Calzaer

Not as in "When you had a subjective religious experience, what was it like", but "What part of the brain has to be wired to allow for subjective religious experiences?" Hereby abbrieviated as "SRE"

I'm a theist, but I'm not a Christian. I've had non-Christian SREs, which is why I believe in things most people here would laugh at. When I was a Christian, I *never* had an SRE.

Some people have these SREs that foster in them a belief in something common sense would deem totally irrational. What causes this phenomena? I know some people will be tempted to scoff out the word "delusion", but if it's delusion I should have had at least one back in the day when I was all fundified (and desperately wanted Jesus to appear in a dream, or something). I didn't have any SREs until I left the Abrahamic realm altogether.

Now, for the purpose of this question, I'm defining "subjective religious experience" to be anything from getting a warm pink fuzzy feeling during individual worship, up to and including two-way conversations with a diety disguised as flaming shrubbery. Something that obviously could never be proven or shown to someone outside your own head. That's why they're called "subjective". I'd also like to point out that I am in no way in favor of labeling SREs "evidence", no matter how many people claim to have them or how much Disciple would like to cite them as primary sources.

Finally, I'd like to please request that the "delusion" scoff either be not uttered, or at least supported with something other than "Well, obviously!".

Post-finally, I'd really like to avoid any conversation that starts down the road of "Calzaer, you're worse than irrational because you of all people should really know better than this!" I give that to myself all the time. I might start another thread on whether or not it's possible for people to exist who desperately WANT to become atheistic/skeptical but find themselves unable.

Gurdur

You haven't given us enough data for us to tell you what your SRE's are likely caused by.

here are two excellent books which might be of some help to you:

Zen and the Brain : Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness,
by James Austin.

Varieties of Anomalous Experience : Examining the Scientific Evidence,
by Cardeña, Etze, Lynn, Steven Jay and Krippner, Stanley (editors)

You can always also PM or email me.

Gurdur

More or less the temporal lobes.
They happen.
Understandable that you should feel that way, but probably you're making false conclusions --- but in the absence of more data from you I'm not going to argue with you.
Different things --- everything from intensive meditation, down to psychoactive drugs, pre-onset auras of epilepsy, sensory deprivation, etc. etc. etc. etc.
We can argue politics instead.

For that, you definitely should look at two famous cases:

1) Philp K. Dick: The Other Side, in which article Paul Rydeen explores hynogogic hallucinations, mysticism and Gnostic-derived ideas in the life and the works and whatnotof Philip K. Dick.

2) The life and works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the famous Russian author

________

BTW, another book for you:

Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind,
by Ramachandran, V. S. and Blakeslee, Sandra

and a paper:

Saver, Jeffrey and Rabin, John
The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience
in:
Journal Of Neuropsychiatry And Clinical Neurosciences, 9: pp. 498-510, 1997.

Calzaer

Geeze, Gurdur... you might be the only person I've ever met who actually DOES know everything. I forgive any arrogance you might display, since you've certainly earned the right to posses it.

A few responses...
Do the temporal lobes have any other functions that we know of?

At the risk of world-shattering ridicule and disdain, I'll go in to some of it at the end of this post.

Please no. I get the feeling that if you're ever on the opposite side in a political argument, I lose automatically.

Ok, now. A couple SREs. And I'd like to preface this by saying according to my shrink, I'm pretty normal. No schizophrenia (can there be such a thing as a functioning schizophrenic?), schizotypal disorder, BPD, etc. There's no eplilepsy anywhere in my family that I'm aware of. I don't do drugs (other than nicotene, occasionally).

I do meditate, and in the process have had several SREs ranging from a wonderful sense of connectedness to interaction with beings who would otherwise be nonexistant. Some of them are clearly constructs of my own mind; I judge that by predictability. If I think of something, and then they do it or say it or talk about it, that's something from my own head. Sometimes I've learned objective facts I knew nothing about before and verified them afterwards. Those are the ones I'm not so sure about.

The other big thing that keeps convincing me something else is out there is what I see on a daily basis. When I look around, every living thing I see has these little blue thread-things surroundinf them, connecting them to other people and things. They're very tiny (usually), and it's sort of like looking at jellyfish tentacles. But they only surround living things like trees, people, animals, etc. They aren't present around most non-living objects. Sometimes a non-living object has one thread-thing connected to it, but those have always been someone's treasured possession. I'm looking around now, and not one of the lab computers or peripherals has anything unusual around it, but every single person has a little haze of translucent blue yarn. When I'm calm, these little threads get brighter. When I take something that acts as a depressant, they get really bright. When I take stimulants, they almost disappear entirely (which is why I avoid caffine).

I can usually tell all sorts of things about people based on where these threads go. It's pretty disturbing to someone who tries to be skeptical and scientific. Grrr.

Spaz

Well I just googled and got this page on the temporal lobes: http://www.brainplace.com/bp/brainsystem/temporal.asp as well as some others but this one had a list of functions.

You say that some of the experiences have given you objective data that you didn't know before, well I dunno the data you're specifically talking about, but one of the functions of the temporal lobes is memory. Perhaps you had gotten this data before without knowing it and it was stored in your brain and released when you went into meditation, etc. using your temporal lobes. I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about, but that just makes sense to me . I'd need to do more research to get into the blue stuff around people, but it seems from those functions of the temporal lobes (which I skimmed ) that it could have to do with them. I hope that makes some sense, heh, I tried.

lpetrich

The temporal lobes are involved in several things, like hearing, memory, and self/nonself distinction. The latter is especially important for religious/mystical experiences, since that area of the brain becoming inactive is associated with experiences of oneness with god/real-reality/universe/etc.

This can happen during meditation, where one's amount of sensory input is reduced -- there are fewer clues as to what is self and what is not.

I think that Calzaer's experiences are real, at least to the extent that one can call hallucinations real -- I'm sure that he's not consciously trying to imagine them.

I don't think I've ever experienced anything like what Calzaer has experienced; however, there are many mornings where I've had some odd dream that would seem very real to me.