TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
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User ID: 616
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Have you tried praying with a humble heart? You might be surprised by Him answering, as I was.
I mean this seriously. I think the majority of materialists, like my own past self, are just fundamentally unwilling to believe in God for emotional reasons. There is plenty of evidence for His existence, but as I spent my post explaining at least partially, it’s not evidence that a scientific framework can easily accept.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
How far am I supposed to bend over backwards extending charity to all the sorcery that turned out to not actually work? Magical beliefs have been with us since we climbed down from the trees, and after thousands of years we have what? What have you brought us?
All of civilization and the foundation that allowed science to be developed and flourish, perhaps?
Yes materialist science is powerful. It's also flawed, and from my perspective has essentially been burning down our cultural myths and the built up social capital of millenia in order to fuel it's relentless search for reductionist physical truths. That store of fuel is almost gone, and if we don't realize and pay attention to the societal structures which undergird science, it won't matter how much scientific knowledge or power we've accrued. We'll kill ourselves anyway.
To be honest, I'm not sure what non-materialists even want from us materialists. They aren't bringing any experimental insights, they aren't bringing any testable theories, and they don't have any magic that works. Do they just want to get snorted at less when they relate their ESP anecdotes at a party or on an internet forum? I don't know what they expect me to do with what they've given me other than shrug.
Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
You make some good points here, although I still fail to grasp the idea of materialistic free will.
I think that even in rarefied philosophy circles, materialism is used constantly as a motte and Bailey. The Motte is the claim you’re making, that materialists just want to find laws and systems et cetera to explain phenomena. Which yes is an extremely defensible position, but on the other hand prescribes or denies basically nothing as you readily admit.
However, the Bailey of materialism is that God, ghosts, big foot, aliens, or whatever supernatural force or being can’t possibly exist because we know stupid bullshit like that doesn’t fit under our materialist understanding of the world.
I suppose a more accurate term could be something like reductive materialism or mechanistic materialism but eh I think people get the point. Thanks for clarifying.
Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.
In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.
There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.
Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, ScientificTM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.
Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.
I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.
Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:
In my review I said that ESP only occurs, according to the anecdotal evidence, when a person is experiencing intense stress and strong emotions. Under the conditions of a controlled scientific experiment, intense stress and strong emotions are excluded; the person experiences intense boredom rather than excitement, so the evidence for ESP disappears...The experiment necessarily excludes the human emotions that make ESP possible.
This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.
There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:
Dressed in his famous white “dontcaredam suit” Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he related the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were lying in port in St. Louis, the writer had a most remarkable dream:
In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.
Twain awoke, got dressed, and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream. Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him a huge overdose of opium for the pain. Normally, the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised sixty dollars to put Henry in a special metal one. Twain explained what happened next:
When I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.
Now who of us would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it all as a series of coincidences? Twain certainly could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were all too many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they work. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.” Finally, Twain gave in, allowed his name to be attached to his own experiences and ideas, and published this material in Harper’s magazine in two separate installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).”
Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.
However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.
If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.
Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:
In traumatic transcendence, we see reality responding to an acute state of consciousness in some individual. However, there may also be a sense in which this happens “chronically” in response to states of collective consciousness. This leads to a startling conclusion, one that forms a central theme of Kripal’s work: culture directly affects the real by mediating and constraining the kinds of consciousness experiences which people are capable of having. In a very literal sense then, the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age.
We did not simply realize the truth of secular materialism, we “realized” it.
Crucially, this is not something that one can simply opt out of by adopting some facile belief in the supernatural. To live in this age of disenchantment is to operate within an episteme of doubt and suspicion; this makes it almost impossible to obtain those states of consciousness which require absolute metaphysical belief of some kind. The spell was broken once we began compulsively “looking over our shoulders at other beliefs” (Charles Taylor).4
This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.
It's worth considering, at the very least.
Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:
As Aldous Huxley pointed our long ago in his own defense of “mystical” experiences, we have no reason to think from our ordinary experience that water is composed of two gases fused together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by “traumatizing” it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with advanced technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands.
Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to exquisite technologies, like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not “material” at all. But—and this is the key—we can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost billions of dollars, necessitated the participation of tens of thousands of professional physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, and required decades of preparation to inflict it and then analyze its results. Hence the recent discovery of the “God particle,” or Higgs boson at CERN.
