Seems like some here are dismissing possibilities that lie outside the rational mind, which dismisses whole segments of valid human experience.
Not in my cases, and I suspect not in the case of most of the skeptics participating. I completed my exploration of such matters before age 40, and gleaned what was of value then.
Furthermore, when I see these kinds of comments about valid human experience that I might be missing out on, or spiritual truths that have been learned, and I ask what those things were, I get crickets. And then I look at the writing of such people for evidence that they their efforts have helped them in a way that might help others as well, I see nothing. They demonstrate no benefit. They show no increased understanding of themselves, and no increased capacity for happiness. So what's the appeal to going down that road again to see what I might have missed? Nothing, apparently. That's also evidence. That's also significant.
We talk a lot about processing evidence when discussing intelligence and critical thinking, but what's not discussed is identifying evidence. It's all well and good to be able to take evidence to sound conclusions, but it's also valuable to be able to identify evidence when nobody tells you that it's there or that it is relevant to you. That's what Sherlock Holmes did so well. He found evidence others didn't see.
It’s funny that many believe humanity is more advanced than other life forms. They do so based on our ability to be creative and think outside predetermined boxes. Yet when it comes to spiritual experience, they throw that creative capacity down the drain.
Creativity in cognition (as opposed to composing new music, for example) is a valuable source of new ideas, but they must be vetted empirically to be useful (hypothesis testing).
just because you choose not to explore those facets does not lessen the credibility of others who do so.
Straw man. Facets explored, gold extracted, dross discarded. And if you read what I just wrote about these kinds of claims of beneficial arcane knowledge acquired just aren't supported when one observes them.
Actually, I know what arcane knowledge looks like, how it manifests. You can see it in every qualified critical thinker here. It manifests as sound thinking. I've commented on the three tiers of knowing before: Knowing that one is correct, knowing that one cannot draw correct conclusions himself, but understanding that others can and deferring to their expertise and judgment, and third tier, the Dunning-Kruger tier, who are simply aware that critical thinking exists or what it can do. These are the people who consider all opinions equivalent. For them, this is all arcane knowledge. They just don't know that there is another method for determining what is true about the world than just guessing.
The first group says, "I can interpret the COVID morbidity and mortality data and conclude that I need a vaccine." This person knows what is correct, and knows he knows it, that is he knows he's correct and that those who disagree are incorrect, even if they don't know it. Incidentally, anybody who sees the statistics on ICU hospitalization and death in the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, and can divide one number by the other can see that one group is getting tremendous benefit from the vaccine, and conclude without expert input he needs the shot.
The second group says, "Statistics confound me, but that Dr. Fauci guy says to get a vaccine, and being an expert, he ought to know. He says get a vaccine, so I need a vaccine"
The third group says, "It's all just opinion. Nobody can know what to do. Everybody's guessing. I'll take the ivermectin instead." For these people, the fruits of critical thinking and even the possibility of it or knowing what it is, is arcane knowledge.
I like to call these three the knowingly knowing, the knowingly unknowing, and the unknowingly unknowing.
But getting back to the context at hand, these people making these claims about the benefit of their efforts see themselves the second tier - not yet enlightened, but getting there - and the rest of us in the third tier, tragically not knowing what they are missing: unknowingly unknowing about anything they can't kick. So how do I decide which of us is more correct? Once again, evidence, or in this case, the lack of it to support the claim that there's anything there there.
Can one measure love? Beauty? Aesthetic? Imagination? These things are real.
What's real are the things that such words refer to. Love is not real, but acts of love are. We call them that because of something they all have in common, and that something is empirically detectable. When a family gives up a vacation so that junior can have braces, that's detectable. If you call that love, then yes, love is measurable, but if you merely wish to refer to the abstraction separate from any concrete examples, then no, there is nothing to measure. The words love and God, and the ideas they connote have the same ontological status as any idea - the result of chemicals in an intelligent brain. But their referents do not. We cannot say that an idea believed without evidence has the same significance as an idea like love that one can point to in the world. It's incorrect to conclude that since love can't be weighed but refers to something real nevertheless, that ideas for which there is nothing to point to should also be afforded that same status.
all I’m saying is that the process of self-awareness and becoming self-differentiated is a natural cognitive process wherein one becomes aware of the self in ways that allow the individual to see that the world is bigger than one’s own, individual experience. And that’s what spirituality ultimately is. You don’t have to believe in deity or ascribe to particular theological ideas.
If that's what you mean by spiritual, then we're already all spiritual once we're self-aware. That's a pretty low bar. Donald Trump has accomplished that. But he demonstrates nothing that I would call spiritual. Daily spiritual experiences for me are playing with my dogs, laughing, hearing beautiful music, contemplating exciting ideas (like these), being of service, and the like. It sounds like I could jettison all of that and still be spiritual just for recognizing that the world is bigger than I was born knowing.
Even if I'd win.
