Let’s talk probability. There are ways a faith affects them. It maintains an antifragile process (2021-11-05). It stirs, looking for opportunity of fulfillment, and has a greater chance of finding one compared to a system that neither stirs nor looks. We can posit that there is a Novelty Search aspect to the path thus stirred by faith (cf. “plasm 118:35 interpretation of Theophan the Recluse”). There’s a connection between faith, working through the pull of Predictive Processing, and desire: both quicken that search. There’s active and passive faith, or desire: one pushes roadblocks and obstacles away, the other is merely pinned by them. Active faith, or desire, thus dedicates resources to search, of nature both known and unknown. One is Cronus, the Time.
Time can be dedicated in a conscious process: as “hypnotic behaviour is meaningful, goal-directed striving”, as a prayer, a ritual, a technique, a dance. Or it can be happening elsewhere, in the physical interactions from which it is measured, far below the threshold of memory and reflection.
It’s funny to think of it though. Time as the fire which will consume everything. Wielded by desire, wielded by faith.
p.s. July have mentioned also how a desire of a parent is manifested in children, something that Berne & co noticed to be a key to a child’s personality. ((VtM: So, if we consider the desire to become a vampire as a form of desire, then the potential is there to have a race of vampires, the descendants of the first Cain.)) This shows a link between desire and reincarnation. A being of strong desire, faith and imagination (aka will? love?) is like a battery, or a portable power source. It makes waves in the fabric of space-time and becomes a convenient actor for reuse.
It is said that even after one’s head has been cut off, he can still perform some function.
(Hagakure)
We can further imagine that a saint or a god (or a demon) thus reused would be connected to the time and place of their origin, and wouldn’t feel as strongly about a time or a place farther away. Not to mention the overhead of the confusion from being invoked at a different age and to a culture that seems awfully wild.