information on the unreliability of memory, check out this article on the Seven Sins of Memory. If you'd like, I'd be happy to look up some additional relevant studies in my psychology textbooks when I get home later today. The “sins of memory” most relevant to past life recall are the sins of commission, particularly misattribution, suggestibility, and bias. Here's a quote from the above article:
Yet, I'm not aware of any scientific studies that have shown memory to be malleable to the degree that would be involved in manufacturing nonhuman past lives. The closest I can think of are the claims of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which have been widely criticized by the scientific community. People often point to cases like the McMartin preschool trial, but those cases did not actually involve false memories. Here's a quote from one of the children, now grown up:
Never did anyone do anything to me, and I never saw them doing anything. I said a lot of things that didn't happen. I lied. … Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn't like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. … I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest. But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do.
There are also studies which have been done on recovered memories which seem particularly relevant here:
A study at the Dissociative Disorders and Trauma Program of the McLean Hospital concluded that that recovered memories are mostly unconnected to psychotherapeutic treatment and that memories are often corroborated by independent evidence, often appearing while home or with family and friends, with suggestion being generally denied as a factor in recovering memories. Very few participants were in therapy during their first memory recovery and a majority of participants in this study found strong corroboration of their recovered memories.
Since I would say most otherkin also recover their memories on their own, rather than through hypnotic regression, I'd say suggestion would likely play a relatively small role.
A very serious and dramatic example of sins of commission in memory is detailed here, where a woman was absolutely certain about who committed a crime against her and only discovered she was wrong years later when a blood test proved it. There is no way to tell if your memory is true or false unless you have physical evidence like that.
I think it's important to mention that in the line-up the woman viewed, the person she accused was the only actual suspect, and had already been linked to the crime through what the police believed was physical evidence and had given them an alibi which had been found to be false. All of the other people in the lineup were city employees who had been asked to stand in for it. She may easily have picked up on his nervousness in such a situation and been mislead by it, since the others in the lineup would have known they had no reason to fear her picking them out by mistake while Cotton knew he was under suspicion. He was also the only person in both the photo array and the physical lineup. And Poole and Cotton do look fairly similar.
You can't even really trust shared memories, peer-corroborated gnosis if you will, due to the sins of suggestibility and bias.
That's why those of us who work with memories have developed methods to check each other. The easiest involves picking certain key details of the experience and holding them back and seeing if they are independently mentioned by the person you're talking with.
Does this mean past-life memories are invalid? Does it mean they are useless? No, of course not! It just means we can't know if they are objectively real, we can't know if they are fact, if they are literally true.
Perhaps not, but we frequently can know if they are objectively and literally false. As such, their falsifiability falls into roughly the same range as scientific theory; they can be disproven but not proven.
(One could argue we can't know that about anything, because of how thoroughly our perceptions define our personal reality.)
Thankfully, Solipsism has fallen out of favor. Just because you can never prove you're not just a brain in a vat, that doesn't mean it is reasonable to proceed as if you are.
If we don't get hung up on memories being literally, factually true, I think those memories can be very personally valid, meaningful, mythically real. Look at the difference between logos and mythos – yet both approaches are valid and useful, even if modern Western culture places much more importance (to its detriment, I think) upon logos.
Mythical thinking certainly has its place, but I think reducing memories to the symbolic level does them a disservice. We certainly do not treat our present-life memories this way, despite their supposed malleability. What makes a past-life memory more prone to symbolic interpretation than, say, your last trip to the supermarket? And if the memory is literal rather than symbolic, are you not risking reading into it symbolism which is not actually there by trying to interpret it mythically?
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Hrafn said:
“Can I truthfully say… that all this magick, all these experiences have merely taken place 'in my head'? Yes. I am saying that. 'It’s all in your head.' But please do not forget the second part of this outrageous statement, 'you just have no idea how big your head is!' As I observed earlier, mind and consciousness transcends the boundaries of the brain, transcend the boundaries of time and space. That’s how big my head is! Nothing can happen outside of it because there is no outside of it.”
So he is operating on the principle that the microcosm of his mind = the macrocosm of the universe. As above, so below. It's definitely not just viewing magic in psychological terms.
Put simply, my point is that just because it is “all in your head” doesn't mean that it must also necessarily be “delusion.” Or, to the extent that it is delusion, I do not necessarily think that is a bad thing in and of itself so long as you retain function, grow as a person, and find meaning through it.
