Do you believe in God and why

[thaibeachlovers]

1 minute ago, Pedrogaz said:

Religious practice is like masturbation and should be done in private, is my opinion.

The Christ had something to say about that, to my recollection. He didn't want people being "good" in public and sinners out of the public eye.

I don't remember the actual text but it was something about how God knows what is in people's hearts.

 

Lots of people go to Church on Sundays and are awful people during the week, unfortunately.

[thaibeachlovers]

5 minutes ago, Pedrogaz said:

When I was a young Catholic about to be confirmed by the bishop, I wanted to be a priest when I grew up and do good in the world, help the poor and sick and win a stigmata, and be canonised. 

I went to an Anglican Church school and was the youngest sacristan they ever had. However, the padre had to tell me not to be one anymore because there were "complaints" about me doing it.

That was the day the Church lost me.

Seems those that complained didn't know the scriptures ie "let the children come unto me" etc.

Such hypocrisy!

[canthai55]

48 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

That photo shows why Thailand is going to have a problem attracting tourists. Look how dirty the gutter is, how filthy the white paint is and the broken pavement.

It used to be OK to be decrepit 20 years ago, but not now.

Looks OK to me - and I spend a lot of time in the gutter !

[ravip]

7 hours ago, Sparktrader said:

Why doesnt god make another son to prove god exists? Would be easy. He could walk on water, turn water into wine etc. Then we can all be nice and do the right thing. Argument resolved.

 

 

+ do away with this pandemic?

[ravip]

4 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

That photo shows why Thailand is going to have a problem attracting tourists. Look how dirty the gutter is, how filthy the white paint is and the broken pavement.

It used to be OK to be decrepit 20 years ago, but not now.

...yet, it seems 1000's are still attracted!

[Sparktrader]

7 minutes ago, ravip said:

+ do away with this pandemic?

or apply common sense

[mauGR1]

2 minutes ago, Sparktrader said:

10 minutes ago, ravip said:

do away with this pandemic?

or apply common sense

Have you become a preacher? ????

[ravip]

1 minute ago, mauGR1 said:

Have you become a preacher? ????

No, just trying to be a faithful follower.

[Sparktrader]

8 minutes ago, mauGR1 said:

Have you become a preacher? ????

????

[Sunmaster]

For your information all...currently there aren't any religious people on this thread, so there's no one to wind up with your troll posts. ????

Just to save you some time and save us from your boring comments. 

Ta ta

[mauGR1]

14 hours ago, Sunmaster said:

For your information all...currently there aren't any religious people on this thread, so there's no one to wind up with your troll posts. ????

Just to save you some time and save us from your boring comments. 

Ta ta

I cannot say that I'm religious nor against religion. 

It should not be ignored though,  that religion has been shaping our society for 1000s of years, in a good and often bad way.

Mocking religion is childish, when not even in bad taste, and denotes a profound ignorance about our common history and our societies development. 

It's like if the branches of a tree were despising the roots,  enough said.

[canthai55]

That is the very reason people mock religion - they are NOT ignorant of the harm it has caused, and continues to harm.

 

Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man

 

That was the Jesuit motto, alleged to be attributed to Francis Xavier, the co-founder of the Jesuit Order. The implication is that the best opportunity to indoctrinate a person in a lifetime of belief and devotion to religious dogma is when they are young.

[Skeptic7]

3 hours ago, mauGR1 said:

I cannot say that I'm religious nor against religion. 

It should not be ignored though,  that religion has been shaping our society for 1000s of years, in a good and often bad way.

Mocking religion is childish, when not even in bad taste, and denotes a profound ignorance about our common history and our societies development. 

It's like if the branches of a tree were despising the roots,  enough said.

Your first paragraph was shockingly sound and fair. You should have totally stopped with 'enough said' right there.

 

That 2nd paragraph...not so much. Not at all, actually. 

[mauGR1]

1 hour ago, Skeptic7 said:

Your first paragraph was shockingly sound and fair. You should have totally stopped with 'enough said' right there.

 

That 2nd paragraph...not so much. Not at all, actually. 

