Autistic Mystics

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11 Nov 2010, 3:13 pm

Autmysticism topic

Since autistic people look inward, perhaps much of this experience of something mystical/mysterious is their own private reality, of which none of us has any direct knowledge. It can only be imparted via communication, and so whether this subjective experince is valid/real is not testable, and therefore ouside the realm of fact/science.

But a good imagination is great for art!

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leejosepho
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11 Nov 2010, 4:16 pm

ruveyn wrote:

Your experience is subjective.

Subject to what, your opinion on the matter?!

Nonsense.

ruveyn wrote:

If I do not share your "experience" ...

Who gives a flip?!

ruveyn wrote:

There is no supernatural realm.

If you might in any way believe I should believe that, then you have some explaining to do:

Why do I no longer have to drink?

And before you might waste a lot of time here, there is no explanation shy of the spiritual realm.

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ruveyn
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11 Nov 2010, 8:06 pm

leejosepho wrote:

Why do I no longer have to drink?

.

Perhaps you reconnected with the good sense you were born with.

I ended a two pack a day smoking habit (that was back in 1962) without help from either God or the Devil. I simply got tired of recurrent bronchitis and technicolor phlegm.

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leejosepho
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12 Nov 2010, 9:30 am

ruveyn wrote:

leejosepho wrote:

Why do I no longer have to drink?

Perhaps you reconnected with the good sense you were born with.

Nope. Next guess?

ruveyn wrote:

I ended a two pack a day smoking habit ...
I simply got tired of ...

I knew all about sick and tired, tired and sick, busted and disgusted ... yet I simply could *not* leave the bottle alone.

How is that I now no longer have to drink?

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ruveyn
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12 Nov 2010, 10:20 am

leejosepho wrote:

I knew all about sick and tired, tired and sick, busted and disgusted ... yet I simply could *not* leave the bottle alone.

How is that I now no longer have to drink?

You finally decided to behave sensibly. Why can't you accept that?

On the basis of Okham's Razor my explanations wins because it does not have to assume additional entities such as God.

ruveyn

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12 Nov 2010, 10:49 am

ruveyn wrote:

You finally decided to behave sensibly. Why can't you accept that?

Because I absolutely could *not* carry out that decision!

My strongest need to stop drinking and my strongest desire to stop drinking were of absolutely no value at all, and the frustration related to that even drove me all the more toward the bottle I simply could not escape.

Try as you might, you are simply *not* going to be able to find any other explanation than this for the fact I no longer have to drink:

"God" has done for me what I could *not* do for myself -- He has placed an "effective mental defense" between me and alcohol.

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12 Nov 2010, 11:17 am

leejosepho wrote:

ruveyn wrote:

You finally decided to behave sensibly. Why can't you accept that?

"god" is a concept that your consciousness uses to fill in gaps in understanding. the complex translations required to change reality into understanding through "observation" don't easily lend themselves to language because language is another construct. it's not magic. magic isn't real. don't delude yourself into thinking your magic is any more real than some other mystic. astrology is more rooted in reality and astrology is a fool's astronomy.

do you think it is your god that pumps your heart all day long? faster when you need more blood? if you have a heart attack, is it because He was being lazy? does he pull and squeeze your lungs to give you breath? or does he leave all of this to you? surely, you don't make a conscious effort to breathe! you can try to voluntarily alter your breathing, but only temporarily. these organs do not concern your consciousness with their functioning but that does not implicate invisible wizardry.

addiction is not magical. it can suck the life out of you in a way that a magic curse could only pretend. similarly, your recovery is not magical. i'm sure it was difficult and, from experience with friends and family who went through 12 step programs, i'm sure that, to you, "god" played a big part in it.

but it's just as likely that Bacchus got bored of tormenting you.

bacchus isn't real either.

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12 Nov 2010, 11:38 am

waltur wrote:

"god" is a concept that your consciousness uses to fill in gaps in understanding.

Or, He is a reality filling those gaps and my experience suggests reality over mere concept.

waltur wrote:

don't delude yourself into thinking your magic is ...

I do not take orders from you, and neither do I delve into magic. The power of "God" in human transformation neither begins nor ends with/at me.

waltur wrote:

do you think it is ... god [who] pumps your heart all day long?

No, but He did design it to do so.

waltur wrote:

if you have a heart attack, is it because He was being lazy?

Nope, that was my own fault.

waltur wrote:

does he pull and squeeze your lungs to give you breath? or does he leave all of this to you?