But if you define it as being all in your head, as having a solely psychological basis (and this is very different from what DuQuette was referring to), how can you grow as a person or find meaning through it? It would be purely a mental symbol for yourself, having all the depth and substance of a user-icon on an internet forum.
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Meirya said:
I would certainly agree with that. I think there's a certain balance that needs maintained – as with anything. I personally have a natural tendency to fall into “is it real? is it fact? how do I know? I could be wrong about this, after all – I can explain all my experiences through psychology so maybe they're not real/true/valid” – and then I go round and round in circles in my head and get too locked up in “real or not real”. So for me, in order to really keep moving forward and accept my otherness, I have to take a viewpoint of “useful or not useful”.
I can understand that.
Now, I do feel it's important to apply reasoning, research, and scrutiny to one's beliefs on a regular basis. There are a lot of people in the community who don't really do that, and go all “mary sue otherkin”/”elven princess syndrome”/etc. (I had a former roommate like this. She was also terribly dysfunctional though, so it was a bit of both.)
*nods* I've run into a lot of them, and in my experience most of the Mary Sue ones are dysfunctional and it's hard to tell which is the cause and which is the result. I do find that they exacerbate each other, though. Being dysfunctional will make one tend to go deeper into the Mary Sue, and going deeper into the Mary Sue will tend to make one more dysfunctional.
And I'd certainly agree that self-deception and delusion is not particularly useful either; nor is senseless ego-boosting and escapism. (“Well, I'm an average high school student/office drone/don't have much power in my mundane life, but it doesn't matter because I'm REALLY a cool/sexy/powerful/otherworldly wolf/elf/vampire/whichever!” …Yeah, not so much useful.)
Yeah. Not useful, and actually rather pathetic.
As someone who doesn't feel hir otherness is sourced in reincarnation, that's not the case for me; but I can see it being the case for others. Memories provide context; experience without context can often be meaningless.
I'd be interested in hearing how you explore your otherness without memories.
Stereotype is certainly undesirable as it lacks complexity and tends towards superficiality. But what is wrong with working with one's otherness as an archetype? Archetypes are powerful, heavily symbolic, often very complex things.
Form in your mind an image of an “archetypal” Native American. Now, think of the stereotypical Indian. How much do these two figures really differ from one another?
By exploring your experiences of being “other” now – behaviors in yourself, quirks of perception that you associate as “other”, ways of thinking, ways of relating to others.
And how do you know which of these traits are actually related to being other, and which are just variations that fall within the normal range of human experience? Do you like the outdoors because you're a wolf or a faerie, or do you just like the outdoors because you're one of many humans who like the outdoors? Do you have perceptual and emotional differences because you're an elf, or because you might fall into the autistic spectrum? Do you have different ways of thinking because you're a dragon, or just because not all humans think alike?
Therians do this all the time to good effect; it is far less common for therians to identify their otherness as sourced in a past life, and so all they have to go on are mental shifts, phantom limbs, behavior, mindset, etc. Here-and-now.
I'm aware of this, but I haven't seen the therian community achieving much with that approach. Admittedly I am not a member of the therian community and have only drifted about at its edges, but where does one go from there? Let's say you identify your otherness via mental shifts, phantom limbs, a list of behaviors and mindsets that are considered to correspond to a specific nonhuman species. Ok, what next? Where do you go from there?
Memory-based otherkin can look into the specific events of their past life. They can compare notes, find others who remember the same places, maybe even who knew them in those lives. They can put their collected information together and try to get a broader view of events, culture, geography, history, language, biology. They can try to learn from those memories, regaining old skills.
Why can't non-therian otherkin do the same thing? I would love to read about what it feels like to be elf, now. An elven friend of mine has briefly described what it feels like when he feels more distinctly “elf”, how elf manifests for him, and it was utterly fascinating and I want to hear more, and hear the experiences of others. I'm curious how it affects you now, yet most of what I read about from non-animalistic 'kin is about past lives.
Frankly, for me, it doesn't feel all that different from being human. Two arms, two legs, a head. All the parts work basically the same way. The main phantom sensations I get from my elven side is the feeling of the clothing. Occasionally my ears look slightly more pointy, but they don't really feel different, I just notice in the mirror that they look a little different.
For us, the memories ARE how they affect us now. I can't speak for everyone, but for me recovering past life memories hasn't involved meditation or hypnotic regression. It's been more like PTSD flashbacks; associations in daily life tend to trigger memories which are then practically relived.