 

[Sunmaster]

PART 4
 

THE EXPERIMENTAL INDUCTION OF RELIGIOUS-TYPE EXPERIENCES

JEAN HOUSTON AND ROBERT E. L. MASTERS

 

 

 

Thus, the recent interest of young people in finding ways of “turning on without drugs” has had its parallel among some former LSD researchers bent upon finding means to continue to explore avenues of highly promising investigation opened up by the psychedelic drugs and then so abruptly closed by the bans upon drug work. Our own current research project is one result of the search for adequate alternatives to the psychedelics. Although (as of this writing) the project has been of short duration, it has already yielded some results of interest, including the creation of devices and techniques that do alter consciousness and do give continuity to our work.

 

Two of these devices are called by us, respectively, the Altered States of Consciousness Induction Device—which abbreviates to A.S.C.I.D., or ASCID—and the Audio-Visual Environment, which comes down to A.V.E., or AVE, a famous salutation of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that has the twin meanings of hail and farewell! When one is dealing daily in visions and ecstacies it is best to keep a sense of humor in the armamentarium. The ASCID was developed by us initially as a facilitator of visual or eidetic imagery. It is essentially a metal swing or pendulum in which the subject stands upright, supported by broad bands of canvas and wearing blindfold goggles. The device containing the subject moves in side-to-side, forward-and-backward, and rotating motions generated by the subject’s body. Typically, in from two minutes to twenty, an altered state of consciousness or trance state results.

 

Trance depth ranges from light to profound somnambulistic, but in almost all cases the subject experiences eidetic imagery, imagery in other sense modalities, and other phenomena characteristic of trance and psychedelic drug states. The trance is different from a hypnotic trance, especially in that the usual hypnotist-subject relationship does not obtain and the experience of the subject occurs with a high degree of autonomy and spontaneity—he goes, if you will, on his own trip. He is responsive, in most cases, to suggestions given him by the experimenter; but he is unusually free of dependency upon the suggestions and also feels very free to reject them. Subjects experienced in both hypnotic and ASCID trance states feel that the trances are distinctly different in basic ways; but a language adequate to a precise differentiation between types of trance states is presently lacking.

 

The Audio-Visual Environment is also productive of altered states of consciousness, of hypnoid and trance states, and of responses to the stimuli indicative of the alterod state. This program consists of dissolving 2 X 2-inch slides, projected by two projectors, accompanied by a co-ordinated taped sound sequence, principally electronic music. The program is exactly repeatable since the sound tape controls at programmed intervals both the changing of the slides and the (flexible: 1 to 20 seconds) duration of the slide dissolves—a rather sophisticated, computerized system that is difficult to describe. Present audio-visual programs consist of from 120 to 160 slides and are from 30 to 45 minutes duration.

 

 

[Skeptic7]

42 minutes ago, mauGR1 said:

 

Your BEST post EVER!!! Bravo!

Mainly becuz you didn't actually type anything, but still quite humorous. Great scene. ????

[thaibeachlovers]

14 hours ago, Sunmaster said:

PART 4
 

THE EXPERIMENTAL INDUCTION OF RELIGIOUS-TYPE EXPERIENCES

JEAN HOUSTON AND ROBERT E. L. MASTERS

 

 

 

Thus, the recent interest of young people in finding ways of “turning on without drugs” has had its parallel among some former LSD researchers bent upon finding means to continue to explore avenues of highly promising investigation opened up by the psychedelic drugs and then so abruptly closed by the bans upon drug work. Our own current research project is one result of the search for adequate alternatives to the psychedelics. Although (as of this writing) the project has been of short duration, it has already yielded some results of interest, including the creation of devices and techniques that do alter consciousness and do give continuity to our work.

 

Two of these devices are called by us, respectively, the Altered States of Consciousness Induction Device—which abbreviates to A.S.C.I.D., or ASCID—and the Audio-Visual Environment, which comes down to A.V.E., or AVE, a famous salutation of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that has the twin meanings of hail and farewell! When one is dealing daily in visions and ecstacies it is best to keep a sense of humor in the armamentarium. The ASCID was developed by us initially as a facilitator of visual or eidetic imagery. It is essentially a metal swing or pendulum in which the subject stands upright, supported by broad bands of canvas and wearing blindfold goggles. The device containing the subject moves in side-to-side, forward-and-backward, and rotating motions generated by the subject’s body. Typically, in from two minutes to twenty, an altered state of consciousness or trance state results.

