uh.... I have had altered states of consciousness.

I think YOU might be the one who is putting people in little boxes.

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elaborate.

Your contributions are always killer. I respect you a lot.

Prometheus, how long have you been a Scientologist?
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how long have you been projecting random assumptions?

where did this idea of yours come from?

I guess i was a scientologist for all of the few minutes you imagined me to be one.
Other than that, never.

P: "Our society is based on Christian morality and ethics, which is anti intellectual, and anti"supernatural."
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Western culture, for sure, has been heavily influenced by Christianity.

But is it anti-intellectual? I actually have to disagree to some degree. It is hard to argue that Christianity does not seek to intellectualize its own belief system - there is a TONNAGE of text written to try and reason and rationalize belief.
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pan>
rationalization against the current of simple logic as is made self evident by studying coversational logic is anti-intellectual. The intellect
in service to the absurd is anti-intellectual.
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The reasoning and rationalizing can be quite robust and the arguments powerful in their own right.
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pan>
yes, but so far, i can see through or around all of them, so i'm not too concerned about that.
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And I am not simply talking about Biblical iteralists or Fundy's who simply spew doctrine. Ther are Christian scholars and some are quite brilliant. But, my problem with much of that, as a Christian, is that it often does not play fair to the method employed. Its baseline points lack the rational and emperical evidence needed to engage more respectfully and honestly in such dialogue. In other words, its much intellectual ado about baseline concepts that foundationally cannot be proven by a scientific approach.
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pan>
yes, in logic terms, it starts with base axioms for which there cannot be a logically derived truth value.
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In that sense, it is hypocritical. I argue a lot that much of Christianity is plagued by a lack of self reckoning that it not only contributed greatly to modernity but that it also refuses to speak respsectfully to its legacy. It helped to shape a culture until the culture started to take a life of its own and then it tried to deny it. And here I must agree - it probably had a lot to do with power and control. A good movie that I think illustrates what I am talking about here is "The Name of the Rose".
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Pan> it sounds like we are mostly in agreement over the points that are most critical. I'm not here to damn christianity; but to do what can be done to save peices of it. Its a dead horse especially in a forum dominated by atheists. I agree with the atheists more than with the Christians, but as a servant of truth, my job is to show the actual middle ground that niether side can see.
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Much of Christianity, and possibly other religions as a whole, needs to stop pretending that it can play simply along rational and emperical lines. In postmodernity, many are willing to accept that the spiritual and metaphysical are possible without a rational explanation. What it refuses to accept, however, is a narrow defintiion of what such phenomena might be. It is anti-religious, to some extent, but not anti-spiritual (so I agree with you on that point, I think...).
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pan> The best solution is to take what psychology and quantum mechanics provide, and move foreward with a fresh start using logic and reason to simply obtain spiritual states of consciousness. It doesn't matter whether or not the spiritual level of reality is real from that perspective, because wether or not it is real, we collectively still crave it; and its at least as real as the movies and sports and assorted distractions that the vampyres use to replace it.
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P: "The whole point of Christianity is to make people into sheep..."
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I think that is a highly unfair and overaching statement. Even if it has a great degree of merit, it does not reflect the whole of Christianity or the whole of Christian history. I am not saying things did not go terribly wrong and I am not saying things are, on a corporate level, rehabilitated. But Christianity, I think, is the most diverse, in ecclesial and dogmatic terms, of the big 3 monotheistic faiths. There are close to 34,000 Christian denoms worldwide with difference ranging from semantic minutia to gross differences in theology. Not all of Christianity is fairly represented by any one group or grouping.
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pan>
Can you suggest a modern Christian movement which kept the practical stepts needed to use glossolalia as a theta brainwave induction?
CAn you suggest a modern christian movement which kept the practical steps needed to induce an alpha brainwave condition?
Can you suggest a modern christian movement, of all 34 thousand, which does not diabolize yin, and thus women, mother nature, and our own subliminal psyche?
Can you point to a single example of a christian religion which actually works to induce altered states of consciousness reliably?
