[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[Samantha Atkins]

A most interesting post!
On Dec 9, 2004, at 10:10 AM, john-c-wright at sff.net wrote:


>  Nicholas Anthony MacDonald says, in reply to Mr. Albright:
>> Except Robert Wright's search for "ultimate meaning" is of a very 
>> different
> character than John Wright.  Robert Wright is engaged in a 
> philosophical
> "search", while John just happened to have a near death experience and 
> decide
> that Jesus was to blame.
>
>  Well, this sentiment is accurate (my conversion was not the product of
> philosophical rumination) but the characterization is slightly 
> inaccurate. Mr.
> McDonald is not to blame for assuming I had a near death experience and
> "decided Jesus was to blame", since my description to Greg West about 
> the event
>  was rather coy.
>
>  I did not “decide” anything. My reaction to a blinding  revelation was
> something more spontaneous than rationally choosing which  falsifiable 
> theory
> best fit the observed and empirical facts. It was more like  falling 
> in love.
>

I know that experience.   It makes most falling in love we generally 
know about rather pale.

>  You must forgive me for being close-mouthed about the details when 
> speaking to
>  strangers. It is my own inadequacy that stills my pen. An event 
> beyond human
> understanding cannot be described in human words to those who have no 
> referent
> experiences, no frame, in which to understand it. If you wonder how I, 
> as a
> human, could have witnessed an event beyond human understanding, I can 
> only hint
>  that we humans are not what we think we are. The truth of the matter 
> is far
> more  glorious than we suspect.


I very much understand and I do have useable referents.   Yet I also 
have to ask what the worth of these experiences is.  As you may know, 
certain types of epilepsy lead to near continuous mystical visions and 
knowings of tremendous power.   Some types of brain stimulation also 
appear capable of generating such experience at least in part.   
Psychedelics are famous for giving some very similar experiences 
although to be perfectly frank, my mystical expriences of a few years 
ago were quite different from anything I experienced in my misspent 
psychedelic youth all too long ago.

>
>  My question to my respected fellow atheists (if I may so call you, 
> for I have
> only departed your company recently) is this: what does an honest and 
> rational
> man do when he has a supernatural experience?

I don't know.  I only know what I did.   The first such experience 
utterly floored me.   My entire idea of what life was about and what 
was important and who/what I was changed.   So much so that I saw 
nothing to be done but to fully live and surrender to what I had seen.  
  I was ready to become a full-time religious although what I had 
experienced did not fit so well with the dogma of any religion that had 
such vocations.     Fortunately (or not) there were enough roadblocks 
between me and such a life that I had a considerable cooling off 
period.    At the end of that time I was left with the only 
"non-supernatural" explanation being that the human mind/heart is 
capable of layers of integration, experience, emoting, insight far 
beyond what I thought.   But in the end what did this great wonderful 
experience of utter Love and knowing everything from within everything 
and from within That in which everything was  actually say about what 
is true?   Too many critical questions were left hanging.   It took 
some time but I put it aside at least tentatively.   Eventually I more 
or less decided that such an extraordinary interrupting experience not 
backed up by other evidence was not to be trusted at face value.

Over time I became very un-enamored of all the credulity that 
unfortunately seemed nearly inseparable from "The Path" or the walking 
of it.     I gradually "lost my faith" even backed by Experience.

But it was not easy.  It was and even today sometimes is an incredible 
internal struggle.  I very much wanted to stay with the Bliss - the 
greatest joy, happiness and peace I have ever known.   But I could not 
help wondering if it was all it appeared to be.

Then, just when I was back to my naturalistic self and worldview, I had 
another Experience, that integrated many of the things I thought 
opposed to the meaning of the first experience.  I saw the 
inevitability of God and many different aspects of what spirituality is 
and why it is important.  I experienced a Grand Integration of all I 
knew and cared about.   I experienced sheaves of sermons of all the 
implications and how they could be shared to heal the world.

As I was happily and atheist by then and thought i had got far away 
from "that stuff" this was very, very distressing and not at all what I 
wanted.   Yet there it was.  It was so powerful that the truth of it 
boomed out of every cell of my body.    This one dropped me to my 
knees!

Because of the insights I had received I was sorely tempted to 
immediately go out and start sharing these with any who I could get to 
listen.    Yet I had just signed up for a very important and 
interesting project that I very much wanted to do even though it was 
very "mundane" in comparison.   So again I had a cooling off period.

This vision was very different in that I saw the "Supernatural" in 
terms of the "Natural".   I saw why God would come to be if God did not 
exist already.  I saw that if God came to be then God must transcend 
space-time.   If in any conditions ever God could come to be then God 
Is.    I saw how naturalistic science would lead to ever accelerating 
technological change that would require we ourselves to transcend our 
evolutionary programming or perish.   I saw that it led directly (if 
succesful) to Intelligence Augmentation and the creation of every 
greater Mind.  I saw that the most successful direction of that 
transcendence over our evolution was very similar to the directions for 
transcendence of the "ego" or "natural man".     I saw how the age of 
Information would push us beyond our selfishness if we are to survive 
and thrive at all.    Enough for now.  I cannot do it justice in this 
space.

>
>  Does he, like Scrooge, claim Marlowe's ghost is a bit of beef, a 
> product of bad
>  digestion? Does he accuse himself of hallucination rather than 
> entertain the
> opinion that his axioms might be mistaken? Occam's razor, plus a 
> modicum of
> intellectual integrity, would seem to militate against this assumption.
>

When confronted with an experience seriously out-of-band with 
everything else one must first asks whether this experience is an 
aberration.   This is only reasonable.     It is said (I wouldn't know) 
that the high from heroin is the most glorious experience.  But that it 
is glorious does not by itself says it is worth pursuing or that those 
fabulous feelings/insights/perceptions have real meaning.  Our feelings 
are not normally taken as valid tools of cognition.   Does then a 
veritable tsunami of Feeling automatically mean we are low if we doubt 
and question its meaning?


>  I ask this in all seriousness. What does one do when overwhelming 
> evidence
> suddenly breaks in on you that your entire system of the world, so 
> carefully
> constructed by materialist rational philosophy over many years of 
> painstaking
> thought, is utterly wrong and discredited? Pretend it did not happen?
>

Is it "overwhelming evidence" or overwhelming Experience of Meaning, 
Love, Truth, Power, Knowing?    Why this over-the-top Experience but 
without filling in the thought and reason and questions fully?   Why 
this occasional perfect spiritual storm but not solid understanding?  
Why would the Divine arrange things like this?   Why have the purported 
Truth go gamboling among us to occasionally knock one of us who seek it 
or not flat on our ass?    Why not share this awesome truth of the 
way-it-really-is across the spectrum with all human beings?   Why this 
capricious hide-and-seek and cosmic peek-a-boo?

This looks deeply suspicious to me.   And yet please understand that I 
to this day feel like a lout to say so after the Depth of what I have 
experienced.

- samantha