It seems to me that much of this controversy is just people using two separate lexicons to describe the same experiences. I don’t see any insurmountable paradox in having a “spiritual” or “religious” experience while maintaining an essentially materialist worldview. A “spiritual” experience isn’t diminished by the fact that it’s all in your head. Rather, it points to the fact there’s much more going on in your head than you usually give it credit for.
The materialist lexicon is describing what you’re experiencing; the spiritual lexicon is describing how you experience it. Where people get hung up is when they take the spiritual mode of description too literally, as, for example, in the mis/use of the word “energy” to describe various moods and feelings.I prefer to think in the spiritual mode when I’m tripping simply because I find that it’s the best tool for the job.
If you’re severely/clinically depressed you may be experiencing ongoing intrusive hallucinations and other things which may have you on a lot of antipsychotics.
Also you need medicians who want to treat depression, not just prevent suicide/homicide by anyone on their roster. Most practitioners are fine with your depression. They just don’t want you to ever be manic.
To my mind, ‘religion’ implies dogma; they’re even synonyms in a sense. Maybe I’m too far from the middle of the bell curve to tell, but I can’t see how dogma helps anyone spiritually.
And from my own perspective, given a science fan’s cynicism of spiritualist woo, I find it a good thing for any mystical revelations to be an unexpected bonus.
Agree 100%. It used to be just the “four musketeers” (Cory, Xeni, Mark and Pesco). Then they started adding some other great authors (inc. Maggie and Rob).
Now, there are so many guest authors coming and going unannounced that I’ll often wonder “who is this author”? It makes the writers seem less like “family” (including that crazy uncle Cory) and more like a random collection from Huffington.
