Of course the possibility that what we call God may be experienced differently within various cultures does not render any of the ways He is experienced a delusion.
Our experience is internally constructed but what our experience assembles need not be a counterfeit. Same goes for the expression of that experience in narrative form.
C S Lewis wrote a useful reflection on the relationship between perception and our analysis of that perception. Itâs called âMeditation in a tool shedâ, and you can find it here.
Excellent and new to me. Thanks!
Many spiritual experiences may be genuinely spiritual and supernatural, but that doesnât mean they are all genuine encounters with the divine.
For example, one spiritual experience may lead someone to believe that Jesus is God and died for our sins, while another may lead someone to believe that Jesus was simply an enlightened prophet, that sin doesnât exist, and that the fullness of divinity resides within each of us and simply needs to be discovered. Both may be real spiritual experiences, in the sense that they arenât merely figments of the personâs imagination and/or delusions, but they certainly cannot both be of divine origin, because God is not a deceiver; He is the God of truth, not the God of deceit and confusion.
1 John 4:1-3 : âDear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.â
There are certain demons (one in particular) who can be understood as forces that drive the mind toward madness by dissolving the ordinary ability to distinguish true from false, self from not-self, and meaning from chance: in other words, they corrupt the mindâs use of logic by making every statement unstable, reversible, and self-undermining.
The principle of non-contradiction says that the same thing cannot both be and not be, at the same time and in the same respect. This principle is fundamental to reasoning, communication, and coherent thought, and some of these entities attack precisely that level of mental integrity.
In Crowleyâs The Vision and the Voice, one such entity is called Dispersion and is described as being unable to âfix his mind upon any one thing for any length of timeâ.
The destruction of consciousness happens because consciousness depends on distinction, with this I mean that, to be conscious in any stable way, the mind must be able to say:
âThis is this.â
âThis is not that.â
âThis is a thought, not a command.â
âThis is a symbol, not literal reality.â
âThis is fear, not revelation.â
âThis is contradiction, not mystery.â
When this collapses even language breaks down, for example: words no longer point clearly to anything, as a statement means one thing, then its opposite, then both, then neither. At first, this may feel mystical or profound; but eventually, language stops guiding the mind and starts trapping it ( the ordinary âIâ depends on a certain continuity: âI am the one experiencing these thoughtsâ, but if every thought can claim truth even if they contradict themselves, and if a statement can have contradictory meaning, the self is no longer centered, itâs pulled apart by competing fragments).
The crucial point is that a positive mystical experience, a true encounter with the divine, may stretch the mind beyond ordinary categories, but it ultimately produces greater clarity, humility, and integration. And this can be verified by reading the lives of the saints.
Coming in contact with a deceitful entity produces the opposite: âeverything is true, everything is false, therefore follow whatever fragment feels absolute in this momentâ.
This is why Jesus calls the devil âthe father of lies.â
Not all demonic experiences lead to the fragmentation of consciousness (although they all lead people to believe lies as if they were truths), but some do lead to fragmentation, and these experiences are often disguised as âego dissolution,â when in reality they lead to madness and to an even greater demonic influx (someone who has lost a coherent center of consciousness is far more vulnerable, and far less capable of defending themselves, for obvious reasons).
The discussions in this thread are wide ranging, and I am interested in how a Christian may view our understanding of God (I discuss this in my book âSalvationâ, for anyone interested) â we claim that God has revealed Himself to humanity. When considering revelation, even if it is agreed that we avoid considering God as an object for empirical investigation, we cannot reason that revelation may be within a range of natural phenomena accessible to our human senses. We have ruled out objective-based activities such as found in the natural sciences. Revelation cannot be defined as a philosophy or a science that may be argued and tested experimentally. In making negative statements about our capabilities, I need to show that my arguments are reasonable; it is not necessary for an argument to be testable as absolutely true, but it is necessary for what is reasoned to be coherent and believably true. Those aspects of reason and knowledge that are intuitive (and indeed all knowledge), are usually subjected to tests of falsification (theoretical) and verification (practical) in the sciences, and to criteria of reason in philosophical discussion. It is my assertion that reason needs to sustain the goodness and the continuation of life. It is possible for a person to consider the good in life through experience (Ă posteriori).
