zago
New member
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2008
- Messages
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- MBTI Type
- INTP
I have had mystical experiences. I believe in mystical experiences.
Many, if not most, people have had mystical experiences. If you haven't, you can. Meditation, yoga, etc. can provide them, but it is not guaranteed and could take years even if it happens. Psychedelic drugs put an absolute guarantee on mystical experience, although I do not recommend taking them. The experience is fundamentally unpredictable at this point in our knowledge of them, and your experience may indeed be mystical, but of the "evil" sort. After all, hell is just as spiritual a place as heaven, is it not?
So obviously mystical experiences exist, but what can we really say about them? They are by their nature tempting to read in to, but are they really any different from something like dreaming? Dreaming is not quite the same thing as a mystical experience, but it would be hard to say it is not equally mysterious. We know little about it, and can say little about what our dreams truly mean and why we dream what we dream. That doesn't stop some of the more dishonest or non-rigorous among us to go about trying to attribute significance to their dreams they cannot prove.
In the same vein, people have always and continue to do the same thing with mystical experience. I myself was once visited by Jesus when I was on a drug (and believe me, this is one of many visits by deities), and I had a full blown experience of being full of sin but redeemed by this savior, and it was so powerful I was left on my knees sobbing in pure awe and humility. Weird stuff, right? That left me bewildered for years to come, but ultimately, I never took that experience and made a doctrine out of it.
What I have retained is something that I think anyone can appreciate. I still have this curiosity, this sense of excitement about that experience and what questions it raises. I think it is an interesting facet of the mind to contain these things within it, and it points a promising path toward things we will learn in humanity's future. We will surely, in a sense, unlock these experiences and educate ourselves in them, harness them. Perhaps we will be able to summon them at will and share them with each other as a way to commune and know each other in the deepest ways imaginable. Anything I say at this point, and much more could be said, is pure speculation, but I can safely say that I don't believe spiritual experience is an idea that should simply be flushed down the toilet because we can't say much about it yet.
I do, however, firmly believe that we can't have these sorts of experiences at this point and use them as a way of gleaning truth about the universe--which it is admittedly very tempting to do. Many a time on mushrooms and other drugs have I had the most Earth-shaking epiphanies about how one should live in this world, or what may be the truth about the cosmos. When I sober up, I am truly back to normal. I remember those epiphanies, but they don't have the same impact anymore. I can't remember how I got to them.... and I certainly can do nothing to prove them.
The world we live in right now is not a particularly spiritual one, not compared to what it could be. If you've never had this sort of experience, if you've never taken a big dose of this sort of drug, you can simply have no concept of what I'm talking about, but suffice it to say, experience can be far more spiritual than it commonly feels to a sober person, as we are in today's world. Not saying things won't change, and I'm not saying things are entirely unspiritual now. We get a very, very faint glimpse of the depth of those mystical experiences from time to time, when we see a beautiful scene, when we are moved by a song, when we feel deep love of another person or animal, when we laugh until our sides hurt, when we look out into the stars and wonder about all the possibilities.
The future is promising, if we continue to value peaceful exploration and scientific growth. We will use our expanding knowledge to cure the inherent Darwinian maladies and tragedies of our minds. We will grow in our abilities of psychoanalysis, nutrition, and chemical states, and we will increase our general health to levels it's never been before. All I have to point out here is the trend that we can already clearly see. Someone born in America today, and indeed much of the world, has an expected health-span and life-span never before existent on this planet. We've brought that about with unprecedented understanding of the mind and body, and of nature around us. We can only expect this increase of wellbeing to continue into more and more blissful states, far into the future.
As a final comment, I do want to emphasize that this is not a given. We need to retain this open state of mind. We need to stop short of turning our speculations into unprovable dogma. There are those out there who have seen these sorts of experiences and become fanatical and rigid in their beliefs about them, and these are dangerous people indeed.
What I so desperately wish to tell them is that the joy and promise of these experiences still remains, even if we admit to what we don't truly know. No one can deny the existence of mystical experience itself, and our future ability to continue to unlock it and find out more. If anything, to ossify it into a doctrine at this point is to destroy it in yourself, to shut off all possibilities and cut yourself off from this excitement by narrowing it all down. What we can truly say is that literally all cultures have their own unique versions of spiritual experience with a few broad commonalities - and this, to me, seems like a great feast waiting to be explored and loved, should I not limit myself to one particular understanding.
