That was my point earlier, my only worldview ISN'T material, and it definitely isn't solely spirituality. I guess this comment brings us back to the point of the thread, I'm an agnostic, and I guess I also look at these experiences agnostically as well. And I understand what you're saying but I think it's kind of over simplifying things a bit. I can't pretend to know anything about spiritual realms because it's TOO subjective to record information properly, as we can see with many diverse beliefs regarding spirituality and psychedelics.

I respect where you're coming from, but don't be so quick to dismiss me purely because I think the experience is internal. Currently, I don't hold any strong belief in spirits, but I also acknowledge that it's a possibility, and I probably wouldn't even consider it as a possibility if it weren't for my psychedelic experiences.

HF,

I am saying this strictly to you. Just making sure its loud enough for everyone else to hear....

This IS ABSOLUTELY the most simple, elegant, AND eloquent collection of words that can be viewed with equal objectivity from both sides of this "science/spirituality" belief spectrum/fence/debate. I either believe a "truth" or disbelieve a "falsehood". One cannot seek "truth" in ANY of its forms without keeping the word belief in AT LEAST ONE of its forms in their pocket IMO.

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We should push this conversation away from WHAT we all "feel is truth" in existence and towards HOW each of us use what we feel to manipulate our shared realities.

Ill give it a shot first!
Lets go simple...

At least 3 times in the last week alone I focused(thought) about what I was SPECIFICALLY in the mood to eat that day. I didnt think about how tasty it would be, I imagined it in front of me. I visualized the plate on an empty surface near me where ever I was within a number of given moments. THOSE VERY DAYS that I do this THAT SPECIFIC FOOD would show up around me. Not a situation like I went to the store or a diner and bought it; it just showed up by a strangers hand, ready to eat. Not limited to but including the specific combination of ingredients on the pizza. I have been doing this on a regular basis for almost two months now.

I am MANIFESTING what I want into my reality PHYSICALLY. Seriously yall.

Maybe I am every bit as delusional as I have been accused of being HERE in recent memory. (not bitter, just acknowledging)
Maybe I am onto something "real" here.

Maybe anyone that tries it wont be disappointed...¿¡

At the risk of sounding simple, I feel that joy, serenity, understanding, and revelation, as well as their negative counterparts are the truly important constituents of the spice. It is within the greater context of your beliefs as an individual that they gain their numinous validity. Atheist, agnostic, theist... None of these persuasions are empty, each and every one is full to the brim, and capable of feeling and experiencing the important things we all have, in every imaginable way.

What about those folks who view the glass as half empty??? Would that also be a persuasion that's full to the brim?

yes elijah, even though THE GLASS is half full/empty, THE PERSON is filled with THAT or whatever "belief"

Merci beaucoup.

As for manifesting food, I too have done this and been jaw-dropping astounded at how well it worked. Even still, I typically forget to practice it and slip into the take it as it comes mode (which is fine).

I don't think it is delusional to recognize that there is something to the visualization and manifestation powers of the mind. I balk at the hokier new age takes on this stuff with The Secret and What The Bleep coming to mind right off the bat... and yet, I do think the "Law Of Attraction" stuff works.

How it works, is a matter for debate (perhaps its own thread even).

I remember one time on a remote beach in Honduras, after days of feeling deprived, my buddy and I began visualizing our 3 M's (marijuana, mujeres y mangos) of which we not only had none, but hadn't had even an inkling of a hope for any of them in a little while. Lo and behold... I shit you not... a few girls came down the beach bearing mangoes less than an hour after a local kid came literally out of the bushes to deliver us some ganj. We hadn't asked anyone for anything, and we hadn't even moved more than 100m. We really and truly did nothing to manifest these things other than will them to come to us. Bear in mind that we were in the middle of nowhere, many hours from the nearest village... a village that was drier than a tumbleweed when we passed through.

What does this prove? Jack shit... but it was freaking awesome.

I got you.

This wasn't specifically about you to begin with, and I don't want to make it about you. My comment leaves ample room for people to have a wide range of worldviews, and i will amend it to say that you can even combine or hold more than one worldview... as well as be flirting with a number of worldviews and have yet to make up your mind. You can remain undecided forever.

