As if you know about that!!!
I'm with you on the part "but I have seen with my own eyes some things that put my skepticism down" from my own experience in things I've had to learn myself.
A group I was in touch with I'd prefer not to name here have members in Brazil & I was in touch with their leader for several years & got to meet him once when he came to the UK & he spoke very highly of what you posted about.
As far as I'm aware Santería / Lucumi is an off-shoot of it too.
You ever come across The Church of The Inner Light in Brazil?
Yeah man, I cannot speak openly about this subject, given details, but I can give you my personal vision, which has been acquired through some experiences that I have witnessed so far
Once upon a time a skeptic falls apart, probably a philosopher said this in some point of the history, anyway, when I was an adolescent, about 17, I went with my mother to an “umbanda” center in Brazil. Umbanda is a religion that have its primordial origins in the slavery when Brazil was a Portugal’s exploitation colony; it is neither Christianity nor black magic, it deals with good energies grounded on African traditions and knowledge about nature.
The cult consists of two parts: (1) a “lecture”, where diverse themes are debated depending on the schedule; (2) spiritual benediction ritual (I could not find a better world than “benediction” to translate what I want to say but I am not satisfied). In this ritual, there are several persons who are there receiving the entities. These entities, as I have mentioned in my previous post, are, by no means, satanic or divine, they are entities, different ones.
When I sat there in front of the “possessed person”, an old woman, grandma-style, clearly poor, she was speaking with an abnormal resourcefulness, completely uncorrelated with her appearance. Her eyes, holy shit, these were maddened eyes, those things were not from this spiritual plane. I knew from that point that something else exists behind our comprehension.
I kept going to this center during a time and by accident a met a guy there, which knew a little bit more about occult forces than I would like to have discovered in my life.
But this is a subject for other post that I will write in the near future...