Feb 11, 2020, 2:51 PM
The only thing heathen (nature) and pagan(archetype) religions ask of us is to acknowledge debts of our inheritance so that we pass that inheritance ‘unspent’ on to others.
The rest is an excuse to find relaxation, comfort, entertainment and and joy with others in some activity other than running, hunting, or eating.
What you call spiritual is the result of two biological processes.
The first is just auto association that is constantly going on in your brain. The human part of our brain never stops, we merely regulate attention or wakefulness to increase or decrease its activity – but it’s always working even in sleep. If It is always engaged in transforming perception into a world model, predicting from that world model, focusing our attention to narrow on some prediction or other, or when not doing so, it’s in continuous rehearsal of short term memory to convert it to long term, and auto association of stimuli to find opportunities.
Auto association is like daydreaming. It’s cheap. It’s relaxing. While thinking, reasoning, calculating, and computing with reason is expensive and hard.
The second is the old brain constantly worrying about (calculating) social status, advantage, safety.
So the experience we call spiritual is the ritual act of sedating the auto-association function of the brain (which is very deep in the bottom center, so that it can fucking relax, and we can feel the safety we feel resting or sleeping with the well fed pack of males (herd of females).
Meditation can do this, ritual can do it, prayer can do it exercise can do it, dancing, singing, any group activity that doesn’t force you to calculate status and hierarchy can do it.
That’s all it is.
A purely mechanical process by which we manage the primitive parts of our brain that evolved prior to reason, and that we gracefully fall back upon when we don’t want to think very hard, or cannot solve a problem, or must act rapidly by instinct.
Now how does abrahamic religion work? It creates a false debt to a false god, for false crimes, and asks for us to submit and surrender our reason aspiration and transcendence and instead to ‘stay in place’.
So if you wish to worship your evil semitic gods, whose sole purpose is to prevent you from transcendence of man, rather than just to use Jesus as another philosopher that is fine. But for the rest of us Jesus is just another philosophy, and gods are archetypes of our ancestors, and all those archetypes serve as proxies that we can through prayer (conversation), communicate with and obtain wisdom from.