And even for less human aspects, like my draconic life, I can't say that the phantom sensations have really had much effect on this life. Nor am I likely now to engage in the same behaviors I remember from that life. The memories, on the other hand, have given me a much different perspective on working with energy than I had previously.
Hah, yeah, I hear you on that! I co-facilitate an energy workshop here in Denver on a monthly basis. For the first year of it, just about everyone there (10-15 people) were otherkin or vampiric or therian. It was rather entertaining. Less so now, we've gotten a lot of different folks cycling through, but still.
Itzocelotl has been running an otherkin meetup around here for a while. It actually didn't get many people to it, despite having a lot of otherkin in the area, and we kept going off on tangents that took us away from actually discussing otherkin. Partially because we do all know each other and have been friends for so long. We've just recently stopped that meetup, and replaced it with a workshop on basic magic/energywork/psionics. Attendence is still low, but it's mostly new blood, and at the last meeting we actually ended up discussing more about otherkin than we did for most of the otherkin meetups.
I think that's partially due to some bleed-over between the therian and otherkin communities… it used to be a lot more separate between those two communities, and now you'll see a good number of therians in the otherkin community and vice versa. The therian community has long had a number of people who identify as “psychological therians” (though they're a minority), so I wouldn't be surprised if that cross-pollinated.
I thought so at first too, but everyone I've seen so far that identifies as psychological otherkin isn't a member of the therian community. I'd say it's more a result of memories falling out of favor in much of the otherkin community. People have decided that talking about memories is focusing too much on the past, and that it should be about being otherkin in the here-and-now. (Or they say they've decided that when they've actually decided not to talk about their memories save with people they've known for years in real life, and even then only while drunk.) The net result has been conversation about actually being nonhuman largely drying up on most otherkin lists.
Agreed. I have utterly no tolerance for people using otherness (or, well, anything really) as an excuse for maladaptive behavior, and especially an excuse to not work on their maladaptive behavior.
*nods* Same here, and I've seen it used way too often.
However, I would say it can be useful to frame thought patterns, behaviors, and mannerisms as something. For instance – I associate a certain type of high-anxiety panic that I sometimes experience with bird. Is it because I'm hawk? Maybe, maybe not. But in that state of anxiety, I bird-shift, I am hypersensitive to environmental stimuli, I start losing the ability to form words (in my head or aloud), I feel like a panicked bird.
This is actually useful because, by framing this anxiety state as a bird-shift, I have a clear tool to use to get out of it: focus on human-thought, words, fingers, manual dexterity, the limits of my physical skin, the contours of my physical human body. Consciously focus on shifting back towards human. Now, this is essentially just a body awareness exercise, and body awareness can be a useful therapeutic tool in relation to anxiety issues; so is it still useful to frame certain psychological quirks like the birdpanic as hawk?
I would say that for me, yes it is, because it helps me remember to use those body awareness techniques when I feel that high-anxiety.
But couldn't you set up any mental association as a trigger to remember to use those body awareness techniques? How does viewing it as birdpanic, specifically, help? Does studying the psychology of stressed birds help in avoiding or reducing that state?
At which point you would reject the identity of “wolf” because it doesn't fit. How is that any different from any other type of otherkin who discovers, after additional research, that what they thought they were was inaccurate/doesn't fit with lore or reality?
Well, for those of us with memories, we still have them, they haven't changed. They may not be of what we initially thought, but they're still obviously of being something nonhuman. With someone who finds out the psychological processes they identify with wolf bear no resemblance to wolf psychology, that's it.
Again, in the therian community, we have a number of people who identify their animality as purely psychological, but they find value in working with that identity and comparing experiences. They still experience mental shifts and sometimes even phantom limbs and all these things; they just identify the cause as purely psychological.
But, if it is purely psychological, then comparing experiences would have no value. Because neither person would have experienced being a wolf, they would have experienced being their personal mental images of a wolf, which would not necessarily match. Likewise, their “mental shifts” would be based on that mental image rather than on the actual experience of being a wolf. And they may experience phantom limbs, but for them wouldn't it just be a tactile hallucination and nothing more?
Liesk is someone who was fairly active in the community for a while and identified his animality as psychological. Here's his article on it, and it's rather an excellent read. One point he makes is this:
He makes the assertion, but I don't see him backing it up. The entire text is his personal pet theory, and he admits there have been no psychological studies of therians to actually verify any of it. It also suffers from an acute inability to explain therians or otherkins who did mentally identify as human until their awakening; it tries to suggest a suspension of the formation of species identity, but how long can one really go in life without identifying as any species whatsoever? It also tries to explain mental shifting as a lesser version of multiplicity, while most of the sane multiples I know would be highly offended by being considered nothing more than polarizations of a single psyche.
