Is that God talking?
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One potato, two potato, three potato, four...
Psychological normality is statistically derived, "fo' shore."
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Even the author of the article says they would not personally attribute the experience to god or anything spiritual.
It has been well known for many thousands of years that various practices can induce these experiences. Everything from yoga, to music, to drugs, to sex, to ritual. In the absence of modern science our ancestors made up all sorts of silly explanations for why things happen.
You don't have to be completely crazy to have had some sort of experience with what the article is talking about. Even without prayer or intense meditation some people have overly active imaginations. In the end it all comes down to what a person believes about what they are experiencing.
Churches and forums like this one can act as a support group for people to reinforce and share each others delusions. Maybe some level of indulgence in this is healthy for some people, and can keep people from going "over the edge". Sadly however I still feel the potential for harm is greater than good.
Just look at all the cases of people who hear god's voice tell them to kill abortion doctors, or drown their infant child. Look at all the crazy occultists who have delusions of being the "chosen one" and all that. People who take their conspiracy delusions to the level of paranoid schizophrenia. Our society is riddled with this stuff.
Not to mention all the wars and fighting for supremacy of ideology.
There are many different levels of crazy and sane. Everyone knows what a crazy crackhead bum looks like. And yet plenty of people who consider themselves perfectly sane will buy into homeopathic or magical cures that are totally bunk. I think that's crazy.
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@McMiller said
"Even the author of the article says they would not personally attribute the experience to god or anything spiritual."
It seems to me that you're trying to create an argument where nobody is arguing.
As the OP, I'm certainly not saying that the contents of the article speak one way or the other to a cause or explanation, only to description of the phenomena (which is my greater area of interest anyway). The only position reflected in the original post is my conclusion that "people who practice substantially the methods recommended by Abramelin will obtain results substantially the same as those predicted by Abramelin."
"Sadly however I still feel the potential for harm is greater than good."
Understood, with appreciation for your concern.
"Just look at all the cases of people who hear god's voice tell them to kill abortion doctors, or drown their infant child."
Those are schizophrenics. The article clearly distinguishes between characteristics of the "hearing the voice of God" by the 1% of the populace that is schizophrenic, from "hearing the voice of God" by the 70% of non-schiz people. The experiences are dramatically different. (Well, I have to admit that some of the latter might well think God wants them to torch a clinic. But, hey, if they're the kind of person who would do that, then they could just as easily do that because their neighbor told them to.)
"Not to mention all the wars and fighting for supremacy of ideology."
Of course, if religion weren't the excuse, there would still be wars and fighting for the supremacy of ideology. It just wouldn't be religious ideology. (The same nonrational centers of the brain are hyperactive during political argument as during religious argument; or, for that matter, arguments over commercial product superiority.)
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From the highly suggestible to the psychologically unsound,
If ever I have bound thee, be by these words unbound.Just in a rhyming mood, I guess. Ignore it if you wish.
I've all the moods, and flare, and the opinions of a fish.Is poesizing crazy? It's abnormal; that's fo shore.
But every one in twelve's abnormal to eleven more.Functional's the crazy question, and functioning, I am,
And being right's the right of all who on opinion stand.By gum! You're right!
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@Los said
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"I'd like to believe in this objective, extra-mental reality you believe in, Los, but all the evidence I've been able to observe came to me through my mind."I see I'm going to have to explain this again...."
Why didn't you just say, "I'm a metaphysical realist"? Those five words would've said the same thing and taken up a lot less space.
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@Los said
"But a healthy individual is very capable of distinguishing -- within those experiences perceived by the mind -- between things. Two primary categories -- again, within the world perceived through subjective experience -- we call "things in the mind" (such as thoughts or emotions or hallucinations) and "things not in the mind" (such as the couch in front of me)."
What defines the couch outside of your mind?
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@Uni_Verse said
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@Los said
"But a healthy individual is very capable of distinguishing -- within those experiences perceived by the mind -- between things. Two primary categories -- again, within the world perceived through subjective experience -- we call "things in the mind" (such as thoughts or emotions or hallucinations) and "things not in the mind" (such as the couch in front of me)."What defines the couch outside of your mind?"
The couch is something that any impartial observer can detect. My thoughts about the couch can only be detected by me.
Further, my thoughts about the couch have no impact on what the couch actually is. For example, I may misremember the couch as being darker than it actually is, and I can later discover that my thought doesn't match the actual state of affairs with regards to the couch's color.
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@Los said
"The couch is something that any impartial observer can detect."
Are you sure about that? I mean, have you asked them all?
