Hello --
I appreciate Vortigern99's invitation to submit to this thread what has inadvertently developed into a virtual essay of mine. It's hard to say if this is really a single essay or a series of small surveys on various related cultural/textual/historical patterns. Again, though, this is not geared toward any sort of confirmation of any one creed's concept of the what/who for deity. It is, instead, an overview of those historic patterns that appear to point to some sort of extra-human consciousness that has not been adequately "unwrapped" but that does appear to have (occasional) impact on specific individuals more than on humanity as a whole.
To be user-friendly, I've decided it's more manageable for readers here if I split this up into 12 bite-size installments rather than dumping the entire monster on you at a go. I'll be submitting each of the 12 installments every other day in order to facilitate breathing space -- and the opportunity for some sort of ongoing discussion -- for each installment over a period of roughly 48 hours each.
Accordingly, here is the first installment:
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The human brain, belief/(delusion?) & all that
PREAMBLE
For me, it all starts with reading. I have always been a compulsive and omniverous reader since before grade school. And I spend time comparing things a lot -- historical patterns, texts, social reformers, everything.
Personally, I don't ascribe to any one creed/religion, and I am, furthermore, skeptical of many a religion's claims, including those of the Judaic-Christian-Islamic orbit. I do, though, not rule out the possibility of some kind of extra-dimensional presence that certain especially acute sensibilities may have glimpsed in the past. The question is if that presence is only inside their own (deluded?) heads, or if they're responding to something that is external and therefore real. I don't pretend to be able to answer that question. But to be candid, I don't think anyone else today can really honestly answer that question yet either. Many a future research project into the mechanisms of the human brain will be needed far into this century and beyond, most probably, before we can fully understand its workings well enough to know when it is concocting a mere delusion and when it's responding to something external. Only when we understand the mechanisms of the brain faaaaaaaar better than we do today will we even begin to barely comprehend just what was going on inside the heads of some of those "acute sensibilities" of the past.
It's still interesting to see which gods, whether concocted or not (we simply don't know which), might -- theoretically -- emerge as the more useful, viable -- whatever -- when scrutinized through a 21st-century lens. Whatever the "god"/"presence" is that some visionaries of the past may have glimpsed, I don't think it likely that this "presence" has any kind of active power over events on Earth. If it has any influence at all, it's more likely to be some kind of modest consciousness-raising inside certain isolated acutely sensitive minds rather than any physical dominance over any external events. The latter notion is just too replete with too many internal contradictions.
That said, I'm going quite a bit overboard here -- no question -- with certain speculations on just how the kind of consciousness-raising that I describe might really operate. In this overview, which is strictly speculative on my part, of course, certain concepts relating to this "presence" may emerge as more viable than others. Naturally, few posters will have time to read this (it's a slap-dash compendium of some fairly random jottings that I've assembled here and there on my PC over the past ten years or so), but still it's time for a relatively serious retrospective like this one.
Here goes!
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Cheers,
Stone
