Can a Mystical Experience Tell Us Anything About God?

/ Paul Sunstone / 5 Comments

(About an 18 minute read)

One of the greater joys of older gentlemen of an intellectual bent such as myself is cackling at younger people in the park is discovering obscure philosophical problems that most likely won’t be solved within our own lifetimes.  As it happens, that’s not so easy to do these days, since all the really good problems have already been discovered.  Problems like, “If deity exists, then how do we know it exists?”,  “What does it mean to live a good life?”,  and of course, “What is the maximum number of chickens that can cross the same road in the same joke?”

But why indulge oneself in attempting to solve unsolvable problems in the first place?

As it happens, the world population can be divided into two kinds of people:  Those who love their journey more than their destination, and those who love their destination more than their journey.  If you are someone who most loves his or her destination, then you probably are not attracted to unsolvable problems, for such problems are pretty much all journey and no arrival.

Yet, if you most love — and perhaps even crave — the thrill of traveling in and of itself, then perhaps you are one of those relatively rare individuals who cherishes the way pondering an unsolvable problem can get you thinking creatively beyond the common assumptions we all have about things.  And at least sometimes, you will be rewarded — not with a solution to the problem — but with a greater understanding of the issues involved.

As for myself, I fall into the latter category of humans.  I savor the journey quite often more than the destination.  At least when it comes to philosophical problems.  In fact, I have taken to heart Kenko’s maxim, “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty”, and all but find offensive most efforts to bring philosophical journeys to safe and secure destinations.  Give me the climb, but not necessarily the mountain’s summit.  I like the changing views on the way up best of all.

Now, despite how hard it is these days to discover new philosophical problems that are virtually insolvable, I myself am proud to say that I believe I may have found one.  I’ve actually been mulling it over for a few years, and I believe that anyone who properly understands the issue will agree with me that it has no easy solution, if it has any solution at all.

Yet here’s the rub: The problem takes some explaining.  The explanations are simple enough, once you grasp them, but they run to a little length.   Let’s begin, however, by stating the problem: “Assuming that god exists, is there any guarantee that a mystical experience of god imparts knowledge of god?”

Put differently: “If you somehow first knew that god existed, and you had a mystical experience that at least appeared to you to be of god, could you say with absolute certainty that anything you learned about god during that experience was true?”

Once again, “Even if we were certain that god existed, are self-proclaimed prophets like Pat Robinson justified to believe that the messages they receive from god provide genuine knowledge of god’s will, character, etc.?”

To be sure, there is an easy answer to the question.  Unfortunately, the easy answer seems to rest on a misunderstanding of the question.   The easy way out is to say “no” on the grounds that we cannot know for certain that our experience of god is not a delusion, hallucination, brain fart, etc.  But that answer ignores that the question asks us to assume we know god exists.  Although most people will not make such a silly mistake, my experience of people says some are bound to.

Having said that, let’s now get on with my awesome explanation of the problem.  We should first define “mystical experience”.

People commonly mean upwards of a dozen things by “mystical experience”.  Things like clairvoyance, mind-reading, near death experiences, out of body experiences, and so forth.  In this beautiful essay, however, we will mean one, and only one, thing by “mystical experiences”.  Namely, one’s first cup of hot, fresh coffee on a chilly morning the experience of “oneness with everything”.

The experience of oneness is famously difficult to describe to anyone who has not themselves had it.  Yet, the experience seems to lie at the root of the notion there is some such thing as “spiritual enlightenment”.  That is, moksha, samadhi, nirvana, satori, kensho, etc.  It also seems quite likely to in many cases inform or influence notions of god — especially those notions commonly found in Hinduism (e.g. Brahman), but also in other religious traditions, such as mystical Judaism (e.g. Ein Sof), and even the Christian God.  While many people who have had a mystical experience do not claim it was an experience of god, very many others do.

Now, I’m just enough a god-snob to believe that — if there is a god — the mystical experience is in all likelihood the purest, most authentic experience of that god that our noble and esteemed species of spear-chucking super-chimpanzees can have.  I cheerfully peer down and sniff my perfectly handsome nose™ at auditory or visual “experiences” of god.  How can any sensible person compare merely hearing the voice of god, or simply seeing an image of deity, to the overwhelming,  earth-shattering,  life-transforming, supreme experience of oneness?  The very thought of it!  Tsk. Tsk.

Like most snobs — whether god-snobs, social-snobs, or some other kind of snob — I myself have no extensive personal experience of the superiority I claim to be the highest available standard that can be aspired to.   What modest experience I do have, I recognize as being anything but definitive of the whole range of mystical experiences that humans seem capable of having unless you count that purely blissful moment when  I first saw Terri’s breasts by the moonlight.  So I am quite cautious about defining the mystical experience.

