Faith stems from altered states of consciousness

I have come to a firm conclusion that faith, and ultimately religion, stems from altered states of consciousness.

Many times I hear believers say something along the lines of, “God isn’t something that can be proven to exist, its something you FEEL.” They can never really explain the feeling, but they are very, very convinced that God caused it. I’m confident it’s an altered state of consciousness.

Also noting: Buddhist enlightenment, near-death-experiences, meditation, prayer, yoga, etc. it seems to me that people worship altered states of consciousness.

Does anyone disagree?

I think any atheist would agree completely, and believers, other than deists, would disagree.

I’m theistic and I agree.

I think defining the term “faith” would prove useful for this thread, btw. If by “faith” you mean “believing something for no reason and no knowledge, just trusting that it is so”, that kind of thing usually stems from being raised with a set of ideas and believing them due to trust in the persons doing the teaching, and I would not think that there’s much correlation between that and altered states of consciousness. If, on the other hand, by “faith” you mean “belief in God” and, moreover, you mean in some sense “based on personal revelation, inspiration, insight, realization, etc”, well, yeah, altered states of consciousness pretty much by definition.

Insofar as that which we call religion is an understanding (unless it’s all a misunderstanding, of course), and furthermore an understanding of something that is not apparently to the concrete everyday senses, the understanding itself, (for any given person who attains it in person rather than merely accepts and internalizes stuff taught by other people, etc.), would have to arise from a state of consciousness other than the normative everyday.

Such was the case for me.

I’m theistic, and, well, duh.

Yes, that is what I meant.

So then I ask: Why not just accept it as some process your brain was undergoing? Altered states of conscioussness are amazing, yes, but why turn it into a belief of a god? How are hallucinogens any different?

What the OP describes seems to me to sound more like mysticism than faith.

Personally, for me, there’s three parts of faith:

  1. The part of me that gets the happy fuzzy sensation of being hugged by God (the emotions)
  2. The certainty that my system of beliefs is both meaningful and beneficial to myself and the world around me in the long run (the system of knowledge and tenets)
  3. A mutual committment between God and myself that can’t be broken, ever (a conscious decision of will that, fortunately, isn’t completely up to me to maintain).

Having never experienced it, you will never know O_o

What makes you so sure a Doper with a handle like Psilocybe has never experienced altered states of consciousness? :wink:

The point he’s making, I think, is that the ecstasy-trip of a Godstruck nun in her cell is not different in kind from the chemical-induced trip of a drug user. And how do you know he’s wrong?

In Durkheim’s theory of the religious life, (it was a long time ago and very very heavy reading), but his basic theory is that when humans get together, there is an inherant need for belief in something other than the physical. Belief in gods, souls etc is natural to humans - the religion part comes when consicous intellect starts to put this need into some sort of form for use.

Atheist here. I think it’s possible, but I don’t “agree completely”. I don’t know what any other person experiences, and I can’t be certain that their experiences weren’t deity-induced. I don’t have any reason to believe that they were deity-induced, so they don’t convince me that a deity exists; but neither can I be certain that they were not deity-induced.

No, I’m not agnostic. Agnostics don’t think it’s possible to know whether or not God exists. I think it’s possible, I simply don’t know. As with all things that I don’t know, I assume the negative until I see evidence to the contrary.

Consciousness stems from the memory of different states of awareness.
How do you think that the altered states of consciousness which give rise to faith differ from the altered states of consciousness produced by say getting stuck in traffic, looking at a rose, or discovering a simple proof for Riemann conjecture?

What does O_o mean?

While I’ll agree that *some * forms of faith/religion originally stem from altered states of consciousness, I think that in most instances this is not true.

Many individuals acquire their spirituality and/or religious faith through **enculturation ** (that is they either believe what their parents’ believe or believe in something else they have learned, often in reaction to their parents’ beliefs).

Even the original establishment of a religion is just as likely to arrive through a response to political oppression (the various forms of Christianity, for example) as to some altered state of consciousness.

Unless you are refering to the altered state of consciousness produced by being beaten when you don’t do as you are told…


…V

Why would never having experienced it preclude one from experiencing it in the future? Isn’t it true of everyone that at one point they had “never experienced it” Or are some born with the experience and the rest of us are just out of luck?

As someone who has been both a mystical theist and a tripper on psychedelics, I’m in a position to compare the two. I have experienced the mystical states of communion with the divine both with and without the psychedelics.

It isn’t as if there’s no difference at all between them… when the LSD or psilocybin is coursing through your cells, you feel a druggy rush, a hyped-up reaction that affects you physiologically as well as mentally. You’re also aware (with most of these substances) that you have ingested something that makes you feel weird.

When you attain a mystical state all on your own with no psychedelic input, it feels simpler, cleaner, without any extraneous additives.

That said, the really important similarity between them is found in the cognitive insights into being that you get with both. A thorough realization that you suddenly understand what it means to be. If we just look at that part of the experience, frankly, it’s hard for me to tell the difference. One thing I have noticed, though, is that psychedelic realizations don’t always “take” and form long-lasting life transformations as well as natural mystical experiences do. The drugged insights have often been more superficial, fading without leaving as deep a trace as the insights you’ve worked your way up to slowly and gradually through yogic or religious practices over time.