Your selections are too limited there.

waltur wrote:

these organs do not concern your consciousness with their functioning but that does not implicate invisible wizardry.

... and I have not said otherwise.

waltur wrote:

addiction is not magical.

... and I have not said it is.

waltur wrote:

similarly, your recovery is not magical.

... and neither have I said that.

waltur wrote:

i'm sure that, to you, "god" played a big part in it.

Nope. He was/is (and will always be) the essence of it all.

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12 Nov 2010, 12:06 pm

leejosepho wrote:

waltur wrote:

similarly, your recovery is not magical.

... and neither have I said that.

luckily, you don't have to take orders from me so you are free to call your magic something other than magic.

it's still magic. "supernatural."

that you refuse to see it as magic says much about your faith. if i were a believing christian, i would admit that i believed that jesus christ was capable of magic. real magic, not that flashy stage-crap. water-into-wine, birds-from-clay, walking-on-water, blindness-curing, dead-raising magic.

but it's hard to say it that way, isn't it?

because magic isn't real.

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12 Nov 2010, 12:27 pm

This is a completely pointless conversation that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic. There is no way Leejosepho is going to believe it was anything other than God, and no way the atheists are going to accept divine assistance; both were at an impasse before it began.

Why is it that a member cannot start a topic to discuss a book with a spiritual theme without people, with nothing to say on that topic, jumping in to repeat an argument they have already had in scores of threads? None of this has anything to do with autism or mysticism which is the title of the topic.

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12 Nov 2010, 12:44 pm

waltur wrote:

JedCurtis wrote:

If the premise of William Stillman's book "Autism and the God Connection" is correct, are there any autistic mystics who care to share their interest in a direct connection to God?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

if this subject interests you, that link should be eye opening (or mind f***ing).

if more "mystics" could be honest with themselves, we could work more on solving mysteries instead of just exploiting them.

tim minchin sings it well:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUc_kATGgg[/youtube]

tryptamines are great for perspective as long as the user can understand that the perspective they experience is still their own. i'm very hopeful about research going on regarding psychedelic treatments for alzheimer's and depression.

of course, if physical/chemical explanations aren't your thing, you can always just call it mysticism.

pointless? yes. impasse? probably. nothing to do with the topic? hardly.

i think skafather said it best:

skafather84 wrote:

I consider it more like how magic is merely technology we don't understand yet. Mysticism is psychology and pharmacology that we don't understand yet.

And if the chaos magicians are right, maybe physics too. :p

and i think that leejosepho's testimony to his own experiences of mysticism, especially in using it to help with an addiction, was perfectly fitting for the topic.

if you want a thread to stay on a single topic, addressed from a specific point of view, you'll need to make one of your own and either ask a basic math question (though i'm sure more than a few people on this forum can make basic math more complicated and fun than anticipated) or make one of your own and present an argument to debate (like AG did about different aspects of christianity).

minds such as ours are prone to wander.

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12 Nov 2010, 12:48 pm

Whatever Jedi Mind Trick works to cure an addiction is useful. The explanation might not be true, but the results are manifest.

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12 Nov 2010, 1:01 pm

waltur wrote:

i think that leejosepho's testimony to his own experiences of mysticism,

Leejosepho's testimony had nothing to do with mysticism, let alone magic. In her more complete work, Evelyn Underhill devoted a whole chapter to the error connecting the two; here is a link to it if you would like to learn something about what you are talking about.

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12 Nov 2010, 1:26 pm

NobelCynic wrote:

waltur wrote:

i think that leejosepho's testimony to his own experiences of mysticism,

that link provides an excellent justification to label the aforementioned testimony as an experience of mysticism. it also provides excellent justification to label any claim of deistic intervention as a claim of magic.

as i mentioned before, skafather provided an excellent perspective on magic and mysticism when he paraphrased arthur c clarke ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") and expanded it to include mysticism as "psychology and pharmacology that we don't understand yet."

feel free to point out where i'm off on this. different perspectives are always welcome.

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ruveyn
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12 Nov 2010, 2:58 pm

Mysticism is Nonsense on Stilts.

ruveyn

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12 Nov 2010, 9:00 pm

skafather84 wrote:

waltur wrote:

but mysticism carries too much of an implication of magic or the supernatural and hallucinations are entirely natural. it's our perspective that makes them "mystical."

Yes.
It's like people's understanding of modern science in the renaissance, the instruments were crude and the waters were muddied.

IMO

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