My point was more about those people that are not agnostic about it, but are died in the wool materialists. Ascribing to a purely materialist, physical model of the Universe is, by definition, the antithesis of the spiritual model. I may have simplified things a tad, but the point basically stands. If you truly 100% (no room for doubt) believe that your consciousness is simply the result of some neurons and neurotransmitters that evolved randomly from unconscious matter over the course of X million years... you are not a spiritual person IMHO.

Furthermore, as much as the materialists like to think that they have the evidence and science to back up their feeling about this... it is fundamentally impossible to prove that you even have neurons, a head, or a body. There is no test to prove you are not dreaming. We regularly (often a number of times a day) prove dreams to be dreams by "waking" from them... but never once in your entire existence have you been able to prove you were not dreaming. We are talking about 50,000 proofs of dreaming vs 0 proofs of not... ignore this and you are abandoning objective reason.

Again, this is not aimed at you... so don't take it personal. I fully accept your agnosticism as an intelligent and rational stance in lieu of overwhelming evidence in either direction. In cases where there IS ample evidence and the decision really is pretty much polar, though (i.e. Romney v Obama), then being undecided is basically equivalent to saying you don't give a sh*t and can't be bothered to actually think about the issue.

Ahhh, the coveted swing voter...

This reasoning makes no sense to me. How could you possible show evidence for an "all powerful omnipotent creator", a being that could tweak the entire subatomic structure of the universe in an instant? If such a God exists it could have destroyed and recreated the whole universe one minute ago purposefully making it appear in every detail to have exited all this time without a creator.

IMO such an all powerful being eventually negates its own existence. Its best bet would be to turn itself into a pandeistic being completely losing itself in its own creation.

^^^^^^

Bravo!

Some would say that the entire universe around us, the whole darn thing, is evidence of such a being (or IS that being!)

...But the ability to actually prove such a thing appears to be, by nature, self-contradictory.

Why wouldn't there be evidence of this being? So this God can and does do anything with nothing being impossible since it makes all the rules and creates all. How can something so limitless not be able to even be detected? That's my question. And let's say God does exist exactly as some say it does, what reason would there even be for it to ensure its lack of detection or knowledge of its existence?

Your own words admit that its impossible to show any evidence of God existence...then why would you believe in it? Why does God always get a pass? If anyone put forth a proposal of the existence of something like a gremlin or a unicorn wouldn't you ask for some hard evidence of them to believe they exist?. This is what I don't understand.

Doesn't it really just come down to how you choose to define "God"? If you're talking about the Abrahamic religions' anthropomorphic concept of a bearded guy in the clouds, hiding dinosour bones all over the place just to "test" us, I'd tend to agree with your viewpoint. IME that's just silly. But what if you define the entire universe as "God"? It fits every meaningful qualification for the job I've ever heard, in particular as an all-powerful creator who made up and enforces the rules. It is everywhere at once, we are part of it and it is part of us, in a very literal and scientifically demonstrated way. And it certainly works in mysterious ways. So if that's the case, I'd say there is quite a bit of evidence of "his" existence, if anything really exists at all. OR, what if "God" exists in the form the unified field of consciousness that so many of us have experienced merging with? That makes you and I both similar to individual cells in the body of "God". Or, why can't we use the word "God" as a label for the totality of both those things?

Not claiming to have all the answers, just offering food for thought. Without first settling on some kind of definition of the thing you're denying, how can you say there's no evidence of it?

chemicals is god.

consciouss chemicals.

Who's to say there isn't evidence of god? Before the first person tried DMT there wasn't evidence of hyperspace, does that mean it didn't exist? Just because we haven't acquired the means of detecting something does not mean it doesn't exist.

Do you believe in love? Can you prove that it exists? Can you prove to a blind man that the color blue exists?

I understand what your saying but let me ad that there is no evidence that hyperspace exists other than an altered state of a persons perception.

For thsake of argument let's define God as some being that is supernatural.

Ok then, what is supernatural? Do you just mean something that hasn't been proved by science yet? The big bang hasn't been proven, and there's not even a solid theory for what caused it, so is that supernatural? The word itself would seem to imply something greater than nature... which goes back to suggesting the entire universe again. Since it created and contains all of nature, that means it must be greater than nature, right?

