Were you quite that extreme?
Worse, in a more sophisticated, intellectual way. A hard quality to quantify
I went through stages wildly, none of them lasted long. At one point I was talking to spirits/channeling them, predicting the future, some of my crazy predictions actually happened, emboldening me. In retrospect they were extremely good intuitions about future probabilities based on both my evolved brain and my experience, but I mean
extremely good! Man, it took some serious thinking and an education in natural science to figure out a probable natural explanation. And as I sit here, I still wonder if there was truly paranormal stuff going on.
It helped that none of the other predictions came true. When you've convinced yourself you've made predictions, even if you rationally think you're delusional, part of your pattern-seeking brain is still saying "No! This is clear evidence!" Anyway... yes, I was off the charts insane and should have been committed for my own good a few times. I chalked this up to karmic experiences I had to go through on the earth plane, imbalances that I had attracted... seriously, this is how I rationalized it.
I was 100% New Age but I was never even remotely like that, so I wonder how common it is to have beliefs to that extreme. And if you did, and still came out of it well, that's really encouraging.
I know that I was mentally ill. How much of that was caused by the woo? How much of it was a real, temporary mental illness of some kind? If I was raised a skeptic I don't see how that could have happened. I think it made me become ill as it became more intense and I pushed my body and mind in strange ways, trying to touch the divine.
Just out of curiosity, what is it that would have made you open to such a deprogramming course?
Well-being is the answer to all questions, not 42 as the local tribe would have you believe. I was looking for well-being. If you had a method for achieving well-being, I wanted to know about it. I didn't care if you were James Randi or Deepak Chopra, if you had something to say about well being, I wanted to listen to you. You don't necessarily have to promise well-being, but if you make your organization all about achieving it, sooner or later people will come like bees to honey to check you out.
The problem is that science-based thinkers have too much integrity to offer advice on well-being when they don't know all the answers. Too often they are too conservative in applying the science that they do know. I think if we want to reach the most number of people we have to offer a vision of something that works, applied naturalistic science, but we have to do it in a way that helps them reach the transcendent state they are looking for. People are too tempted to get into Transcendental Meditation or all of that "naturalistic woo" when they drop the more serious woo. We need a framework to understand these experiences. People are seriously out of touch with this. Sam Harris says the same thing and
Dan Dennett goes What? A great exchange(Dan is another personal savior, I envision him as the Godhead in this science theology of mine
). I'm so glad Sam is trying to have this conversation with people, he is serving all aces on that front at the moment, especially with this "fact-based morality" stuff.
Another barrier is that no one wants to be like the religionists or the evangelists. No one wants to get too radical or go ahead on a mission lest they be accused of fundamentalism the way the "new atheists" are regularly. Naturalistic science cures us of this psychological barrier. The same confidence a surgeon has in going to work, we can have going to work on ourselves and each other, if the science and framework is sound and we have tested it's reliability.
When it comes to health your doctor is all "Meh, eat a banana and go to the gym" and he really did give me crappy advice and a crappy anti-depressant when I needed his help. He's busy keeping people alive and he's got a physically healthy, wild-eyed true believer in his office talking about energy so I guess I've got no serious complaints with him. But that was a serious fail. The stuff that makes me a lucid, sane person today (heh, maybe?) all comes from mainstream modern science knowledge that I taught myself. Why the hell did I have to teach myself about that stuff? The closest I got to science was that doctors office and I didn't get connected to the full sphere of possibilities from there. I physically go out and do this job. I talk people out of all sorts of crap all the time. It's not that bloody difficult. The medical community should be trained to deal with this. No? I think a lot more, I think that if you just take the focus off of skepticism/debunking and place it on the value of well-being, skepticism just becomes part of that.
So, take TM for example. If you teach people why it works, it becomes a principle in their life instead of a quack technique. They'll get rid of the theory and the woo and keep the knowledge. All we need is the naturalistic science and we can achieve the goals of humanism and transcendence, we can express those yearnings in ourselves.
This is the revolution that I see coming in well-being for humanity.