Just because one identifies something as rooted in brain and neurology and psychology doesn't invalidate it at all, doesn't make it any less real than if it's rooted in reincarnation or energy or spirit.
I very much disagree. If it's really all just in your head, then the simple fact is you're NOT a wolf. Your brain doesn't actually work like a wolf's, it works like a (possibly damaged) human brain. You don't respond to canine social cues, nor take part in a pack hierarchy. That doesn't make your experience less real, but it does invalidate them being connected in any way to wolf. The connection itself is unreal in such a case.
Personally, I believe that everything is multicausal – the subtle (energetic, spiritual, etc) reality/realities affect the
psychological and spiritual, just as much as the mind affects the subtle and the physical, and just as the body affects the mind and the subtle. There are multiple explanations for any experience, and all can be true simultaneously. Are you tired
all the time because you are depressed, or are you depressed because you are tired all the time due to improper nutrition, or are you tired and depressed because of an energetic blockage, or do you have an energetic blockage because you are not eating right and you are depressed? I am more likely to believe you are tired because you are depressed and you
have improper nutrition and you have an energetic blockage, and all these factors must be addressed for optimal health/improvement.
Personally, I'd be inclined to attribute the tiredness and the energetic blockage to the depression and poor nutrition. Physical explanations, not spiritual or psychological. Depression has less to do with psychological concepts such as id and ego than it does with one's neurochemistry.
Similarly, I feel that my experience of being “other” is energetic and spiritual and psychological, and it can be all of those at the same time.
Whereas, I see it as being spiritual, and possibly impacting energetics and psychology rather than being based on those things.
Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:
Verbally, I wouldn't know how. It is possible to charge an item with the feel of Alorya, but that's been another method we've used to help verify people. I still have, among my ritual tools, a piece of driveway gravel that Eyovah charged with the feel of Alorya when we were first trying to figure out if we remembered the same place.
That’s awesome. 🙂
There's definitely a shared history, language, and culture. Some of us have even remembered contact with the Tulari during their lifetimes, though I'm not one of them. I've gone through periods where I do apply the term Elenari to myself, and periods where I do not. Currently, I do not. I also am not a fan of the term Eldari which some Aloryans have used for themselves.
They seem different to me, personally. I don’t know if I care for ‘Eldari’ or not.
I think you might be surprised to find out there was no discussion of Ahril's site or her claims on the Elenari mailing list prior to Adrastai.com being added as a sister site. There hadn't even been a post to the list for several months prior to that, nor was there one until a month after. Hell, going through my old mail as far back as May of 2005, I can't find any posts on that list by or about Ahril or her website. I believe her site was unilaterally added by the webmistress of Elenari.net. As such, I'm not sure to what degree it was actually vetted by the community of Elenari as a whole. I left that list in mid-2008, though, so I can't tell you to what extent it may have been discussed since then.
*nods*. It does surprise me in a way, but I guess I could also see something like that appearing out of the blue. 
Frankly I would expect it to be discussed in great detail, based on the sheer volume of the material that she wrote and the way it’s presented, and I would expect to see more Elenari creating their own sites.
Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:
It is possible to charge an item with the feel of Alorya, but that's been another method we've used to help verify people
Something I just thought of (though I hate to ask it of you): would it be possible to charge something I could see and feel for myself? Or would that negate verification, since I could say whatever I wanted?
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Liryen said:
Something I just thought of (though I hate to ask it of you): would it be possible to charge something I could see and feel for myself? Or would that negate verification, since I could say whatever I wanted?
It would be possible. I wouldn't want to post something like that publicly, but I could send a charged image via email or something. And there's plenty of other stuff about Alorya that has not been made public that can be used for verification.
Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:
It would be possible. I wouldn't want to post something like that publicly, but I could send a charged image via email or something. And there's plenty of other stuff about Alorya that has not been made public that can be used for verification.
Thanks! 🙂 I don’t want to pressurize you or anything, but I’m pretty confident that if I got a better feel for the energy, I would have a strong hunch one way or the other.
Meirya said:
By exploring your experiences of being “other” now – behaviors in yourself, quirks of perception that you associate as “other”, ways of thinking, ways of relating to others. Therians do this all the time to good effect; it is far less common for therians to identify their otherness as sourced in a past life, and so all they have to go on are mental shifts, phantom limbs, behavior, mindset, etc. Here-and-now. Why can't non-therian otherkin do the same thing?
