Professors seem to love to point out how the "common sense" view about life is a dualist view: that there's a mind and a body, two separate things, with the mind capable of existing without the body. They say that this is the view of life that most people grow up with, but that it does not make as much sense as materialism. Funny thing is that I (and some of you) have got it all reversed! We grew up with the opposite view, an atheist and materialist view. Only later are we introduced to the idea that there might be a God, a soul, and a distinction between the material and - perhaps - the spiritual.
Then comes the myriad of oddities about life: OBE's, NDE's, certain lucid dreams, strange psychic-like experiences. What do we make of it? The explanations from my professors are that these are illusions, hallucinations, pseudo-science, folktale... but wouldn't it be so much harder for them to say that if they themselves had similar experiences? Perhaps they are stuck in sleep paralysis and met a ghost who helped them wake up. Perhaps they have a friend who consistently sees ghosts, or a friend who talks about having psychic experiences. It's so much harder to discount those experiences when they're close to you. I think that difficulty comes from an intuitive knowledge that these individual experiences, though not scientifically testable or reproducible, does give us legitimate information about this strange, strange world.
It does complicate things when many people lie about their experiences. Yes, there are lots of people who are willing to deceive, lots of people waiting to drain the pocket of the gullible by falsely claiming that they have "special powers". They're horrible people, but they don't change the fact that the universe might be much more complicated than we give it credit for. I really want to know whether this experience is real. I want to know whether there are any critics of Robert Monroe, and whether they found anything wrong with his institute, or with the Stargate Project.
I think that the typical materialist should open their eyes to a new set of observations. Sticking to objective, repeatable, and "scientific" knowledge got us pretty far, but it might also restrict us. Maybe this is just one of those things that you can't rely on other people to tell you. Maybe there are things that we just have to discover for ourselves to know.
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"Funny thing is that I (and some of you) have got it all reversed! We grew up with the opposite view, an atheist and materialist view. Only later are we introduced to the idea that there might be a God, a soul, and a distinction between the material and - perhaps - the spiritual."
ReplyDeleteThat made me sincerely smile for a full minute.
thanks for the post. it's the first time I've seen the words materialism bundled with atheism/rationalism in an argument; i like it.
definitely a self journey. XD
ReplyDelete@steven i'm not sure if i understand... did i say something terribly stupid?
ReplyDeleteno, it's 1 of those sincere/appreciative smiles. like when something u said clicks with me in strangely wonderful ways
ReplyDeleteu know, i'm not always an ass who considers ur points stupid, u know =P
First one needs to abandon the axiom that experience of something in the physical world is cemented permanently and pervasively to "reality". On a level of physical reality, there are many simple experiences which leave no physical trace of their passing but which are nonetheless real. There are also many experiences which leave catastrophic physical traces but are NOT "real", ie their causation relies on emotions not on physical collisions.
ReplyDeleteAstral projection doesn't have to fit a dualistic real/not real dichotomy- it can be an act of imagination and still provide objective information that is proven to be accurate, for example one could imagine various things to be true and later have them proven to be accurate predictions, quite apart from any confirmation bias.
If our thoughts shape the world on one of the levels of "reality" then it follows that our thoughts, if they can be shared, can provide "spoilers" of what our shared mental "studios" have in production. :)
My perspectives: glad to know about your skepticism.....objectively doubting insufficiency of the objective ("scientific") reality and there could be more to it .......let me suggest you to try Thomas Campbell's book My big TOE......... and his videos on you tube.......
ReplyDeletethanks.....
Zaibin