Have mystics throughout history always been deluded?

[Federico del pueblo]

You know how most of the ancient (or even current) tribes, but also civilizations like the Maya, Inka or Egypts had their own type of spirituality and also some mystics or shamans etc. and as far as I know many of them had access to very potent psychedelics too.

All of these folks used to believe in a whole array of different gods and deities and spirits, like a god of the sun, the god of wine etc.

But I guess all of this is just nonsense thought up by humans who needed to make sense of their existence and their environment and thus they came up with these god's.

But then I'm wondering, if these folks had actual mystics wouldn't you assume that these guys had the ability to access very heightened states of consciousness, have transcendental, spiritual experiences, which would have enabled them to make realizations about the nature of reality and thus see through the illusion of all of their made gods and deities?

Or do you think I'm expecting too much of them here and their spiritual experiences would rather deepen their already existing beliefs about deities/gods/spirits etc.?

[Thought Art]

I don’t know 

 

But, I do think Gods and Deities were more archetypal than literal

[Federico del pueblo]

2 minutes ago, Thought Art said:

I don’t know 

 

But, I do think Gods and Deities were more archetypal than literal

So what does one actually believe when a deity is perceived as archetypal? Is like "yeah we just like the image/idea of a god of X, but we don't really think it's actual"?

[Yarco]

They might all be tapping into the ultimate truth, but seeing it through the worldview and framework of the time in which they lived.

Same as scientists a couple hundred years ago. Sometimes they got the answer right by sheer luck, but their rationale behind it was wrong in bizarre ways. Other times they get stuff totally wrong that is obvious to us today in retrospect.

It's easy to think that we're at the pinnacle and peak of understanding. In some ways we are compared to the vast majority who came before us, but we're also most likely incredibly ignorant on an infinite timescale.

Chances that even Leo has the ultimate truth are near-zero, as demonstrated by the fact that he continues to have even deeper and more profound awakenings.

 

[Leo Gura]

35 minutes ago, Federico del pueblo said:

But I guess all of this is just nonsense thought up by humans who needed to make sense of their existence and their environment and thus they came up with these god's

Humans always invent conceptual constructs to make sense of reality. You're still doing it today.

Even nonduality and science does this.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Federico del pueblo]

@Loba oh, that was interesting.

I can still be struggling a bit with what is real vs what is "imaginary".

So there is this consensus material reality that we all know.

Nobody would have a debate with me about whether the table in front of me is real or not. If I show them a photo of the table they'll agree it is real.

But if I told them that I know some spirit that keeps visiting me, then everyone would doubt it and challenge me in all kinds of ways.

I can see how for them something is not real (or imaginary or false) if they can't see any evidence of it, but that doesn't make a thing unreal per se.

But then again you could have someone who makes claims that can't be justified in any way, like "in the center of earth there is some huge red dragon living, that can spit fire etc." and it's a problem because the people who have legitimate experiences with certain spiritual entities could be lumped together with these people who make false claims.

Anyway, so you've had experiences with spirits or entities of any kind?

[Carl-Richard]

10 hours ago, Federico del pueblo said:

All of these folks used to believe in a whole array of different gods and deities and spirits, like a god of the sun, the god of wine etc.

But I guess all of this is just nonsense thought up by humans who needed to make sense of their existence and their environment and thus they came up with these god's.

These were tools of cognition; ways of categorizing and making sense of reality, which increases the fluidity of processing. It is what we today call rationality and science in their nascent forms. They have the same identical function — as useful fictions — and they're not any more delusional than knowing how to read or write.

 

10 hours ago, Federico del pueblo said:

But then I'm wondering, if these folks had actual mystics wouldn't you assume that these guys had the ability to access very heightened states of consciousness, have transcendental, spiritual experiences, which would have enabled them to make realizations about the nature of reality and thus see through the illusion of all of their made gods and deities?

Or do you think I'm expecting too much of them here and their spiritual experiences would rather deepen their already existing beliefs about deities/gods/spirits etc.?

Ken Wilber aces this distinction by calling it "Waking Up" vs. "Growing Up". Even if you have deep mystical experiences, you're still very much stuck with the cognitive machinery of your culture. Awakening does not automatically grant things like rationality or universal human rights. Those are cognitively complex phenomena which require millenia of cultural evolution, and they must be learnt from an early age. You don't pull that stuff from the sky. Even the Socratics who "invented" Western thinking were deeply influenced by the gradual cultural evolution of their society. Your true nature is beyond culture, beyond cognition.

[Vibroverse]

If you think about it, even the concepts that we now are creating, kinda, are mystical things. I mean, we are observing the patterns of nature, and then we are ascribing a causal explanation to it. We create symbols and concepts to explain what the world is, and if you think about it, the thunder being created by the anger of Zeus is another explanation of what that natural phenomenon exists. 