Regardless of what hyperspace is it exists. It is an experience that one can have, see, and hear. Whether its all in your head or an actual place we visit, does that even matter? It exists as an experience. Heaven may very well be an altered state of consciousness.

Besides god is supernatural at this current time, by definition.

This.
(something a bunch of us have said over & over on this thread in one form or another)

1) Why on Earth would you expect that a divine being that was omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient would "play by your rules?" Dictating how such a being should behave or appear smacks of hubris. Do we play by the rules of e coli bacteria?

2) Why would you think your puny senses would be anywhere near sufficient to detect something utterly transcendent? Especially, if you have not even tried to train your senses to detect transcendental or supernatural things...

3) You ask how it would be possible for such a being to exist and not leave evidence? Well, A) I believe there is ample evidence for those mystics who want to look for it & B) By definition, an all-powerful being would have the power to be imperceptible to somewhat evolved primate who doesn't even believe in their sixth sense.

4) People who complain about the lack of evidence for a deity by and large have never actually looked for such evidence. What you are saying Oly, is that unless the greatest, grand ultimate creative force actively comes directly to you uninvited and for the sole purpose of proving itself to you... it doesn't exist?

I hope you realize how petulant this can come off. No offense, as I think you are an intelligent guy, and many of my most intelligent friends have (or have held) opinions along these lines.

But the fact is, even a cursory glance at the historical record shows that a great number of people have claimed to have the existence of G*d proven... to them. Prophets, saints, mystics, sadhus, shaman and more all have said that you can have this proven for you... but you have to want it, and put in the hard work.

The idea in most traditions is that G*d defaults to a non-interventionist model with humanity because of a thing called free-will. Any overt action on the part of such a deity that was not explicitly called down by the human in question would violate this free-will and force people to believe... thus dictating their actions.

Some people view this as the idea that as G*d's children we are given the space to create, dream, play, learn, fumble and fall. In the end, we are protected from any real danger, and all our fears, pain and suffering is revealed to be but a dream that we created. As children of G*d the ability to create is our birthright and thus, much of what we experience is actually OUR creation, and not that of our creator... except by virtue of its having created us naturally.

So,

5) The basic claim is that G*d can be proven to individuals who go to extraordinary length, desire it passionately, or something along those lines. I don't know why anyone would think that such an honor would be effortless. Having evidence for G*d's existence littering creation would be more absurd than having streets paved with gold in a system where the scarcity of gold made the whole thing run.

In fact, according to the logic of Oly's posts recently, many people throughout history could claim that gold didn't exist in veins in the Earth simply by virtue of never bothering to go to a gold mine. The occasional gold ring or nugget that they saw other people possessing could be written off as products of artifice and not ample proof of the "Earth contains gold" theory. If such a person dug a pit in their back yard of a meter or two and didn't strike gold, could they then extrapolate that gold didn't exist in the ground at all?

Well, the people who complain about lack of evidence for G*d are even more obtuse IMHO because they haven't even bothered to dig that pit, let alone study with the "metallurgists & miners" and put themselves in a position where they could find evidence.

One last thing.

It is inevitable that someone will chime in here that personal anecdotal evidence of G*d is not sufficient proof. There will be some who will not be happy unless G*d is scientifically verified in a laboratory somewhere... and not just hinted at endlessly as is the case now. Well, I preemptively give me typical response:

You can not prove anything exists. You can not prove that laboratories are real. You can not prove that you are alive. You can not prove that the body you seem to inhabit is real. You can not prove that other people exist. You can not prove that history isn't just a memory planted in your head.

6) Why then would it surprise you that you can not prove the existence of a being you clearly don't want to believe in?

You can not disprove "brain in a vat" theory, solipsism, life is a dream, or any of a dozen theories that completely and utterly deflate the materialist proof you so desperately insist on. You could very well be standing as a character in a dream insisting that other characters of varying lucidity prove that the entire scene and all its characters and timelines are existing in the mind of some über being called the Dreamer by the standards of proof you have established within the dream. Meanwhile, the lucid dreamers around you simply know that it is a dream by virtue of having transcended it already.