However, after 35 or so years of interest in the topic, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that all mystical experiences I’ve heard of have at least one thing in common.  That is, they involve a specific, defining change in our perception of reality.

Now, grab hold of your seat, strap yourself in, for here comes the core description of what makes an experience “mystical”.  A mystical experience can be distinguished from a non-mystical experience by the simple fact that it (1) involves an abrupt cessation of our normal, everyday, “subject/object perception”, and (2) its replacement by an awareness or experiencing of the oneness of all things.

I can only imagine, dear reader, that you are now in awe of the sheer elegance of my description.  The experience of god, summed up in 41 words!  Only my scurrilous two ex-wives would seek to distract you from the glory of my accomplishment by daring to suggest that I stole the description from someone!

Which, of course, I did.

I confess the basic idea is derived from the writings of Sam Harris, who — whatever else he is — is an author of beautiful, clear, and concise prose, genuine wit, and sharp insights.  In fact, I am so struck by Harris the author, that I believe his only major flaw as an author is that he’s not me, poor man.  But putting all that aside, what do we mean by “subject/object perception”?

The concept is simple enough once you get it.  Merely look at whatever device you’re reading this on, and then observe that you have a sense or feeling of that device being distinct from your self.  Or take note of anything else in your perceptual field, whether that something else is a sight, a sound, a taste, a touch, or an odor.  Without usually thinking about it, you divide the world into self and non-self.  “I see a tree, but do not see the tree as me.”  “I hear a plane, but I do not hear the noise as part of myself.”  That’s subject/object perception, which is our normal, everyday way of perceiving the world.

Now, it’s relatively rare — but it is still possible — for subject/object perception to come to an abrupt end while yet some form of awareness or experiencing continues.  When that happens, the division of the world into me and not-me breaks down, and you are left with a perception that all things within your perceptual field are really, in some profound or fundamental sense, just one thing.  Or, as Robert Plant famously sings in Stairway to Heaven, “When one is one and one is all”.

It is quite easy to interpret such an experience as an experience of god.  For instance, what could be greater than that oneness?  Absolutely nothing you perceive lies outside it, apart from it.  Everything is included in it.  Everything is embraced by it.

Second, that experience of oneness almost invariably comes with an overwhelming sense or feeling that it is real.  Indeed, our normal, everyday sense or feeling that something is real pales in comparison.   Were you to lower your head, snort like a raging bull, and then charge at full tilt and head first into a brick wall you would — if you survived the experience — have a nearly unshakable conviction that the wall was real.  Perhaps you could later on intellectually convince yourself that it wasn’t real, that you were really a brain in a vat, and that the wall was a delusion, but I think it’s highly unlikely that you could convince yourself of that much beyond an intellectual level.

The experience of oneness is that feeling of realness on steroids.   Which, I think, largely explains why so many people who’ve reported having it come away convinced that our normal, everyday reality is an illusion, and that the reality of oneness is the True or Ultimate Reality.

There are a few other generally present attributes to the experience, such as a feeling or sense of infinity, an experience of bliss or ecstasy, an experience of unconditional love, and so forth.  Some people come away from such experiences convinced they have assured knowledge of god, such as that “God is infinite”.

But how can they be certain that god is infinite?  Please recall that we are assuming god exists: Our question is only whether on not we can trust an experience of god to tell us something about the properties of god.

Now some — but not all — mystics are inclined to say the mystical experience is so convincingly real that it cannot possibly be the case that it is misleading.  “My experience of X as real convinces me that X must be real.”  But we know we can be convinced something is real without its actually being real.  Many people are convinced the sky is blue, but we know the blueness of the sky is not an actual property of the atoms and molecules that comprise the atmosphere, but rather an effect of the diffusion of light through it.  No matter how great the sense or feeling is that something is real, we cannot be certain on those grounds alone something is actually real.

Something else that might incline us to believe our experience of god has given us assured knowledge of god’s properties is the simple faith that “seeing is believing”, or put more precisely, “Experience or observation is conclusive evidence of fact”.  But this too is quite obviously not the case.  The floor lamp beside my desk looks solid, but we know from physics that it is comprised of atoms held in a matrix with more space between the atoms than there is space occupied by the atoms themselves.  In other words, far from being that solid matter that I observe, my floor lamp is largely empty space — much like the mostly empty inside of a politician’s cranium.

