Do spiritual things exist?

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Does it really matter if someone knows if they're hallucinating? Shamanistic use of ayahuasca comes to mind. Some think it leads to an induced OBE. Whether the spirit actually leaves the body under the influence of ayahuasca is debatable. What I'd like to know is whether an altered perception really does lead to spiritual insight and actual change in a person's life. Can a hallucinogen really help someone open the door to their own personal spiritual world?

I love that line from Harry Potter: "of course it's happening inside your head Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

Personally, I'm suspicious of chemicals altering perceptions and even of some religious tendencies to work themselves into an ecstatic altered state of consciousness. If I'm going to have an experience of God or some spiritual reality, etc., I'd prefer to do it with a clear head.

Does Bigfoot exist

I'm not sure. Sounds interesting but not altogether different from saying physical, mental, and spiritual as the suggestions I keep hearing is that the mind is the next stage up from the physical and the spiritual having information free and easy at such high levels that its currency really becomes emotion.


Do you have any writing you'd suggest regarding the specifics of the laws which people believe correspond up and down the spectrum? I'm still a bit new in my study of this and have lots of gaps I'm trying to fill in. My gut tells me that different planes will function differently according to their level of purity - ie. ratio of light/darkness, where just the interplay of those two variables has a lot of sway over fundamental fulcrums and how the world ultimately looks, feels, etc.. I'd like to think there's a practical way of using that whether its finding matter and energy that's more discrete than what we have now, studying higher vibration or hotter particles, etc. etc.

A completely different way in may even be the NDE route. As WilliamDelaney and I were noting there are already people performing serious and legitimate research out there who are working with hypotheses from NDE's, in some cases even their own. If NDE's really are superpositioning of the mind or if the sense of speaking with higher beings is exactly what its perceived to be then having that direct contact with the light and gleaning useful bits of data (especially as people can figure out how to do this without risking their own death) in quantities that they can take back with them could exponentiate progress on this front.

The question should be why do people who do not believe in spirtiual things care so much about them

i don't really like the medicalisation of mental health, so what i shall do is put medical in inverted commas, i.e. "medical".

i'm not sure i agree with you, the hallucinations would only become a "medical" problem where either the hallucinator believes the halucinations to be, in fact, a facet of reality, or they become overwhelmingly frequent or intrusive in nature to the point where they make participation in everyday life difficult to maintain.

what i am saying, in short, is that hallucinations are not necessarily a problem per se.

the problem as i would see it is that if one believes hallucinations to be real, a belief system founded upon flawed or delusional notions becomes a possibility or even a likelihood. where hallucinations are understood to be what they are, they can at times provide an enjoyable or insightful adjunct to normal reality.

Most people who actually have enough interest to investigate the issue just end up being atheist or agnostic. This doesn't diminish the interest necessarily, so you end up with a lot of atheists who have a paradoxical obsession with the topic of religion. That's been my theory on it for a while.

I know it's strange for a religious/spiritual person to hear, but I honestly think that an honest, authentic process of investigation would generally render the same conclusions on the subject that I have. Therefore, I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that someone might investigate the topic and come up with different ideas. It's not important what the conclusions are. What is important is going about it in an honest and authentic manner. I am just very strongly of the opinion that doing so will generally result in someone becoming a skeptic.

If you disagree, that's fine. If we agree on the value of honest and authentic investigation, we are not of differing opinion on anything I consider to be important. You can believe in flying unicorns for all I care. I've had respectful discussions with people who thought honestly that they turned into werewolves and similar nonsense. I've even dueled with a fundamentalist Christian who liked quoting Ecclesiastes and come away feeling that this person was just as enlightened as I was.

To me, it's all about how you approach the topic. It's following a certain code of being honest with oneself and honest with others. To do anything else is ignorance itself, no matter what one's convictions are.

Tech, I'm sorry, but Mellon-Thomas Benedict is sounding increasingly hokey, and his story doesn't even sound remotely similar to the other experiences you are referring to. The inconsistency between his story and the others is not even funny. The same goes for the neurologist that was interviewed at the Bioethics committee.

Gone for another few days, I'll finish the Mellon-Thomas Benedict thing when I get back.

