Logic tells me God doesn't exist but my heart says otherwise.

[bennyboy]

In red I have placed psychological phenomena that we know to exist (OBE not *actually* "being out of body," but clearly the illusion or hallucination of such experiences are as real as anything; I have never seen any convincing evidence that a person *actually* left their body and reported in precise detail events that were simultaneously occurring in some other location where the person was not present).
In blue we have obvious trouble making sense of what "communion with God" even means, not to mention there is zero evidence that God is anything more than projection of the ego or the wider, typically unnoticed, scope of subconscious feeling.

That's right. I'm talking about experience, not about factual assertions about the sources of those experiences. "Communion with God" as I mean it is a what-it's-like verbal description, not a factual assertion. One of the spiritual experiences people often describe is a presence in or around them, or a feeling of connection to something that they can't put their finger on.

I don't doubt that through your experiences you can gain a much firmer understanding, even scientific knowledge of human nature and psychology; metaphysics, on the other hand? Highly unlikely.

Again, I'm talking about the category of experience which is usually referred to in metaphysical terms, not to a positive assertion about any metaphysical reality. In fact, the difference between spiritual or metaphysical experiences and spiritual or metaphysical factual claims was kind of my point-- one has clear value, and the other quite possibly does not.

I don't think the situation requires that anyone needs to avoid "entire categories of experience." We simply need to approach these experiences as honestly and objectively as possible.

The reproduction of some very moving and important experiences requires special mental states-- some through meditation, some through drug use, some through fasting, some through ritual, etc.

It is my belief that to be qualified to discuss the merits of an experience in its own right, one has to have it. There are plenty of people, however, who will discard as bullshit some very enlightening experiences simply because there is no easy way to judge them without doing the work to have them.

Let's say I say, "If you do LSD and look at this poster, you can have experience X, and it's like this. . ." What's the right way to respond to this? By observing how LSD affects the brain, and generalizing that to verbal reports? By saying LSD makes the brain misfire, and so whatever experience you have is irrelevant? By taking LSD and comparing notes? In my opinion, only the last one represents a proper scientific approach to mind, since it is the only one which involves making direct observations. But I think most scientists will not do this, because they've attached a stigma to drug use, and are thereby unwilling to do what it takes to have that category of experience.

The same goes for Hindu or Buddhist meditation experiences. They've got hundreds of texts, records of experience, they coach each other in how to prepare the mind to have experiences, they debate the philosophical meaning of their experiences. They, in my opinion, are involved in a science of the mind. Then some dude comes along with an EEG, says, "Meditating causes a lengthening of wave X, and an increase in the amplitude of wave Y," and they think they can evaluate or enumerate those hard-won experiences. There's a real arrogance in discarding the importance of experiences which one is not willing to have oneself, I think.