So neither the conviction that something is real, nor the observation that something is real, can assure us that something is real.  Hence, the experience of god as infinite cannot be certain evidence that god is infinite on either one of those grounds.  Does that leave any other grounds for such a claim?

As it happens, some mystics make the curious claim that their experience of god is immediate.  By “immediate”, they seem to at the very least mean that their experience of god is not mediated by the senses.  Instead, they have a direct awareness of god, perhaps in somewhat the same sense of our having a direct awareness of the thoughts in our head.

Now, if it is true that mystics can have an immediate experience of god, then that would provide a different sort of grounds for the claim that an experience of god as infinite is conclusive evidence that god is infinite, for how can an unmediated experience be anything but a true experience?

To say that it could be a false experience would be like saying my experience of thinking could be a false experience, and that I might not be experiencing any thoughts at all even when I think I am thinking — a logical contradiction that, so far as anyone knows, has only been accomplished by the membership of the Ku Klux Klan.

Hence,  we cannot say that an immediate experience of god as infinite could be false on anything like the same grounds that we can say the conviction that an experience is real could be false, or the observation that something is the case could be false.  But does that still leave us with good grounds to doubt our experience?

When I think I’m thinking, are there ever any grounds to doubt that I’m thinking?

The answer is quite obviously, “no”.  And yet, there remain good grounds to doubt that my experience of thinking accurately reflects or represents thinking itself.  To illustrate, suppose I think about the most ecstatic experience of my first wedding night: The three fulfilling, blissful hours I spent in bed intimately lecturing my new wife on the epistemology of carnal knowledge.  My thoughts of that taste of heaven on earth appear to me as their content.  But I know from the sciences that in actuality those thoughts might somehow be the product of biological events in my brain, the mass firings of neurons.  In which case, there is a crucial gulf between my experience of thinking, and my thinking itself.

Of course, that gulf is normally hidden from me.  I have much less awareness of neurons firing in my brain than normal, healthy teenagers have of their mothers asking them to do their chores.  Yet — assuming it is the case that all thought is ultimately the product of those neurons, and there is no such thing as a consciousness that exists independent of them — I have here sufficient grounds to doubt that even a direct, unmediated experience of god as infinite necessarily proves that god is indeed infinite.

After all, if there be a gulf between my experience of thinking and thinking itself,  there could be a quite similar gulf between my experience of god as infinite and god’s “infinity”.  For all I can know, my experience bears no or almost no resemblance to god’s infinity.

A somewhat imperfect analogy here might be colors.  Most of us commonly see the various objects in our perceptual fields as having colors.  Green leaves, pink sunsets, purple flowers, and so forth.  But colors are not properties of those objects.  Instead, they are manufactured in our heads.  The objects themselves have no colors at all.  Because they are manufactured in our heads by tiny tiny little elves trust me! we can say we have an immediate experience of colors.  But even the immediacy of that experience does not entail that they really exist apart from us.  In somewhat the same fashion, it seems possible that god’s infinity might be manufactured in our heads.

So, even if we grant that god exists, and that our mystical experiences are somehow of god, we cannot be certain that any knowledge those experiences impart to us is true knowledge.  But if that is indeed the case for what we have been calling here “mystical experiences”, it is also the case for merely auditory or visual experiences of god.  To say — as a Pat Robertson might say — “God spoke to me last night and said, ‘I will send an earthquake to devastate Utah for I am angry with the Mormons who live there’.” is subject to the same uncertainties as mystical experiences.  We have no way of knowing whether that message is assured knowledge of god’s will, character, or intentions.

But why stop there?  If we cannot say with absolute assurance that god is infinite or that god is angry with virtually anyone who fails to contribute lavishly to our TV ministry, can we say that an experience of god imparts any certain knowledge of god at all?  I think not.  Even if we assumed something exists apart from our own brains that is the ultimate cause of our experiences of god, we could not say with complete assurance that we knew much of anything about that something.  For all we could really know, god might be some as yet undiscovered combination of natural causes.

To be sure, quite the opposite of what we’ve been saying could also be true.  Maybe an experience of god as infinite quite accurately reflects or resembles god’s infinity.  The point here is not that such a thing is impossible, but that it is uncertain.

I do not wish anything I’ve said here to be misunderstood as poo-pooing the notion of god, nor as hostile to the notion that mystical experiences can be immensely life-affirming, to say the least.  I have plenty of doubts about the notion of god, and plenty more doubts about certain specific notions of god, but I have far fewer fixed and firm convictions about god than perhaps most of us.  And I have personal experience of how life-affirming seeing Terri’s breasts in the moonlight mystical experiences can be.