And the inverse question; how do you account for a set of religious paradigms which not only fail to help one achieve altered states of consciousness, but whose ideas and concepts such as satan and sin and etc are a handling of the subconscious which makes the subconscious the enemy and thus starts an internal psychological war which is then projected out into all of reality; thus that christian cultures are invariably war cults?
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P: "...to herd people against their better interests away from the possibility of having genuine spiritual experience."
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I can understand that perspective but I see it a bit differently. My problem with Christianity when it comes to spirituality is that in many cases, it holds to a distinctively dualitic model of life (i think we agree on this specific point). As a result it separates and even holds in polar tension the flesh and the spirit.
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pan>
exactly. Logic calls this the falalcy of the excluded middle, as well as the fallacy of the false dillemma. First off, there are more points in the spectrum than just flesh and spirit. Second off, you don't have to choose between the two; and in fact a right relationship with one will reflect as a right relationship with the other.
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So, while not denying the spiritual, it can often see spirituality as something so mystical and transcendant that it is virtually unable to be experienced as a phenomena within the "sinful" person's own self.
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pan> You have just delineated for me exactly the method by which Christianity keeps people from obtaining altered staes of consciousness; by shaming them into believing they aren't worthy enough.
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Even in more charismatic settings phenomena such as speaking in tongues is seen as a manifestation not of one's own spiritual potential but by the overpowering of the Holy Spirit of God. So, I cannot say Christianity does not believe in spirituality. But it often does seem to compartmentalize it into something that generally in tension with our normal state.
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pan> Glossolallia is what it is; its nonsensical improvisational music being generated by hundreds of co-singers spontaneously. Yes, that induces a waking theta condition if done right. And yes, that can connect us to god. Theres no reason why we can't follow that path rationally, saying that god is causing it or that the holy spirit is doing it to us is really firstly the fallacy of magickal thinking and secondly the doom of the operational procedures that make it work. Because those hundred voices have to be in time and in tune with each other, not just making noise.
Each persons contribution hinges on focused and concentrated mental processes that don't happen unless each person is given a useful set of instructions on how to manage the intellect. So the very idea that glossolallia was god talking through us ends up dooming the methodology to simply not work in the modern era due to paradigm decay.
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In this sense, much Christianity reveals its Western legacy (including Platonic perspectives) and how it deviates from its partial roots in Judaism which seems to hold to a more unified view of human existence.
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pan>
that they picked up the greek and roman perspective and mixed it with judiasm is an important point. Understanding that paradigmally, christianity is the child of judaism and roman paganism is the first level of lucidity in understanding any modern christian paradigm. Understanding that Yeshua ben yeoseph and all of his followers were killed within two years of his crucifiction mostly by being acts in the
snuff sport bread and circuses of the roman coliseum is also key. No real christians survived. End of story.
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This is not entirely true of Christianity, however. One of my favorite Xian theologians is the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner. He holds to an interesting ontological perspective where he believes that we are, by default, spiritual and open transcendence and this on a universal scale. So, as Christian-centric as it sounds, he has coined the phrase the "anonymous Christian" - in other words, differences in religion and even atheism do not neccesarily pose a barrier to spiritual encounter and transcendence even if the recipient is not fully aware. If we can, for a moment, ignore the Xian-centrism here, it is a robust view of spirituality that says that everyone is able to experience transcendence and God outside of dogma.
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pan> i would argue that people only experience transcendence outside of dogma.
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He tries to reconcile the theist/atheist tension by finding common ground on a moral/ethical plane (and here not talking only about specific Xian morality). I am not suggesting you should buy his perspectives but it does present a much more open view of sprituality and he is able to acknowledge and affirm the presence of spirituality in other contexts. It is, to me, a refreshing view of spirituality that is seen as being very immanent within the universal human experience.
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pan> Thanks for sharing that. Yes, i am trying to reconcile the atheist perspective here, and i'm certainly doing that from an eclectics perspective, not a christian one. I think that lends my argument believability for the atheists, but i'm sure the christians will find plenty of faultwith it. I can't be everything to everybody; its funny how language is the prime limitation that way. Any argument i make is going to rub some people the wrong way.
