Do We All Have A Personal Guardian Angel?

Sorry, this isn't in the religion section. For the life of me, I can't find it. I've been scrolling up and down, and I'm blind to it.

ANYWAYS, if you do think we all have a personal guardian angel, then I must ask the dreaded question of...

... why do bad things happen to people? Shouldn't the guardian angel protect the person from harm, or at least punish the wrongdoer?

 

The section you're looking for is Philosophy and Religion.

I don't know if we've all got an "angel" per se, but I do believe there are spirits around us. I felt jostled awake the other night only to find that a broken strap from my sleeping bag had become wrung around my neck. I know I heard some voices speaking just as I woke too. But maybe it was the middle of a dream and just a coincidence.

 

I call her Zorya, she dresses in a black cloak, very dark long hair, she's very beautiful and when we connect which isn't often, my heart flutters for her. I have seen her mostly in my dreams where she seems to keep her distance but she is a sign to me that something of significance is about to take place in my life. Like a beacon of sorts.

The last time she visited me she appeared on the slope of a hill, the closer I got to get the farther away she seemed. She has only come into my presence a handful of times, to whisper to me softly. Her words are barely audible and I do not remember much of what she's says.

As I do not know much about her I do not know where she comes from or from whom but I have always called her Zorya (Zorr-Ja) and I think she is my guardian angel of sorts.

When I think of her, I often sing this song, which I believe is a depiction of her from somebody else. Why this song means so much to me is it exactly how it is for me when she does appear. It's this song. And I always awaken with a fluttering heart and feelings of adoration and yearning. And yet she's the constant reminder that I'm in those world for me, and no matter what, she'll be there watching. It's very comforting really.

She came to me one morning one lonely Sunday morning, her long her flowing in the midwinter wind. I know not how she found me for in darkness I was walking and destruction lay around me from the fight I could not win.

She asked me name my foe then, I said the need within some men to fight and kill their brothers without love or thought of god and I begged her give me horses to trample down my enemies, so eager was my passion to devour with waste of life.

But she would speak of battle that reduced men to animals so easy to begin and yet impossible to end. For she's the mother of all men and who councelled me so wisely then, I feared to walk alone again and asked if she would stay.

Oh Lady lend your hand I cried and let me rest here at your side, "have faith and trust in me " she said and filled my heart with life. "There is no strength in numbers, have no such misconception, but where you need me be assured I won't be far away"

Thus having spoke she turned away and though I felt no words to say I stood and watched until I saw her black cloak disappear. My labor is no easier but now I know I'm not alone and I find new heart each time I think about that windy day.

And if one day she comes to you, drink deeply from her words so wise, take courage from her as your prize and say hello from me.

 

because "good" and "bad" are wholly human notions/constructs and in the much bigger picture are pretty meaningless.
Actions don't count for shit spiritually, it's intention and motive that matter.

 

In this forum, basically karma is just bad luck and all in your head. People in jail don't deserve to be there.

When you die, you're just a fucking corpse. Six feet under...unless you took a Viagra before dying. Then they might have to make a taller casket for clearance.

There is no religion here. We live and then we die. It's that simple.

 

nothingness after death is the ultimate boredom. Worse than sitting in a parking lot for three hours without a paperback

 

What do you mean by intention and motive?

I think I understand. You're saying that you can do things that are considered socially bad, such as murdering someone, but if you believe in your God and you serve your God well... that you will get good things in your life and afterlife. I hope I understood correctly.

 

You seem like you don't like the population that makes this particular section of the website.

 

So, I'm guessing you do believe in angels, or one angel. Right? No? Maybe?

 

Well I do believe in them but a bit differently see the traditional angel from heaven I believe is most likely just an alien entity. In most of the religious texts that describe angels and the descent from the heavens I find extremely similar to modern day technology.

I don't believe in flying angels with swords of fire that sprout wings and fly in the name of God if that's what you mean, to me these aren't mythological angels, to me they're flesh and blood aliens.

As for the guardian angels of sorts, to me they are what us spiritual people in Germany would call a "wight".

Now the definition of a wight has been changed recently due to fantasy television and books like lord of the rings and game of thrones where a wight is now a ghost or a living dead creature but that's what they mean to me, I've always grown up with wights being bound spirits of sorts, woodland spirits, a Wudugust even. Whether they were human at some point I'm not sure, alive? I'm not sure either yet if they weren't human they can take form of a human and they distance themselves immensely yet when you walk in the wood and people get that "I'm being watched" feeling, they are the spiritual wights of the land and every land has their own and they appeal to cultural significance. Like a middle eastern wight isn't going to have a bearing on my life, but my cultural wights will.

So that's what my follower is to me a woodland wight because I have only ever seen her in the woods amongst the trees, hills and beams.

Now I've so much in common with Loki the thought of the similarity is often disturbing, and at times I think perhaps maybe she's just shapeshifted Loki himself playing a trick on me. I don't think so though, her appearance is too significant for me, and I don't think he'd care.