Yet, like Jiddu Krishnamurti and some others, when it comes to these things, I believe certainty is largely or even entirely counter-productive.   You might find the god you set out to find, but that god will be a projection of your own convictions about what a god should be.  Or so it seems to me.

So what do you make of all this?  What am I missing here?  Your comments, questions, rants, and mouth-watering insights are welcomed!

For a larger and more general discussion of mysticism, see “Mysticism is a Whore: Allow Me to Introduce You“.

Mom Died Recently

/ Paul Sunstone / 11 Comments

(About a 9 minute read)

One night, when I was about eight or ten years old, I woke up towards 11:00 PM and, sensing something was wrong, went looking for mom.  She was not asleep in her bed, but there was a light on in our living room.  I expected her to be awake reading, which she sometimes did.  Yet, when I got to the living room, her favorite chair was empty.  Almost the same moment, however, she came in through the front door.  Naturally, I demanded to know where she’d been.

“I’ll tell you”, she said, “But only if you first promise me that you will not tell anyone where I’ve been.”

I solemnly promised that I would not, for she was using her serious tone of voice with me, the tone she reserved for when she wanted her words to sink in.

“I leased an apartment to a new tenant today, a mother and her five children, and I discovered that she was out of money and without food for herself or her family.  She won’t get paid for a few days yet.  So after work, I went to the store and bought some groceries for them.  Then I waited up until I thought they would all be asleep before delivering the groceries to their doorstep.   I’ve just now returned from doing that, and you must not tell anyone what I’ve told you, not even your friends.”

“But why, mom?”

“Because it could rob them of their pride if it ever got around how poor they are, Paul.  Besides I don’t want them thinking they owe me anything.”

I don’t recall that I entirely understood her reasoning, but I did understand the gravity of my promise, and so I kept her deed a secret even from my two brothers.  Looking back now, I can see how that event Illustrated three of her character traits: Her compassion, her sensitivity to others, and her modesty.

To many people in our community, she was above all else a strong, stoic person, even a bit on the strict side — and while I think there was a great deal of truth to that — I knew her as also caring, compassionate, and considerate.  She was, however, a very private person, very modest about most things, and so somewhat difficult for most people to know.

In fact, I have wondered for some time how much even I and my brothers knew about her.  Some years ago, when she retired, the local newspaper ran a full page article on her accomplishments, positions, and honors.   My brothers and I were astonished to discover that about half of it was news to us.  I would not call mom an “intentionally secretive” person, but there was so much about her that she had simply not thought important enough to mention to us.

For 33 years, she was the CEO of a small housing company at a time and in a community where women were not generally thought to be extraordinarily capable of running a business.  She grew the company eight-fold.   When she took it over, it was in the red.  In relatively short order, she had it in the black, and she kept the company there for 30 consecutive years until her retirement.  Yet, when you spoke with her about it, she would modestly ascribe her success “mainly to luck”.   Mom seemed to feel no need for praise nor recognition.  In fact, she tended to shun it.

Like many people in our hometown, both of my brothers think of mom as an especially strong person.  My younger brother in particular has told me he believes “she was the strongest person he’s ever known”.   A story that’s still told about her in the town concerns a huge, burly contractor who once went ballistic on her, yelling and screaming at her in her own office.

She had employed him to build a six-story apartment building.  One day, she noticed a flaw in the brickwork and ordered him to tear down the wall in order to fix it.  That’s when he lost his temper, threatening her with, “I’ll have your job”.

It was no idle threat.  He was well-established and respected in the community, friends with several of her board members, and she was new to her job.  Moreover, she had three small children to fend for, no husband to fall back on for support (our father having died a few years before), and no prospects for landing a similar job in the local economy if she lost the one she had.  Yet, as the story goes, she didn’t blink.  She stood her ground, calmly presented her case to the board, and in the end, the wall came down and the brickwork was fixed.

I too remember her as a strong person, but even more, I remember her as a stoic person.  In all the time I knew her, I witnessed her crying once, and only once.  If you’re curious, I blogged about that here.  My brothers, on the other hand, never once witnessed her crying.

Only one of us ever witnessed her lose control of her temper, too.   My older brother has a memory of her engaging in a shouting match with a neighbor when he was about five or so.  That’s the only time anyone of us can recall her raising her voice in anger.  Of course, she would get angry at times, but — excepting that once — she kept her anger in check, never lashing out irrationally or unreasonably.

In fact, she could be a bit too stoic, I think.  During the earliest parts of my childhood, she found it difficult to express love or affection.   A friend — a psychologist — noticed that about her, and convinced her to reform herself.  Afterwards, she gradually got much better at it with practice, but I will always remember her very first, very awkward effort to express the love she felt for me.  She shocked me one evening with a hesitant but abrupt pat on the head — after which, she was so embarrassed that she fled into the next room.  Somehow I cherish that memory of her as much as any — it was, after all, part of her character.

