The God Experience

The edge of understanding and knowledge is a strange place. We get a peek into it when we few awe. I had several peak experiences in my late 20's without drugs or injury. A description lacks vividness and emotional intensity.

We all know what it's like to talk to spirits. That's essentially what happens when we meet someone in a dream. It's more vivid than remembering speaking to someone, but based on the same ability.

Memory is an inexact recreation of what happens. Our minds are perfectly capable of recreating parts of it and changing others. The brain might change the person or what they look or smell like. It might change the background or location. It might change the words or the tones, adding warning, anger, threat, benevolence, wisdom.

Given a concept like God, advertised as more powerful and profound than anyone or thing we've ever met, our minds can do incredible things with it. Add some real social power, like thousands of people following one, and one could even imagine they're an emissary, special, chosen, even infallible. This is how churches create leaders and doctrines.

Possibility can be intoxicating. The mind can spin wildly at the boundaries of the life we've known.

Power is intoxicating, too. But it's all imagined. Real power is imagined power put into action. It starts with imagination. All, or almost all, of us have had such thoughts. Most of us are brought back to reality quickly by our lives. Our minds are always capable of such impossible thoughts at all times.

All sorts of weird thoughts and experiences are not quite available to us because the sensible parts of our brain filter them away. In old age, or during a trauma or near-death experience, or on drugs, these filters can lessen or fall away and waking experience can be more dream-like even than a dream.

At times, our experience can save our lives. The mind can see an oncoming car that we don't see. It can sense something's off about a someone we meet. At the same time, it easily makes large mistakes and can be easily misled or fooled.

We evolved to do well in a natural world against animals and friendly and hostile humans. We did not evolve to do well in a complex world of digital information. Nor did our evolution prepare us to understand anything about the supernatural.

The best advice is to be tuned into your senses, your intution, and your experience. But don't believe them.