Agreed. But I wouldn't limit it only to the occult game. It happens to complete materialists, too. It's a part of the basic human condition. As long as we're wandering around in human bodies, we're prone to it.
No it's definitely not limited there but the occult form is particularly insidious because many of the ideas and concepts in magic and divination would basically be obsessive-compulsive or irrational obsessions in a different context. For example, you have a couple of long work-days, you're exhausted, running up on too many deadlines, maybe with some professional rivalries in the mix. You're all stressed up, trying to get some sleep and suddenly a thought creeps into your mind: "Oh my god, I misspelled that one word when calling the quarters last night! What if a demon entered the circle?! What if I'm gonna get possessed?" All the daily drudge and stress finds a pretty fertile field where anything goes and creates all sorts of wildly imaginative fears.
The key I think is to always hold any magical or spiritual belief in that grey area away from completely serious ideas where you can easily push them into the area of nonsense so that when they start to revolt against you, you'll be able to say "Possessed because I misspelled something? No, that's bollocks, I'm going back to sleep, got things to do tomorrow.". The whole point of willpower in magic is to control your belief, empower what you want to happen with it and shatter anything unpleasant with the most vicious disbelief to the point of roaring laughter.
The general motto which seems to annoy people but I might also be bad at fully explaining is "Why so serious?".
And that, too. And Tarot will tend to show you when you're hiding negative stuff within yourself from yourself so well that you don't even realise it's there any more. So when you see it, is the time to *do*something about it, ad have a new, developed, more mature relationship with yourself.
I was mostly talking about prediction or external events you might get knowledge of through Tarot. I usually do this sort of introspection you're talking about with pure reflection and pondering. I don't really disagree with the things you say though. I'm a firm believer that positivity and negativity are both inherent parts of nature, they're equally necessary and both should be under our control when they're within us.
All of your post pretty-much bounces off mine, from a slightly different perspective.
Yes, and the kind of concept you have about what demons (and probably angels) are is pretty much the exclusively materialist take on chaos magick. I could go on with how I see things (I'm pretty close but not exactly there while still being a kind of materialist) but we'd get horribly off-topic.