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Nevertheless, I was raised to believe that I am so sinful I am not capable of spirituality or goodness alone and that all good things are because of an "a posteriori" awareness and indwelling of God - a notion I have long discarded. Obviously, I am at odds with Calvin on the concept of total depravity. This area of Protestant dogma really bothers me because it present one fo the greatest dividing lines to respectful dialouge between many Christians and other contexts because is so easily lends itself to a notion that 1) human beings are unable to have spiritual experience on their own and
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pan> My argument centers on this point. Because the truth is that atheism is only a biproduct of that belief, a reversal of it. Atheism is just christianity, holding on to that belief but chucking more obvious others. By continuing with the rebellious notion that there is no God, they then conclude that spiritual experience is also bunk. What they don't realize is that they are having an obvious reactionalist kneejerk response to realizing that dogma is bunk.
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2)because of this "dependence" on God for such things, it allows very easily for people to from a very narrow view of what God is and obviously to then go and exploit it.
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pan> exactly the problem, well said.
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P: "Atheism is just Another type of Christianity; The Christians who don't believe in God. They make all the same assumptions, and they use all the same false dualities. They are proponents of the same morality, and the same "belief" based system of thinking. Atheism denies that god exists and manages to pull this off because due to christianity, most people haven't experienced god. But Atheism is just a reversal; a belief in not believing."
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Well, I would say I disagree. IMO, genunie atheism reflects an approach Christianity engages in only "half-assedly" (as I mentioned above). It is modernity done more honestly. I cannot say it reflects the same dualism because it does not believe in a god as a source of any spirituality.
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pan> your own argument above shows exactly how it works. First Christianity comes along and programs you to think that you can't talk to god because only the pope can do that. You get tired of the lies and propaganda, and opt out. Since you have never had a personal spiritual experience, you simply decide the whole thing is bunk, and decide there is no god. What you don't realize is that you can only have the personal experience of not having spiritual experiences if something has opressed your natural inborn spiritual nature. Atheism is simply the end result of christian exclusivity as carried through a single rebellion stage.
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I am not sure where the statistical lines are drawn but it seems reasonable to me that someone who is atheist could conceivably believe there is a spiritual side to humanity without having to believe in a god if there would be scientific evidence to support that such an aspect of the human experience is measurable. It that sense, I see that it would be different than the traditional duality that much of Christianity holds to.
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That sounds like an opinion poll waiting to happen. How many atheists think that there is a spiritual reality without a god in it?
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P: "All of these paradigm are just Christianity in photo negative; an experiment in double think; simply reversing a belief system and turning it inside out and then pretending that its not the same thing that you started with. "
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Based on my perspectives above, I would say that all of these, including Christianity, represent modernity having gone awry in varying degrees or taken as far and as honestly as it could go (atheism). But I would have to say I also agree, to some extent, that they share some common characteristics. In modernity, both science and religion try to assert themselves as having a monolithic hold on truth. Science is in a far healthier position, imo, because it does not betray its own foundation and it often does not seem as preoccupied with discounting the spiritual or mystical as much as it is preoccupied in measuring things. So, given proof, it might be able to consider anything unlike many aspects of religions where proof of the contrary is often overlooked or denied in order to maintain control the scope of its own influence.
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pan>
Yes and no. Science is really just one set of paradigms thats kept slaved to the interests of the luxocrats. I'll give you ten quick examples.
Light bulbs that last literally forever are as easy or easier to build as ones that burn out. Hovercars are not only possible, they were possible 25 years ago. Cable cars should have and could have replaced inner city transportaion. Geothermal power beats fossil fuels and nuclear power hand down as cleaner and more efficent and less dangerous. The NASA space shuttle is a peice of 35 year old junk.
Soft nuclear power, or nuclear events without radioactive isotopes is not only possible, its safer, and any solid matter can be used.
Psychology simply doesn't recomend that you drug people ,but that you find ways to meet their needs. Psychology vindicataes sociology, and damns psychiatry.
hydrothermally induced fevers can just about cure most cancers and most aids and a whole lot of other things. but you won't hear about hydrothermally induced fevers, because its not something to make money on.
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sincerely,
peace and light
prometheuspan

