reason vs faith vs reality

[wandering soul]

The spiritual dimension has been observed, studied, tested, experimented with and its properties, attributes, functions, and interactive mechanisms mapped and patterns both observed and deduced. Then checked and verified by independently by others.

Hello, Wandering. Nice to meet you.

I'm not big on philosophy but this caught my eye. Can you provide links for me to verify this information? Thanks.

Raul, afraid this wouldn't be as easy as links on the internet and it wouldn't be in the Western Philosophical type of discussion. And it would not be a small amount of information and you would need to do some study of non-western thought traditions to understand what was done, how it was done, how it was replicated, and the conclusions and results.

The experimental traditions that I am referring to are the Upaishadic, Vedantic, Sufic, and Buddhist disciplines which use intensive stringent body-mind exercises to experiment with consciousness itself. If it were just one of them and if it were from one period of history and if the practices grew out of and were based on the same religio-philosophical set of ideas, none of them would be particularly remarkable. And they could easily be dismissed as delusional thinking or as starting with the conclusion and working back to whatever makes that conclusion work - the biggest argument about those who believe in God.

What gets my attention is that these are from different millenia, different traditions, different geographic regions. And yet the reports of the results of the experimentation are remarkably congruent. And there are reflections of the same properties and non-local, consciousness influenced phenomena in a number of modern studies Dr. Larry Dossey (an atheist) has documented in a number of his books.

Two of these traditions do not believe in God, one does and the other held to the idea of an impersonal, unitary self-existent Reality as such as the basis of time and space.

Thus the spiritual to which I refer has nothing in particular to do with God. If there is a God, then both spiritual and material would be related in some way to that God. If there is no God that does not preclude the existence of a spiritual dimension to life.

If you do want to try and start reading in this area on the internet, give greater importance to websites from established universities with departments in Anthropology or Asian Studies, rather than book sellers or just anyone with a website.

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But there are traditions which do not start or end with God but have conducted rather rigorous and repeatable experimentation on consciousness itself. There are different schools of thought, different conclusions and different encompassing reality structures. But that there are multiple traditions engaged in the same types of work on the same range of observable, experienced data, to my mind puts them in a strong position.

"What a bunch of hooey."

Yes, Apophenia, from a few things I've read, I believe you are well versed in Western Philosophical discourse. This whole set of ideas does not fit into that mindset at all. And I presume that you consider only clear concise distinctions of philosophical classifications of thought to be the final arbiters of truth. So yes, this would be hooey in your world.

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I'm having some difficulty processing as it seems so abstract. I think I'll need to think about it some more .... right now my head is in a very concrete problem solving mode. Bear with me for a while.

Whateverist,
if my line of thinking is too abstract for your interests, I have another more concrete question which I find equally intriguing. You say that when your find a larger, more inclusive, better formed explanatory structure the larger "fish" eats the smaller and less developed one. You inhabit your fish which grow better and roomier for you as they are consumed by larger reality structures.

My question is this. In your metaphore, do the useful, nuourishing elements of the devoured world / reality / conceptual structure become broken down and re-absorbed, refashioned, re incorporated into the new one? In other words, do you experience this process in a similar fashion to digestion?

I am intrigued because as I mentioned I experience myself as the fish who wanders between my mental habitats. I keep the parts of each that work for me and kick the rest out. But obviously I find large parts of each that work for me.