I had mixed feelings on him as well. On hand he's supposedly getting enough information to be speaking with pharmaceutical companies and helping them target specific gene defects for future drugs, on the other hand of all the supposed inventions of his I'm seeing the only one I've noticed online is some type of UV light for health which by itself is little more convincing than inventing more Scientologist gear.

This is the other reason why I'd like the spiritual aspect of NDE investigated further - while on some angles it bears convincing hallmarks to indicate that people's conscious minds are super-positioning its quite hard to tell just how much of what people are seeing past that is literally places and other beings and how much of it is projection from their own minds. I'd like to see more solid research into making that distinction, getting to understand the structure of what we're dealing with, and on that level we may be able to obtain increasingly accurate and helpful information regarding technology, human advancement, etc.

The central problem with problem is that there is NO singular center of perception (according to eliminative materialism). The Psi experiment shows this. It is not right to simply assume the patient 'experiences' NDE real time when the brain function stop. What they (think they) is more like fragments of memory formed when they are recovering.

We might not be able to tell anything about that for a long time either. I'm less worried about figuring out when exactly it happens in the brain as I am about examining the content. With enough NDE's people will bring back ideas that are testable, for any of these ideas that are both leaps and bound beyond the present state of science and testable by the present state of science we might be able to solve a lot of problems out past that and, once those problems are solved, loop back around to figure out when the experiences happen, how they chemically react with the brain for us to remember them when we're resuscitated, etc.

That is a world famous tactic well pioneered by religious, especially Christians, basically the claim people like me give to religious is that they lack the evidence to convince us and so they think the burden of proof lies upon us, however thats not our claim, our claim is that their claim lacks any supporting evidence which means we are fulfilling our claim until they provide the evidence to the contrary, and the shift of thebburden of proof fallacy, along with the circular logic fallacy, are two very common used tactics, i hate debating Christians because of the shift of burden of proof fallacy and circular logic fallacy, no matter how much evdence we provide they use the same flawed arguments that can easily be debunked and they deny them and continue spouting their disproven nonsense as if it was true, they tend to refuse to even acknowledge the existence of reason, of course Martin Luther(founder of Lutheranism) warned that reason is the biggest enemy of religion

Do you have any statistics to back up that statement? Because my interest in such subjects, while it's changed my beliefs, has not caused me to become anywhere near agnostic or atheist. I can't speak for others, but I would be interested to know if you're citing statistical evidence.

I don't know much about neurological science, but I have read some about how Carl Jung concluded that the collective unconscious exists, and of his work with people battling addictions. It was his last-resort advice that someone find a spiritual focus to combat their alcoholism that led to the founding of AA with its spiritual basis and its success for uncounted people. So there is apparently in many people's psyches a need for spiritual belief, and there's strong evidence that a lot of humanity's spiritual symbolism comes from the collective unconscious. No one knows exactly what that is, but the evidence is clear that there's a source or connection to certain images and symbols that is carried in each person, possibly in our DNA, as an instinctive memory.

Carl Jung, who was first a scientist (a psychiatrist), was also interested in research into ESP. (Anyone who tracks their dreams for long will find that they have premonitions in dreams now and then - I have, and many of Jung's patients did. No Jungian would deny that it happens.) He started his career as an agnostic (he was raised Christian but fell into doubt after his confirmation and after learning of his pastor father's crisis of faith) and in spite of that after his research related to psychiatry and analytical psychology, he ended his life with a firm belief (knowledge, according to his own words) in the existence of deity.

I'm also skeptical of the Mellon-Thomas Benedict account, because it's so different, but I have to wonder if you're operating from a materialistic bias. I'm not accusing you of such, it's just a suggestion of the possibility. I know I'm biased.

Last edited by SpiritBlooms on 27 Jun 2012, 2:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The fact that there's a psychological need for it, to me, explains its existance; wishful and comforting thinking, more or less.

Your all being weak atheists even talking about things that are spirtiual. I mean I don't believe in Bigfoot i'm not going to investigate if he is real or not. It's a waste of my time

You said in another thread Christians kill people out of fanaticism (you said it, so I'm not going to defend it or anything, I'm just saying). Bigfoot believers don't do that, nor do they attempt to influence the laws of the country, discriminate against particular groups, exacerbate conflicts with other fundamentalists or anything like that. They mind their own business.

Last edited by edgewaters on 27 Jun 2012, 2:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

No but atheists try to infulence laws in countries to like in Russia Romania ect.