New Age spirituality has become a cesspool of garbage

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I mean, if you think it would do useless harm to say 'You're going to cease to exist' and it would be a lie to say 'Yes, you're going to heaven!' - I'd think not saying anything at all along those lines would be the best option.


TBH I really don't feel like I can be of much help when people say that. The idea seems to be that there's zero evidence of life hereafter, zero evidence of consciousness outside of bodies, we're all supposed to accept that it's the only socially appropriate paradigm, and just nod in agreement at the challenges of it (I'm not saying you're telling me to do that - just the cultural state around it).

IMHO it's too hot / contentious a topic, our cultures have had too many wars over it historically, and to be a good humanist is to deny its existence.

My own personal challenges with this topic are admittedly a bit different. I see strong evidence that at least some people end up collecting data (while they're out) that wasn't relayed by any acceptable five-sensory means. Ian Stevenson had extensive examples of children with past-life memories being validated out past what they could guess or generalize by the usual types of extrapolation considered for dismissals. You have strong synchronicity which, in my mind, at the very minimum at least suggests various stacks of conscious organization happening outside the individual human level. When people just repeat to such things louder 'Consciousness only exists in brains!' it just sinks the sense in further that this is a political rather than philosophic or scientific issue. My biggest challenge is asking the question - is this system sane enough, considering Darwinian evolution and the pressures it places on it, not to self-terminate through destructive competition with accelerated technology to where world-ending technologies are increasingly democratized. I've also really found the word 'supernatural' to be a huge red-herring, I'm more with Michael Shermer that if a thing is real it's natural, if it's 'not real' then it's something else. I get that people used to mean by this term that it was effects from a level outside of or beyond nature but - there's no sufficient causation possible unless it's a natural and generally passive layer that occasionally tips the odds instrumentally in favor of certain outcomes, and any layer of the conscious 'stack', to me, is natural because it's all integrated. Considering how Darwinian evolution works though - the ways in which status gets conferred, the ways in which one stays in the good graces of the mass mind (ie. conformity for conformity's sake), truth and Darwinian fitness generally don't have much in common (particularly when it comes to abstract issues) and ideas and beliefs that help consolidate and defend power generally mean much more than actual truth if actual truth has no political benefit.

What would I do:

Allow the person to express her beliefs, listen, and don’t argue with the person.

My mother is probably dying. She doesn’t want to die. She has a belief in an Afterlife. Now’s not the time to argue theology.

For the most part I feel incredibly uncomfortable telling people what to say to their closest and most intimate family members when a person is approaching death because it's too personal, too individual, and all of the factors involved are too complex for general advice to be good.

The only thing I would say - if she does start seeing deceased relatives coming to meet her do your best to be sympathetic to that process. While I don't think it's as common for the medical establishment to dose people up with antipsychotics anymore when that sort of thing happens it's not a state of affairs best treated as psychiatric illness and if anything, in that specific case, I just recommend standing by her cognitive autonomy and right to experience these things as they occur if they occur.

I suppose what's going on is a conflict between two tenets of morality - truthfulness versus easing somebody's mental torment. I'd be very uncomfortable about having to choose, because I strongly dislike dishonesty, but under the circumstances I think I'd opt for the lie, if I thought they were likely to believe me. So if it was a Christian having doubts at the last minute that were causing them anguish, if they didn't know I was an atheist, I think I'd tell them I was sure they were going to Heaven. Whatever they needed to pass away in peace.

Having them ask you for assurance of heaven would be a bit of a nightmare in that case. I don't see why you couldn't say 'I have no way of knowing' or 'If there is a life hereafter I'm sure you'll be okay'. I obviously don't know your personal circumstances but I get the sense that options such as those at least pass on the need to lie and pass on the need to tell them that they're hours or minutes from ceasing to exist for all of eternity.

If you were to ask me to label my spirituality, I could hand you a whole bundle of words, but among the most accurate terms I've found are atheo-pagan/naturalistic pagan. I've had the most sacred experiences and most inspiring realizations in/by way of nature, but don't believe in actual deities. (Even if I did, I wouldn't have much respect for one who needs my praise. How desperate!) As this puts me in a niche within a niche, I know that I REALLY don't need anyone else to inspect and approve my POV; it's truly mine, and it serves me well, which is what actually matters.


Put aside the Nosey Parkers accusing you of appropriation. They should find something better to do--and you have something better to do. Take care of yourself and the nature that surrounds you.

I don't take too much notice of Wikipedia, that's just random people writing what they think.

Personally I was surprised how well EFT works. Obviously on emotional problems, not things like broken legs. I was so sceptical and thought it was nonsense but it does actually help me. I'm generally sceptical of way out theories like that, I'm very suspicious of most things.

Those are some very good points.

Yes it's a shame that so many people push their opinions like that. In my case I just haven't found any convincing evidence of extra-corporeal life.