 

Trance depth ranges from light to profound somnambulistic, but in almost all cases the subject experiences eidetic imagery, imagery in other sense modalities, and other phenomena characteristic of trance and psychedelic drug states. The trance is different from a hypnotic trance, especially in that the usual hypnotist-subject relationship does not obtain and the experience of the subject occurs with a high degree of autonomy and spontaneity—he goes, if you will, on his own trip. He is responsive, in most cases, to suggestions given him by the experimenter; but he is unusually free of dependency upon the suggestions and also feels very free to reject them. Subjects experienced in both hypnotic and ASCID trance states feel that the trances are distinctly different in basic ways; but a language adequate to a precise differentiation between types of trance states is presently lacking.

 

The Audio-Visual Environment is also productive of altered states of consciousness, of hypnoid and trance states, and of responses to the stimuli indicative of the alterod state. This program consists of dissolving 2 X 2-inch slides, projected by two projectors, accompanied by a co-ordinated taped sound sequence, principally electronic music. The program is exactly repeatable since the sound tape controls at programmed intervals both the changing of the slides and the (flexible: 1 to 20 seconds) duration of the slide dissolves—a rather sophisticated, computerized system that is difficult to describe. Present audio-visual programs consist of from 120 to 160 slides and are from 30 to 45 minutes duration.

 

 

As you wrote, IMO the woke were trying to find a way of making that illegal. Can't have the masses finding out that there is anything else out there, can we?

[mauGR1]

1 minute ago, thaibeachlovers said:

As you wrote, IMO the woke were trying to find a way of making that illegal. Can't have the masses finding out that there is anything else out there, can we?

That's an interesting hypothesis, but,  let me play the devil's advocate a bit..

Would you fly on a plane whose pilots are high on mushrooms?

 

[Skeptic7]

59 minutes ago, mauGR1 said:

That's an interesting hypothesis, but,  let me play the devil's advocate a bit..

Would you fly on a plane whose pilots are high on mushrooms?

555 well here ya go! Fitting, entertaining and hilarious vid by Foo Fighters. The band play themselves as well as most other characters. Bit part by Jack Black. 

 

 

[thaibeachlovers]

1 hour ago, mauGR1 said:

That's an interesting hypothesis, but,  let me play the devil's advocate a bit..

Would you fly on a plane whose pilots are high on mushrooms?

 

The effects of mushrooms may last a while, but I assume that something that doesn't rely on chemicals would cease having an effect as soon as one stopped using it.

[Sunmaster]

1 hour ago, thaibeachlovers said:

As you wrote, IMO the woke were trying to find a way of making that illegal. Can't have the masses finding out that there is anything else out there, can we?

I guess everything happens for a reason. While it was great for this new awareness to hit the counterculture of the 60's and influencing all subsequent decades, it's also true that, had it been left unchecked, it would have probably created more problems than it tried to solve. 
It was a bit like in the stock market: there was a hyperbolic increase in change, then a 80% retraction, then consolidation phase and now the market is slowly gaining confidence again....to reach new all time highs (hopefully). ????

The sad part is that they also shut down scientific research for 30 years and are only now slowly starting again. 

Edited July 31, 2021 by Sunmaster

[mauGR1]

14 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

The effects of mushrooms may last a while, but I assume that something that doesn't rely on chemicals would cease having an effect as soon as one stopped using it.

Well, it was a provocative question, in fact i tend to agree with your previous post. 

[Sunmaster]

PART 5
 

THE EXPERIMENTAL INDUCTION OF RELIGIOUS-TYPE EXPERIENCES

JEAN HOUSTON AND ROBERT E. L. MASTERS

 

The slides, each one an individual oil painting, painted with transparent colors on 2 X 2-inch pieces of glass, are mostly abstract and intended either to suggest emotional and projective responses or to facilitate and encourage free projection—a “seeing into” the abstraction. Slides are projected over the whole surface of an 8 X 8-foot semicircular rear projection screen, behind which the subject is sitting. This gives the effect of an “environment,” of almost being in the painting pictured. Sound comes to the subject through a headphone or from speakers at each side of him.

