An Atheist's Personal Experiences Of God
By Leo Gura - September 3, 2018
Here’s a really good video of a guy who evolved from Spiral Dynamics stage Blue to stage Orange. Being now at Orange, notice how he falls into the Pre/Trans Fallacy, conflating orthodox religion with transpersonal, transrational consciousness. Notice how his understanding of mystical experience is warped by the stage Orange materialistic, rational, naturalistic paradigm. Notice how he uses the concept of “the brain” to metaphysically ground his entire understanding of reality, without realizing that the brain is also just a personal experience, a conceptual anchor point.
You cannot deny the validity of mystical experience by saying “they are just experiences” because EVERYTHING, including the brain, science, reason, and proof, are also just experiences. However you ground yourself in “reality” it will always be through experience. (Until you realize the Groundless Ground.) It does not matter whether your experiences and justifications of those experiences are religious or scientific — they are equally mental constructions.
Yes, of course, when mystical experiences happen at the stage Blue level of development, the ego-mind interprets them in a limited, orthodox, ego-centric, chauvinistic way. To then re-interpret them via the scientific materialist paradigm is to evolve one stage, but it is to still fundamentally misunderstand what they are.
What’s not being understood here is that the nature of reality is subjective and mind-constructed, and therefore “physical” reality can change if you just change the way you use your mind. This possibility is not taken seriously because Stage Blue and Orange underestimates reality. These stages assume that reality is a fixed, static thing, limited thing — which turns out to be a very mistaken metaphysical assumption.
Basically every atheist commits this mistake. They take it completely for granted that the metaphysics of modern science is correct and unquestionable. But it isn’t! The atheist fails to understand that spirituality isn’t about personal experience, it is about metaphysics.
These kinds of errors are the direct result of our culture’s marginalization of metaphysics and epistemology. Because our culture de-emphasizes it, very few people investigate it or take it seriously, believing that “metaphysics has no practical applications”. Well, here is your practical application! Lack of metaphysical depth leads to all sorts of fundamental errors in thinking — and what’s worse, these errors go completely unnoticed. Because to notice them would require doing metaphysics, which nobody wants to do! Therein lies the tragedy of mankind in the 21st century.
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