Good day.
Many, if not most, people have had mystical experiences. If you haven't, you can. Meditation, yoga, etc. can provide them, but it is not guaranteed and could take years even if it happens. Psychedelic drugs put an absolute guarantee on mystical experience, although I do not recommend taking them. The experience is fundamentally unpredictable at this point in our knowledge of them, and your experience may indeed be mystical, but of the "evil" sort. After all, hell is just as spiritual a place as heaven, is it not?
So obviously mystical experiences exist, but what can we really say about them? They are by their nature tempting to read in to, but are they really any different from something like dreaming? Dreaming is not quite the same thing as a mystical experience, but it would be hard to say it is not equally mysterious. We know little about it, and can say little about what our dreams truly mean and why we dream what we dream. That doesn't stop some of the more dishonest or non-rigorous among us to go about trying to attribute significance to their dreams they cannot prove.
In the same vein, people have always and continue to do the same thing with mystical experience. I myself was once visited by Jesus when I was on a drug (and believe me, this is one of many visits by deities), and I had a full blown experience of being full of sin but redeemed by this savior, and it was so powerful I was left on my knees sobbing in pure awe and humility. Weird stuff, right? That left me bewildered for years to come, but ultimately, I never took that experience and made a doctrine out of it.
What I have retained is something that I think anyone can appreciate. I still have this curiosity, this sense of excitement about that experience and what questions it raises. I think it is an interesting facet of the mind to contain these things within it, and it points a promising path toward things we will learn in humanity's future. We will surely, in a sense, unlock these experiences and educate ourselves in them, harness them. Perhaps we will be able to summon them at will and share them with each other as a way to commune and know each other in the deepest ways imaginable. Anything I say at this point, and much more could be said, is pure speculation, but I can safely say that I don't believe spiritual experience is an idea that should simply be flushed down the toilet because we can't say much about it yet.
I do, however, firmly believe that we can't have these sorts of experiences at this point and use them as a way of gleaning truth about the universe--which it is admittedly very tempting to do. Many a time on mushrooms and other drugs have I had the most Earth-shaking epiphanies about how one should live in this world, or what may be the truth about the cosmos. When I sober up, I am truly back to normal. I remember those epiphanies, but they don't have the same impact anymore. I can't remember how I got to them.... and I certainly can do nothing to prove them.
The world we live in right now is not a particularly spiritual one, not compared to what it could be. If you've never had this sort of experience, if you've never taken a big dose of this sort of drug, you can simply have no concept of what I'm talking about, but suffice it to say, experience can be far more spiritual than it commonly feels to a sober person, as we are in today's world. Not saying things won't change, and I'm not saying things are entirely unspiritual now. We get a very, very faint glimpse of the depth of those mystical experiences from time to time, when we see a beautiful scene, when we are moved by a song, when we feel deep love of another person or animal, when we laugh until our sides hurt, when we look out into the stars and wonder about all the possibilities.
The future is promising, if we continue to value peaceful exploration and scientific growth. We will use our expanding knowledge to cure the inherent Darwinian maladies and tragedies of our minds. We will grow in our abilities of psychoanalysis, nutrition, and chemical states, and we will increase our general health to levels it's never been before. All I have to point out here is the trend that we can already clearly see. Someone born in America today, and indeed much of the world, has an expected health-span and life-span never before existent on this planet. We've brought that about with unprecedented understanding of the mind and body, and of nature around us. We can only expect this increase of wellbeing to continue into more and more blissful states, far into the future.
As a final comment, I do want to emphasize that this is not a given. We need to retain this open state of mind. We need to stop short of turning our speculations into unprovable dogma. There are those out there who have seen these sorts of experiences and become fanatical and rigid in their beliefs about them, and these are dangerous people indeed.
What I so desperately wish to tell them is that the joy and promise of these experiences still remains, even if we admit to what we don't truly know. No one can deny the existence of mystical experience itself, and our future ability to continue to unlock it and find out more. If anything, to ossify it into a doctrine at this point is to destroy it in yourself, to shut off all possibilities and cut yourself off from this excitement by narrowing it all down. What we can truly say is that literally all cultures have their own unique versions of spiritual experience with a few broad commonalities - and this, to me, seems like a great feast waiting to be explored and loved, should I not limit myself to one particular understanding.
Good day.