Regarding revelation, the person being revealed unto needs to understand, respond, reason, and to consider this within his/her (context of) life. The meaning of God, which includes that of love and concern for all humanity, is provided by revelation and needs to be completely comprehensible. Since I understand all human life and reason to be within the freedom of birth, of life, and of thought (intent), revelation is also understood within freedom. The unreasonable part of the human condition is lack of freedom that finds its ultimate condition in death.
Theologians discuss general and special revelation; for the present discussion, it is sufficient to note that we would respond spontaneously, instinctively, to revelation, and subsequently we may decide to consider and reason regarding the experience. This argument may be developed into a major premise that equates revelation of the meaning of God with the meaning of life (i.e., gives our life meaning). Briefly, such meaning is the goodness that God provides to life. This goodness is synonymous with the Holy Spirit. Reason may respond to revelation rather than synthesize (or contrive) an idea of revelation. In general, I believe such a respond is via the ideal (not to be confused with idealism). Any reasonable person may respond to revelation in this manner. Some may communicate this ideal in almost illiterate ways, while others may communicate this ideal with great elegance.
The transcendent: is it all in our heads?
The presumption being that if it is all in our heads, then it is nothing and of little importance.
But I think it is the other way around. If it is all just like our bodies and material then it is more superficial and of little importance. I think it is in our minds where the greater portion of our life and humanity is to be found. Some people look at âmeaningâ and âloveâ and âjustice,â and they just see words â all in our heads. But I think the mind is a living organism and saying these are just words and in our heads is like saying our lungs, heart, and liver are just organs in our body. In each case they are how our minds and body organize themselves, live, and respond to the world.
Youâre certainly right on one point. People here are unlikely to think that diverse spiritual experiences imply delusion for the sole reason that they are diverse.
Suppose you are a maths teacher and you give your class a difficult maths problem to tackle. If several different answers came back, that fact alone would be a bad reason for concluding that all the answers are wrong. What you would do is assess each answer on a case by case basis.
Spiritual experiences need to be assessed on the same basis. Itâs theoretically possible that all of them are delusions. But other treatments are possible. Perhaps one is valid and others are delusional. Perhaps they are all real experiences but have been interpreted in different ways. Perhaps some experiences are partially valid. (In maths, only one answer is right. But some wrong answers are much closer than others to the right answer.)
So the important question is, how do we wisely assess an individual spiritual experience? Thatâs a big question, but I would start with a few basics:
Started to say I agreed with all but your second statement because I am still convinced by my own feral experience. But then I realized it is true for anyone whose experience takes on the background of the Christian mythos. In those cases even poorly informed me would likely catch a false note. But I do agree about the residue of humility. That would be a constant regardless.
Mark, I appreciate your openness there. I too have had bad church experiences, so I agree that the church is by no means infallible. Fortunately Iâve also had loving and accepting church community life, which has at least given me a picture of what is possible.
@seamitchell
Wondering how your search is going
Thank you for asking, Kendel. Sorry I havenât been on top of tending to my own thread 
This topic is a rabbit hole, to say the least, and an intimidating one at that. The simple response is, I donât know how itâs going. But I think referring to spiritual experiences as âdelusionsâ isnât very accurate. Some of you, like @GJDS and @peterkp, seem to think that âexperiencesâ are interpreted through what we know in order for us to make any sense of them at all. But having a criteria and community input for interpreting these things can help us stay grounded in reality and other understandings, if that is something we care about.
And even if these things are in our subjective experience, I suppose that doesnât diminish their value.
I have seen some people express that our âsoulâ (or even just the concept of âselfâ itself, lol) is linked to our possession of language and abstract thought, as (I think?) youâve implied in the past. My searching has winded down the path toward just trying to understand the soulâif we have a spiritual side of ourselves that can even make contact with spiritual realitiesâor if that is just a product of imagination (Iâm using the reductionistic word âjustâ again, I notice) from our physical brains. But conversing about a spiritual/immortal aspect of âusâ would veer in a different direction than this thread is intended for
You are under no obligation to manage or tend a thread you start. Sometimes they veer off into the unknown and the writer of the OP abandons what the thread has become. No problem.