Elves are a lot like humans ( we can even have common children, hence half-elves). We experience a full range of emotions, we have families, we get up in the mornings and go to work, we have goals and gifts and shortcomings and individual personalities. I feel phantom eartips – I feel them quite a lot – but that’s not enough. I need to explore who I actually was in my elven life, because if I don’t I might as well be a human (albeit a quirky human with a thing for elves who feels phantom ears and has some paranormal experiences). We have rich cultures and histories that we try to remember, and skills that we try to re-learn. So focusing exclusively on things we can rarely define, like behavior and mindset (without caring about why we behave or think that way), would be a big loss.
I would love to read about what it feels like to be elf, now. An elven friend of mine has briefly described what it feels like when he feels more distinctly “elf”, how elf manifests for him, and it was utterly fascinating and I want to hear more, and hear the experiences of others. I'm curious how it affects you now, yet most of what I read about from non-animalistic 'kin is about past lives.
I’m not sure how to describe what it feels like. I can’t say that I ever “shift” into elf – I simply am an elf, all the time, whether I’m in this body or another one, or on this world or another one. There are times when I feel my ears prick up, but this doesn’t seem to accompany any kind of separate mental state.
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Against my better judgment, I'm going to make one last response. Generalized rather than specific.
First: I apologize for starting up a debate/argument. It wasn't my intention. I prefer amicable discussion, sharing of information and experiences, to each side trying to convince the other that “I'm right, you're wrong”; when a conversation gets to that point of heated debate, I generally drop out. I'm not fond of conflict. I didn't intend to engage in debate and am sorry I did; I hope I didn't cause undue irritation.
Second: It sounds to me like you (Jarin and Liryen) have put a lot of work, time, and energy into recovering past life memories, learning about your past life cultures and worlds and events, corroborating that recalled information with others, building up an understanding of your particular past life settings and timelines. It seems very important to you and an integral part of your identity and your otherness. Please note that I never said that memories were 100% false, I only said they were unlikely to be 100% fact; which is to say there's a strong possibility of distortion and some inaccuracy. Again, that viewpoint doesn't invalidate their meaningfulness, it doesn't mean they themselves are invalid, and it certainly doesn't mean your otherkin nature is invalid if your memories are not 100% factually/literally true.
In the same sense, though, not having memories of being “other” does not invalidate my otherkin identity. It is a different way of approaching otherkin, but it is also a valid one; and the existence of otherkin who aren't caused by reincarnation does not invalidate the existence of those who were caused by reincarnation. One of the reasons I strongly believe my otherness isn't caused by reincarnation is because I am not my past.
For instance: I was born in Texas and lived there until I was nearly 13 years old. I have memories of being a 10 year old child in Texas. I identified for a few years as Texan, after leaving Texas; but as I grew up and had additional experiences and evolved as a person, I stopped identifying as Texan. Nowadays, I would not choose to move back to Texas because I wouldn't fit there anymore, I have grown too liberal for most of it, and Colorado is my home. I no longer identify as Texan, I am not a Texan anymore, even though my history within Texas as a child did have an impact on me and probably still affects me in some ways to this day.
But it is not my identity. I do not have vivid experiences of being a 10-year-old child again. I do not have tactile experiences of being that height, that weight, that shape; I do not have experiences of being in that stage of mental development. So I do not identify as a 10 year old child and I am not one.
I am not my memories.
Hawk is very present and tactile. Often I feel feathers prickling along my skin. Sometimes I feel more hawk than human, sometimes more human than hawk, though I am always a blend of the two; sometimes one manifests more strongly than the other. The vacillation has gotten smaller over the years, as I've integrated my hawkness, found outlets for bird-urges and bird-instinct so that it doesn't surge forth at awkward times; I've found a certain equilibrium so that I do not shift wildly; I've learned balance. But it still affects me on a regular basis, I still identify as hawk, and I still find value in identifying as hawk.
But I have no memories of ever being hawk. I don't believe I ever was hawk. I am now, somehow; why doesn't matter so much as it is. And it manifests in a very different way, a more present and tangible way, than any memories of this life or past lives ever have for me. That may just be how my memory works – my memory tends to be semantic, contextual, rather than specific. People with stronger specific memories probably have different experiences.