Well, Ian Stevenson says so, and he may have been consciously sincere about his claims, but I'd want something I could personally see and examine, in order to take it on board as strong evidence. I'm left wondering why, if he was onto something real, his apparent discoveries haven't resulted in lots of other people trying out his methods and reproducing his findings. I see he set a combination lock with a secret password as a test of the existence of an afterlife - the idea being that after his death he would try to communicate the password to a colleague. What happened to that? But the annoying thing about trying to prove or disprove an afterlife is that it's so resistant to success. If his experiment failed, it can be argued that he survived his death but was somehow unable to pass on the code. If it succeeded, somebody would probably say the code was cracked by some mundane method.

I'm afraid I don't understand that.


I'm sure that happens a lot. Another way of putting it may be that you prefer the inquisitorial method over the adversarial method of determining the truth. I see both as having merit and problems, but I often wish everybody would be inquisitorial.


I don't understand that.


I at least understand the beginning of that, after which I failed to follow it. By "supernatural" I suppose I mean beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding as it currently stands. The problem with deleting the word from discussion about afterlife, Cartesian dualism, ghosts, deities, etc. is that it then becomes difficult to think about it.

I'm sorry that so much of what you've written in that post is unintelligible to me so far. It looks as if it might well contain a lot of useful and relevent ideas, but it's too concentrated for me.

Last edited by ToughDiamond on 25 Nov 2022, 4:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Of course it's wise to check out anything that anybody writes, but I've not found anything much wrong with the pages I've read. If an assertion in an article hasn't been backed up by citations, it's soon labelled "citation required." Articles with issues quickly get a label saying so. Where else would you find that? It can be very difficult to distinguish truth from propaganda but I think Wikipedia does quite well in making that easier.

Why not just lie though? Like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXYvwEeWrm8

Strong synchronicity suggests causation of forms that, under a reductive materialist paradigm, are impossible because they can't exist (and the only way that really makes sense is that it's either all apophenia and credulity on the part of the experiencer, the experiencer has no grasp of mathematical probability, or the number of times when strong synchronicity observed by a credible viewer happen it's consistent with the statistical averages that would naturally be expected). The argument there isn't that wow - a rare thing happened - but that the rare thing that happened was so absurdly connected to other things in the experiencer's life, including both topic and timing, that the occurrence strongly suggests some direct causal line. This is admittedly different from an argument for a life hereafter as it doesn't say anything up or down about that but does call into question the assumption that the universe is non-mental outside of neurons, or at the very least suggests that there are information conduits in the cosmos that can work on chains of correlation whether or not these conduits themselves are conscious in any directly self-aware sense.


Consciousness generally serves a supervisory role of events, integrates information, and delegates tasks. Part of what makes the idea of a conscious cosmos so strange to us, given what we know of nature, is the sheer brutality of Darwinian evolution. People also have a lot of great arguments as to how any sentient supervisor could allow the early 20th century to unfold the way it did - ie. Nazi Germany and it's death camps, the Soviet Union and its gulags, Mao's Great Leap Forward, Khmer Rouge, Japan's Unit 741 in China, all of these seem to suggest that there was either nothing sentient there to change the situation or that if there was it was completely indifferent. A lot of this did real damage to any notion that there's a 'sky dad' to watch over human affairs let alone to prevent our extinction.

It will be interesting too see what happens over the next century, as well as it will be interesting to see what people like Christopher Kerr and his work with hospice patients who often spend the last two weeks of their lives seeing deceased loved ones approaching them, turns up.

My honest take on these things is we'll find out that these things are 'real' in that people are interacting with another system, while at the same time admittedly a lot of what people report seeing during NDE's seems deeply individual, related to religious beliefs they'd been given (not all aspects but the symbols). What makes this very difficult for us to get our heads around, at least a as a primarily physicalist / materialist culture, is we expect things to be either 100% as they appear or 100% BS, so we don't do well with complex blends where its a bit of both. Something similar I think is happening with the UFO phenomena where part of that could be non-public aviation technology but plenty of it is better described as aspects of how even our physical cosmos works that we don't understand. For as much as Mick West likes to feign fascination with Jacques Vallee's intellectual perversion in believing that these things are predominantly a Jungian phenomena or existing in some capacity where a conscious system is sort of rendering them in to our reality haphazardly (per pop reductive materialism - 'Crraaaazzyyyyy! Crrrrraaaaaaaazzzzzyyyy!'), the more I looked at the contents of UFO / UAP I have to agree with Vallee that it seems much more like dream logic of a sort bleeding out into physical reality or at least doing some combination of seeming to, subjectively, to experiencers and then there being cases where it does become physical but in very unstable ways.

Overall I'm convinced that we live in a 'solid' enough universe for us to utilize science as we do, for Darwinian evolution to be a driver of biological life, for us to make several nanometer transistors or bank-shot a probe off of Jupiter or Saturn's gravity well to rendezvous with one of the outer planets like Pluto. At the same time there's more causal complexity that keeps evidencing itself in odd ways, particularly around consciousness, and I think there's going to be a lot of denial of that for a long time (mainly I think fear of fundamentalist religion taking the high-hand away from science again or stealing valuable resources and grant money) but I'm really hoping that there will be increasing numbers of credible scientific thinkers and peer-reviewed papers that clarify that there's something there and do so in a way that puts it in the purview of science rather than religion. I see some of Karl Friston and Michael Levin's work starting to break down the whole notion that only huge numbers of neurons can work as conscious networks, they're finding the fractal nature of consciousness within biological systems, and I think there will be more of this to come which will go to even stranger places such as functionalism with multiple realizability and mechanics at least similar to what Donald Hoffman suggests with his stacking tiers of conscious agents.


