Gaslighting Ourselves - Denying Our Own Religious Experiences

[loverofhumanity]

Wow... maybe when I'm more into crone territory I'll be able to tell a similar tale. I'm not sure how good I will be at counting the years, though. Something something roughly a few decades ago something something... haha.

I've been doing a lot of deeper work on my own tradition and it is dumb how things you think you know get turned up on its head. Did you find that connection with God deepening and evolving over time? Giving you new insights like "gee, it's like I'm a kid who doesn't know much all over again?"

The more I’ve learned the more I’ve become aware of my own ignorance. In life I think one only really ‘knows’ innately a very few things. The rest of knowledge is borrowed and handed down by our parents and through formal education. But of one’s own discoveries I think one is very fortunate if they find something real. I only know a very, very tiny bit but it brings me so much inner peace daily and it didn’t come from other people, it came from the Holy Spirit. This is something I would wish on one and all but I cannot give it to others. It is a precious gift however undeserved. I can only point in the direction one can go rummaging for it but then it’s for the person and up to God as to whether they obtain it.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

...
How do you manage your religious experiences and the meaning you weave with them? Have you ever been challenged by your own inner gaslight whispering "that didn't really happen?" What did you do with that feeling? Where do you think that feeling came from? Within? Without? Where did you direct it? Do you still believe or did the magic die inside? What came of that?

I am weird as religious, because I am also a strong general skeptic in the Western tradition. But to me, it happens when I direct my understanding to the limit of knowledge.
I am not a nihilist, but this one captures my religious experience.
"“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you”
The Abyss is the absurd part of being a human and on the other side of that, I found faith. Ask more if you like.

 

[SalixIncendium]

Denying/questioning..."gaslighting" ourselves, as you put it, is a result of attachment to that which lies in transactional reality...the reality one thinks is real. A person wants to believe such an experience is real, but are conditioned, either by themselves (their ego self) or society, to question the experience and "keep their feet on the ground," so to speak. So they deny the experience in favor of the attachments which they know to be familiar.

Stability in the experience of what is real, in my experience, comes through letting go of the attachments to what lies in transactional reality through either a path of devotion, a path of action, or a path of knowledge, or a blend of the three.

 

[Erebus]

Do you still believe or did the magic die inside?

I've successfully managed to kill off most of my passion and wonder to the point that I'm iffy about even calling myself a Pagan anymore.

It's something I've struggled with for a long time as I try to draw a line between what I can believe and what I can know. For example, I have seen a ghost and I'm not the only person who saw it. Each person was able to accurately describe what they saw. That's one instance where I really can't write the experience off as a hallucination but I still find myself tempted to explain it from a materialist perspective. Perhaps it was something akin to a naturally occurring photograph rather than the soul of a dead person.

I've also seen a shadowy figure on a couple of occasions and strongly felt that it was watching me. Given my mental health and the fact that nobody else was around, I need to be open to the possibility that I was hallucinating in this instance.

So what am I supposed to do here? If I don't try to ground myself in materialism, I risk losing touch with reality. If I do try to ground myself in materialism, I end up empty.

 

[RestlessSoul]

I've successfully managed to kill off most of my passion and wonder to the point that I'm iffy about even calling myself a Pagan anymore.

It's something I've struggled with for a long time as I try to draw a line between what I can believe and what I can know. For example, I have seen a ghost and I'm not the only person who saw it. Each person was able to accurately describe what they saw. That's one instance where I really can't write the experience off as a hallucination but I still find myself tempted to explain it from a materialist perspective. Perhaps it was something akin to a naturally occurring photograph rather than the soul of a dead person.

I've also seen a shadowy figure on a couple of occasions and strongly felt that it was watching me. Given my mental health and the fact that nobody else was around, I need to be open to the possibility that I was hallucinating in this instance.

So what am I supposed to do here? If I don't try to ground myself in materialism, I risk losing touch with reality. If I do try to ground myself in materialism, I end up empty.

Have you tried grounding yourself in a God of your own understanding? A benign divinity which, however you may conceive it, wants to love, guide and protect you?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Have you tried grounding yourself in a God of your own understanding? A benign divinity which, however you may conceive it, wants to love, guide and protect you?

My God can do that, but She leaves it to me, how I do that.

 

[RestlessSoul]

My God can do that, but She leaves it to me, how I do that.

Something to do with free will, I imagine…

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Something to do with free will, I imagine…

Well, yes. And yet not, because there is no free will, unless you believe in it. I don't. To me free will is nothing but in effect a non free will way of coping.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Well, yes. And yet not, because there is no free will, unless you believe in it. I don't. To me free will is nothing but in effect a non free will way of coping.

Fair enough. I think we make choices all the time, but the choices always have a context, over which we are largely powerless.

Looked at another way, we appear to live in a deterministic universe, where every event has a cause, or rather every event emerges from a convergence of causal factors. But the underlying fundamental reality, of which we and the world we see are but emergent phenomena, appears far more random; thus it is that our minds create order from chaos, in order for us to navigate our way through the molecular dance. And implicit in that process of navigation, is a will to proceed, a drive to travel hopefully, for some perhaps only half acknowledged purpose. How free that will is, who can really say?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Fair enough. I think we make choices all the time, but the choices always have a context, over which we are largely powerless.