Thirdly: As someone who has done a lot of self-work, therapy, and introspection – who has graduated from college with a bachelors of psychology, has worked 2.5 years in the mental health field, is interviewing for grad school to get a masters in transpersonal counseling psychology, and aspires to have a career in the psychology field – who is fascinated by psychology and the incredible wonders that are our minds – I feel very strongly that something being “all in your head”, or something that's “only” psychological, does not make it invalid, does not make it worthless, and does not make it useless or meaningless. There is a school of thought I've observed in the otherkin community (and pagan, and new age…) that if something can be explained by psychological causes, it's not “real”, it's not valid; that something is only “real” and “valid” if it's primarily spiritual or energetic. I sincerely believe this is not the case.
I think that we're going to have to just agree to disagree on a lot of this. I do appreciate the discussion, it's brought up some interesting points and food for thought.
Meirya said:
Against my better judgment, I'm going to make one last response.
Don’t worry about it. 🙂 I don’t bite 🙂 (And I’m sorry if I left you with the impression that I was angry. I had my poncy critic hat on, but that’s much more a reflection of me than you.)
First: I apologize for starting up a debate/argument.
I don’t think you need to apologise for anything! Honestly, I don’t think Jarin was irritated. 🙂 I’ll admit that I became rather huffy, but I’m not as good at articulating all the reasons why I don’t agree with something or the other.
Please note that I never said that memories were 100% false, I only said they were unlikely to be 100% fact; which is to say there's a strong possibility of distortion and some inaccuracy.
I may be speaking only for myself, but memories of the distant past can be much clearer than those of a year ago, or last month, or yesterday. And luckily, we can often figure out (either by logic or gut feeling, or a combination of both) which parts of these memories are more likely to be true.
In the same sense, though, not having memories of being “other” does not invalidate my otherkin identity. It is a different way of approaching otherkin, but it is also a valid one; and the existence of otherkin who aren't caused by reincarnation does not invalidate the existence of those who were caused by reincarnation. One of the reasons I strongly believe my otherness isn't caused by reincarnation is because I am not my past.
Of course not. I don’t have very many memories at all.
But I have no memories of ever being hawk. I don't believe I ever was hawk. I am now, somehow; why doesn't matter so much as it is. And it manifests in a very different way, a more present and tangible way, than any memories of this life or past lives ever have for me. That may just be how my memory works – my memory tends to be semantic, contextual, rather than specific. People with stronger specific memories probably have different experiences.
Why would a human brain suddenly or gradually “decide” to become hawk? It makes more sense, to me, to interpret it as spiritual.
Thirdly: As someone who has done a lot of self-work, therapy, and introspection – who has graduated from college with a bachelors of psychology, has worked 2.5 years in the mental health field, is interviewing for grad school to get a masters in transpersonal counseling psychology, and aspires to have a career in the psychology field – who is fascinated by psychology and the incredible wonders that are our minds – I feel very strongly that something being “all in your head”, or something that's “only” psychological, does not make it invalid, does not make it worthless, and does not make it useless or meaningless. There is a school of thought I've observed in the otherkin community (and pagan, and new age…) that if something can be explained by psychological causes, it's not “real”, it's not valid; that something is only “real” and “valid” if it's primarily spiritual or energetic. I sincerely believe this is not the case.
And yet, many argue that All That Is comes from spirit energy. This is the basic premise of energywork. That even our minds ultimately come from this energy, from Stillness, from a state of being that isn’t thinking, nor resting, but simply Being.
I think that we're going to have to just agree to disagree on a lot of this. I do appreciate the discussion, it's brought up some interesting points and food for thought.
I think if one good thing has come out of this, it’s that it’s very clearly illustrated the difference in our viewpoints. There’s a lot to work with there.
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Liryen said:
Why would a human brain suddenly or gradually “decide” to become hawk? It makes more sense, to me, to interpret it as spiritual.
Aha, but I actually said a page or two back that I do feel my otherness is something spiritual/energetic. It can be spiritual without being about reincarnation. I believe I've never physically been hawk. I theorize that my ka is somehow hawk – the ka, in the Egyptian worldview, is your spirit, you-this-life, the part that becomes an akhu (ancestor spirit) after death.
The ba is the soul, the eternal part of the self; if any part of the self reincarnates, it's the ba (my personal theory, uncorroborated by any Egyptian lore since reincarnation is not actually talked about much / at all in Egyptian texts, is that if the ba does reincarnate, it gets a new ka with each lifetime/physical body).
Of course, this is all theory, and it's really just mental exercises since we can't prove any of it, but it makes sense to me and it's my current theory for my otherness.
