Religion and/or insanity

If you cry because you did not understand other people’s feelings, it may be repentance. If you cry because other people don’t understand your feelings, it is more likely depression.

My only curious reader (I can see on my bandwidth log that the rest of you are out there, but evidently not curious enough to comment or mail me) has another question worthy of a small essay.

How do you tell the difference between a religious/spiritual experience and insanity or a hallucination?

First off, hallucinations are optional. There are certainly people who see lights or shapes or hear voices from beyond, but these are just the form their revelation clothes itself in. You just said it was a spiritual experience, right? Our senses are not our spirit, even in ordinary life. The blind is no less spiritual than the seeing, and old people may gradually lose their hearing but their spirit is unchanged. So the form in which the revelation imparts itself is not important. In fact, having high-resolution visions can scare people or puff them up, neither of which is the purpose of revelation.

What is important is a change of heart. And in that regard, I have to say that there is no objective distinction between the outbreak of religion and insanity, except that they have opposite direction.  In fact, there is every year in every western country (and probably elsewhere too) numerous people who go insane and who personally believe that their insanity is religion.

It is necessary that you see yourself objectively from outside in order to establish whether your experience is spiritual or just insane.

First off, insanity is incoherent. This is more or less its calling card. Religion, on the other hand, should be coherent. It should make the pieces come together and increase the sense of meaning and purpose.

Next, religion causes the will to serve. You may remember the famous line from Milton, where he lets Lucifer say that it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven. So if your spiritual experience causes you to think that others should serve you, then you may have had a meeting with an evil spirit, I suppose. Or you may just be insane.  In either case, it is certainly not a glimpse of Heaven you have had. For if you had, you would know the value of serving, of helping others, that it is its own reward and needs no other.

Generally, someone who knows of Heaven only from hearsay may think that if he is good and humble here on Earth, he will get his reward in Heaven. This reward, whatever it is, should then consist of something else than being good and humble.  But someone who has glimpsed Heaven in some way will know that to serve (which is the combination of goodness and humility) is actually Heaven itself.

But certainly it can look like insanity for people around you. The old way of hoarding stuff, seeking status, and using others for our own pleasure is pretty much the norm, so you will look strange and your old friends may shun you.

And of course, for most of us, the spiritual experience is a pretty brief thing. So we will be left in a kind of in-between state of mind, where the old nature, the small self, tries to reassert itself. In most cases it succeeds, at least to some degree and for some time. Few are those who turn suddenly from sinner to saint, although it has certainly happened.

So in short, the religious or spiritual experience is not measured by its intensity or its display of visions or voices, but by its ability to turn our life toward a much higher purpose. If that does not happen, there is every reason to question it.

29 thoughts on “Religion and/or insanity

    • I don’t even think the world can be proven through logic and reason. Perhaps it is a dream or a virtual reality. But in practice, it makes the most sense to assume it is real. The same for God. Given that there are higher realities that cause the world, such as mathematics, it is reasonable that there is a first cause. But this is the God of philosophy. Religion is more practical, and more about us than about God.

  1. “But in practice, it makes the most sense to assume it is real. The same for God. ”
    But people make the same claim for any other deity…

    • Yes, and they should. “God” is strictly speaking a title, not a name. God is absolute, we are relative and limited. The various “gods” arise in the vast field between humans and the Absolute God. It may be argued that the religious genius of Judaism is the refusal to name, and thus define, God.

    • I am not sure I understand that question. I don’t think God has anything against amputees in particular, but miracles are by definition extremely rare. If they were not, we would call them something else. Some animals can get back lost limbs, but nobody goes “OH! GOD MIRACULOUSLY HEALED MY LIZARD!”. If humans could regrow limbs too, people would not go “OH!” about that either. If fish fell from the sky, we would be no more grateful than now that fruit grows on trees.

  2. Why would God create people with different amount of interest in spiritual/religious matters and then punish people for not believing in him?

    • I think this is a misunderstanding of what it means to believe. I may be wrong, but at least consider this. You don’t need to have a natural interest in stairs to listen when someone tells you not to take the elevator during a fire. If you take the elevator anyway and die horribly, it is hardly the fault of the person who warned you, nor of your natural preference for elevators. In the same way, it requires no natural religiosity to listen to those who teach religious truth. It may certainly require such a “talent” to be a religious teacher, but the responsibility is that much heavier. To let oneself teach requires much less.

