/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>46963408
>at the end of a 3-ish hour read-and-partial-skim
Oh. It's gotten that long hehe. I wonder how many pages of printed text this would make at this point.
>>46963438
>divination
>tarot
I've had and used a deck myself for almost six years now. I did so every now and then even during the time when I tried to not believe in magic, because it was such a good tool for sorting out my thoughts when I felt clueless. I tend to use it mostly on special occasions these days.
>shamanistic spirit medium
>Shinto-derived arts like "takusen"
You gotta tell us more at some time, somewhere.
>a few traditional kami
Which ones, if you don't mind telling us.
>daily prayer around a very roughly-assembled kamidana
What kind of prayer? I'm really foggy on what the general practice is even like. I change the water daily and then I do the bow, clap twice, tell them that they are seen, heard, remembered and spoken for and then bow twice. It feels right?
>overall interest in everything Touhou had to offer renewed in an extremely refreshing way
Yeah it's very interesting to see how these things feed into each other. The games become more enjoyable and more manageable to play.
>PCB
>it made a very big impression on my subconscious
Yeah I started with PCB and it the spiritual dimensions shine through already there. Mountain of Faith is in my opinion where things really kick off.
>my first touted "Gensokyo Dream"
Still waiting for mine. I have seen some of the kami in my dreams though, and Reimu once.
> for the first time in any dream I had ever experienced, I wasn't in my own body
Very, very interesting
>I now suspect it has to do with her inclinations against certain types of possession
That's super fascinating.

I hope to hear more from you sometime, someplace

>>46776730
I know it's weird, but for me there's two parts two it.

First is simply becoming more interested to learn about the things portrayed in the game. Like yeah, religions are portrayed often in a negative or goofy light in the game, but I want to know more about it. Is "buddhist magic" a real thing? Is taoism really that weird? What is shinto even about and what miko actually do? Did the buddhists and taoists really have that bad relations in real life? And so on.

And religion isn't always shat on in the games. Shintoism fills Gensokyo like air. Reimu being a bad miko is more ZUN-humor than critique of religion IMO. The Buddhists and Taoists are some irredeemable monsters only in the imaginations of Grimsokyo enthusiasts. There's good and there's bad and it just is.

The second thing for me is something not a whole lot of people are going to feel, but there were, are, moments when I was playing the games which triggered exact same emotions for me as spiritual experiences have. Just this really profound sense of awe and beaty and reverence.

>>46432753
I see. Did the games have any impact in you getting interested in buddhism? There's certainly some (rather surface level, I suppose) buddhist things in the games.

I have some background in western esotericism and got into the games only fairly recently. My previous expose to Touhou was mostly the memes, the music and of course the hentai and watching one of my friends play Imperishable Night 10+ years ago. So I was very surprised how much spiritual/religious stuff there is in the games. I find the games themselves strangely meditative too, the absolute focus they demand, the mandala-like danmaku patterns, the aesthetic qualities...