pan>
Our society is based on Christian morality and ethics, which is anti intellectual, and anti"supernatural."
The whole point of christianity is to keep people from having genuine spiritual experiences so that those people can be controlled.
The whole point of Christianity is to keep people inside a mental cage, keep them dull and slow, and beholden to the Church. The whole point of Christianity is to make people into sheep; to herd people against their better interests away from the possibility of having genuine spiritual experience.>>>>

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ricky>
This stuff is your stereotype of Christianity. I don't really mind what other people do. You can't rightly speak for all Christians. You could at least start with :" It's my belief".
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pan> if it was absed on beliefs, that might be an intersting point. Since my position is based on rational observation and logic, its not a belief.
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pan>
5. Despite all of this, acheiving real spiritual experiences is actually very simple if you get your facts straight. The simple use of modern psychologies tools can bypass all the bickering created by religions, and its very easy if you know what you are looking at to apply modern psychology to get reproducable results. The simple formulae to follow is this;
A; There are four main states of consciousness when measured according to brainwaves.
B; Each of these states of consciousness can be further subdivided into two main types; sleeping and waking states. ,etc.>>>>>>

ricky>
This is arrogant. To suggest that your beliefs transcend all others.
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pan>
i'll give you even more arrogant then. I don't have beliefs, i have direct experience and facts and knowledge and a strong logical and rational background to back it up.

ricky>
propaganda warriors>>>
This long statement makes YOU a propaganda warrior.
The Medicine men I know do not discount christianity as a valid spiritual experience.
They are tolerant of others.
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pan>
fine then, you can pin one up for the team on that. Its true, i am a proapganda warrior. I'm the one against all propaganda, so, I'm fighting
on the side of truith in the propaganda wars.

Interesting thoughts Promethius... I enjoy your posts.

I am in agreement with some of it...

but it would appear that in general you seem to feel that autocratic powers that be are infiltrating most religious paths as a way of denying spiritual experiances people could have, which I would a assume it's insinuated clearly their power would somehow be threatened.
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well, its very simple, the whole point of romanism was to get jews to pay taxes. Christianity was just a means to that end,
but it worked pretty well also to brainwash the roman soldiers.
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and that may be true to a degree, I am not sure.

But what I find from a position that is almost "psychaitric" is this:

People choose to let themselves be led by leaders that give them the excuse to do what they'd do anyway. It diverts blame from themselves should they ever be held to account for any acts that are bigoted or unconscionable by history that they can say there were "misled".
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yes, that often happens.
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Some people feel that having a true spiritual experiance they can't control and make fit their expectations is a threat to their very sense of idenitity.
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Well, it is a threat to egoic identity; in order to experience a waking theta condition ego has to "die."
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In the face of spiritual experiance identity becomes a fragile thing if it doesn't learn to become more malleable.
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yes, grim for example is a great example of somebody whos obviously emotionally weak, overcompensating, and thus,
trying to come off as "tough" on "bad theists."
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They create a spirituality under any religious or non-religious banner which preserves their sense of idenity.
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yes, thats exactly what religion is; spirituality under the banners of convenience, usually political but oftentimes
ideological and personal.
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They don't need to be told to organize a propeganda campaign organized by hidden leaders, because the rationalizations people use to keep from growing beyond a certain stage are all very similar so those rationalizations are enshrined and dispensed in every religion like holy manna deep fried in cumulatively deadly trans-fat.
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yes, its a very large un conspiracy glued together by doublethink. Its most sinister aspect is the fact that its unhidden. Everybody knows
christianity is a war cult; most people double think into thinking thats a good thing.
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It's a mockery of religious experiance, that people alternately crave, and fear, or both just as some people crave and fear death itself at the same time. They want the orgasm, but are afraid of letting themselves lose control,
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very apt metaphor. They only want the orgasm if they can have it in a sterile and unemotional and interpersonally safe way.
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so they repress the orgasm unconsciously and wonder for themselves in moments when they feel sorry for themselves why sex doesn't satisfy. Forgive the analogy between religious and sexual experiances... but perhaps the two may be considered intertwined.
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I find that i am priapic precisely because my chakras are open. Being turned on turns out to be multi dimensional. Having an erection
5 or 6 hours of the day is a direct phenomenonological result for me of my spiritual connection. I think that you have a very clear understanding actually of that connection. Sex is just the primary we we are built to experience social otherness. Being opened to social
otherness via the collective unconscious can be like having a new form of libido poured into you.
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So they make the same identity perserving rationalizatons and distortions collectively, because collectively there is a fear of what change might mean, and if they had a leader that would even begin to suggest a path to a more real religious experiance that would threaten them the result probably would be something similar to a crucifiction... at least politically.
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i face a life time of tiny crucifictions.
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A bit like the premise of the movie "Tommy". They will not rest until they can find the leader who embodies their collective rationalizations and denial.
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yes, a leader becomes just a symbol for the path.
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It is convenient to beleive that these leaders are the tyrants deliberately cultivating widespread ignorance to keep their power... but really perhaps their power is more tenuous than you think and solely resting on the willful ignorance of the populace which is all happy to assign all leadership and blame to a leader that conveniently tells them what they want to hear or beleive.
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I think that is generally true, and it certainly complicates pinning the problem down when theres nobody really to blame specifically,
but thats wha we are left with.
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It reminds me of the mythological story of the Isrealite Exodus.