Looked at another way, we appear to live in a deterministic universe, where every event has a cause, or rather every event emerges from a convergence of causal factors. But the underlying fundamental reality, of which we and the world we see are but emergent phenomena, appears far more random; thus it is that our minds create order from chaos, in order for us to navigate our way through the molecular dance. And implicit in that process of navigation, is a will to proceed, a drive to travel hopefully, for some perhaps only half acknowledged purpose. How free that will is, who can really say?

Well, I am indoctrinated as a former professional to deal with chaos differently, because you can't do war without accepting chaos. And for *UBAR I can see that as chaos even in ordinary everyday life. So I live with chaos as a natural part of how I understand being a human.

Not that you have to do it like me, but to me it is a sort of duality of no order without chaos and I cope with chaos by accepting it as a part of life.

 

[Erebus]

Have you tried grounding yourself in a God of your own understanding? A benign divinity which, however you may conceive it, wants to love, guide and protect you?

I would like to but my outlook on the world is too negative. The idea of genuinely loving deities is difficult for me to properly accept.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I would like to but my outlook on the world is too negative. The idea of genuinely loving deities is difficult for me to properly accept.

Yeah, I have the same problem. To me in practice love is a human behaviour and not the only one possible, even if I am in practice a kind of weird deist.

 

[RestlessSoul]

I would say that to love is divine, and that humans are capable of love, is evidence of how close we are to divinity.

I'm talking about unconditional love, not the jealous kind. Jealousy shuts love out. Compassion and humility can open the door that lets it in. And somehow, we have to learn self love. That's the hardest love to find.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I would say that to love is divine, and that humans are capable of love, is evidence of how close we are to divinity.

I'm talking about unconditional love, not the jealous kind. Jealousy shuts love out. Compassion and humility can open the door that lets it in. And somehow, we have to learn self love. That's the hardest love to find.

Well, I have in practice settled for good enough as even for self love. But that is me. I hope your version works for you.

 

[Mock Turtle]

I'd ask - how many have had such experiences and who have never ever taken any recreational drugs, such as which might subsequently affect how one might view or analyse such experiences? See timely new thread below. And of course, how many are truly knowledgeable as to their own minds, the way it works, and/or the deceptions it might experience, together with all the various ways that our perceptions deceive us. But then I suppose I could be just one of those who is/was denied these experiences, even if I could point to a few that just weren't seen as such, amazing as they were.

Are mystical experiences induced by psychedelics authentic?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I'd ask - how many have had such experiences and who have never ever taken any recreational drugs, such as which might subsequently affect how one might view or analyse such experiences? See timely new thread below. And of course, how many are truly knowledgeable as to their own minds, the way it works, and/or the deceptions it might experience, together with all the various ways that our perceptions deceive us. But then I suppose I could be just one of those who is/was denied these experiences, even if I could point to a few that just weren't seen as such, amazing as they were.

Are mystical experiences induced by psychedelics authentic?

Well, I am fairly knowable about my own mind since I have learned mentalizing and meta-cognition, yet that is not evidence for the metaphysical and ontological status of the non-natural.

So yes, I can explain my self using naturalism, yet I can also explain myself not using naturalism.
So what now?

 

[idea]

Mystical experiences happen to all:

I now reinterpret them for what they really are, NOT messages from "god", but messages from our own biased minds, and herd/group think experiences.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Mystical experiences happen to all:

I now reinterpret them for what they really are, NOT messages from "god", but messages from our own biased minds, and herd/group think experiences.

If that works for you, good.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Most of us who practice or follow a religious tradition have had some inexplicable, mystical experiences from time to time.
How does this fit into the sacred stories of my tradition?

After we come down from the inexplicable, the mystical, the magical, we ask that question - "did that really just happen?"

How do you manage your religious experiences and the meaning you weave with them? Have you ever been challenged by your own inner gaslight whispering "that didn't really happen?" What did you do with that feeling? Do you still believe or did the magic die inside? What came of that?

None as far as I am concerned.
Hindu philosophers questioned the existence of Gods in RigVeda as well as in Samkhya philosophy since at least 3,000 years.
Samkhya - Wikipedia
Rig Veda: Rig-Veda, Book 10: HYMN CXXIX. Creation.
Sacred stories are myths, to be enjoyed and also to get some inputs as to how to deal with situations that arise in life.

Science is trying to answer these questions, but it seems you are in a hurry, want to understand it today. It is going to take a long time, possibly decades or centuries.
I was, but science gave me the answers. My religious belief also agrees with it totally. No conflict there. Sure, existence is magic till we do not understand it fully.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

None as far as I am concerned.
Hindu philosophers questioned the existence of Gods in RigVeda as well as in Samkhya philosophy since at least 3,000 years.
Samkhya - Wikipedia
Rig Veda: Rig-Veda, Book 10: HYMN CXXIX. Creation.
Sacred stories are myths, to be enjoyed and also to get some inputs as to how to deal with situations that arise in life.

Science is trying to answer these questions, but it seems you are in a hurry, want to understand it today. It is going to take a long time, possibly decades or centuries.
I was, but science gave me the answers. My religious belief also agrees with it totally. No conflict there. Sure, existence is magic till we do not understand it fully.

At least you are honest that they are religious beliefs.
But according to science as describe here, science can't be used like you use it.
Science has limits: A few things that science does not do - Understanding Science

Your belief in Ultimate Reality is supernatural, just not theistic.