"The lunatic is in my head."

The analogy with the radio made me recall this book, All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, written in 2014. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It's a book about World War II and a French girl, Marie-Laure, who goes blind when she is a young child, and an impoverished German boy, Werner Pfennig, who grows up in an orphanage. Werner finds an old broken radio and from it he learns all about radio technology. I'm not sure how this paragraph will read to people who haven't read the book, but this is from near the end, years after the war, Marie-Laure is walking with her grandson Michel:

I haven't read the book, but would like to after reading this. Thank you.

I'm not panning the book based on one paragraph, but writing like that makes me gag.

...and a pretty poor one at that.

Logically inconsistent.

For all the "you can't prove god doesn't exist!!!" types, that is quite true. Define your god, and only then can we test for it. They never want to take you up on that first part, though. I think that's all the evidence one needs to determine the likeliness of gods existing.

Please note that "science" is in quotation marks in the article. The word "perhaps" also appears in the article. "Perhaps" that's because this is all speculation and imagination.

But does that mean transcendent experiences are only a physiological event? Or, is this how the brain is wired to connect with a dimension of reality that our physical senses cannot perceive — in other words, does the brain activity reflect an encounter with the divine?

That's just disorientation. Or being out of it. Or forgetful. Absent minded.

Granted, forgetting, shutting out your envirinment, can help focus on your thoughts.

But monks even screw that up too.

"Contemplative prayer" is usually closer to useful thought, thinking, than "meditation" of nothingness, or nowhere.

Perhaps you have a defective antenna but a better something else. I have received prophetic messages from God, or perhaps my subconscious. I believe that this sense of the divine that some of us feel is not FROM God, it IS God. It's what people are actually referring to that can be measured as activity in the brain. It often feels like it is coming from outside ourselves. It probably isn't. But if it is, there is no way to measure it.

INTENDED for them to work differently, and thus directly cause confusion, disagreement, and chaos.

If that's the god you believe in - essentially Loki - then I cannot dispute the evidence. Your god is an asshole.

He is Tyr's less enlightened alter ego. Plus, he was lovely as a mare.

Loki is the hand, like Thing from the Addams Family.

Svaðilfari certainly thought so.

The mythological association with horses refers in this case as well as for centaurs, to a god's ability to travel long distances (in time) and even carry men.

Maybe Zoroaster thought if it were perfect, people could become perfect. But it never worked out that way. Then the idea got into Judaism, then Christianity. And it still never worked out. They just pretend that it could.

and getting into your brain, then it is at some point a physical process and can be measured.

with it's aches and pains and chitter chatter brain. You still feel all that stuff, but no longer identify with it, as if that's all you are. It's like getting a furlough from jail.

But in exchange, you are in the middle of an empty nothing. No place.

Not necessarily an empty "place." It can be filled with any number of exquisitely useful constructs.

from a divine entity, it is an internal brain state.

Giving up your whole life to be no place, nobody, might be a devilish bargain. And a kind of premature death, or brain sleep or brain death

I think everyone does meditation to a degree. The everyday version is shutting out distractions, and concentrating on your work. Or thoughts. Or nothingness.

But I'd suggest this can become exaggerated and semipermanent. When you talk to nerds, and very spiritual persons, you sometimes sense they are not quite there, here and now. Most of their lives. They can't really see the here and now. Or they seem lost in fantasies, phantasms, abstractions, surreal dreams. More or less permanently, or longterm.

I am not sure what being a nerd has to do with this. A lot of people who are not spiritual are also not quite there.

Last edited Fri Feb 8, 2019, 08:26 PM - Edit history (1)

Does the color red exist? Physically, it is just a wavelength of light, but knowing this does not change the perception or any emotion it may evoke. It doesn't change the fact that redness appears to be a property of an object, even though it is really a property of your eye and brain.

Likewise, spiritual feelings have certain qualities to them. It's essentially irrelevant where the come from. Many people call these feelings "God." Sometimes it feels like the feelings come from outside oneself. Sometimes they don't. Cultures build elaborate narratives around these feelings. That's the religion you are always criticizing.

But these criticisms do not penetrate because it doesn't change the feeling. You might as well point out all of my wife's flaws and explain how love is really just chemicals in the brain. Your criticisms of my wife may be 100% correct. It still changes nothing.

for each of us. But the op wants to extrapolate from specific types of experience to some babble of extra dimensional divine forces. It’s just bullshit.

If the claim was just “it feels like the divine”, it would be unobjectionable.

.. came to say later on, that TM was not even religious. Just a relaxing state of mind.

Just say "it feels divine"; leave out like "the" divine?

the point is that it is an internal experience.

He just said that people have these experiences, quoted some doctors who have different opinions about and said that he personally did not know the answer.

The experiences are hard to explain to anyone who hasn't had one. Even if you've had one, it's also can be hard to talk about with someone who has a different interpretation.

Even harder is that our society is so rationalistic, we don't have a very good language for it, and tend to dismiss anyone who talks about it as "irrational" or "crazy" whether they claim it's natural or supernatural.

“But does that mean transcendent experiences are only a physiological event? Or, is this how the brain is wired to connect with a dimension of reality that our physical senses cannot perceive — in other words, does the brain activity reflect an encounter with the divine?”

in answer to that question.

Heidegger may have agreed that Nothingness was important, in that it is the complementary opposite of Being. (See Sartre Being and Nothingness).

So a secular philosophical reading seems indicated.

Personally I see this nowhereness 1) as a state of mind, 2) and pretty secular. And 3) continuous with what anyone experiences, when they "shut out the world," ignore distractions. In order to free their mind for work or fantasies, or simple relief from clutter.

But how many people read Heidegger? Religious writers make a point of being accessible to a wide audience. It would be nice if philosophers did that.

based on nothing with neuroscience.

It is standard woo-purveyors ploy.

.. could indeed be a problem.