I donât remember having discussed the soul or spirit myself. I doubt I have, because I donât have a lot to say about it. Whatever it is, like my spleen, it is what it is and does what it does, whether I understand it or not.
I know itâs a huge topic for a lot of people. It just isnât for me. I find it an unknowable. Open to endless speculation.
What I do find more helpful is understanding the history of the concept in various cultures. And why that doesnât really fit a Christian concept of it.
Iâm not interested, though, in establishing some hard and fast idea of what it MUST be. Iâve read too many ideas I thought were just silly to worry about what MUST be in someone elseâs view.
For the classical theist, the soul is the form of the body. This is called hylomorphism. Humans are composites of matter (physical body) and form (soul). It is the acting principle of what it means to be human. For classical theists, abstract thought and things like âtriangularityâ require our rational intellect to go beyond mere physicalism. The soul is how we reconcile the physical nature of humanity with the immateriality of our thoughts.
I disagree the direction is different. You ask if the trancendent is all in our heads. That humans have an immaterial component (soul) and that abstract thought requires the immaterial cuts right through the heart of many of your inquiries. If this is true then abstract thought is transcendent and by definition, isnât all in our heads. Things like justice and triangularity exist outside the physical brain.
If true, your very question would saw off the branch it sits in. Unless you want to assume physicalism is true then pretend to ask a question youâve already definitely declared settled by presumption going in? This is where the hard problem of consciousness stems from for modern materialists. Since the time of Descartes and Galileo, the secondary qualities of matter (color, sound, smell) have been disregarded and matter is seen strictly as mathematical and colorless. For some of us, redness is a real quality of a rose and not just a subjective feeling to be pushed aside in favor of a mathematical framework. Modern physicalism is deficient in many ways. I see it like this. The modern physicalist/materialist starts by ignoring everything that isnât quantifiable (math) and is then surprised or vexed when they canât find things like âmeaningâ or âexperienceâ in their equations. This a baker who refuses to use anything but flour wondering why the cake doesnât taste sweet. Science only offers a framework view of the world. It is good at it but its portrait is incomplete and its limited in its present form to mostly efficient and material causation.
And as I mentioned earlier, your initial post also suffered from an egregious example of the genetic fallacy. Explaining something doesnât invalidate it. In addition, explaining the physical mechanism of a thought or experience does not mean they are nothing but that mechanism.
Vinnie
I had just quoted Mitchellmckain, and was referring to what I had interpreted him to have said elsewhere. I know Mr. Jim Stump alluded to something connecting the soul and language in his book (Iâm almost done reading it). But I should have made that more clear that I was directing the statement at Mitchell. Nonetheless, I appreciate your response!
There are many more ways to understand the soul than I first assumed. And yeah, in the end, itâs all speculation. It seems that most of these hard questions hit the wall of speculation eventually⌠here I thought so highly of my quest for knowledge that I thought I could do what thousands of years of philosophy has yet to do .
I will admit, if something is part of us, itâs strange that it is unknowable to us. Then again, the ancients thought our feelings came from our hearts or livers, and that the sky was a dome. Just because itâs not fully understood doesnât mean that it doesnât affect us and that itâs not real, like how emotions and the sky are still real. I could probably make a better analogyâI have a ways to go to catch up with your and everyone elseâs wit!
Sometimes I think God just has a greater tolerance for or appreciation for diversity than we do and heâs fine humoring our culturally specific constructs to some degree if thatâs the vehicle required to relate.
This may sound weird and Iâm sure Iâm not going to communicate it well, but sci fi movies that deal with humans communicating with extra-terrestrials that are very different from us are actually very encouraging to me, and make me think more charitable thoughts about belief. Because if I can imagine a world in which there are beings fundamentally different from us and beyond our world but we can still figure out how to communicate, even if we canât really understand each otherâs reality, then I can also imagine a world in which God accommodates all our human constructs and languages to communicate with us. And it seems obvious different people from totally different worldviews are going to come away with different takes on the interaction.
Fascinating⌠the concept seems familiar, but Iâve never heard it explained!
Ah, okay good. I know that threads can branch off in different directions if prompted, and a lot of my surfacing questions can be sporadic. But Iâm glad it wasnât perceived that way, even if it was to me initially.
