Why does a spiritual epiphany have to mean...
Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 6:42 pm
...what somebody else told you it should mean?
Multitudes of people have peak experiences which can been described as spiritual witnesses, epiphanies, visitations, revelations, etc. These experiences are anticipated aspects of human experience. Abraham Maslow described them as part of the human potential for self-actualization. William James viewed them as a common feature of a variety of religious experiences. These experiences are often mysterious and can defy mortal interpretation. Given the mystery and potency of these experiences, would it be possible to control human beings merely by offering to interpret them? Yes, of course.
If I were to start a religion today, I would begin by capturing the persuasive powers of these normal experiences by applying a limited and particular meaning to them. I might ask my followers to read a book, received by inspiration, which is replete with mysterious and worthy anecdotes, as well as moral principles. The text itself instructs the reader to discern its veracity by settling herself into a quieted state which is at the core of my own prescriptive process.
Of course many, but not all readers will experience something profound. Those who have these profound experiences do so within the context of an embedded suggestion, the suggestion that their peak experience is directly related to the verity of the text. If I can then create or usurp a causative agent, e.g. a holy ghost, who is responsible for infusing the seeker with this peak experience, I gain control over the interpretation of it. I thereby become the author of the term “holy ghost,” which my burgeoning congregation will thereafter profess and I also acquire authority over those who believe that my term is the "correct" term. For those who now believe in the verity of my new religious system, their normal and human spiritual epiphanies will forever be a branded commodity, wholly owned by me and my organization. These people will thereafter believe that their experiences arise from the context which I provided for them. I will have successfully coopted a natural process and converted it into intellectual property.
Unfortunately, this scenario has happened and will continue to happen until people refuse to allow others to define and delimit their personal ecstacies. So much can be gained from a peak experience if one is not hamstringed in their choices of what the experience means, or worse where the experience originates. Your freedom to interpret your own experience outside of a matrix of memes, designed to capture your allegiance, is something every person should avail themselves of. By keeping your own counsel with regard to your experiences, you become free to interpret them and to reinterpret them as guided by your own muse.
Moroni can only corner the market on your experiences if you let him. Don't let him or anyone place limits on the myriad meanings available to a purely personal interpretation of the mystery.
By the way, Maslow has the following to say about peak experiences and religious experiences:
Multitudes of people have peak experiences which can been described as spiritual witnesses, epiphanies, visitations, revelations, etc. These experiences are anticipated aspects of human experience. Abraham Maslow described them as part of the human potential for self-actualization. William James viewed them as a common feature of a variety of religious experiences. These experiences are often mysterious and can defy mortal interpretation. Given the mystery and potency of these experiences, would it be possible to control human beings merely by offering to interpret them? Yes, of course.
If I were to start a religion today, I would begin by capturing the persuasive powers of these normal experiences by applying a limited and particular meaning to them. I might ask my followers to read a book, received by inspiration, which is replete with mysterious and worthy anecdotes, as well as moral principles. The text itself instructs the reader to discern its veracity by settling herself into a quieted state which is at the core of my own prescriptive process.
Of course many, but not all readers will experience something profound. Those who have these profound experiences do so within the context of an embedded suggestion, the suggestion that their peak experience is directly related to the verity of the text. If I can then create or usurp a causative agent, e.g. a holy ghost, who is responsible for infusing the seeker with this peak experience, I gain control over the interpretation of it. I thereby become the author of the term “holy ghost,” which my burgeoning congregation will thereafter profess and I also acquire authority over those who believe that my term is the "correct" term. For those who now believe in the verity of my new religious system, their normal and human spiritual epiphanies will forever be a branded commodity, wholly owned by me and my organization. These people will thereafter believe that their experiences arise from the context which I provided for them. I will have successfully coopted a natural process and converted it into intellectual property.
Unfortunately, this scenario has happened and will continue to happen until people refuse to allow others to define and delimit their personal ecstacies. So much can be gained from a peak experience if one is not hamstringed in their choices of what the experience means, or worse where the experience originates. Your freedom to interpret your own experience outside of a matrix of memes, designed to capture your allegiance, is something every person should avail themselves of. By keeping your own counsel with regard to your experiences, you become free to interpret them and to reinterpret them as guided by your own muse.
Moroni can only corner the market on your experiences if you let him. Don't let him or anyone place limits on the myriad meanings available to a purely personal interpretation of the mystery.
By the way, Maslow has the following to say about peak experiences and religious experiences:
The very beginning, the intrinsic core, the essence, the universal nucleus of every known high religion (unless Confucianism is also called a religion) has been the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer. The high religions call themselves revealed religions and each of them tends to rest its validity, its function, and its right to exist on the codification and the communication of this original mystic experience or revelation from the lonely prophet to the mass of human beings in general.
But it has recently begun to appear that these "revelations" or mystical illuminations can be subsumed under the head of the "peak-experiences"[1] or "ecstasies" or "transcendent" experiences which are now being eagerly investigated by many psychologists. That is to say, it is very likely, indeed almost certain, that these older reports, phrased in terms of supernatural revelation, were, in fact, perfectly natural, human peak-experiences of the kind that can easily be examined today, which, however, were phrased in terms of whatever conceptual, cultural, and linguistic framework the particular seer had available in his time (Laski).
In a word, we can study today what happened in the past and was then explainable in supernatural terms only. By so doing, we are enabled to examine religion in all its facets and in all its meanings in a way that makes it a part of science rather than something outside and exclusive of it.
Also this kind of study leads us to another very plausible hypothesis: to the extent that all mystical or peak-experiences are the same in their essence and have always been the same, all religions are the same in their essence and always have been the same. They should, therefore, come to agree in principle on teaching that which is common to all of them, I.e., whatever it is that peak-experiences teach in common (whatever is different about these illuminations can fairly be taken to be localisms both in time and space, and are, therefore, peripheral, expendable, not essential). This something common, this something which is left over after we peel away all the localisms, all the accidents of particular languages or particular philosophies, all the ethnocentric phrasings, all those elements which are not common, we may call the "core-religious experience" or the "transcendent experience." [from ISBN:0140194878, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences by Abraham H. Maslow ©1964 by Kappa Delta Pi and ©1970 (preface) The Viking Press. Published by Penguin Books Limited ISBN 0 14 00.4262 8]