When I was a child growing up on the family farm, my father would regularly hand me a mason jar and send me out to pick tomato bugs off the tomato plants and potato bugs off the potato plants. Even then I thought it mysterious how you never saw these bugs anywhere else, not even in the forest. They just sort of came into being in great numbers when tomato and potato plants appeared, as if conjured or summoned from elsewhere - some insect dispatch at Bug Central made some calls, "Hey, boys, latest intel says the tomatoes are getting tall on the Holland farm! I want six teams out there right now, sweep the crops, circle the perimeter!" Later in life, as I learned about bacteria, fungi and such, I noticed a similar phenomena. Certain types of decomposing matter attracts certain types of mold and fungi that love to feed on it. These life forms were there all along but were invisible until someone drops a banana and enough of them build up a large enough colony on it to be seen with the human eye. This concept can easily be extrapolated to unseen other-dimensional beings, either as a metaphor or as a literal interpretation of "how the universe works." It's a given that we are, at all times, swimming in a sea of invisible entities (if you're reading this kind of book in the first place I'm assuming you've already got this idea under your belt!) As the rotting citrus fruit is the intercessor that manifests certain citrus molds that we subsequently see, so too are there intercessors of the mind that bring other things into view. The human body is filled with various bacteria and fungi. We usually know what some of them are and some we don't. We know why some of them are there and some we don't. Some are the usual suspects but there's a lot of wildcards in there. It's been posited that they exert an influence on human consciousness, and I'd go as far to say they almost fully dictate behavior in a lot of people who are easily led, happily gaslit by microbes. Among addicts - any kind of addicts - you'll find some who freely admit they love the addiction and wouldn't change themselves even if they could...but there are also those who don't even enjoy it, and dearly wish they could quit whatever it is they're addicted to. This latter type has long fascinated me. I'm a sensualist at heart. If it feels good do it, repeat until it fails, and if it doesn't feel good, well, Heavens to Betsy, why would you keep doing it? I can't wrap my head around the idea that you can hate, say, smoking, drinking, heroin or gambling even though you actively don't enjoy it and acknowledge it's ruining your life. How does that work? Clearly *something* is directing their behavior, something that isn't them, possessing them against their will. Literally, somebody else is driving the meat bus and the addict is made to sit in the back. The fundamentalist Christian might say it's "demons", the Jungian might refer to "the shadow", the Freudian might vaguely ascribe blame to "the subconscious", the Scientologist might suggest there's an engram chain in there that needs to be dealt with, etc. In the course of this treatise, we'll address various things - invisible things, and TINY things - that feed on your emotional responses, reward you for your efforts with baubles, trinkets and crystallized dopamine nuggets, and encourage *more of the same behavior*. Good boy! Fetch it again! Biscuit. Good boy. Fetch it again! Biscuit. Repeat until it fails.