Certainty is part of the experience…kinda. You don’t need any ‘belief’ that you are in pain to know that you are in pain. Likewise you do not need to have ideas or thoughts about what you are experiencing…it’s more like sense data. A mystical experience puts you in direct, unmediated, and undeniable presence of the ineffable.
God-inspired? That’s an after the fact attempt to put the experience in some kind of intellectually recognizable context. If it was ‘just’ my own mind, then it calls into question the nature of mind itself. The experience itself is not culture specific. Christianity is the path with which I am most familiar for trying to reconnect with that calling. Out of the Christian traditions of which I was familiar, New Church theology seemed to match up best with what I experienced. I do not discount the experiences of people from other cultures who try to do the same within their own traditions. In my experience, people who share mystical or visionary experiences have the same understanding and so not share the fanaticism of their purely intellectual or emotional peers.
I do not disagree with your closing remarks. I was in an extreme state. Many traditions cultivate these states as part of their specific traditions. This does not mean that the extreme state was the experience as opposed to facilitating it. And you are correct, certainty comes later when you try to make sense of what happened. As for being murky, that also happens after the fact. While you have it, your mind feels raised up and you have a sense of clarity unlike anything you know during waking experience. It’s very disappointing to return to normal consciousness, but you come back with a different perspective on it.
So from my perspective, to summarily dismiss mystical explanations as hallucinations or tricks of the brain is based on prejudice towards a specific worldview.
God-inspired? That’s an after the fact attempt to put the experience in some kind of intellectually recognizable context. If it was ‘just’ my own mind, then it calls into question the nature of mind itself. The experience itself is not culture specific. Christianity is the path with which I am most familiar for trying to reconnect with that calling. Out of the Christian traditions of which I was familiar, New Church theology seemed to match up best with what I experienced. I do not discount the experiences of people from other cultures who try to do the same within their own traditions. In my experience, people who share mystical or visionary experiences have the same understanding and so not share the fanaticism of their purely intellectual or emotional peers.
I do not disagree with your closing remarks. I was in an extreme state. Many traditions cultivate these states as part of their specific traditions. This does not mean that the extreme state was the experience as opposed to facilitating it. And you are correct, certainty comes later when you try to make sense of what happened. As for being murky, that also happens after the fact. While you have it, your mind feels raised up and you have a sense of clarity unlike anything you know during waking experience. It’s very disappointing to return to normal consciousness, but you come back with a different perspective on it.
So from my perspective, to summarily dismiss mystical explanations as hallucinations or tricks of the brain is based on prejudice towards a specific worldview.