Mom was an eminently reasonable person.  There were many times when I thought she was wrong, but there were few, if any, times when I thought she failed to listen to my side of an issue.   Even when as small children we challenged her rules, she would (at least at first) patiently explain her rules and seek to reason us into complying with them.

Only as a last resort would she fall back on, “When you’re old enough to make your own rules, you can make the rules you want, but you will obey this rule because I’ve made it, and I’m your mother, and responsible for you.”  Sometimes we could even reason her into changing a rule — especially as we grew older — and provided that she thought we’d made a good case for ourselves.  Friends of hers often enough remarked that she “spoke to us like adults.”

Mom was in the habit of gently interrupting us whenever we made an error in reasoning. She would then not merely point out the mistake, but also patiently explain to us precisely why it was a mistake. Naturally, as a child, I did not immediately appreciate her guidance in these matters. In fact, I came to think she was a wee bit obsessed. Or, as I once insightfully put it to my best friend, Dennis, “My mom is nuts”.

It wasn’t until I was at university taking an introductory course in logic that my opinion of her sanity began to change. When my class came to the section on informal fallacies, I was astonished to discover I already knew 35 of the 36 most common fallacies of logic – knew them backwards and forwards, and knew them only because mom had drilled them into my head over the years I was growing up. All I had left to do was learn their names.

She was quite reasonable in other ways as well.  I’ve blogged about one of those ways in a funny post here.  She also implemented a policy after we became teens that several parents in our community were inspired to adopt for their own kids.  She told us that if we were out drinking and we even “so much as suspected” that we’d had a bit too much to drive safely, we could call her at anytime, no matter what the hour was, to come get us home — there would be absolutely no repercussions.   She would not, she promised, so much as mention or hint about it the next day.   My brothers and I took her up on her offer more than once or twice, and she was always true to her word.

Mom took religion seriously, so seriously that she believed children were too immature to make any firm decisions about it.  Consequently, she forbade us from deciding whether we believed in God and such until we had, as she put it, “reached the age of reason” — by which she meant at least 18 and, preferably, our early twenties.  She went further than that, though.  She refused to tell us of her own beliefs while we were young on the grounds that we might go along with her just to ape our mother.  Of course, her rules for us about religion scandalized a few people in the county who thought she was hellbent on raising infidels.

She did send us to Sunday school each week, and when we asked “why”, she told us it was “to expose us to our cultural heritage”.   Around the age of eight, I got fed up with Sunday school for some reason that I now forget.  I pleaded with mom to allow me to stay home.

At first, she was adamant that I should continue to go, but then I had a rare stroke of genius.  The thought suddenly occurred to me that mom’s real objection to my staying home was that she cherished having an hour or so by herself without us kids underfoot.  I promptly began fervently promising her that I would be quite well behaved during the “church hour”, exceptionally well-behaved, even silent as a mouse well-behaved.

She held her ground until I blurted out my newfound conviction that what she really wanted was quiet time to herself, and that since I was willing to give that to her, she should give me a chance in return.   That struck her as reasonable, and so I was allowed to stay home on Sundays — on the strict condition that I kept my word.  The very next Sunday, my brothers cut their own deals with her.

In her later years, mom would reminisce with us about the days we were growing up.   What she herself seemed to remember best was the laughter.   One day the four of us were eating in a restaurant when a man approached us to remark that he’d seldom seen a family laugh together as much as we were doing.  And that was pretty typical of us.  Whenever we were together, whether in a restaurant, around our kitchen table, at friend’s homes, or in our car, we were often enough laughing.

Unfortunately, most of the jokes were of the sort that would take some explanation, for we seldom recounted jokes we’d heard, no matter how funny they were.  Instead, we made things up on the spur of a moment — and our family tended to see humor in nearly anything.  My mother, for all of her stoicism, never had a problem with laughing, and she especially appreciated self-deprecating humor and genuine wit.

She drew the line, however, at malicious laughter.  She simply did not believe in making fun of others if doing so risked wounding them.

The newspaper article published upon her retirement mentioned, among other things, that she had served on the boards of one university, one college, two poet’s societies, an historical society, a zoning and planning commission, and a welfare advisory council.

Much of that was news to us.  At her visitation, my brothers and I were still finding out things about her from the guests.  In some ways, I think I knew her well, but in other ways, I believe she will always remain a bit of a mystery to me.

