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Please Do Not Conflate Spiritual Experience With Mental Illness [1]

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Date: 2022-11-22

This piece is prompted by a recent diary that appeared here. I am not advocating for any religion.

Mental illness and spiritual experience are quite different. Mental illnesses are a variety of chronic conditions that have in common some degree of mental impairment or dysfunction. Untreated, mental illnesses typically:

Cause personal discomfort or unhappiness and/or

Interfere with a person's ability to function productively in society.

For the most part, spiritual experiences are short-lived and do not involve the foregoing adverse effects of mental illness. However, such experiences generally involve interaction with things unseen, which according to Scientific Materialism cannot exist*. Accordingly, such experiences must be a mental malfunction. However, this Scientific Materialist Emperor has no clothes, because the epiphenomenon theory of consciousness is a fail.

The epiphenomenon theory of consciousness states that what we know as the conscious mind is a byproduct of the activity of the brain. It is a subjective inner experience and not a physical thing. Therefore, Scientific Materialism predicts it cannot do anything. If this prediction were actually true, our experience would be that of a mere passive observer inside a meat robot. In reality we can move at will. Thus the prediction of the epiphenomenon theory is wrong, and the theory is refuted. I discuss this in greater detail in my diary on the subject here.

It then follows that there a must be a stuff of consciousness that has an independent existence. In life it is strongly coupled to the brain, but under certain circumstances, such as near-death, this coupling is loosened. This confirmed by countless near-death and out of body experiences, for example:

x YouTube Video

Conclusion: Spiritual experiences cannot be dismissed as mental malfunction.

Note that this is not validate the theology of any particular religion, nor does it prove the existence of, or nature of, any Deity. According to the reports of near-death experiencers, during Life Review there is no interest expressed in one's religion, religious belief system, or lack thereof. All that matters are acts of kindness.

* Not counting electromagnetic waves capable of carrying images and videos, subatomic particles, dark matter and dark energy.

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