We invested our energies, time, and money there, and so we are finding out all sorts of astonishing things about the world in which we live and of which we are intimate expressions. But we will not invest them here, in the everyday astonishing experiences of human beings around the world, and so we continue to work with the most banal models of mind—materialist and mechanistic ones—that is, models that assume that “mind equals brain” and the psyche works like, or is, a computer. What is going on here? Why are we so intent on ignoring precisely those bodies of evidence that suggest that, yes, of course, mind is correlated with brain, but it is not the same thing. Why are we so afraid of the likelihood that we are every bit as bizarre as the quantum world; that we possess fantastic capacities that we have so far only allowed ourselves to imagine in science fiction and fantasy literature? (The Flip, pg. 38)
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
It’s incentivized by ‘nature’ in the same way Big Macs are incentivized by nature. Sure it is great in the short term, but there’s a reason cultured and place rootedness evolved. I’d imagine this hyper mobility would begin to lead to anomie, loss of community, general unrest… oh wait….
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Hey man, just want to give you some solidarity. I also struggle with chronic anxiety that has awful physical symptoms. The medical world can be harsh, and frankly doesn't know what to do with patients like us. I've made improvements over time though, so I know it's possible. I wish you the best.
Happy to discuss further in a PM if you think it might help.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Ahh, tragic story to hear. Yeah we have been through a lot of expensive training with him, although he's not so bad we would have to rehome him. Hopefully! I love the dog and don't know if I could actually make the decision to let him go.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
How badly behaved is the average four year old? Should they be crying and loud in public or is it reasonable to have them sit quietly at a restaurant for an hour or so with enough discipline?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
My dog escaped four times this weekend while I was gone. He’s crazy and super anxious but we love him.
Has anybody had success just drugging their dog into less anxiety? What do you recommend?
You hit the nail on the head here, and highlighted something that isn’t often discussed but is absolutely crucial to the dominance of modernistic liberal culture. Hyper mobility of location and the willingness to abandon your birth culture is completely baked into the current ruling class. In order to pass the crucible and become an elite, you absolutely must be willing to throw your previous, place-rooted culture under the bus. It’s not even hidden or very subtle.
Part of this culture is the criticism or doubt in almost everything. New York WASPs are out of touch and bad because they’re rich. Deep South folks are out of touch and bad because they love white people and hate black people. Californians are okay but there are still plenty of bad apples there that need to be eradicated.
Overall the modern elite liberal culture demands total obedience to the demands of their ideology. While it’s not explicitly written in a declaration of loyalty like previous political ideologies have created, the social reality is undeniable. And the lack of an explicitly written down creed which denounces one’s culture of birth, while simultaneously demanding this denunciation socially, is in my opinion modern progressivism’s most impressive and almost unique strength.
Strip a man of the ideals and culture he grew up with, and he will have no recourse but to toe the party line and double down on the latest progressive ideology.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Most people would just say “well because zoophilia and infant murder are wrong!” Without any conception of the fact that before Christ these things would’ve been totally normal.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Thanks for the quality response here. I also think the effects of stress are dramatically underrated by modern medical science. Overall we have to understand that our understanding of population level genetics and statistics are extremely poor and misleading. We need far more epistemic humility than we have, especially for a claim as strong as HBD.
Unfortunately, it's easy to believe things that confirm your priors.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
What is “spirit”? How does it interact with the physical world?
Not exactly sure but basically it's associated with the heavens, with mind, with immaterial or supermaterial forces.
Also, it's hard to have a discussion and honestly explain things I believe to you when you keep calling my beliefs BS. Just a note. Also your name is referencing a Catholic monk, just FYI ;)
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Or, to put it another way, we realized that we’re animals and, the wool having fallen from our eyes, understand the mechanistic nature of our minds isn’t connected to something greater, isn’t part of some grander system of reincarnation or heaven in which our lives will persist beyond the brief time we have on earth. We understand that life is brutish, nasty and short. We understand - now, increasingly - that the brain is just a Large Language Model trained on the multimodal input of our senses, and that all of our philosophy is simply a product of this banal pattern recognition and prediction.
I feel like you deserve a reply, although your nihilism is so scathing it burns my heart. I just disagree with this, fundamentally.
I don't think that we are coping, I think there's a reason these religious traditions have survived and in many cases have flourished despite this narrative you're packing, which has a TON of power. I mean modern nihilistic materialism is the most extremely powerful framework for understanding the world ever. The more miraculous thing to me is that there are still so many people who believe in God.
Then I started to open myself up to the idea that maybe I was wrong, and well, I began to get undeniable personal evidence. 'Religious experience' as you would probably call it. I know it's not convenient or testable in a lab, but it's real nonetheless. That's the best explanation and response I can give you at the moment, though I'm sure you'll find it wanting.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Wait aren't you a Christian? I am new to this whole thing but I figured most Christians believed in some forms of faith healing.