She died peacefully, August 22, at the age of 99.  We buried her the 2nd of September.

Something quite unplanned happened after the graveside service. We were each of us holding a red rose, quietly conversing, when one of my young nephews approached the grave, stood silent for a few moments, and then dropped his rose onto her vault, which had already been lowered into the ground.

One by one, the rest of us followed his example, without a word of direction from anyone, until we had all said our silent goodbyes.

“So Of Course I Didn’t Even Think to Ask!”

/ Paul Sunstone / 2 Comments

(About a 1 minute read)

Jennifer was the first person to befriend me after I moved to Colorado in my late 30s.  One day she showed up at my work, looking for a job in response to an ad I’d placed.  Our rapport was instantaneous, and I quickly hired her.

Unfortunately, she didn’t like her new job and quit within two weeks.  She kept in touch, though, and we became casual friends.  I soon learned that Jennifer harbored a number of eccentricities.  Not the least of which was her enjoyment of sexually teasing me.  However, I was able to quickly realize that she wasn’t seriously coming onto me, because she would tease me in such blatantly funny ways.  So, I would just sit back and enjoy her humor.

But about a year after we’d met, she left the city to live up in a small mountain town with her mother.  We lost contact with each other, and I gradually accepted the fact I probably would not see her again.

However, one winter’s day I walked into a convenience store near my apartment and was astonished to discover her clerking there.  It was her first day on the job.  After enthusiastically reintroducing ourselves, I wrote down the directions to my apartment, and left them with her.

The next day was extremely cold, and the night even colder.  Around eleven o’clock, there was a knock on the door.  I was happy to see it was Jennifer.   We kissed “hello”, and then sat down on the couch together.

Immediately, she turned herself towards me, broke into a wide, brilliant grin, and without a word of warning, plunged her hands down the front of my pants!  Then she quite cheerfully rushed out an explanation as rapidly as she could,  “I’m so sorry Paul!  But my fingers are freezing!  And I figured your crotch would be warm.  And you’re such a humane man I just knew for sure you’d want to help stop my fingers from getting frostbite, so of course I didn’t even think to ask!”

We both broke out laughing.  Jennifer was back.

Experiencing God the American Way

/ Paul Sunstone / 3 Comments

(About a 4 minute read)

From:  Paul Sunstone
Subject:  What’s up?
To:  Christine Andrews
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2017 10:07:41 -0600

Hey Chris!

How’s it going?  I’ve been thinking of you and wondering what you’ve been up to?  Are you still the insufferably brilliant businessperson that you were here in Colorado, or has California change you?  😀

I’m doing fine.  Actually, I’m pretty happy these days.  I’ve been tutoring a young university student from Australia via the internet.  She’s an enthusiastic learner, which keeps me motivated.    Mom turned 99 this year.  Can you believe it!

It’s been ages, Chris.  Eight or nine years by my count without a word between us.  Why’d we let that happen?   I miss our trips to the hot springs.  I hope all is well with you!  Please drop me a note to let me know how you’re doing when you get a chance.

Paul

From: Christine Andrews
Subject: re: What’s up?
To: Paul Sunstone
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2017 16:14:22 -0700

Paul! Gold to hear from you!

What have I’ve been up to?  Great things! Paul, I’m excited, really excited!  Here’s the nutshell. First, I’m out of the turnaround industry.  Totally.  I formed a new company awhile back, and we’ve been working our butts night and day on a franchisable “spiritual system”.   Huge potential!  Certain to capture up to 80% of the rapidly growing market for salvation and enlightenment!  Screw capital acquisitions, I’m finished with that crap, money’s in religion. I just closed the alpha tests and I got to say I’m very pleased with the results.

We’re positioning to be very competitive.  Churches, temples, mosques, they’ll be history.  Had their chance for 1000s of years and blew it fighting religious wars.  The first dozen franchises are all opening their doors between November and mid-December, Paul, just in time for the Holidays.

I’m absolutely confident customers will flock to purchase our God experience.  We’re rolling out no less than the most competitively priced, the most reliable, and above all else, the fastest  (no annoying waits!)  God experience on the market!  And totally drug-free.  That’s key to capturing the health segment.

We are going to steamroll the competition.  I actually feel a little sorry for them.  But not too sorry.  Research shows the big complaint, the number one complaint the market has with our competitors services are their long long wait times.  Typically years, decades, even lifetimes between order placement and fulfillment.  And that’s If our competitors deliver at all.  Paul, you would NOT believe how lax their fulfillment controls are.  We are poised to kick ass!

