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Path: utzoo!laura
From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: what does it mean to talk to God [a brief attempt at an answer]
Message-ID: <5297@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 19-Mar-85 07:47:33 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5297
Posted: Tue Mar 19 07:47:33 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 19-Mar-85 07:47:33 EST
References: <893@topaz.ARPA> <2635@mcnc.UUCP> <660@pyuxd.UUCP> <4048@umcp-cs.UUCP>, <711@pyuxd.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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From Rich Rosen:

	The fact that you can no longer really tell when I'm telling the truth
	about these things, these "experiences", should give you a taste of
	your own medicine:  this is exactly how YOU sound to the rest 
	of the world.  One can 	only wonder why you don't sound that way 
	to yourselves.  For just as I might have wished you to believe in
	my experience, you wish yourself to believe your own.

Rich, if you think that the people who talk to God don't already understand
that they sound weird to the rest of the world, then you need to do some
reading. Every single mystic I know of comments on the difficulty of
expressing what has happened. Religious experiences are very difficult
to write about. The reason that mystics make a certain amount of sense
to each other is a commonality of experience. There is something in
mystic experiences which seems to be common, no matter what faith the
mystic has. It is also the case that mystics seem to draw closer to a
common set of beliefs -- though by no means into an easily separable
``universal religion''.

There is no way that you can prove that a mystic experience is only
wishful thinking. It is definitely one theory. I tend to reject it,
though. Too many people have ended up having mystic experiences when
they were not really seeking for them. For instance, I was interested
in a way to get rid of migraine headaches, hit upon meditation and
ended up with a whole lot of stuff. Why do you reject subjective
experiences out of hand like that? More importantly, why do you
``hunt them down and kill them'' :-) rather than just ignoring them
as having no relevance to you?

Laura Creighton
utzoo!laura