From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Thu Apr 03 2003 - 00:29:59 MST
Charles Hixson wrote:
> That said, I don't consider a hallucination supplied by a "God" to be
> any proof. I've encountered a few, and decided that they were
> projections from activated archetypes (I was going through a heavily
> Jungian period).
Well, if we claim that any/all experience of what appears to be
a transcendent reality usually considered spiritual is in fact
an hallucination then we have a rather closed loop system going,
don't we? We can't possibly get any experience of anything
transcendent because we will just chalk it up as hallucination
or "activated archetype" and be done with it. So I am not at
all clear there is anything that could be encountered that would
in fact be convincing that God is.
> Again, these are difficult to notice as what they
> are. A starlet isn't called a "love goddess" by mistake. When people
> see her, they are projecting an emotional hallucination from the
> internal "love goddess" onto the image that they see. There are other
> gods, and they act the same way. I don't believe in the messages that
> they provide... their hit rate seems pretty low. But they exist. I
> suspect that in the environment for which we evolved they were much more
> accurate. Think of them as one of the necessary preconditions for
> language coming into existence. But when you encounter them, you can't
> be rational (except partially). Rational judgements need to be
> postponed to appreciate the numinosity of the event. THEN you can
> rationally analyze it. But be cautious, for some of the emotional
> arguments can be quite convincing.
It is a tad more than emotion that is involved in some of these
experiences. The grand numinous joining with all that is, was
or can be, of *being* all of that, is an experience more
powerful than any other I have ever encountered or can imagine
encountering. The actual experience was many, many orders of
magnitude beyond anything I ever thought or imagined it might
be. Rational judgement? Rational judgment is a very pale best
effort to eke out a few truths without really being able to See
compared to that. But is even this sort of experience
incontrovertible evidence of the reality of what is then
experienced? No. At least it was not enough for me.
- samantha
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