When I am arguing in defense of psychological otherkin, it's not because I identify my otherness to be purely psychological; it's because I'm playing devil's advocate because I can comprehend the idea of psychological otherkin, and sympathize with those who take that viewpoint for themselves, and Jarin indicated a few pages back that it didn't make sense to him. So I tried explaining it.
And yet, many argue that All That Is comes from spirit energy. This is the basic premise of energywork. That even our minds ultimately come from this energy, from Stillness, from a state of being that isn't thinking, nor resting, but simply Being.
That is one theory. Sort of. A simplified version of it. Actually, that's a fairly simplified version of the Golden Dawn's approach – that everything comes from the ALL, and that which is Mental is just a lower vibration of that which is Spirit, and that which is Matter is just a lower vibration of that which is Mental, and so on. Gets more complicated than that, too, but it's 1:30 AM, so I'm sticking with simple. 😉
So if that which is Mental comes from that which is Spirit, then something stemming from the Mental plane is still quite valid and important, is it not? I think this goes back to the idea of your mind is much bigger than you think it is – even Jarin's interpretation of that statement, really.
What my statement about validity and psychological explanations was referring to was the fact that a lot of otherkin seem to get very defensive in response to psychological explanations of otherness. As if it's threatening, or invalidating. It isn't invalidating, for one. And it shouldn't be threatening, if you're at all secure in your identity.
(I'm going into transpersonal psychology. Which is a field where psychology encompasses and includes and acknowledges the spiritual, too. Where does the line between psychological and spiritual end? Depending on how you look at it, there's not much of a line there at all.)
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Ack. Accidentally hit “quote and reply” instead of “edit”. It really is bedtime now. @_@
Meirya said:
I believe I've never physically been hawk. I theorize that my ka is somehow hawk – the ka, in the Egyptian worldview, is your spirit, you-this-life, the part that becomes an akhu (ancestor spirit) after death.
Well, I’m certainly not going to tell you that it isn’t – I think it may be possible that for someone for whom the concepts of ka and ba strongly resonate, their soul would actually “work” (though that doesn’t seem quite the right word) along those lines. Though I’ll confess, I’m not sure why someone’s ka would choose to spend incarnation as a hawk in human form, skipping the experience of being a hawk more directly. And the idea of a ka-per-life is not resonant for me at all. But if that’s your viewpoint, then I don’t think I really have any right to argue with you.
So if that which is Mental comes from that which is Spirit, then something stemming from the Mental plane is still quite valid and important, is it not?
Yes and no. I guess it just depends on whether you choose to personally identify with that, but that’s not my core. Does that make any sense?
One last post here.
First, to Meirya and Hrafn –
I’m sorry if I was rude or snippy, or if either of you were upset by my comments. I’m not trying to attack either one of you, but there’s rather a lot going on in my life right now, and it came out in this thread. I apologise.
Next, to Jarin –
I wish that this hadn’t happened, and I feel really stupid about it. Also, I should probably get the heck out of the Introductions now.
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To everyone:
I'm really not sure what just happened here, and how we went from what I thought was a very thoughtful and interesting discussion comparing, contrasting and debating certain points of the otherkin experience to people being very upset and posting final replies against their better judgment. I've actually avoided posting on the forums for a few days because I've been trying to decide how to respond in a way that hopefully won't make things worse.
For my part, I didn't perceive this as a particularly heated debate at any point. No personal attacks or “flames” were made that I saw, points were being responded to with logic and sound arguments even where people differed, and I thought we were at least getting to see people's reasoning even if we were not persuaded by it on either side. To be fair, though, I'm a veteran of old mailing lists like TNODungeon and Outlawkin, so perhaps my standards for what constitutes heated debate have become a bit harsher than most in the community today.
If people were offended, I do apologize, but I can't guarantee any kind of debate-free safe space on this forum. My debate guideline here, though unwritten, is roughly the same as the written guideline for the Wanderingpaths email list. To quote:
Debate Guideline: Wanderingpaths is a list focused more on open debate and discussion of ideas than many Otherkin forums. As such, disagreement is expected to occur quite regularly, and those who are not comfortable with having their beliefs challenged in any way will likely not be as comfortable on this forum as they might be on other lists. Likewise, those who are not willing to offer support for odd-sounding things they claim to be fact may also not be comfortable here. While this list supports the right of others to hold the beliefs and opinions of their choice, this does not mean that anyone else must automatically agree them. It is not intolerant to argue that factual beliefs are incorrect, or ask someone for the sources of their information, or even to state that you believe they are wrong (and reasons why). It is intolerant, however, to try to force them to change their opinions by repeatedly badgering them about those opinions, or to bash them for having the beliefs rather than simply challenging the logic of the beliefs themselves. This applies even to less popular belief systems such as Christianity: please challenge the logic of the beliefs, don’t bash those who hold them simply for holding them, and don’t bash entire groups for the actions of some individuals.
