Colt
Well-Known Member
That's close to my point - many are confusing the spiritual experience with the presence of spirits. The feeling is familiar to us all, although it is often not recognized or called spiritual. It's a natural psychological response to some experiences that manifests as a thrilling sense of connection, and can occur while stargazing, hearing rapturous music, falling in love, laughing, gardening, or admiring the family pet. As I indicated, for me, the mistake is to begin to invoke and attach spirits and otherworldly entities and realms to the experience. When we have that deep belly laugh with somebody, and for a moment, there is just you and the other, connected by a common bond, feeling the thrill of existence, he is having the spiritual experience, but rarely calls it that. When feeling the same thrill gazing at the night sky, he often does, but this is the same feeling (see reference to Ptolemy below).
I'd like to elaborate on this a bit more. Spirituality has nothing to do with spirits and everything to do with a psychological response to life and the world in which one experiences a sense of connection to nature manifest as a warm feeling, a sense of awe and mystery, and often, a sense of gratitude. It is an inherently emotional situation. There are several examples from history of men mistaking this experience for spirits.
The ancient Greeks did this with the muses. They didn't have a concept for the mind being creative. Creative inspiration was not understood as a product of the mind, but rather, as a received message from a creative muse whispering silently into one's brain.
Likewise with dreams, who most understand to be products of their own minds, but others mistake as messages being delivered to them.
And likewise with internal moral conflicts, which are often depicted as a devil and an angel sitting on one's shoulder and arguing through one's ears.
This is the same, except that many have not discovered that their apprehensions that they call God or spirits are also endogenous psychological states and not perceptions of external reality.
Ptolemy expressed a similar sentiment describing his geocentric solar system, one star gazers are familiar with when they contemplate the vast distances separating us from the stars of the night sky yet understanding that we are made of their ashes, and one feels a sense of connection and a thrill. Here's how Ptolemy described the experience: "I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia."
These are all examples of people confusing thoughts originating in their own minds as evidence of some external agent communicating with them.
Do you have a rebuttal of this? I'm sure that you reject it, but can you make an evidenced argument that contradicts it? I don't think you can. I don't think anybody can. It might not be correct - there may be spirits yet - but can you show it to be wrong? If not, doesn't that mean that it might be correct? Is that something a theist can agree with - that he may be wrong?
A cell phone is separate from the signal. It's designed to receive the signal, but one can turn off the phone, ignore that there is a signal and just use the phone as a calculator and other features and qualities.
No, I can't prove that there is a signal, and you can't prove that there isn't without the mechanism of the phone. Your mind is that mechanism and by design! I guess that religious emotions may look just like nonreligious emotions, yet faith-trust in the spirit remains inexplicable for those who "know" the presence of spirit. God is so obvious its blinding. We are supposed to be having a faith experience.
IMOP this puts it better than I can retell it, so I just paste it. Its open and free on the net, no copyright:
"Religion, the conviction-faith of the personality, can always triumph over the superficially contradictory logic of despair born in the unbelieving material mind. There really is a true and genuine inner voice, that “true light which lights every man who comes into the world.” And this spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human conscience. The feeling of religious assurance is more than an emotional feeling. The assurance of religion transcends the reason of the mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion is faith, trust, and assurance.
1. True Religion
101:1.1 (1104.4) True religion is not a system of philosophic belief which can be reasoned out and substantiated by natural proofs, neither is it a fantastic and mystic experience of indescribable feelings of ecstasy which can be enjoyed only by the romantic devotees of mysticism. Religion is not the product of reason, but viewed from within, it is altogether reasonable. Religion is not derived from the logic of human philosophy, but as a mortal experience it is altogether logical. Religion is the experiencing of divinity in the consciousness of a moral being of evolutionary origin; it represents true experience with eternal realities in time, the realization of spiritual satisfactions while yet in the flesh.
101:1.2 (1104.5) The Thought Adjuster has no special mechanism through which to gain self-expression; there is no mystic religious faculty for the reception or expression of religious emotions. These experiences are made available through the naturally ordained mechanism of mortal mind. And therein lies one explanation of the Adjuster’s difficulty in engaging in direct communication with the material mind of its constant indwelling.
101:1.3 (1104.6) The divine spirit makes contact with mortal man, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of the highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts, not your feelings, that lead you Godward. The divine nature may be perceived only with the eyes of the mind. But the mind that really discerns God, hears the indwelling Adjuster, is the pure mind. “Without holiness no man may see the Lord.” All such inner and spiritual communion is termed spiritual insight. Such religious experiences result from the impress made upon the mind of man by the combined operations of the Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth as they function amid and upon the ideas, ideals, insights, and spirit strivings of the evolving sons of God.
101:1.4 (1105.1) Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind. The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a purely personal experience.
101:1.5 (1105.2) While religion is not the product of the rationalistic speculations of a material cosmology, it is, nonetheless, the creation of a wholly rational insight which originates in man’s mind-experience. Religion is born neither of mystic meditations nor of isolated contemplations, albeit it is ever more or less mysterious and always indefinable and inexplicable in terms of purely intellectual reason and philosophic logic. The germs of true religion originate in the domain of man’s moral consciousness, and they are revealed in the growth of man’s spiritual insight, that faculty of human personality which accrues as a consequence of the presence of the God-revealing Thought Adjuster in the God-hungry mortal mind.
101:1.6 (1105.3) Faith unites moral insight with conscientious discriminations of values, and the pre-existent evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true religion. The experience of religion eventually results in the certain consciousness of God and in the undoubted assurance of the survival of the believing personality.
101:1.7 (1105.4) Thus it may be seen that religious longings and spiritual urges are not of such a nature as would merely lead men to want to believe in God, but rather are they of such nature and power that men are profoundly impressed with the conviction that they ought to believe in God. The sense of evolutionary duty and the obligations consequent upon the illumination of revelation make such a profound impression upon man’s moral nature that he finally reaches that position of mind and that attitude of soul where he concludes that he has no right not to believe in God. The higher and superphilosophic wisdom of such enlightened and disciplined individuals ultimately instructs them that to doubt God or distrust his goodness would be to prove untrue to the realest and deepest thing within the human mind and soul—the divine Adjuster." Urantia Book 1955