And if it's all in my head then just know I take great comfort from it so the fable made up fantasy in my head is truly positive energy and emotion for my wellbeing.

 

not exactly.
Say someone breaks into your home and is attacking a loved one, or anyone, and you kill them vs you having a problem/hatred for a person and you kill them.
it is the intention and motivation for our actions that carry the real weight, not the actions themselves, in a spiritual sense.

simplistic example, but I hope you understand.

 

Quite a few of you act like you don't like the segment of the population here that doesn't, and these people are determined that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

That's never been a popular idea among most cultures, even in our modern culture today.

Most people don't like a group mentality shoved down their throats. Some of us here don't either.

 

You always have free will. To be protected or prevented from bad things means you have no free will. People often think there is nothing because you have this choice. But sometimes you need to learn.

 

i think the 'guardian' bit is human presumption, but other then that, why wouldn't invisible people be just as friendly as anyone else?

 

I dig what you are saying---is that the German spelling?

I certainly agree that there are spirits of the land--Local spirits. It is also possible that cultures may bring spirits with them---though maybe these are manifestations of the collective consciousness or what not. But there are certainly spirits of the land.

I saw a Diwata in the Philippines---a forest spirit or a little person. My wife was not feeling very good and we had a friend that was visiting us. She was complaining that we went to the doctor earlier and they were no help. He suggested they do a divination ceremony in which candle wax---if I remember correctly---is dropped into water, or maybe water onto the wax. Anyway it formed the image of a person. Our friend claimed that it was a Diwata that had become infatuated with her that was causing the problem. He offered to massage her to remove it. This was a very agnostic and skeptical time in my life so I figured he just wanted to get his hands on my wife, or that he liked showing off that he was a healer of sorts (which is one way of achieving respect in the Philippines---a conniving way since there are so many con artists-----but there are authentic healers too I will now say----including my wife's family, but that's another story).

Anyway, she laid on her stomach and he started massging her back, and then he would shake his hands off to the side. The last time he massaged her and shook his hand, I saw, as if it was out of the corner of my eye---a small figure on what looked like a small horse run away from his hand through our living room and through the wall. It was like I saw it but I didn't see it---it was in color, but it was like a shadow too. The strange thing too is that I knew what it looked like, but if I tried to focus on details I could not see it. It was just a weird thing and for many years I could not really tell you if I actually saw anything or not. But then something happened after about 5 or 10 years later and we had moved to the States, and the ghost hunter shows had been really big here. We have the Philippine channels on our cable, and my wife was in the bedroom watching a Philippine version of an American ghost hunter show. I went to the room to ask her something, and happened to see that they were in a forest looking for Diwata. There are lots of spirits in the Philippines, so I didn't make the connection between the forest nymph, or whatever you want to call it, and what had bothered my wife. But then they brought in a local old man who had often seen the Diwata, and had him draw a sketch of it-----there in the sketch was exactly what I had seen, the little spirit with the horse. The way it was dressed, how it looked, everything----all the details that I thought I saw but that I couldn't see----I suddenly realized that I had actually seen it and that is exactly what it looked like.

This is one of a series of events that were apparently intended to break down my own modern aged Western objectist-rationalistic mindset. I have been told that we close our selves off to such possibilities because of our dogmatic obsession with physicality.

Today I walk the Red Road (follow Native spirituality) and it has presented a reality that is so strange and irrational from a Modern context. And I do not use the word, reality, lightly---I am not talking about a belief, or something we try to see in our heads, or a reality that we want to be real and so we try to construct---I am talking about an objective reality outside of myself that can be experienced and observed, especially during ceremony. So I have no doubt about helping spirits. In fact I have been in Lakota ceremonies where even abstract spirits---such as 'wind' have come into the cermony to help----but this is not strange to the Lakota, because the 4 winds were brothers who helped create the world. When I say the wind came in----I literally mean moving air from a breeze to a wind, that came into a closed room, no windows, no fans, and it was localized---not filling the whole room, but blowing where it needed to be.

Today a lot of tribes try to distance themselves from the term Spirit Animal. For one thing the New Age movement has turned something very spiritual and personal into a parlor trick or a bunch of nonsense. For example, indigenous people who have a close relationship with a spirit animal, don't simply try to figure out what their favorite animal is, or what month they were born in, or take a bunch of cards and shuffle them to see what animal comes up. Furthermore, the concept of what we refer to as a spirit animal in English plays out in a broad spectrum of ways---in some tribes the motif appears as an ancestral or clan symbol, and other animals may appear to a person as they are needed, and their reasons for doing so may be different each time. In other tribes each person may have his/her own spirit animal. But most any tribe today tries to separate itself from New Age crap and plastic shamans and will outright deny certain things if they think it sounds like something that could be bastardized by the New Age Movement.

But I certainly do believe that we all have helping spirits. I also believe that these spirits will appear to us in ways that make sense to us individually. Therefore to some they may appear as angels, Boddhisatvas, or jinn, or animals, or simply spirits.

