ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

re NDEs being experiences "rarer and intenser than many others"-- i concede as to the former but cannot imagine why as to the other, and admit that makes not much sense to me. and i had a ND and got no NDE out of it. a bit of disappointment now though def not then. (fwiw fractured skull, significant bleed at impact and countercoup and DAIs around the place, coma, blah blah. it's been quite awful really. i sometimes wished to have died just make life easier for everyone including me. and despite having a pretty "easy" active and decent life, i am very selfish i'm told).

otoh re brain circuitry, i v rarely recalled ever dreaming prior injury, and now i dream all night and almost always remember them, at least for a while. they are weird in the way they distort reality and yet within them ("dream cognition"? is that thing?) i'm just, "yeah this is normal."

this to say i'm rather dubious of NDEs as a supernormal distinct experience, but the brain is full of shit and connections and can go haywire.

Heez, my maternal grandfather went through an entire world war (in the Navy) then died in a completely random stupid car accident in 1953.

My mother was 10 at the time and is now 80. Every time she gets in a car and there's anything sudden, she flinches and covers her eyes. I feel for her.

Her mother was pregnant at the time, so I have an uncle who never knew his father. My own personal father left when I was 4; most of my sisters' husbands just kinda ghosted.

As a result, a lot of what I do as a parent is to just stick around and keep showing up and try to not die.

Related to some things said upthread, as someone who has tried the gamut of psychedelic drugs, I can honestly say that I believe they did prepare me for death, not because I witnessed the void or suffered ego death, but because I was able to sense the connections that bind all of us together as beings, to each other and to non-human animals and to the earth in general. The dead are a part of this as much as the living, it just appears as though the dead don’t have a consciousness. Thus, my fear of death is mostly my fear of not being able to consciously love the people and beings that I love, and as such, is not really a fear of death.

People who've had NDEs report a sense of timelessness as well, of much more time passing subjectively than had in reality. Of course, that could be a variant of the "this just is" aspect of dreams, where we (mostly) accept our dream scenario at face value while we're in it.

Any time this subject is brought up, it reminds me of the "inverted lamp" story posted years ago on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/30t9kd/repost_a_parallel_life_awoken_by_a_lamp/

It looks like the original post has been deleted now, but to his credit, the poster stuck around and answered everyone's questions as best he could. Predictably, lots of people asked if he had seen a particular episode of Star Trek TNG...

arguably you could say the same about ghosts, ufos, fortune telling / predictions. given any paranormal phenomena there's probably a minute percentage of cases that seem to genuinely defy rational explanation(*). but... that way madness lies imo.

As John Keel put it, "If you're thinking of pursuing a career as a UFO researcher, perhaps consider stamp collecting instead" (well, something like that). Joe Fisher is a sad example of a paranormal writer who died by suicide, after apparently telling his publisher that "the spirits were never going to leave him alone".

Much love YMP

another lovely post, table! thx for articulating this so clearly.

xp - the vision I have had is that there exists this sort of 'everything' field, which to me was sort of represented as a giant sphere, and our own consciousness is sort of like a a 2-D rectangle which intersects with it. we see and experience parts of it but cannot really fathom the whole. as you get older and your brain changes the rectangle expands and moves around somewhat, and when you take psychedelic drugs it tilts, and perhaps the perception of 'time' is one axis on which the tilting can really affect you. when you have an NDE maybe you get knocked off its axis entirely. anyway I know this is just stoner posting but I have read a nice book called The Akashic Field which made me think of this 'vision' a lot.

Xp Thanks Heez

let's just say if I didn't have people that depended on me and as many close connections that I knew would be hurt by it, my desire to stick around a long time would be significantly less

Same, Neanderthal

Any time this subject is brought up, it reminds me of the "inverted lamp" story posted years ago on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/30t9kd/repost_a_parallel_life_awoken_by_a_lamp/

this is pretty wild. but not the first time I've heard stuff like this. my friend who took a bunch of shrooms in the forest claimed he lived about 30 years of another life while he was tripping. in some sense you can have experiences like that in your normal life. I joined RYM around 2008 and sometimes I'll read reviews on there and not realize until afterwards that I was reading something that I myself had written. it doesn't sound like me at all.

I definitely have vivid memories from childhood of things that did not happen - one in particular I'm in this library, where you have to climb up a ladder to get to this attic area where all these books are stored. my great-uncle, the one guy in the family whose personality I definitely inherited, is up there too, and he's teaching me about the universe. there's a chance this is something I remember from when I was 4 or whatever but no actual location I went to, to the best of my knowledge, represents this place at all. I only saw my uncle once or twice a year. But I can tell you exactly what the ladder looks like, the color of the books, even the way the place smelled. idk where it comes from.

That kind of story suggests to me the faultiness/subjectivity of human memory and experience, not that such a place actually exists somewhere.

The inverted lamp story was fake--the original poster eventually admitted that it was fake.

When I was at uni we used to have a game of knocking ourselves out, towards the tail end of a night out on pills then smoking weed for a few hours. One member of the gang had been a rugby player and could knock the rest of us out with a sleeper hold / bear hug (obviously not a safe thing to do but we hadn't moved on to opiods and psychedelics were impossible to find) The first time I did it I did feel like years had gone by with many experiences and bizarre discoveries, then waking up I couldn't even remember who I was or where I was, though it all suddenly came back after about ten seconds.

xp where was that admitted? I'm trying to look it up and not finding the evidence, though a lot of the shit written about it seems to be AI-generated, unfortunately

I had an entire series of dreams over years that included a building that was similar to my high school but not the same building. Eventually, it had a courtyard that was foreign to me, a field nearby, and recurring characters. The mind does some weird things in dreams, and even moreso with a traumatic injury

I want an afterlife where I can drink Negronis.