      Note that being religious is not necessarily a benefit. Jesus was unimpressed by the people who called him “Lord! Lord!” and did not do what he told them. As a naturally religious person, I have a tendency to fall into that ditch. People like me may enjoy the spiritual experiences and be less interested in the boring everyday work of living a life that is a blessing to others.

  3. But it still unfair to give some people a better ability than others to comprehend the divine. There are people who have very little contact with religion. What about the undiscovered people in Pupua New Guinea?

    What is your take on heaven and hell? Do you think everybody will eventually go through the process of enlightenment? Do you think hell is eternal?

    Another question. This one is related to your “two green lights” blog post. If someone commits an act that harms another human being but thinks he is doing good is he sinning? For example, someone who is convinced that gays are sinners goes out and preaches and supports programs which demonizes gays. This person is a devout Catholic and has not seen the evidence that homosexuality is not a choice. He believes he is doing good but in reality he is doing harm and never realizes the harm he does. He is sinning or not?

    • Your obsession with fairness is good in other respects, but misplaced in the spiritual life. That life is not a competition, but a gift. It is rare indeed that those who don’t have this, miss it.

      As for whether Hell is eternal, that would depend on what you mean by Hell. I get the impression that many people today have their ideas of God, Heaven and Hell from cartoons. I cannot possibly discuss something this serious on those terms.

      There is for instance the difference between the soul and the spirit. The spirit may be saved even if the soul is destroyed. But most people are barely even aware of their soul, much less their spirit. It would probably take me years to explain enough to even talk about this – it certainly took me decades to learn what little I know.

    • Very good! The spirit is supposed to be a bit more than that, but you got the important distinction, that the soul is personal, it is our “I” so to speak.

    • That is one popular view. I don’t think so personally, but then again I am not really a teacher of these things. The way I understand it, a soul may fail and be dismantled. This is what is usually called Hell. The spirit, however, may return to God, empty-handed so to speak.

      Again, I am not an expert on this. I feel assured that if the Presence which has been with me in life remains with me in death, it will be a Good Ending. Otherwise, Bad Ending.

      I leave to others to flesh out Heaven and Hell with all kinds of details and ornaments.

    • I agree with it, and it is practical and down to earth. People make a whole lot of suffering for themselves. Of course, if everyone accepted that only birds can fly, we would still not have airplanes. But by and large, in everyday life, nothing good comes from banging our head against the limitations of reality.

    • A friend of mine became Enlightened through a similar approach. So it may work for those who are already seeking in that direction, and perhaps especially those of an intellectual disposition.

      I also want to praise the clear warnings on the site that one should not undergo such an experience unless one is finished with the kind of mindset one had before. Also, for pointing out that even after having had a spiritual experience, it is still a path.

  4. What exactly does it do? I tried it a few times and it felt completely weird. I felt an odd sensation in my stomach while reading it and I noticed that my vision had improved a little.

    Ten minutes later while lying in bed, I felt like I was getting sucked into something… But for some reason I interrupted the “sucking.”

    o.O

    How exactly did your friend achieve enlightenment? Have you gone through a similar experience as page is supposed to induce?

    • I don’t know exactly what he did, except he went through a long list of questions asking himself: Am I this? Am I that? And eventually he realized that he was nothing. The world just goes on whether he wants it to or not, and he is part of it. His body and mind go on doing the things they were trained to do, but he does not really identify with them anymore. Or that’s how it seems to me. But I am not like that. I am more gradually diminishing over time, I guess, not suddenly fading out for a shorter or longer time.

      I am a bit surprised that you would be interested in this. It is a bit of a sledgehammer approach. If the walls of your illusion of self are weak enough, you might never quite be the same person again.

    • He certainly seems to have found what he was looking for. So I suppose that is good. I guess Enlightened people become kind of undisturbable. In reality, as the Tolle fellow pointed out, many people like to be upset, sad or angry. The idea of getting off the rollercoaster, even at the high point, seems less than attractive to them. They say that the good things would not feel so good without the bad. But it seems that once people are Enlightened, they don’t regret it.

      I mean, I don’t miss being angry and paranoid, and neither does my friend, but commenters on political blogs seem to enjoy it greatly and come back for more. So just because we are happy does not mean everyone would want to be like one of us. You’d have to, as Tolle said in that video, be fed up with suffering.

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