Are religious experiences subjective or something else?

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When I think of someone describing a religious experience, I always assume that they are describing a subjective experience they've had. But if the subjective is defined by the senses, how is it possible that an experience like that can be said to come from them?

Last edited by snapcap on 02 Dec 2011, 10:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not an expert, but a person's surroundings can play wonders on his mind. He could have had faint feelings (of the sense kind) that triggered things in his mind. Although I really don't have a clue.

I was baptized as an infant in a mainline denomination (Lutheran), in which born again experiences aren't in vogue. So, other than telling you that born again Christians tend to be overbearing, sanctimonious, self-righteous asses who think that the rest of us who aren't born again are going to burn in hell, I'm not one to give you any positive feedback on the subject.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Everything is subjective.

I get very frequent religious experiences from simple partial seizures with mesial-temporal lobe epilepsy. The best ones are sensations of divine ecstasy, the worst ones are sensations of extreme deadly fear, and the in between ones are blase with synesthesia. When they generalize to grand mal, near death experiences are common too. A few % of non-epileptic people can induce godly visit sensations with the "God Helmet".

The simple partial seizures are at times entirely subjective (as even doctors can't tell the difference), but the line between subjective and objective involves environmental stimuli by statistics (then subliminal effects on others are, by frequency, evident too), as I've stated before:

When I was playing geologist in the 1960's and early 70's, I was in the middle of nowhere in deserts and mountains around the four-corner states often enough to have plenty of partial seizures in moderately isolated places, the slightly famous ones are like the Red Rocks east of Gallup, NM, the areas around Sedona and Cottonwood, AZ, SW of the Great Salt Lake, and the mountains between Durango and Ouray, CO. My rationalizations for what could simply be called mystical experiences is that seizures can inadvertently function as pivotal parts of behavioural conditioning, somewhat like Pavlovian Conditioning with ecstatic seizures being a superstitious reward for being in the moving shadows of rock pinnacles, or like aversive conditioning of fear seizures being a superstitious sensation while being in line with twin buttes with parallel shadows. The coincidences seemed more likely with a moderate number of available possible "clues", such as a moderate desert situation, as the Rocky Mountains gave too many clues, and the Salt Flats gave too few clues. Other situations are too unreliable, changing, or "dynamic" to be stable clues. Using memory tricks to remember facts with cues utilizing all the senses works best with a moderate number too. The easiest to artificially induce sensations are the ones with aversive conditioning, like ringing a bell with a very unique ring followed by a very painful electric shock for a few cycles will give the unique ring the power to induce adverse visceral sensations without any continuing electric shocks; the extinction of the power of the unique ring is often a very long time period (often a lifetime). Seizures that of the type, or of intense enough strength, to interfere completely with memory probably prevents most all of these effects. With Sedona, AZ being now so famous and popular for these effects, I wonder if the location hasn't been exploited with such techniques (like baking yourself half-to-death in a hut for the neurological effect of increased susceptibility to minor stimuli).

Then, it might be the Gods doing it!! !

Tadzio

This makes very little sense to me.

How do you propose we go about experiencing things without using our senses?

The shape of our receiving equipment shapes our perception of everything. Humans can't have objective experiences.

Religious experiences are a kind or type of self induced psychosis.

ruveyn

Absolutely. I liken it to the dissociative "possession" phenomenon common still in the rural third world, and less than mainstream, often culturally isolated groups of people who can be found in the industrialized west.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Was told today that possession in a Himalayan context is a bit different. Mostly because in the West we see the body as mechanical, that we can try to interpret, but never fully explain (although, admittedly, sometimes we're not so far from the mark). So we do posit that if something is "taking over", then where is the individual's soul gone off to?

My teach told us that the medium who channels the god in the Himalayan remembers everything from when she is possessed, or that at the very least, the whole village remembers. What interested me is that he told us that the person apparently can see through her eyes and recognizes the faces of the people she's with, but cannot identify them. If I remember right, there is a section of the brain that resides over that.

I've had a couple vivid spiritual experiences, that I guess were self-induced, as I took some chemicals to achieve them, and they were very energizing uplifting, almost like a partial rebirth. It's strange for me to think that if the subjective is governed by the senses, that something like that could arise out of them, unless what the subjective created was a whole new beast.

I think that there is a mistake is equating "subjective" with, "sensory." From my perspective, subjective means, "pertaining to the subject of a declaration," in contrast with objective, meaning, "pertaining to the object of a declaration." From that perspective, a speaker's experiences are not limited to the speaker's sensory memories. Dreams, for example, are most certainly subjective experiences, but they do not depend entirely upon sensory input. The speaker's imagination can create images that the speaker has never seen.

The more interesting question, from my clinical perspective, is not, "Are religious experiences real?" but rather, "Do religious experiences have a real effect?" I have seen plenty of cases where visits from a spiritual advisor have had a positive impact on a patient's morale, that has in turn coincided with real, measurable improvements in the patient's condition. This is, perhaps, no different from the positive impact from the visit of family and friends--but it underscores that the value of religious experience lies not in the objective truth of the experience, but in the impact from the subjective perpsective of the individual.

So, if praying makes a person feel better, then my medical advice to that person is, "pray." Not in substitution for active steps to maintain your health, or for active medical care--but as a complement to those things.

To put it briefly, you scrambled your brains.

ruveyn

According to my experience, it's good to scramble your brains every so often.

Religious experiences are subjective.

If they were objective, then their validity would be evident to everyone, instead of only the person having the experience.

Just be careful that the "experience" is not actually caused by allergies/anaphylaxis, anorexia, dehydration, depression, electrical shock, fatigue, grief, illness, insomnia, hallucinogens, hyperventilation, hypnosis, infection, intoxication, mania, migraines, schizophrenia, starvation, or a reaction to having eaten spoiled food.

It would have been easier to list the ways they can be induced. Is it safe to scramble my brains with meditation?

Everything is subjective, and reality is determined by power.