Maybe I've got your faith wrong though, if so, apologies.
Hell, I believed in faith healing as a Buddhist from reading so many accounts of yogis and other wise men healing others.
Yeah, I've seen this approach a lot and this type of thinking helped me draw closer to God. I think it's a good bridge for staunch rationalists and materialists. But at the end of the day, as @Amadan said, I don't buy it. It feels like telling people to delude themselves for positive utility.
I did try this approach over and over again, and it worked for a bit but kept falling apart due to the self-delusion issue. Then I got, as Vervaeke would say, some personal, 'experiential' evidence of God's existence. That changed my tune quite a bit, but I understand not everyone can be as lucky as I am. And I'm sure the rationalists will read this and say it's all brain chemicals or hallucinations or whatnot. They're entitled to their opinion, as are you. But I'm convinced that the universe is far more mysterious than we understand, and that we're not even close to unraveling the secrets of the inner self, and God.
As a side note, many Orthodox Christians have a somewhat similar interpretation while believing in a real God. Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom, an Orthodox Bishop, writes that the way to pray and to find God is essentially to look deep inside yourself. That God is in creation outside us yes, but our deepest communion is found by encountering the spark of divinity and grace placed within each of our hearts.
At a certain point you have to wonder, which is more real? The psychological approach that tries to reduce everything to a 'scientific' understanding? Or perhaps, if the practices and effects seem to be real and work in your life, maybe the religious people were actually right all along?
EDIT: Also yes I tried the path of the mystic and shaman for many years. Ultimately the mental chaos was too much for me. And I firmly believe that without a society and religion that supports and understands the role of the shaman or mystic, it's practically impossible to get true wisdom out of that path. Sadly.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Well no, not quite like a lion. They are beings of spirit, fundamentally different from us physical beings. And by many accounts much older and wilier.
Besides, there are plenty of people who have personal evidence of demons active in their lives. There are plenty of recordings of ghosts and strange phenomenon if yo know where to look. Again, the point is that scientific evidence requires reproducibility on demand.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Better men than myself have gone up against the edifice of materialist science, spent whole careers showing strong effects and getting nowhere, like Rupert Sheldrake and plenty of others. I don't trust the scientific apparatus to test things like prayer in a valid way, and the replication crisis, Covid, and other issues, to my mind, have born out that skepticism.
I'll also leave a link to this article on angels and demons I quoted below.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Okay, but let's say I agree that meaning is "important" to human beings and necessary for human happiness and flourishing.
It does not follow that religion, any religion, is true. It just means that religious belief might make people happier.
I agree it doesn't follow that a religion is true, necessarily. However my main claim is not that meaning is important, but that materialism is ultimately false. You haven't addressed that here.
This is not dissimilar to the argument some people have made here, that religion is good for society and therefore we should promote it regardless of whether it's true. We'd be better off if everyone was Christian, so go to church even if you don't actually believe in God.
Perhaps I haven't fleshed out my argument enough, but my stance is in fact quite dissimilar from that argument. I do believe in God, and supernatural beings such as angels and demons. I think the whole 'psychological' argument from pro-religion types, while pointing to important considerations, is sadly quite flawed and does lead to self delusion.
However a related argument, the one that convinced me, is learning to trust experiential evidence or knowledge. Due to our upbringing in Enlightenment rationalism, we are trained to only trust a sort of consensus, 'objective' view. Or in other words we've learned to distrust and disbelieve any of our own experiential, or dare I say empirical, qualia in favor of only believing things that can be confirmed via repeated scientific experiments, or the consensus making machines of our society.
My point is that this 'objective' reality is, once truly dug into, false. The scientific materialist worldview is full of misconceptions and outright lies.
To put forth a bit more of an argument in favor of the supernatural, I'll quote from this article on angels and demons which, while a bit out there, makes an excellent point here:
Dumb matter, a ball rolling down a hill or a set of chemicals reacting in a vial, is going to behave the same way every time, no matter when or where you ask it to perform. You can set up an experiment in Chicago and expect to get the same results you got from the same experiment in a lab in Tennessee. The Conservation of Momentum, Acceleration Due to Gravity, The Second Law of Thermodynamics… these things just happen, and the matter involved in the experiment doesn’t have any mind or will to resist them and to act otherwise. There’s no intelligence in the ball to be able to say, “Hey, you know what? Not feeling it today. I’m tired of the whole F = ma thing. I don’t feel like rolling. Maybe tomorrow.”