But you know what?  Looked at financially, the REAL secret’s in the spiritual mix. Tests prove there’s no difference in what the market will pay for a 100% God experience and a 70% God experience.  So we’re rolling out the 70% experience at the 100% price point, and pocketing the difference.  Breakeven is a mere six to nine months, and return on investment is conservatively projected to be astronomical!

But enough about me.  So, Paul, what have you been doing? Still painting?  I love your portraits, man!

From: Paul Sunstone
Subject: re: re: What’s up?
To: Christine Andrews
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2017  04:15:17-0300

It’s so good to hear you’re doing well!   I’m stunned by what you’re up to.  It sounds BIG!  I’ve got a thousand questions, but I know you must be pressed for time, so I won’t ask all of them.  If you get a moment though, please let me know how you got into the God business. How did you come up with the idea for it? I just got to know!

Hope all is well with you!

From: Christine Andrews
Subject: re: re: re: What’s up?
To: Paul Sunstone
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2017  22:28:18 +0000

Sorry about not getting back to you sooner.  Been working 18 hour days, but no complaints about it. I love the work.  It’s all coming together faster every day.  We’re going make this happen, Paul.  Me and my team.

So here’s my story.  I hope it answers your question.  I was lonely after my move to Cali.  Met a man and we become friends with benefits.  He introduces me to his spiritual group.  They’re the first people I meet out here, so I spend a lot of time with them.  But the more time we spend talking about God, enlightenment, nirvana, salvation, and other things, the more I feel something nagging at me.  Nagging and nagging, only I don’t know what it’s trying to tell me.

One evening Jessica, my new best friend, and I are in a restaurant, just the two of us.  She confesses she’s leaving the group.  I ask why.  She says, and I remember her words, “Look at me! I just turned 32 last month.  I don’t have forever to find God and it’s like it totally will take forever.  I’ve made my decision.  I’m dropping religion and taking up CrossFit.  I want you to come with me.”

Right then, Paul, it came together in a flash.  All of it.  Everything I ever knew or ever heard about religion instantly rearranged itself in my head until I could see clear as day everything! Everything important about religion at once.  The market. The service. The competition.  The challenge.  And most important of all the Opportunity!

Cut to the chase.  I’ve written the plan, raised the capital, put together the very  best team of R&D neuroscientists ever to work in private industry.  For awhile it’s all dead ends. We lose some people.  But I myself never lost faith.  That paid off when the break through came!   Simply the easiest, safest, most reliable means to enlightenment ever devised, Paul.  And most of all, the quickest!

You know Paul, this all really means something to me. It really does.  But I don’t know,  did I ever tell you?  I’ve always had a spiritual side.  Never wore it on my sleeve, so maybe you never noticed it. Most people don’t.  I’ve been told all sorts of things about myself, but never has anyone talked much about my spirituality.  I’m not complaining, just saying that’s how it is.

This is going big, Paul.  What I’m doing is going to go big.  First North America, then India, then the world.  The Indian market alone is estimated to be worth a trillion dollars over the next decade.  I feel good about it.  Hell, I feel excellent.  For me, making all this happen is a spiritual experience.  A true spiritual experience. Probably the biggest spiritual experience of my life.  Even bigger than the God experience itself.  Even bigger than that.  Do you get me, Paul, I’m right on the verge of realizing the American Dream!

An Important Message From the Monotheism Relief Fund: Please! We Need Your Help Now!

/ Paul Sunstone / 10 Comments

TRIGGER WARNING: Be advised that some of the words in this post may conjure up disturbing images of the profound misery and suffering that can be caused by Abject Theistic Impoverishment, or ATI.

Dear Soul,

Over seven billion people are alive on our wonderful planet today, and for most of us, religion is a rich source of wisdom, security, and comfort. But did you know that is not true for everyone?

Sadly, there are people on this earth who at this very moment live in horribly abject theistic poverty. Decent people. Good people. Perhaps even neighbors of yours. People who mostly through no fault of their own were born into religions that have but a single god! Yes, just one — and only one — god!

Hard as it might be for those of us who are better off to imagine, literally billions of unfortunate people at this very moment are forced to survive their day to day existence living as monotheists! Each night, these poor souls go to bed with only one god to pray to.

Yes, as unimaginable for most of us as it is, billions of theists today exist merely one step away from no gods at all, and the dire heartbreak of atheism! Atheism!  Humanity’s oldest philosophical scourge!  No one deserves to be but one step away from it.  No one!

Can you help?

Here at the Monotheism Relief Fund, we are passionately dedicated to providing blankets, warm clothing, shelter, food, and vital copies of polytheistic literature to the world’s abjectly impoverished monotheists. But we cannot do it all by ourselves. We need your help.