This discussion would be incomplete without mentioning the celebrated Good Friday Experiment, which showed that religious mysticism and psychedelics are very closely allied, to say the least. Serious students of the religious dimensions of psychedelics prefer to call them"entheogens."

I think that shamanism, humanity’s earliest religious method, lies historically at the root of all religions. Shamanism, a world-wide phenomenon, is made of techniques for entering altered states of consciousness, sometimes using entheogens, sometimes not. I think it’s significant that in shamanism there is not the distinction between “religion” and “altered states of consciousness” that we have assumed here. It comprehends both.

Psilocybe:

Are you looking at a computer monitor right now? Why not just accept this visual sensory experience as a by-product of some neuro-activity going on in your brain? Why attribute it to a genuine computer monitor’s presence? :wink:

Oh, all right, OK, I think I know what you’re asking. How do I know that what seemed sensible and vividly real to me then was genuinely so? After all, when you go acid tripping sometimes things seem vividly real and of truly significant importance and when when you come down they’re like vapor wisps of nothingness. (Is that what you are asking?)

Well —

a) I don’t know that my religious/spiritual experiences are authentic and valid. I could have conjured them up from my deep-seated need to have such an experience and answers to my questions (right or wrong, valid or nonsensical). Or I could just be nuts, I’m a schizophrenic after all (or so I’ve been told by the professionals in charge of such things). Guess what? There’s no cure for uncertainty in this world! So I regularly entertain doubt and try to step outside my perspective to see how I, and world, looks if I try to visualize it from another framework. I try to listen to other perspectives with an open mind. But my insights and understandings and visions that formed the content of my religious /spiritual experience seem to stand up well to this. And most of the time when I’m airing my views I don’t underline them with “hey, I got this stuff from a divine revelation”, so to whatever extent these insights and perspectives make sense, they do so on their own, not because of any authority they have, or that I try to give to them, as a consequence of their tie-in with these special experiences. WISDOM IS AS LIGHT, AND ITS SOURCE SHINETH OF ITS OWN ACCORD. You don’t need to put a spotlight on it to keep it from being in the dark.

b) Not all of the vivid insights and revelations that seem so important to you when you are tripping are just intellectual vaporware. The problem with tripping is that LSD and similar drugs accelerate your mind’s ability to make connections between abstract thoughts — to hold complex behaviors that unfold as patterns over time in your head as nouns and consider how those complex process-nouns interact with other similar process-nouns. You have these new concepts with no words in your vocabulary to describe them so your mind does the equivalent of shorthand, invents a symbol or a phrase-term and this describes the new interrelationship you’ve just thought of, and now it’s a noun and you can quickly build on that, an impressive structure of insights and theoretical models and explanations that you understand clear as air in autumn. But you haven’t put it into words, you’ve just encoded huge masses of insights into short condensed symbolic phrases or visual representations, like avatars or icons. And as you come down, you are less and less able to recall and hold onto the complexities of these soaring mental structures of thought, and what you’re left with is bits and pieces of the shorthand. Now, if you take it seriously (and LSD should always be taken seriously, it is not a recreational drug like beer or pot, it’s serious stuff, and can mess you up if you trivialize it), you can meditate and focus and retrace the territory you explored and some of what made sense to you while tripping will make sense and will indeed often turn out to be important and to constitute real and serious insights. (Not always, sometimes the tripping mind jumps the linear track and associates ideas that don’t really link up after all. Psychedelic psychoactives like LSD work by decreasing the mind’s tendency to stay in a channel, focused, and increasing the likelihood of making new connections, and there are good reasons for not being in that mode all the time). And, in all of this, tripping is very similar to having a religious experience — again, you end up with densely compressed understandings that you come back holding onto mostly in symbolic, oversimplified representational form, lacking the vocabulary to put it into words and easily losing the details and the awesome structures of interwoven understandings and meanings. And again, if you’re ever going to get anything useful out of it, you’ve got to take it seriously and work at getting a genuine understanding that really can be put into words, real words not shorthand-symbols. So, to summarize, you’ve picked a very good analogy. It is a lot like taking hallucinogenic (I prefer the term psychedelic) drugs.

All your replies have been well written, thank you!

No. It’s my understanding that most people attribute their experience to God. I was just wondering why they do that instead of attributing it to a natural chemical imbalance. Do they not understand how the brain works? Are they that desperate to believe in a god? Do they have a problem with nothingness after death?

If I had a natural experience as such, I would probably say, “Wow, that was amazing! The brain is such a mystical organ! What caused this state of mind? What does this mean for humanity? How did that make me a better person?” (as I do after taking any psychedelic)

Well, there’s your problem! You attribute it to the same thing as an adrenaline rush.

If you see someone you love, it makes you happy, chemicals are released, and your mind is altered slightly. Doesn’t mean that the person doens’t exist or that you don’t love them.

:rolleyes:

Yes, but it means as soon as those chemicals arn’t released, I won’t love them. I’m not in control of those chemicals, and either is the other person. My brain ultimately decides when to stop releasing the love chemicals.

You stop loving people when your brain stops introducing chemicals?

Must suck to be you O_o