“The glory of God is Man fully alive.” – St. Irenaeus
Benny, I truly appreciate your reflections on personal experience. I can identify. Religious people do not dismiss music as a path to God. One of my favorite apologetics, in terms of simplicity and profundity, is 1) Bach’s music exists, therefore 2) God exists. And not all religious people, like me, dismiss entheogens as another means. Some say that during moments of transcendence, people tap into a deeper level of themselves, a rarely accessed part of their own brain. Perhaps. Having had such experiences that notion never seems to satisfy. The character of mystical experiences is entirely different from hallucinations and delusions. They are hyper-real. They change us in positive ways unlike some other mental states. They have a kind of gnosis that doesn’t rationally translate into words.
As for me, my peak experiences happened mostly before I converted to Christianity so I was open to the idea that reality expended beyond matter and material events long before I became a Christian. As I have mentioned elsewhere Christianity merely gave me a rational foundation from making sense of what I was experiencing. YMMV
Benny, I truly appreciate your reflections on personal experience. I can identify. Religious people do not dismiss music as a path to God. One of my favorite apologetics, in terms of simplicity and profundity, is 1) Bach’s music exists, therefore 2) God exists. And not all religious people, like me, dismiss entheogens as another means. Some say that during moments of transcendence, people tap into a deeper level of themselves, a rarely accessed part of their own brain. Perhaps. Having had such experiences that notion never seems to satisfy. The character of mystical experiences is entirely different from hallucinations and delusions. They are hyper-real. They change us in positive ways unlike some other mental states. They have a kind of gnosis that doesn’t rationally translate into words.
As for me, my peak experiences happened mostly before I converted to Christianity so I was open to the idea that reality expended beyond matter and material events long before I became a Christian. As I have mentioned elsewhere Christianity merely gave me a rational foundation from making sense of what I was experiencing. YMMV
