Angels Angels^1 are emotional crisis^2 phenomena. Whenever I experience a crisis I can either figure a way out of it, or, if I feel helpless, ask someone to help me (i.e. a councillor), or invent an internal helper/councillor. Such internally generated helpers, if experienced as benign, are called angels. By and large, happy, contented and well-adjusted mature people don’t experience angels.^3 For someone in emotional crisis (or turbulence) an angel serves as useful fiction, in other words, as a placebo.^4 Creating an internal helper, or angel,^4 has short-term and localised benefits, for instance, if one is living in seclusion having withdrawn from day-to-day activities. In the long run, or if operating in the real everyday world, fixation upon an angel that initially^5 appears to dispense goodies, i.e. to fulfil one’s wishes, can be dangerous^6 in that it impedes growth to maturation, the latter being achieved if and when one solves one’s own in-the-world problems, and so demonstrates one’s creativity and independence.^7 In short, fixation upon one or more angels retards one’s full intellectual and emotional development. Angels may or may not be experienced as real depending on the intensity of mental concentration applied.^8 Since angels are self-generated, they cannot be trusted to help one when interacting in the everyday world.^9 The widespread use of angels (and demons and gods) by religions of all sorts serves as expedient role model template but eventually impedes the young, the naïve and the emotionally battered^10 from maturing to mental and emotional independence. © 2018 Victor Langheld

1. Likewise fairies, spirits, ghosts, Ufos, gods, demons and so on. Angels, such as the ‘Mother of God,’ are virtual realities that inhabit a world so much better than the everyday world as vale of woe. 2. Hence survival 3. By the age of 10 most humans have developed beyond the need for inner helpers, i.e. angels, save in periods of intense crisis. 4. As Spielberg recently noted, engaging more and more with virtual realities makes return to this world, and in which one has to toil and sweat and suffer, very hard indeed. 5. Like a dream to be made true. 6. Since angels are actually fallible human creations, the ‘dark’ (sometimes even destructive) side of angels emerges only with time and when they fail to fulfil wishes or satisfy with pleasing emotions. 7. Pantheists and pan-deists (such as the inventors of the Upanishads, 2800 years ago), claim that each living thing happens as a localised, hence specialised God clone or app. In short, each living thing is God adapted to a niche, thus has available, potentially at least, all God functions. Every function (and emotion) produced by any living thing is, consequently, a God function or God emotion. 8. Intensity is generated by means of flooding (or bathing) with a selected data stream. 9. In the long run, angels being merely virtual realities self-generated within one’s own brain operating as reality simulating device, hence being as smart or dumb as the individual generating them, cannot significantly enhance one’s overall everyday survival capacity. 10. Specifically emotionally distraught middle aged women (and a few men).