Fair, it's just that - from my observation - the meaning of 'supernatural' has left what the prefix and root would mean, ie. 'over' and 'nature' and, by the way we use the term 'natural' today 'supernatural' effectively means bullsh--.

The problem with saying that something outside of current understanding is supernatural suggests that the extreme ends of quantum physics and whatever we haven't been able to figure out or pin down would equally be 'supernatural'. I don't think anyone would apply the term 'supernatural' to undiscovered or unclarified science, they would apply it however to strange folk beliefs and fetishes.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 25 Nov 2022, 5:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Lol, not even sure where to begin.

Following a couple different chains of logic:

1) You risk the odds of someone you care deeply about having their last memory of you etched as condescension and patronization. It's like seeing them off with a profound insult.

2) Considering the possibility that they are moments from ceasing to exist forever - in best case if you don't tell a whopper to them of the sort that would encourage them to tell you to f' off and let them die in peace - they go to eternal non-existence and don't really experience anything or have a sense of self. You, OTOH, have decades to live and decades to deal with having lied to a dying person. Profound lies efface the structure of your character and the soon-to-be-nonexistent probably don't need you to do that to yourself, and what's even more dangerous than how you might feel about yourself with damaged character is what kinds of external malleability sets in (ie. the possibility that people can manipulate you more easily if you've chipped / damaged your own relationship with truth).

That's why I think it's way better to play it safe. If they believe in a life hereafter and you don't just do your best to make sure that their last moments are as tolerable as possible, that they aren't being treated like soon-to-be biological waste by the team of doctors, make sure that they aren't being pumped with any more drugs than they'd need to be or want to be, and as I mentioned earlier - make sure no idiots pumping them up with antipsychotics if they say that they're seeing dead relatives (especially if they're near death - WTF is the point, if their subconscious mind wants to play them a beautiful movie that's no one's business to stop).

I didn't say anything to this earlier but - I think if an area of research, like parapsychology, is pounded hard enough to become taboo or where positive results are considered to almost guarantee faulty experimental design or even failure of the scientific method then even when people can't 'debunk' certain findings in various areas, where Ian Stevenson's work or the statistical anomalies in Ganzfeld studies - they'll just assume that it's either a matter of time before someone finds the flaw in their science or, alternately, if it's so obscured as to be indiscoverable that it'll be some tiny portion of the data - absolutely blown out of the water with proof / evidence that the universe is dead / unconscious matter, that consciousness only exists on neurons (or at least biological cells), and that death means no more consciousness.

We seem to be in a very awkward place right now where the phantasmagoria of the CO2-addled brain the way Suzanne Blackmore described it back in the early 90's should have either made NDE's disappear or at least relegate it too the realm of pure pseudoscience and cranks. That's not what's happened, rather the field and the amount of anomalies to talk about is growing and the number of credible researchers involved didn't get liquidated in the early 90's when Blackmore's CO2 hypothesis or other people's parietal lobe seizure hypothesis, or even DMT hypotheses, should have made everyone assume that there was nothing to see. It could also be that there's an excuse to keep looking into these things just from the standpoint that AI is coming, that it will feign consciousness so well as to be genuinely dangerous if we can't get under the problem, and there's also issues of duties and obligations of doctors to patients, how we want to die, how we want to be treated as we're dying, and so we're trying to make end of life treatment more ethical - and as that gets probed so are NDE's, the halo effects where people start seeing deceased loved ones about two weeks before their death, or even the stranger stories of shared NDE's where people who aren't dying but who are with the dying end up having an out of body experience where they experience going part of the way with the deceased.

That's what I mean though, it's getting stranger and getting more professional interest. If it was just wishful thinking, BS, scam-artistry, things like that generally dissipate rather than picking up more steam.

I can't even keep up with my own topic anymore....


But for the record, I really don't care if there is an afterlife or not anymore. Since death is the only true promise given to each of us from birth that will always be kept I am 100% positive that we are all headed to the same place once we die, even if that place is just a hole in the ground.

The biggest thing - even if you give up on various philosophic, metaphysical, or spiritual vantage points - is not to give up on yourself.

The outside world and its problems is something you can't control. Your internal world is something that you can do something with technically and its on you to be as good to yourself as you can manage because the alternatives are almost guaranteed to lead to miserable places. I know a lot of the LGBTQ community isn't wild about Jordan Peterson but as far as internal state management and his reading on Jung he's right about a lot in that regard, particularly out of his 12 Rules for Life, Rule #2 - Treat yourself like someone you're responsible for helping.