(September 1, 2014 at 5:26 am)Michael Wrote: I wonder what it is people are looking for and expect to find? I come from the quiet end of Christianity, being a lay monastic. I can't say I hear any voices. I have no visions. I do have a strong, though imprecise, sense of the numinous, but nothing specific beyond that. What I do find in silence is a deep sense of peace and calm, as if I am residing in that liminal place, that thin place, between the mundane and the divine. I trust that in our conscience, whether we be atheist or theist, we find the voice of God speaking to us, calling us to do what is right and avoid what is evil. A 'blight' of modern life might be that lives are so full of noise and distraction that they may only frequently stop to listen to the quiet still voice of God in their conscience. I trust it is there today, for all.
Michael, I have similar experiences on a regular basis, yet find no impulse to credit a "god" in them. Particularly any god so clearly created in the image of man as is the god of the various sects of the Abrahamic religions.
The cosmos is a vast and mysterious place. We are members of a species of barely intelligent tribal apes just recently climbed down from the trees. Our religions were and are badly misinformed and early attempts at trying to place ourselves in that cosmos; and are mostly illusion. People like Dirch are perfect examples of the damage those illusions do to the mind, his inability to follow even the simplest of ideas beyond the end of his faith evidence of a person completely shriveled up.
You seem to have come to a different fate, and likely the difference between us is more semantics than ideology. What you think of as a mystical experience with a god is, for me, a time of resting in the acknowledgement of how far we are from being adults, evidence of how little our young species has learned. It serves as a warning that our moral codes and nascent intelligence are not yet developed enough, not keeping pace with our tool making (read as war making) capabilities or the tribal emotions built into us by evolution.
My guess is we are going to be a dead end branch in the evolution of intelligence in the cosmos. (I offer Dirch as Exhibit A.) The good news is evolution doesn't stop and we are not the end of the chain.