Please donate generously to the Monotheism Relief Fund by calling, 1-800-ANOTHER-SUNSTONE-SCAM now! Have you credit or debit card handy!

Act now and with every donation of $25 USD or more, we might or might not send you a precious four volume copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God — which is veritably an encyclopedia of deities through the ages!

You CAN make a difference! Act now!

Could Star Trek’s Mr. Spock Really Exist?

/ Paul Sunstone / 18 Comments

(About a 5 minute read)

Like most sensible people, I am firmly convinced that around 2,400 years ago in Athens, Greece, Plato invented Mr. Spock.

Of course, I do not believe that Plato invented all the details of Mr. Spock right down to his curiously arched eyebrows and pointy ears.  So far as I know, those details were worked out by Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Nimoy, and their band.  But the essential notion that a hyper-rational person would have few or no emotions — that was Plato.

In Plato’s view, emotions and thought were clearly distinct, and the only connection between the two was that emotions could mess with thought.  That is, while emotions could cause us to reason poorly, they had little or no positive impact on reasoning.  Apparently, Plato was the first to come up with those ideas — ideas which went on to become commonplace assumptions of Western thought.  And Roddenberry, etc seized on those assumptions to create Mr. Spock.

Of course, there are some rather obvious ways in which Plato was right.  Most likely everyone has had some experience with their emotions overwhelming their capacity for reason.  Every child is cautioned not to act in anger or other strong emotional state, least they do something irrational.  And many of us — perhaps even most of us — know that we tend to be more gullible when listening to someone present their views with a great deal of passion than when listening to someone present their views coldly.  “I don’t think Snerkleson is quite right in his views, but he’s so passionate about them that he must honestly see some merit to them.  Maybe there’s at least some truth to what he says about dog turds replacing petroleum as the fuel of the future.”  There are clearly ways emotions can interfere with thought, as Plato knew.

As it happens, though, the notion that emotions only have a negative impact on thought is not borne out by the evidence.

In the early 1990s, a man — who has come to be known as “Elliot” — was referred to Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist, by his doctors.  Elliot had applied for disability assistance despite the fact that, “[f]or all the world to see, Elliot was an intelligent, skilled, and able-bodied man who ought to come to this senses and return to work”.  His doctors wanted Damasio to find out if Elliot had a “real disease”.

Damasio found that Elliot tested well when given an IQ test and other measures of intelligence.  His long-term memory, short-term memory, language skills, perception, and handiness with math were unquestionably sound. He was not stupid. He was not ignorant.  Yet, when Damasio started digging into Elliot’s past job performance, he found that Elliot had often behaved as if he was indeed stupid and ignorant.

For instance, Elliot had at least once spent half a day trying to figure out how to categorize his documents.  Should he categorize them by size, date, subject, or some other rule?  Elliot couldn’t decide.  Moreover, he had been fired for leaving work incomplete or in need of correction.   And when Damasio studied what had happened to Elliot after his job loss, he found the same pattern of poor decision-making and incompetence.  Elliot had gotten divorced, then entered into a second marriage that quickly ended in another divorce.  He had then made some highly questionable investments that brought about his bankruptcy.  He couldn’t make plans for a few hours in advance, let alone months or years. Unable to live on his own, he was staying with a sibling. His life was in ruin.

When Damasio looked at Elliot’s medical history, he found that the turning point for Elliot had come about when he developed a brain tumor.   Before the tumor, Elliot had been highly successful in his business field.  He was even a role model for the junior executives.  And he had had a strong, thriving marriage.  Although the brain tumor had been successfully removed,  Elliot had suffered damage to some of the frontal lobe tissues of his brain having to do with the processing of emotions.

Damasio began testing Elliot for his emotional responses to things.  In test after test, Elliot showed little or no emotional response to anything.  He was, Damasio concluded, cognitively unaware of his own emotions.  Then Damasio had a revelation.  “I began to think that the cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options,” Damasio wrote.

Damasio went on from Elliot to look at other case studies of people who had suffered brain injuries preventing them from being cognitively aware of their emotional states.  He found the same pattern over and over:  When emotions were impaired, so was decision-making.

The findings of Damasio and other scientists have largely revolutionized how scientists view the relationship between emotion and thought.  It now seems that emotions are, among other things, the means by which we sort out information: The relevant from the irrelevant, the high-priority from the low-priority, the valuable from the worthless.

And Mr. Spock?  Well, a real life Mr. Spock might spend hours trying to figure out whether to set his phaser to stun or kill.  Without emotions, decision-making becomes extraordinarily problematic.