I just can't think of a single way you could be sure about that without presupposition. I don't understand the mechanics (etc.) of how you could confirm that anything whatsoever existed outside of your mind. (Even having other people tell you they saw it isn't good enough unless you have already established that they exist independent of your thoughts about them.)
You'd have to be out of your mind to observe that the couch existed out of your mind
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Yeah, who here hasn't had a dream where the other characters "independently confirmed" an "objective fact"?
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@Jim Eshelman said
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@Los said
"The couch is something that any impartial observer can detect."Are you sure about that? I mean, have you asked them all?
I just can't think of a single way you could be sure about that without presupposition. I don't understand the mechanics (etc.) of how you could confirm that anything whatsoever existed outside of your mind. (Even having other people tell you they saw it isn't good enough unless you have already established that they exist independent of your thoughts about them.)
You'd have to be out of your mind to observe that the couch existed out of your mind"
If Los understood the Observer Effect (and the Copenhagen Interpretation) he'd know that observations are never impartial.
"But I will go so far as to suggest that no two brain-mind states are ever perfectly identical."
J. Allan Hobson, The Chemistry of Conscious States, Part 1, Defining the Brain-Mind, Ch. 2, "Brain-Mind Schizophrenia," section, "Why a New Paradigm?" (p. 29).
Thanks to Frater 639 for bringing this author to my attention.
"In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes within the limits to be learned by experience and experiment."
John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer.
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@Jim Eshelman said
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@Los said
"The couch is something that any impartial observer can detect."Are you sure about that? I mean, have you asked them all?
I just can't think of a single way you could be sure about that without presupposition."
That's because you seem to be using "sure" in the sense of absolute certainty, which is both impossible to have and completely irrelevant. All a person needs is to be reasonably convinced that it's likely to be true, based on the evidence, that the couch is something that other people can detect and interact with, in distinction to other types of things, like thoughts in my head.
"I don't understand the mechanics (etc.) of how you could confirm that anything whatsoever existed outside of your mind."
Of course you don't understand it: because you insist on disingenuously using "mind" to refer both to the vehicle of perception and one of the categories that we're capable of distinguishing within those perceptions, based on evidence gathered within those perceptions.
This isn't the first time you've conflated words and tried to draw conclusions on the back of labels, rather than the things to which the labels refer.
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"Yeah, who here hasn't had a dream where the other characters "independently confirmed" an "objective fact"?"
And you seem to have since determined -- based on evidence -- that it was a dream and thus only available to you, unlike, say, this message, which is perfectly available for any person with an internet connection to read.
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I behave as if that's the case, but I'm not absolutely certain, sure, or without a doubt, that I'm not dreaming or deluded about the objective nature of thus forum.
In other words, I try not to conflate the concepts of certainty and assumptions about reality.
Btw, I didn't see you mention it in this thread, but have you any personal experience hearing the voice of God?
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The relationship between perception and reality may be more subtle that we suspect, and calling all perception hallucinatory may make a valid metaphysical point, but it casts too wide a net for ordinary conversation. It makes sense to distinguish ordinary perception from hallucination, or else the word hallucination is not useful.
Or to take a different tack, and allude again to Sach's book, there are various types of hallucination. So if it makes you happy to call the ordinary waking perception of a couch hallucination, then fine, but you have to recognize that it is of a different kind -- it has distinct characteristics and a different neurological cause -- from, say, the hallucinations caused by macular degeneration, those we call hypnogogic imagery, those associated with schizophrenia, the boring ear-ringing called tinnitus, etc.
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Los,
As said elsewhere, you argue the couch is real because other mental apparitions that you experience (people) agree with you. Consensual reality. Is it any wonder that similarly wired instruments from the same factory get similar results? If we were in a fictional reality like the one described in the Matrix, all your neighbors would agree the couch exists. And yet Neo and company would know that what you call a couch is actually a mental manifestation; an illusion.We have the ability to distinguish one thing from another; we can slice and dice the experience stream however we choose. We make many distinctions habitually and subconsciously, and we may believe in their objective reality. But that does not make it so.
Having said that, being able to reliably distinguish a couch is handy if you want to sit.
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"I behave as if that's the case, but I'm not absolutely certain, sure, or without a doubt, that I'm not dreaming or deluded about the objective nature of thus forum."
And there's your problem: you've been bamboozled by this idea of absolute certainty. There isn't such a thing as absolute certainty: it's a complete red herring. Get rid of it.
When we evaluate claims, we do so to degrees of likelihood, based on evidence. The likelihood may be very high in some circumstances -- we know that it is very likely, for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow because of the massive amounts of evidence we have -- but achieving absolute certainty is both impossible and irrelevant.