The condemnation of God wasn't merely that these tribes delivered from enslavement as a physical state turned to anything particularly sinful.

But rather that their enslavement was as much a mental state, that they preferred the predictable slavery of Egypt that they were delivered from over the uncertainty of the migratory life of a desert borne tribe (like the beduin)

He referred to them as "stiff necked" as his major criticism before he'd punish them."
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i am not sure i am willing to endorse the idea that god ever punished anybody.
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Religions around the world, even political ideologies and sciences, are debased and supressed because people are stiff-necked. They don't want the flexibility to allow the unknown and the uncertain to enter into their equation.
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yes, another way of saying that people are in ruts with inertia. narrowmmindedness.
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And there will always be more of them, than there are of you.
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until the wyrm turns and the tao flips and the hundredth monkey principle turns the tide.
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But then again, in every religion, even Christian, and probably even among others you may have dismissed in general, you will find people who are in it because they want a legitimate religious experiance, and because they are not afriad and don't unconsciously work to prevent themselves from having that experiance they simply have it.
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I don't dismiss any paradigm. I study them, and i learn from them whats good and bad inside of them. Dismissing a whole paradigm
is folly; even the worst paradigms have some gems in them.
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For truly, Promethius, even if you were to start your own religion from scratch and ran it up on a flagpole to see who salutes it, the followers you might attract will probably debase what you intended to teach and hang onto their denials, even claim to religious experiances they never had in the same spirit as a spouse that fakes an orgasm continually. A small percentage will seek something deeper, but no larger or smaller a percentage than those who are the same in other religions.
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thats a danger anybody who wants to start a new paradigm faces, but its worth it when you realize how ripe our civilization is for something
new.
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All religions are debased in the same ways by the same kind of people
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yes, true.
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and perhaps all religions are redeemed by a minority of people who represent the best of what the human spirit can become when it's open.
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there are a small handfull of "christians" and "Jews" (and Islamics, and etc.) who live the good side and follow the gems more than the junk, and, those people
are to be admired and modeled as minor succcess stories.

I suppose it's really what a bhuddist nun refered to as an embrace of groundlessness as a fact of life, that there are no real certainties but that it's taken as something as an epipheny that frees a person from the prison of their own presumptions.

In some ways I'm not sure if it can be distinguished much from the process of becoming an atheist, where one accepts the groundlessness of beleiving there is no God, no plan, no predesination, no comforting ideas to seperate the self from the harsh light of reality... a light that can literally burn notions of personal identity away.... and for a moment there is fear, an existential crisis, like the book "Nausea" but the fear is overcome, it passes, identity returns altered and strengthened. Instability is accepted, there are no angels watching, things happen without meaning but just cause and effect, you can die tomorrow or twenty years from now... but life is an adventure for it.

In fact, I think in some religion taken to a level of enlightened mysticism can be similar. It can become almost the opposite of popular religion which promises certainty, resists change, imposes meaning, makes judgements, re-enforces heirarchy. Most people don't want what mystics experiance, it frightens them deeply, it tears off the same veils of comfort that embracing atheism would. It has no certainty. The moment lived in is what is, and the only moment, the only one that one can consciously act in and somehow adapt to as it is rather than hide away in elaborate fantasies not to deal with the present moment.

I suppose to distill it down further...

a spiritual experiance is one where one ceases to march in step through life, and starts to dance their life instead from their heart, whoever they are and whatever they beleive... and accepts themselves for it.

or at least... that's what it is for me.

but Grim, you are talking to a person who feels that the language of the spiritual and it's practices and mythologies only serve as a metaphor for our own minds coming to grasp with it's internal stresses between the primative brain and higher brain functions, and then coming to grasp with the universe outside ourselves as it is and harmonizing with it. Some people choose to embrace the map as the territory, probably because it's an easiest way to stop personal growth while deluding themselves that they are somehow very spiritual. So if I seem to tie together atheism and spirituality, will I am, because for me spirituality is real but only in the sense that it is a real reflection of people's psychological realities. A psychological reality still is an aspect of the realities we must live in, given we we are social beings who depend on other concepts which only have power because we beleive in them, such as the concept of currencies... it isn't a reality that should be dismissed totally as nonsense just because it's not empircally true.