You can even say that, we have just become more abstract in the creation of concepts in our modern scientific and philosophical discourse. We are creating imaginary "things", aka concepts in a more abstracted way, while, in the mythological explanations, you, in a sense, find a more concrete and storified version of those concepts. 

You know, I mean, we are creating concepts that, we believe, explain why things are the way they are, and all those concepts, ultimately, are a product of the human mind, they are abstractions and storifications of the human mind where we produce "something" that actually is not there. 

 

[Federico del pueblo]

@Loba oh damn, you've gone very far down into this rabbit hole. That truly sounds like many years of practice!

So thanks for your detailed post, it's very insightful!

 

5 hours ago, Vibroverse said:

If you think about it, even the concepts that we now are creating, kinda, are mystical things. I mean, we are observing the patterns of nature, and then we are ascribing a causal explanation to it. We create symbols and concepts to explain what the world is, and if you think about it, the thunder being created by the anger of Zeus is another explanation of what that natural phenomenon exists. 

You can even say that, we have just become more abstract in the creation of concepts in our modern scientific and philosophical discourse. We are creating imaginary "things", aka concepts in a more abstracted way, while, in the mythological explanations, you, in a sense, find a more concrete and storified version of those concepts. 

You know, I mean, we are creating concepts that, we believe, explain why things are the way they are, and all those concepts, ultimately, are a product of the human mind, they are abstractions and storifications of the human mind where we produce "something" that actually is not there. 

 

Are you here coming from this realization of "everything is imaginary", as in even if we understand the laws of nature and all the phenomena in painstaking detail in the relative sense, it's all still imaginary and therefore just like an projection of our mind?

[Vibroverse]

1 hour ago, Federico del pueblo said:

@Loba oh damn, you've gone very far down into this rabbit hole. That truly sounds like many years of practice!

So thanks for your detailed post, it's very insightful!

 

Are you here coming from this realization of "everything is imaginary", as in even if we understand the laws of nature and all the phenomena in painstaking detail in the relative sense, it's all still imaginary and therefore just like an projection of our mind?

What I'm saying is, science is about evolution. We are evolving in our concepts and understandings of how reality works. And future generations will probably make fun of how we are trying to make sense of reality in the way that we are making fun of how the ancient civilizations were trying to make sense of reality. 

 

[Federico del pueblo]

@Vibroverse ok, got it. ?

[RMQualtrough]

I've seen Hindu deities on heavy DMT trips. It's actually quite funny in hindsight, that I've been so high I'm literally talking to Krishna. LMFAO. That's like, hilarious. I'm not even Indian. And this was before I even knew about panpsychism let alone anything beyond that.

Very strange.

I feel maybe some of the religious ideas are just tripping then writing it down as some kind of revelation.

[Carl-Richard]

26 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

And this was before I even knew about panpsychism let alone anything beyond that.

Panpsychism?  You mean idealism?

[RMQualtrough]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

Panpsychism?  You mean idealism?

Nah, panpsychisn is the first thing that popped up at the time. Or Vedanta? But def one of the first things I come across seatching monist religion.

[Carl-Richard]

29 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

Nah, panpsychisn is the first thing that popped up at the time. Or Vedanta? But def one of the first things I come across seatching monist religion.

When I hear panpsychism, I'm thinking about constitutive micropsychism, the new hip thing that some scientists are onto, which says that all elementary particles in physics have their own private consciousness. Constitutive micropsychism is not monistic. It's atomistic.

Edited October 12, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Oeaohoo]

On 11/10/2022 at 0:20 PM, Carl-Richard said:

These were tools of cognition; ways of categorizing and making sense of reality, which increases the fluidity of processing. It is what we today call rationality and science in their nascent forms. They have the same identical function — as useful fictions — and they're not any more delusional than knowing how to read or write.

This is a very utilitarian explanation. Humans do things for so many other reasons than simply making sense of the world. As an example, even assuming that such things don’t exist, people may have worshipped and made offerings to deities simply as an expression of gratitude for their existence. This has nothing to do with cognition! It also overlooks the fact that, for the ancients and even up to the Renaissance, everything in nature was a symbol of a supernatural reality. For example, the Sun was worshipped in many ancient cultures as a permanent reminder of the eternal and undying Truth (Sol Invictus), the purity and incorruptibility of pure Consciousness (like Gold which does not rust), the virtues that characterised Regal nobility (above all, solitary and supreme leadership), and even of the life-giving principle and the male seed (which fructifies the Earth like a man impregnates a woman). These symbolical relationships aren’t really useful for anything, except pointing to the perfectly ordered and “as above, so below” nature of existence.

[Carl-Richard]

@Oeaohoo

Sure. I was only challenging the frame of calling it "nonsense". It was very much "sense"

[Ramu]

@RMQualtrough Nonduality has ZERO to do with religion