My understanding is that these spirits are benevolent, and therefore are not meant to seek revenge against one's enemies, or to harm others. The Dine' (Navajo) have the skinwalkers for example---people that use a bad medicine to do nefarious things. Most tribes, including most Dine' believe that it is very wrong to try to manipulate nature in that manner, and that it will only bring one to a dark place. The Lakota, and many other tibes deny such traditions. But the skinwalkers will change into fierce animals to harm others.

They are really here to help us. My wife, for example, always knows when to be careful of betrayal, becuase she always dreams of a snake when someone is going to betray her----and yes, it always happens that her dream is followed by a betrayal. She hates snakes, and she even saw a cobra bite someone when she was a kid. In these dreams she associates the person with the snake---but it is obvious that the snake comes to warn her. (Like I said, her ancestors were healers in the traditional Philippine ways and her family has inherited many gifts from that.)

Once I had broken down my own Modern Aged Western dogma, I discovered I had a relationship with a wolf. When I connected to it, it was as if I had always been connected to it, but in my modern day physical life, I never had any idea that there was a connection. If you had asked me what my favorite animal was, any time during my life, I would have never said a wolf. The wolf has taught me, it has shown me things, it has even taken part in helping me---in helping bring about miracles. On the other hand, the Red Tailed Hawk came into my life too. I helped a Native friend and his wife get across country to visit family. When he got back, which happened to be on the full moon in the fall, he had a gift for me-----the feather of a red tailed hawk, with red cotton cloth tied around its base. I asked him what he was trying to tell me, especially since it was the full moon in the fall, he said he hadn't thought of any of that, but when he saw the feather he knew it was for me. The Red Tailed Hawk can bring change into your life---and it can be upsetting or drastic. But its purpose is to bring you closer to your life's puprose. And that certainly happened to me.

There is a Red Tailed Hawk that lives in a tree up the street from me. I usually see it in the summer. Over the past 4 or 5 years or so, when things get difficult, it'll drop a feather somewhere near my front door. There are a lot of stories I could tell about this stuff. The turtle has helped me, the elk...

 

This is only true if you are truly prevented from bad things without any choice in the matter, and that it is always this case, including that bad things would also happen to you without a personal choice in the matter.

Let's take a simple example: My wife considers her mother, who passed away when she was a young girl, to be one of her guardian spirits. When she was a young mother, and did not know much about raising children, her oldest son got a fever. In the middle of the night, she says that her mother came to her and woke her up telling her to check her son. His fever was so high that he was having convulsions, and so she rushed him off to the emergency room.

The mother was protecting her and her son, but this does not mean that my wife did not have free will. She could have easily said, "I'm tired, I'll check later," or she could have dismissed it with, "What crazy thing is this, am I dreaming?" or, "I'm too tired."

In fact I would argue that in so far as this is as real of an experience as my wife believes it to be, it is in fact an expression of free will. Being taught a lesson can be deemed as an inevitable outcome of a mistake or a bad decision, or the result of ignorance. If it is inevitable, then it in fact represents a lack of choice--it is causal. If you have two choices, a and b, and b represents a bad choice, and because of either a mistake, bad choice, or ignorance you choose b, then there is going to be less free choice if b only has 1 outcome, rather than multiple outcomes. For exmple, if b was deliberately chosen as a bad choice, this could potentially have a worse outcome than if b was chosen because of ignorance or lack of knowledge. The less choices there are between outcomes, the less freedom we have to generate outcomes.

Therefore a young mother who does not know how to take care of her child, and is uneducated in medical terminology, might have a series of choices by virtue of her free choice, one of which could be to appeal to a higher power to protect her and her son. On the contrary, if choice b were to put her son to bed and then sleep, and the only outcome was that he dies of fever, then her free choice is limited. For example, if she was to ask help to a higher power, or a guardian angel, knowing that she could make a mistake, and then her son died anyway, then clearly there was no free choice involved. On the other hand, if she appealed to a gaurdian angel and she was woken up, and then chose to act on that, then there was clearly a free choice involved---or certainly more free choice.

Now let's consider it from her son's perspective. We could say that a guardian angel protected him and therefore he had no free will. But he was a small child and put to bed so he had very little to no free will in this particular matter anyway. If the only outcome was for him to die, regardless, then there was no free will for him. On the other hand, if he was saved, then even though he did not have free will in this particular matter, by being protected and able to continue living, he was able to express free will later when choices were avablable to him.

Even if we were to apply the argument to using a higher power to get revenge on another, we still see free will involved. In such a case the problem is one of Will to Power. It is no different than the question of free will when you have something with more power ( for example, the State) and something without as much power, (for example, the individual), if the individual makes a choice that would cause the State to act out against the individual, we cannot say that the individual did not have free will---he just had less power. This is the same in the case of someone with a gaurdian angel who uses it against someone who has harmed him/her. However, in the case of using a gaurdian spirit, there is once again a caveat of increased free will on both parties. If one person is able to use a gaurdian spirit to seek revenge, then the second person, whether he/she is aware of it or not, is also able to seek the help of a guardian spirit to either protect him/her, and/or to also seek revenge against the first person.