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Jesus
- Thread starter Jimmy
- Start date
I don't know about christians but I have a very delusional brother in law who says he can feel he presence of police and security forces watching over him, He is currently held in hospital under the mental health act.
paarsurrey
Veteran Member
Jedster
Flying through space
A close Christian friend tells me that he feels Jesus all the time. Another friend who is a Hare Krshna devotee says he feels Krishna all the time.
I am sure this goes for other revered people/God/gods.
That feeling is invoked by their beliefs, imo.
(btw, the above friends take no umbrage at me being an atheist.)
It probably means that they perceive the presence of Jesus near or around them.
I’m glad that he is in a safe place where he can receive help.
There are individuals from the past, usually monastics, who claim to have actually seen Jesus.
Thank you, me too, i just wish he would see it like that rather than fighting (mentally) the help he is receiving.
RestlessSoul
Well-Known Member
I’m sure the experience of divine presence is equally profound and equally real to each of them. And it’s their identification of that experience as the presence of Christ or of Krishna, which is a product of their respective beliefs and culture. In other words, the experience, like much religious experience, is universal; but it’s expressed differently, being refracted through different cultures.
Seems to be correct about the feeling, why else would he been held there under the mental health act?
Seems to be correct about the feeling, why else would he been held there under the mental health act?
Because the feeling is false, police qnd security services are not watching over him
Brian2
Veteran Member
I don't think people in Australia can be held under the mental health act unless they are a danger to themselves and/or others.
Same here it's the psychiatrist decision on whether they are a danger or not.
My brother in law wouldn't hurt a fly but he is a danger to himself, not eating or drinking, he has lost over two and a half stone since January and was a little under weight to start with.
John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
You draw a fitting parallel. When Freud called "religion" a pathology, it wasn't expressed in a pejorative sense. He was simply stating scientific fact. Similarly, in direct relationship to your dear brother (may he find peace), the philosopher Norman O. Brown said that the schizophrenic isn't suffering from painful delusions: he's suffering from too great a dose of a truth that's dumbed-down by our biological means of perception.
In the words of the psychologist William James, the newborn baby, like the schizophrenic, suffers from the "blooming and buzzing confusion" that exists when the unfiltered reality of the world isn't subject to the biological desensitization process that lets the so-called sane people giggle and enjoy the twittering mobile that distracts from the unfiltered reality of the world. As James also points out, in his famous, The Varieties of Religious Experience, most, or many (particularly the most eventful) conversion-experiences start out as something akin to a schizophrenic episode that's engaged more like a suffer riding a terrifying wave, and less like the more fitting, and natural, surrender to fear. If a person engages the tidal wave of unfiltered reality just right, they see the face of God. Which might be why many great surfers consider a great ride to be a quasi-religious experience.
I gave up the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending.
Tolstoy.
What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James's phrase, "a bloomin' buzzin’ confusion."
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” p. 113.
John
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syo
Well-Known Member
Hallucinations.
John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
syo
Well-Known Member
that's a good question. I suppose it might vary person to person and might be hard to express and can be in manifested in different ways.
Sometimes it is just a tangible feeling of His presence. That doesn't mean he isn't there when you don't feel it but rather what does it mean when you sense it.
For some it may manifest in their capacity to remain standing as it happened in the Bible
Sometimes it results if knowing that virtue has flowed out to a person in need as it happened to Jesus.
I'm sure there are other explanations but at least here are three.
paarsurrey
Veteran Member
I do not have any particular belief about it.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
They just convince themselves of that thinking it's something really there.
Obviously having a feeling of presence is not something unusual , as people have those type of feelings all the time for just about anything they are focusing on in their minds.
I think it comes from our predator/ prey intuition that are ancestors had to rely on to stay alert. That also applies to perceived protectors like guardian angels and spirits and stuff like that to conversely have a sense of security and well-being.