 

We work usually with a single subject but have utilized the program effectively with small groups of simultaneous viewers. Responses to the program often are intense and include marked time distortion, empathy, anxiety, euphoria, body image changes, religious and erotic feelings and imagery, pronounced muscular relaxation, heightened suggestibility and, in some cases, trance states that continue after the program has ended and which then may be utilized for further experimentation. This is not “the movies,” and it is not just another “light show,” but it suggests film and multimedia possibilities that we may have to contend with in the near future. And it also may disclose in a magnified form alterations of consciousness with heightened suggestibility that already occur in milder forms with multimedia, television viewing and films. Many workers with altered states of consciousness believe that prolonged television viewing, especially, induces hypnoid states with increased suggestibility, especially to certain types of highly emotogenic imagery and propaganda messages. It is, of course, of very great importance to understand these media potentials. We are continuing to refine our own program and make it more effective.

 

There are important possibilities for induction and study of altered states of consciousness and also, possibly, for diagnosis and therapy—in addition to the implications and applications possible in the fields of communications and entertainment. As a vehicle for experimental induction of religious-type experiences, the audio-visual program has not achieved anything spectacular. But even the tapping of such deep psychical levels as are involved in such experiences seems a distinct possibility for the not-too-distant future. On the other hand, the Altered States of Consciousness Induction Device already has been the setting for a number of religious-type experiences, both spontaneous and in varying degrees suggested.

 

For example, one subject with whom we have been working is a rather well-known theologian. His experiences in the device have been extremely intense, ecstatic and visionary. They have also had the fruitful effect of enriching his creative as well as his spiritual life. A writing block of long-standing has been dissolved, and in a period of just three months he has produced a series of papers that he thinks to be among the best he has yet written. We have read some of these, and they are, in fact, outstanding examples of a highly lucid presentation of difficult, complex ideas. He also reports several other benefits—improved relations with his family, better teaching and a continuing sense of growth—but these claims are less subject to verification than the dissolution of a creative block and subsequent high-level creative productivity. It should be remarked that the subject was not given suggestions of improvement in any of these areas—no suggestions about the writing block, the better teaching, or any of the rest of it. If the effects he describes are attributable to the session, there might be many reasons for that. But one should not exclude as a possible cause the experiencing of deep psychical levels where, as with psychedelic drugs, there appears to be activated an entelechy or healing, self-actualizing force, including a creative thrust.

This last is not surprising, and more and more we observe the similarities when not identities of the components of the creative process and the religious-type experiences. The artist, if he follows his road far enough, becomes a mystic—or, sometimes, a madman.  [I like this last sentence]

 

[Sparktrader]

On 7/30/2021 at 2:29 PM, mauGR1 said:

I cannot say that I'm religious nor against religion. 

It should not be ignored though,  that religion has been shaping our society for 1000s of years, in a good and often bad way.

Mocking religion is childish, when not even in bad taste, and denotes a profound ignorance about our common history and our societies development. 

It's like if the branches of a tree were despising the roots,  enough said.

Some religious things are good. Some are rubbish.

[mauGR1]

11 minutes ago, Sparktrader said:

Some religious things are good. Some are rubbish.

The depth of your philosophy is astounding. 

Pls keep posting ????

[Sparktrader]

Just now, mauGR1 said:

The depth of your philosophy is astounding. 

Pls keep posting ????

Well I could waste 30 mins saying the same thing. But there is no need.

[mauGR1]

3 minutes ago, Sparktrader said:

Well I could waste 30 mins saying the same thing. But there is no need.

In a way you are right,  but understanding history is useful too.

[Sparktrader]

Just now, mauGR1 said:

In a way you are right,  but understanding history is useful too.

Learning is better.

[mauGR1]

4 minutes ago, Sparktrader said:

Learning is better.

True,  life is for learning,  and history,  not necessarily the " official history ", is part of that learning. 

[Sparktrader]

Wisdom wasted on the old.