Wednesday, August 22, 2018

The Unbearable Lightness of Believing

I find it fascinating that someone can have a mystical experience and still be an atheist. It just proves there is no test or observation that can be performed to prove the existence of God when your noggin is a hard shell. I suppose there are miraculous divine intervention experiences that could make a crack, but even then, the rigid logic of their minds would make every attempt to explain it away.

It always comes down to faith; on both sides of the fence. Either we make a leap to it’s all random chance (and those mystical experiences are purely epiphenomenal), or we leap to something comes from someThing.

I only mention this because I’m reading Micheal Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. It’s a fun read, and Pollan is an excellent writer. He’s also into immersing himself into his subject matter. As such, in this book he does the noble task of tripping away on psilocybin, LSD, and 5-MeO-DMT (“the toad”).

I’m not strictly opposed to some people who use these technologies. (Yes, I have experience.) But I also acknowledge their limitations. First, you can’t cheat spiritual development. In fact, these mystical tools could make your ego more inflated than it already is. You start to believe in you're special because of your spiritual athletic abilities. Also, the intensity of the experiences could make it challenging to fully integrate them in everyday life, as well as truly cultivate a relationship with God. You’re more caught up by the light show than the light itself. This also makes it challenging to discern the "fools gold" from the gold. Lastly, it could be a form of spiritual adultery that works against the tradition you are rooted in.

With that being said, Pollan makes a good point that psychedelics can bear fruit for those suffering from addictions, obsessions, depression, and existential dread. Funny enough, during their journeys people often report a banal platitude that they already intellectually knew. (For instance, one woman reported "eat right, exercise, stretch" during her journey.) However, psychedelics seem to “relax the brain's inhibition on visualizing our thoughts, thereby rendering them more authoritative, memorable, and sticky.” While before you think you know, but now you just know.

Yet, despite all of Pollan’s mystical experiences and research, he still holds to the idea that it’s all in the head. He says, “it seems likely that all mental experiences are mediated by chemicals in the brain, even the most seemingly transcendent.”

If mysticism is all in the brain, why would random mutations see an evolutionary fitness to it? It all seems superfluous to me, but then again I’m sure our logical atheists would argue that it gave us religion and myth; and therefore communal bonding that allowed for our survival. Aww, come on. 

I tend to side with DávilaMysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge. It may not be proof of the transcendent itself if you’re vertically closed off to that sort of thing. But that's your problem, not God's. 

Or as the Aphorist said: The truth does not need the adherence of man in order to be certain. You may not be sure, but the Truth always is.

And if you really need to explain God away, then you may have to throw in yourself as collateral damage. Two negatives make a positive. Problem solved.


The atheist devotes himself less to proving that God does not exist than to forbidding Him to exist. — Dávila