The point is that based on evidence, we can conclude that when I flew across a field under my own power, that was the kind of thing called a "dream," which is only accessible to me, whereas my posting these words is accessible to anyone who cares to look.
It's completely irrelevant that we can't be "absolutely certain" about that because we can determine, to a high degree of likelihood, that what I've just said is likely to be the case (especially given the fact that I'm just talking about labeling stuff and not asserting any absolute ultimate ontology about anything).
"Btw, I didn't see you mention it in this thread, but have you any personal experience hearing the voice of God?"
As I've said elsewhere, I have all sorts of experiences chatting up imaginary entities, such as Enochian spirits, and I've had experience "receiving" texts and the like.
To the best of my knowledge, though, I've never had an auditory hallucination, with the possible exception of one time when I was falling asleep and heard what sounding like someone calling my name. I quickly concluded that it was -- to a high degree of likelihood -- some kind of semi-dream or trick the mind plays as one approaches sleep.
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@gmugmble said
" So if it makes you happy to call the ordinary waking perception of a couch hallucination, then fine, but you have to recognize that it is of a different kind -- it has distinct characteristics and a different neurological cause -- from, say, the hallucinations caused by macular degeneration, those we call hypnogogic imagery, those associated with schizophrenia, the boring ear-ringing called tinnitus, etc."
Yes, exactly. And given the way that "hallucination" is commonly used, I find it deeply disingenuous to apply it to ordinary waking perception, as if the practical distinction -- which people can and do make all the time -- isn't valid.
It certainly does "make people happy" to play word games like that to their detriment. I would argue that it makes them so "happy" precisely because it enables them to make spurious arguments to support incredibly fatuous claims. After all, they will poorly reason, if everything's hallucination, then everything's equally real, and if everything's equally real, then that "communication" that they just received from a supposed Inner Plane Contact Secret Chief Oogity-Boogity Goblin Man is just as "valid" as anything else, so they have full license to give credence to these fantasies as if they carry some kind of weight.
It's a bunch of rational sleight-of-hand, and it's the exact reason that the Book of the Law curses reason -- too many people use reason not as it's supposed to be used (to reveal what's what) but to conceal what's what from themselves in order to indulge their pleasant fantasies.
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@JNV33 said
"Los,
As said elsewhere, you argue the couch is real because other mental apparitions that you experience (people) agree with you."I argue that the couch is "outside my head" because "outside my head" is a label that we put on things that appear within perception (the perception that is entirely subjective) that seem to be accessible to any impartial observer (who appears within that perception).
Meanwhile, my thoughts about the couch -- which are equally real, by the way -- are only available to me.
The perception is entirely within my head, but within that perception I can distinguish between things that are "in my head" (in an entirely different sense of the phrase) and "not in my head."
This is an easy distinction to make, and we all do it every day. Pretty much the only reason that anyone would object so strongly to this point is if one wishes to disingenuously play word games to hold on to delusive little fantasies.
" If we were in a fictional reality like the one described in the Matrix, all your neighbors would agree the couch exists. And yet Neo and company would know that what you call a couch is actually a mental manifestation; an illusion."
It wouldn't matter. If we were in the Matrix, there would be no way to know that we were in the Matrix, which makes it totally irrelevant.
"We have the ability to distinguish one thing from another; we can slice and dice the experience stream however we choose. We make many distinctions habitually and subconsciously, and we may believe in their objective reality. But that does not make it so."
I think you're getting confused because you think I'm making some kind of ultimate ontological claims. I'm not. I'm distinguishing between stuff that appears to me because being able to distinguish is useful.
"Having said that, being able to reliably distinguish a couch is handy if you want to sit."
Exactly. See? That wasn't so hard.
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I'm fine operating without certainty, but thanks for the suggestions. I was pointing out that you're the one tripping up the conversation by using your pet definitions of things like "sure".
Using the dictionary definitions of the words you use, it appears that your earlier statements are more dogmatic than your later statements indicate.
I'm not sure how much of the debate is ontological vs semantic.
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"I'm fine operating without certainty, but thanks for the suggestions. I was pointing out that you're the one tripping up the conversation by using your pet definitions of things like "sure"."
At what point earlier in this thread do I use the word "sure"?
A quick search does not show me using it on the first page of the discussion: it was Jim Eshelman who injected the word in the discussion by asking if I was "sure" about what i was saying.
That's what prompted me to point out that "sure" -- in the sense of absolutely certain -- isn't necessary.