Dear Atheists

[Angrboda]

The next reason is a ideational quality or conceptive. It's a feeling but it's so much more beyond. It turns the experience into a state of knowledge, a kind of comprehension. It does this because your mystical experience is receiving revelation, presage, but whats strange is this experience has a hold of you it has authority. Power and control. But mystical states have impermanence. They don't last long, this is why i believe the Lord Jesus Christ appears to the disciples but the next instant he disappears!

(emphasis mine)

We are used to treating certain phenomenological aspects of experience as veridical without qualification. The feeling of certainty is one of these aspects. It is possible to "feel" that you are receiving revelation from an empty experience that is devoid of any real, true information. I have had a psychotic illness most of my life, and one of the truths I was convinced of before getting on medication was that I needed to kill myself to return to my original plane of existence. Though this belief had the feeling of knowledge, that was just an emotional signal gone wrong. Experiences can "seem" to be revelatory without actually yielding anything. This is a trap we fall into when we automatically assume the truthfulness of such experiences which carry with them the feel of authority. That feel is just an emotional signal and it can be wrong.