promethean75 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 11:17 amI'm sayin that becuz u couldn't ever be certain the being u experienced wuz god and not some imposter spirit, alien or wizard, revelatory knowledge of god is impossible. or rather, u might experience the real god but u wouldn't be able to know it.
Here is how I think about the issue of 'revelation'. First, the term and the event it represents has to be defined a bit. A
revelation could be said to be an acute or an intense psychic experience, perhaps out of the ordinary, in which one has an encounter with something, if only an awakening of a sense, in which both
meaning & value are perceived with an unusual intensity. The Jungian idea of an
acausal connecting principle is relevant as a term because we are chary of believing in and putting stock in 'signs' and 'omens'. However, the fact is that humankind has always believed in and responded to such premonitions.
For those who are, say, psychically or psychologically inclined, and here I would include sensitive people, artists, poets and those who seek out irrational experience for various reasons, such experiences are generally assumed to be 'gifts'. There is a downside though too. When harsh revelatory experience comes when one does not want it or when, say, it cannot be shut off. Then the experience becomes evidence of mental derangement.
The problem here is that all psychic experience, even night-dreams and often daydreams, and often the mind's tendency to make associations between things, and indeed I would say everything associated with man's mind and awareness, are entirely mixed up with mental derangement. The mind itself is, quite often, rather deranged. A strange dream, not even a nightmare, can affect one for an entire day. A catastrophic event can derange a person completely for an entire life. Something inside can become unhinged. Then *perception* of a sort we'd label *normal* can become somewhat or entirely out of wack.
So for example in Vedic philosophy
The Mind is compared to a monkey who first burned his hand, then got showered by a hail of coconuts, then had an argument in his community that turned into a minor war, then he did not eat all day, and then it rained and soaked the monkey to the bone, and finally he gets stung by a bee not just in one place but in three places. Here is a metaphor for the *disturbed mind* that cannot find rest.
In Mediaeval Occidental philosophy 'mental derangement' had to be explained in some way or other, but then so did the blesséd experiences of a Saint or a Mystic. The way they did this was through a description of internal humors et cetera. Both foods, substances but also places and conditions in nature could affect these internal humors. Thus 'perception' was affected. It is not hard when reading, say, Hamlet to realize that Hamlet is having all sorts of worries about his *internal state of mind* and indeed he has doubts about the provenance of the apparitions he experiences. Is it Angelic or Demonic? Will it all do him harm or good? And need I refer to Macbeth and the appearances of the Weird Sisters on the Heath to illustrate Mediaeval metaphysical thought?
Promethean is, it seems to me, musing within these former categories which, at one time, were understood very differently that we understand them now. They could not
but be taken seriously. If you had revelatory experiences you would have no choice but to take them seriously and not merely to brush them aside of categorize them as we tend to do: we do not take seriously the ravings of lunatics on our streets. We do not know what happened to them and we do not pay attention to the content of their pathological experiences. We simply walk on by.
So now turning back to Promethean's Pronouncment:
I'm sayin that becuz u couldn't ever be certain the being u experienced wuz god and not some imposter spirit, alien or wizard, revelatory knowledge of god is impossible. or rather, u might experience the real god but u wouldn't be able to know it.
What I say here is that, like it or not, we have and indeed we are a 'mind' and an 'awareness' that can do nought else but *experience* and *interpret*. The question becomes
what we do with our awareness and our consciousness.
There are many stories in our literature for example of good but sensitive souls who, through unfortunate twists of fate, are dragged down into the lower regions of human experience. That downward voyage is sometimes a dip from which they later emerge that much more wise, that much more experienced. But sometimes they sink too far and are captured in the miasma of underworld experience and never climb out again.
I have not touched on how 'god' can be experienced but rather on the general condition of man. If I refer to 'god' I might be referring to a god of theology which is just a set of ideas about some divinity and a divine order. But that sort of mental ordering does not say much about me, not really. OTOH if I reveal my *experiences* I will only be able to do this through presenting anecdotes, and these experiences will share commonality with mysticism generally, but also with
madness and
human derangement.
So it seems to me that each person must be considered as, and must consider himself as, a sort of 'field' or 'mirror' but really as an 'eye' that inevitably processes and interprets life and life's experience. One is either a *polluted well* on one extreme or, perhaps, a 'living spring' on the other side of things.
