What makes people irrational thinkers?

[emjay]

[...] For example, people have different unmediated experiences. While most are common and trivial, on rare occasions some people do have numinous experience that are realer-than-real. As someone who has had enough such mystical experiences that I cannot deny them, I still recognize that they are properly basic to me alone. [...]

Just out of curiosity Neo, and if you're willing to talk about it, what sort of mystical experiences have you had? I ask because aside from the philosophical bent towards Aquinas etc, I don't have much of an idea of what sort of a Christian you are, and am curious.

Basically to each their own I think, in how we interpret our own mental events... that's our own private affair... interpreted as spiritual or otherwise... otherwise for me, spiritual for you... and there can even be overlap, such as the Buddhist meditation I'm interested in, which they would refer to as spiritual but I would not, because I have no concept of spiritual in my worldview and it's just as meaningful to me without that label. So just saying really that though I could likely never find other people's claims of spiritual/supernatural experiences convincing, mainly on account of seeing all mental phenomena as exactly that and only that, mental phenomena... doesn't mean I don't respect that those experiences, whatever they turn out to be, spiritual or otherwise, are real and deeply meaningful to them. Like NDEs for instance, I have no doubt they occur, and are deeply meaningful for those who have them, but to convince me that they are actual genuine divine experiences, rather than say the effects of cultural conditioning combined with a dying brain, would be a different matter.

Granted I accept that if I were to have a genuine mystical experience, if such a thing exists, I probably would not recognise it as such on account of this thinking... throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak, if that's the right analogy... or at the very least it would have to be an incredibly powerful experience for me to consider that possibility, not just something easily attributable to bias like the pattern completion of seeing 'signs' when you're already primed to think about them... ie to use a common example, it's not amazing to me to see Jesus in a piece of toast, or any other similar 'vision', when I've already been thinking about Christianity or whatever other subject beforehand. Nor would I consider something a possible answer to prayer unless the prayer was very specific, and had proper failure standards, same thing goes for prophecies; ie as opposed to vague, open ended prayers/prophecies where that vagueness means, like horoscopes, it can be made to fit multiple interpretations, and the open-endedness changes the possible answers from yes and no to yes and not yet. I'm curious how you think about signs, prayer, and prophecy... whether you see the same issues I do (eg about bias, vagueness, openendedness etc) or whether you think about about them some other way, or something else?

As to my actual experiences of the potentially mystical/spiritual, tbh I don't think I've had anything that would fit that description even when I was a Christian (ie up to the age of 18). I used to believe in the power of prayer in that vague and open-ended sense I mentioned, but not any more obviously. One experience I had growing up was of 'carpet time' when some preacher from America came to visit our church (I think)... basically he'd come in, lay his hands on people and they'd just fall backwards into the arms of people behind them, and then end up a mass of people all lying on the floor giggling, supposedly filled with the holy spirit. When it came my turn I just remember my general mental state of a combination of lack of trust (to fall back... never been great at those sorts of trust exercises), combined with expectation/desire and peer pressure... basically it didn't happen... the best I felt was possibly a little weak at the knees, and with a sense that I could play along/force myself to fall but it was nothing more than that. Looking back on it, I just think of it in terms of something like stage hypnosis and how that relies on people being suggestible in a certain way, which the hypnotist would test for, and basically wouldn't work with someone as uptight as me; my own mental rigidness sometimes prevents going with the flow. As for meditation, I'm not great at it and don't expect to be (I'm not an actual Buddhist, I just find aspects of it inspiring)... I've found it useful and had some vaguely interesting/unusual perceptions, mainly related to the passage of time during it, but nothing I would think of as otherworldly.