[System command]

I'm amazed by my own ability to connect the dots. I was told by a friend that telepathy works if you know what a person wants.

Assuming it is true, it seems I suddenly have a fairly self-consistent theory of how summoning/invoking/commanding spirits work :-/

Traditional legends say that you can command spirits as long as you know their true name. This doesn't match with the assertion above, but "true names" are often just succinct descriptions of the entity in archaic forms or in a foreign language. If the entity is famous enough, the name is often strongly associated with their image (hence description).  But why is the description sufficient? Because (especially in spirit) whatever one wishes, they will be. Spiritual entities *probably* have less inherent free will than human souls do, but it still seems safe to assume that they're what they are because that's what they wanted to be.

In short, name=description=desire

So, that deals with the communication part.

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We humans are fragments of the creator, and we are made in the creator's image. Those who correctly read esoteric texts (as opposed to following a religion) would understand that we are (were :-/) inherently much more powerful than we think we are. Very roughly speaking, we are gods (if you disagree, well, then I am god...).  So once we establish communication with a spiritual entity, we tend to be able to ask them to do things.

Of course you can't make them do things they inherently can't do. So, the "good" spirits do "good" things, and the "bad" spirits do "bad" things. 

Apparently this is also a matter of "frequency". Similarly, it's hard enough to make a lawful person commit a crime, and hard enough to make an evil person do good deeds, because they have to change who they are (even temporarily) to do it.

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The reward part. (I admit I heard this in a podcast this morning.) The entities in a "higher" realm (generally associated with "good") live by principles of unconditional love, while entities in the "lower" realms generally live by principles of exchange (or even lower, deceit). So it's natural that if your wishes are "good", you don't have to "pay" for having the entity assist you (but you probably already "pay" by having good intentions and love); and if your wishes are "bad", those spirits would try to extract some payment from you or even deceit you.

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Existence.  Well, we are gods, so whatever we think exists will exist or it will be created... so there's really no doubt about that.

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btw, it seems that resonance can be considered a form of simulation. There's no issue in spirit where there's no single physical entity to communicate to (one can postulate that they are only simulating the entity, and the manifestation is all from their own mind), but there's an additional hurdle for the simulation theory for telepathy -- if you merely simulate the target in your mind, how does it actually reach the other physical person?

Even assuming space and time is an illusion... we would still have to postulate that any sufficiently similar simulation is equivalent to the real thing. Which is an interesting idea if we turn this into a principle.