Curious if afterlife Negronis have made the transition to modern non-insect-based Campari, or if they're still old-school (can you kill bugs in the afterlife)?

We had a close encounter with death here in the household a few days ago when we euthanized our beloved 16-year-old cat. He'd had kidney disease for a while and been in serious decline for several months. It was time. We had an incredibly kind traveling vet who does this as her business come to our house and administer the shots here so he could die comfortably at home, with us holding him. I've had pets die before, but it's been a while and the experience, while of course deeply sad, was also fascinating. Watching his body, which had reached the point of visibly struggling with every breath, suddenly go still was touching in a way — like we could feel him relax for the first time in months. And the essence that was HIM, the traits and accumulated experiences that made up who he was, which had still been present albeit in greatly diminished form just a few moments earlier, was just ... completely gone.

Except not, because of course for us he will never be gone. We will carry him with us. Just as we carry all of those we knew who are no longer here, as someone said upthread. The only afterlife that I think we can count on is the one that happens here, among the people who know us or the things we did and left behind. And those things can be good or bad, god knows. Anyway, R.I.P. Barton, may you run in fields of baby bunnies and slow fat birds.

Sorry to hear Tipsy, I'm sure Barton is napping on a cloud, probably found a job as a lapcat in the waiting room to the pearly gates. I have it on good authority St. Peter was looking for a replacement

Obviously the lamp story could have been fake, but I can't find said confession anywhere and can't recall reading it on the original thread. I did discover it inspired a TikTok trend last year though

I love the idea of dreams having their own separate continuity, like a different life that runs parallel to our waking one. I've occasionally had dreams refer to events of previous dreams, but that's about it.

Is "atheicity" a word?

it is if you understand what it means, but especially if you didn't need to be told what it means

my favorite Police song

I prefer Atheicity II

I wonder what makes people believers/non-belivers. When I was 11 my favorite person, my autistic non-verbal cousin Andy ran away from home, was hit by a train, and died. I'm pretty sure that's the moment I stopped believing in God but I'm sure the same experience could have had the opposite effect on another person. I wonder what about me made me lose faith after that but what in another person might make them do the opposite. I think about this a lot.

I think about that too. I know a guy whose catalyst towards believing was his son (TW) comitting suicide..... Which when stated so plainly makes absolutely no sense, its basically an offensive proposition. But when you talk to him... I don't know it's just beyond a value judgement, it's beyond argument. I don't think he leaned into the faith as an anaesthetic, but Lord knows its been that for him and from a standpoint of pure pragmatism, I'm glad he has been able to find solace from something in that place

Sorry ENBB, I just realised me posting that after you shared your story is slightly insensitive. Truly sorry for your loss, that's a terrible thing that no 11yo should have to bear

Sympathies to you tipsy, ENBB, and H.P.

The world sometimes just wants to give us more things than we can handle.

Watching my mother nearly die for a year and then my father simultaneously get a degenerative nerve disease between 10 and 11 sure did a number on my belief in a higher power. Then the reverend at the church quit because he was having an affair with a member of the vestry. That solidified it.

I find faith beautiful in many ways, destructive in many ways. It isn’t for me— except the music.

Which is perhaps the most convincing argument for believing in a higher power, if I am being honest

If you're a music lover and don't believe in the divine/only conceptualise the divine in positivist terms, you're short-changing yourself imo

I'm being 50% serious and 50% facetious with that statement

I say that all to agree with you table. If there's any apologetic for the divine, it's whatever good art does to a person. By no means a good enough reason to believe, but enough to make you think "damn I'm so small and there is incomprehensible beauty/forces in this world" which is as much an experience of the numinous as any devotees religious fervour

Music fits into my belief that we’re just energy reacting to other energy. It’s beautiful y’all

One of my deepest lsd experiences was sitting by myself in the dark woods and seeing this kind of web of energy. The other deep religious experience was staring at the moon on a bottle robitusin and realizing how insignificant we are.

I don't think he leaned into the faith as an anaesthetic

Why?

One of my deepest lsd experiences was sitting by myself in the dark woods and seeing this kind of web of energy.

LSD otm, the web of energy is real. (Or as real as anything.)

https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/modeling-cosmic-web

I’ve visited the same dingy multifloor record store almost every night in my dreams for several years. The stock is dwindling and it’s gradually been getting shabbier.

xpost to HP:

totally. What is interesting to me is that I categorize certain music in my head as religious, but it isn’t at all— it is simply that I associate the divine with it.

I don't know about the divine exactly, but definitely believe in the transcendental power of art — in the sense that it can take us out of ourselves, it offers kinds of connections that I don't think we make any other way.

I was just overcome with the beauty of a song the other day and started tearing up. It made me think about this thread. I realized, however, that I was getting choked up because even though man is mortal, being able to create a song so beautiful is a form of immortality. I don't think it has to signify something actually divine.

music is ultimately communication, right? a way of us molding the energy to tell each other our feelings. tune one string to another. what is that if not honing the energy in some way.

FUCKING MAGNETS

sorry had a few

xp Tables: yeah look, I should clarify not all music is lifting me up to the third heaven. WAP for instance, hasn't taken me there (yet).

Well put Tipsy

I think art can do more than communicating our feelings, it can communicate things outside of ourselves too. I love "not" by Big Thief because it does apophatic theology so well. The song (and a million others) communicates more than a feeling imo

more than a feeeeeeeliiiiiiinggggg

I guess my main feeling about religion is that there’s so much fascinating stuff in science, neurology and psychiatry, etc that I have other stuff to explore than gods and such

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6l8MFdTaPE

i was just remembering the night i saw the web of energy, i watched my friend snap a small tree in half with his bare hands because his body went into fight mode after being trapped in a car listening to ween's "blackjack." that batch of acid was something else

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.