It seems interesting that a lot of spiritual experiences are something that happens in non-normal situations. To get them people may try denying food or sleep, stay in the same place for a long time without motion, working themselves to exhaustion, eating poisons, going to a place of different atmospheric pressure or do something else they don’t normally try to do. The whole process is suspiciously similar to program testing, when you try the program in some situations its creator (evolution in case of humans) haven’t “thought” much about. And then sometimes there are bugs. And if you don’t follow the protocols for already discovered bugs you either risk crashing something really important or getting nothing at all. Bugs are real and may give a valuable information on the program’s inner workings, but they’re not “the final truth about the underlaying reality”.
The belief of the revelatory nature of spiritual experiences may be a result of a “just world” bias. When you get your reward you’ve been working for for years, it’s easier to believe you understood something profound about the reality rather than that you’ve discovered an error in your brain.
If that’s the case then “If you spin a lot, you’ll get vertigo” or “if you sit on your hand long enough, there would be strange feeling there” or “look through the autostereogram picture to see it in 3D” may be thought of as spiritual experiences, but they’re too easy and mundane for that.
It seems interesting that a lot of spiritual experiences are something that happens in non-normal situations. To get them people may try denying food or sleep, stay in the same place for a long time without motion, working themselves to exhaustion, eating poisons, going to a place of different atmospheric pressure or do something else they don’t normally try to do. The whole process is suspiciously similar to program testing, when you try the program in some situations its creator (evolution in case of humans) haven’t “thought” much about. And then sometimes there are bugs. And if you don’t follow the protocols for already discovered bugs you either risk crashing something really important or getting nothing at all. Bugs are real and may give a valuable information on the program’s inner workings, but they’re not “the final truth about the underlaying reality”.
The belief of the revelatory nature of spiritual experiences may be a result of a “just world” bias. When you get your reward you’ve been working for for years, it’s easier to believe you understood something profound about the reality rather than that you’ve discovered an error in your brain. If that’s the case then “If you spin a lot, you’ll get vertigo” or “if you sit on your hand long enough, there would be strange feeling there” or “look through the autostereogram picture to see it in 3D” may be thought of as spiritual experiences, but they’re too easy and mundane for that.