The difference of course in our case is that the entire premise of the supernatural is that we are dealing with other sentient minds. Beings who can choose whether they’d like to act or not. By its very nature, The Supernatural needs to be approached more like Anthropology or Zoology instead of Physics or Chemistry. Just as you cannot count on a lion to react the same way to each and every passing zebra, so too are spirits likewise entities with personalities whose behavior is always non-formulaic. When you understand that, you see that the entire basis for the dismissal of such things from The Mainstream has no legs. For, in point of fact, “paranormal” things, just like zoological or anthropological things are reproducible.
They’re just not reproducible on demand.
Big difference.
Anyway, hope this clarifies things a bit. And I genuinely am happy you seem to be able to live with and find meaning in a nihilistic framework. I don't doubt that some, or even many people, can. That still doesn't mean that framework is true.
The atheist/religious believer inferential gap is always huge, and especially difficult to bridge in rationalist forums. As someone who went from a materialist to one of the faithful, let's see if I can explain why statements like:
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
tend to rub me the wrong way. More importantly, they represent a total failure to grasp what most intellectually rigorous religious people actually believe.
What most rationalists (with the noteworthy exception of @coffee_enjoyer) fail to understand when discussing religion is that scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims." While the power of the scientific method, and more generally the method of treating all matter as 'dead' or devoid of mind a la Descartes, is undeniable, predictive power does not make something true in any metaphysical sense. Many modern philosophers argue that any description of life itself can't be formulated via materialism means, without resorting to an appeal to some higher organizational, metaphysical structure.
Historically the scientific materialist worldview has of course revealed much about the natural world, primarily through demythologizing our place in it. Over the past few decades however, we as a society have come more and more to understand the limits and outright detriments of a materialist approach. As the popularity of symbolic thinkers like Jordan Peterson clearly demonstrates, materialism leads to a 'meaning crisis' where people struggle to have any sort of deep purpose or narrative arc to their life, something that is deeply necessary for human happiness and flourishing.
While a ScientistTM may just scoff at the importance of meaning or purpose and say "Who cares, my science still gives me Truth," well, unfortunately that assertion is becoming more and more false by the day. L.P. Koch gives a decent summary in The Death of Science, but you can read about the phenomenon of our scientific apparatus falling apart all over the place. You've got the joke field of 'consciousness studies', the deep issues in quantum physics, the shocking revelation that our cosmic model is completely wrong via the James Webb space telescope, et cetera. Or just look at the fiasco of the Covid-19 response.
All of this to say, when people nowadays talk about religion having a comeback, what they often mean on a deeper level is that the Enlightenment myth, first posed by Descartes, is failing. Starting with the existentialists in the mid-20th century, this understanding is now percolated through to the masses with the help of the Internet and other mass communication technology. It's increasingly clear that the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the 19th century, again while granting us great power, is a framework that only goes so far; crucially this framework does not and cannot touch on the deeper questions of human meaning, other than giving us a destructive, nihilistic hedonism.
Ultimately the rationalist Enlightenment has been a Faustian bargain for humanity - we've gained unfathomable power over the natural world compared to our ancestors, but we have lost our souls in the process.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Oh yeah, I've read the whole Chaoswar Saga and attendant books. Excited to dive back in.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Started rereading Magician by Feist, and it's blowing me away. Such a good story, it has all the classic epic fantasy elements from Tolkien but with much sparser descriptions, and a far more engaging pace. Feist is an excellent storyteller.
I remembered liking it as a kid and wasn't sure I'd like it coming back to it, but if anything it's even better now that I've slogged through hundreds of other fantasy books that were totally mid.
Also reading Christ in our Midst, a book of letters from a Russian Orthodox monk to his spiritual son. It's quite good so far, lots of very basic but solid wisdom.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
You have a backhoe? Nice!!!
Good luck with the project.
I believe that our entire scientific, logical system and much of our physics is based on binary or black and white thinking, and that ultimate Truths which religions claim to purvey are somehow above this sort of binary distinction.
Quantum fluctuations and other edge problems in physics are a good example of what I mean, but even here I think the framing of the problem is sorely lacking.
Basically I think we are deeply limited in our understanding of the world, and that we need to be far more humble than we have been when trying to learn more. Especially when it comes to complex systems such as people.
So angels and spiritual beings exist in essentially higher dimensions than ours…. But again I don’t think we have any concepts that can accurately explain. This is why mysticism and experiential understanding is so crucial for most religious practices.
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