For now, I'm going to leave my response here at that and go reply to Arethinn's new thread continuing that aspect of this discussion.
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I am, Ayaka Inu, at least I decided to call myself that, my original
name was never familiar to me. I am, well, not really a conventional
form of being. Originally I was a White Wolf (not simply a wolf that is
white, but an extinct species that looked like white wolves.), but my
people were hunted to extinction long ago and the remnants have been
simply drifting about in an endless cycle of death and rebirth into
various bodies of various species. Eventually the need for viable bodies
reached a point were only nine of us could safely exist at any one
time, and so nine were assigned the role of carriers, each of us given
roughly 1000 souls to carry, divided amongst us evenly. I am not a
multiple in the conventional sense, as the others are non-communicative,
dormant, so in terms of personalities I have only my own. This is my
first time in a community such as this, so I have little experience. I
did not have an “awakening” in the usual sense either, rather I was born
with my memories mostly intact, but I didn't have much time to
accumulate them in the first place since I was killed at a young age. My
memories are sometimes a burden, sometimes a blessing, but mostly a sad
reminder of a world long lost, that I seek to recreate. Well, that is
about all I have to say in an introduction, so pleased to meet you all.
"Staring into my eyes, they can't comprehend what it is that they see, is it a being, or is it just an illusion, they wonder if they even really exist, or if they are just figments of my dream..." -by Ayaka Inu
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Hi Ayaka! Welcome to the forums. 
I'm not that familiar with extinct canine species… do you know what your species is called, in modern terms?
You also mention a shortage of viable bodies… what makes a body viable? There doesn't seem to be a shortage of human bodies around, the population is always growing, so I assume there's more to it than that. I'd be very interested in hearing more about it, and about the experience of carrying so many souls.
What is it from that world you're looking to recreate? It sounds like you kind of got the short end of the stick at the time.
Again, welcome, and thanks for letting us have the chance to get to know you better. 🙂
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Thank you. In response to the species, we did not really receive much interest from humanity, and were not able to speak human dialect at the time, we were killed off before humans even new what we were, they didn't know we were a sentient species since they thought are words were just primal noises. As for the issue of viable bodies, think of something like blood type, without the right blood type an organ may be rejected, now try to imagine a soul having a 'type” and a very rare one at that, essentially there became so few bodies with that type of soul that the number of active white wolves had to be diminished exponentially, leading to the current 1=1000 out of 9000 arrangement. And as for the thing we wish to rebuild, that is the most complicated part, so lets just call it paradise 2.0, essentially rebuilding the paradise (we dubbed it Valhalla for lack of a better human word) that the world once was. as the earth was once locked in a tear in the fabric of reality, a balance was formed, a paradise shared between two worlds, but then that balance broke due to the removal of one of the species(the white wolves) upset the balance, turning the split world into something far less than it's former glory. So long story short: humans put the world in the sorry state it is in, and must someday maybe today, tomorrow, maybe even a hundred years from now, be held accountable for it, although I, or at least this body will be gone within the next two or three years anyway, due to medical complications but hopefully I will get a better body in the next life.
"Staring into my eyes, they can't comprehend what it is that they see, is it a being, or is it just an illusion, they wonder if they even really exist, or if they are just figments of my dream..." -by Ayaka Inu
Hey there. 🙂 Like Jarin said, welcome, and I hope you like it here. 🙂
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It was suggested that I sign up here a while back. I've been “kicking the can around” for a while, so to speak, and decided to take the plunge tonight. And I'm not used to WordPress so my formatting will likely be teh suck until I get the hang of it (I'm not used to “rich text mode” and it's quirks.)
I'm actually feeling a bit out of place here after reading all the intros talking about elves and walkins and multiples and and and and well, everything else *eyes boggle* so I apologize in advance – your 'realms' are not ones that are familiar to me, and while I'm curious, I may ask some pretty dumb questions when I decide to open my yap. Please bear with my occasional bouts of “stupid”, they're just born out of ignorance. 🙂
Hello everyone, I'm Sphynx, and I'm a vampire. Annnd I'm not sure what else to say beyond that.
*Edit: yea, formatting quirks…*
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