The physicalist answer has reasonable statements, but I donât want to close off my openness to spiritual concepts. In fact, had I not found the physicalist argument challenging, I likely would not have asked!
There is a scientistic temptation to assume all will be explained by the mathematical and tangible, likely because science seems to keep âclaiming ground.â
I have noticed that, the more I find myself considering the world through a materialistic lens, the less ârealâ it feels. Or, at least, life seems to have lost something.
I can see how that would be a fallacy on my part! I am making the assumption that scientific discovery diminishes the value or weight of something, and that explaining a process one way removes any other explanation.
Still, even if things can be explained in different ways, science seems to make us continually have to change our definition of the spiritual. Would this be seen as a challenge to spiritual ideas, or is it just like science in that we have to change our ideas with new âevidenceâ? And why would science have an effect on the spiritual definitions if they are dealing with different realities?
That is a very interesting point, Christy! Many of us who see certain biblical books as mythos or allegory seem to accept accommodation, and I could see that still applying today. No matter how you view it, God has to accommodate to us for even the simple reason that we are beneath him (not in a bad way. Itâs just the reality ). I love when seemingly secular media actually makes us think about God and the big questions more.
I do wonder then: Would this imply a pluralistic approach to religion and spiritual experiences? Does it affect the process some people have mentioned about testing your experience against your tradition, or correcting someone of another tradition?
I donât know, I try not to overthink it, but kind of how Iâve been processing it all lately is this: As humans we need to impose narratives on history to make sense of our identities and our place in the world, both in a communal sense and as individuals who find belonging in a community. So I accept that I have this social location as a white American woman born in 1977 into an Evangelical community that has adopted the Judeo-Christian narrative of Godâs revelation to humanity. Itâs my narrative, it is that story and not a different one that has given my people their identity and allowed me to construct and perform my own identity in that community. Because itâs my story I do think there is something special and unique about the Abrahamic covenant and Jesus as the Messiah, and the Church as the Body of Christ, because Christianity is more than just a narrative, itâs a confessional faith, and you sign up to affirm some things are true, not just your âperspective.â
But I donât think that the story Iâve adopted as mine and my peopleâs is the only story of God interacting with humanity and individual humans over the whole long history of the world. Stories get lost. Some people never come in to contact with each other to be able to compare notes or there are so many barriers related to our languages and different conceptual frames that we canât understand one another. People divide themselves from others over silly differences and then the differences and divisions get magnified over time.
I think itâs highly likely that Christians are confused or only partially right about a lot of things. I figure Godâs grace covers it. And as for pluralism, itâs not that I think âall religions lead to Godâ because they make conflicting claims and they are all flawed human constructs. But I think any human who earnestly seeks wisdom and divine guidance and allows their minds to be formed by Godâs Spirit will be resurrected to eternal life and will be spiritually formed in such a way that they will recognize Christ when they stand in front of him, whether or not they have ever prayed a prayer in Jesusâ name during their lives.
Iâm at the point where Iâm questioning the constructs of omnipotence, omniscience, and ominpresence that I was taught. I think that in order for God to genuinely respond to free humans in a time-bound universe, he canât know and control every aspect of the future. So I think God knows what is knowable, but some things arenât knowable because our choices matter and affect reality and we have free will. I think God stays true to his character of love and justice, but I think he can âchange his mind.â I think human history is a big parenting experiment for God and he is learning from what has worked and what has failed relating to humans and the whole idea that heâs constantly creating ad âmaking all things newâ entails change and movement and responsiveness. So why wouldnât different groups have different experiences and stories to make sense of it all? Maybe God parents different children using different strategies.
All of this is just musing and not anything Iâd sign in blood or teach as doctrine, and I may see things differently in a year, but for what itâs worthâŚ
Nicely put. God doesnât dance alone. He delights in there being others. Theyâre all from him but he didnât create us to use as sock puppets.
I second that.
I had a thought in grad school that got me scolded: that God is able to know the future but He doesnât peek.
A rabbi I knew back then had this view: God sees the peaks and valleys of the future but as from a 747 â no real detail. He can âzoom inâ at will, and often does where the coming shape of a peak or valley twists against the Plan.
âLet your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.â -Colossians 4:6
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