Experience

William Blake said that Experience and Innocence are the two contrary states of the soul. Ah yes, to see my education actually working.

Anyway. Being the spiritually inclined person that I am, I tend to have friends and acquaintences who are also spiritual or religious. And sometimes, I ask questions about "the" religious experience. Who decides what's authentic and what's false testimony? All the Abrahamic religions claim divine revelation, but they can't all be right, right? And yet, the leaders in each sect is convinced and confident that he's doing God's bidding.

And as the leader of the sect, I guess it's pretty important to believe what you're doing is correct. At the very least, you can't be faulted for your motives. But people often do the same thing for what I suppose can only be a scaled equivalence for their own lives. Doctors diagnose with certain confidence because of their medical training, and literary critics assert their own theories with examples of writing.

But there is a difference between the evident, and a contrived pattern. Or, more specifically, there is a line between the quest for religiosity and self-delusion. Protestants joke about the Pope being a self-deluded cronie, whose years in the papacy have effectively brain-washed him into believing he was appointed by God. And I'm sure the Jewish are laughing at all of us for thinking the Messiah has already come.

But what about personal feelings? I have a friend, whom I'll call Durian (after an asian delicacy), who was convinced that God was telling him that a certain someone was to be his future mate (this mate I'll call Pineapple). I won't go into details, but basically, in the end, things didn't pan out. So does that mean God was lying? By definition God's infallible, so I don't think that's really possible. The conclusion, therefore, is that Durian was "praying" so hard, that he basically convinced himself, in a form of self-hypnosis, that what he wanted was a sign from the divine.

But despite my personal repugnance at the situation in general, I think this is a reality that everybody is succeptable to, regardless of their spiritual or religious inclinations. Just because we're talking in the realm of spirituality, it doesn't follow that the laws of physics and the observations of psychology don't apply anymore. We are still human, and we still have human psyches.