Why does a spiritual epiphany have to mean...

[_The Nehor]

Then why don't they replace the Apostles in General Conference with sexy chicks and famous athletes?

Flip-flopping. You might get away with it, but not likely.

I've decided I can get away with anything. Start praying that I become Prophet everyone.

[_Scottie]

Then why don't they replace the Apostles in General Conference with sexy chicks and famous athletes?

Flip-flopping. You might get away with it, but not likely.

I've decided I can get away with anything. Start praying that I become Prophet everyone.

I think you'd better request that everyone pray that you survive my smilie revenge!!! :)

[_The Nehor]

Then why don't they replace the Apostles in General Conference with sexy chicks and famous athletes?

Flip-flopping. You might get away with it, but not likely.

I've decided I can get away with anything. Start praying that I become Prophet everyone.

I think you'd better request that everyone pray that you survive my smilie revenge!!! :)

Death cannot conquer the hero again.

[_amantha]

TD said:

It was a challenge trying to integrate my personal spiritual (peak), experiences with the LDS spiritual paradigm.

It took me a very long time to trust my personal experiences and allow myself to live in my own truth. The more I released the LDS framework, and embraced my own, the more peace filled my soul.

It can be scary to trust ourselves. We learn to trust others from childhood. That's not a bad thing, but part of the passage into adulthood is learning our own lexicon of life. Sadly, there are too many who will gladly forfeit their creative potential for the security of relying on other people's creativity, oblivious to their loss. We can use other people's ideas as jumping off points (inspiration) for our own. We can take inspiration from the good ideas of people like Joseph Smith without shackeling ourselves to his now sinking ship.

I learned from Joseph Smith some of the ways to start a successful religion. You need a book. You need to assign credible meaning to universal spiritual epiphanies. You need charisma, etc.

L. Ron Hubbard is another man who learned some creative ways of controlling minds in indirect ways.

Become an author, it will confer upon you great authority.

[_Some Schmo]

That's what marketing is all about: relating and associating your product with something that people find pleasurable. That's why there are sexy chicks in beer commercials, and famous athletes peddling trucks. The brain is set up to relate things that have nothing to do with each other, like bell ringing and salvating.

Then why don't they replace the Apostles in General Conference with sexy chicks and famous athletes?

Because I don't run the church's marketing department.

[_charity]

amantha, you have seriously misrepresented Maslow's concept of "peak experience." There was no provision for visions or visitaitons. Maslow particularly did not include religious experiences in his theory.

A peak experience is a sudden feeling of happiness and heightened control over the emotions, a sense of awareness. Awe and wonder are common expressions of the feelings associated with a peak experience. There is a sense of understanding that unifies the persons's cognititons.

There was no provision in the peak experience for revelation, visions, or visitations.

Spiritual or religious experiences could incluide peak experiences. But as all collies are dogs, but not all dogs are collies, there are spiritual and religious experiences OUTSIDE the Maslow theory.

See what I mean. Hook, line and sinker.

If you want to be taken seriously by peole who really can think, you have to get your facts right. You did not.

[_charity]

I realize that this sets up the dilemma. I can say I have a revelation from God, and you can say it came from Satan. This is where we will see in the next life.

or not.

The term for the archetypal nemesis "Satan" and the specific deities "Elohim," "Jehovah" and "Jesus Christ" were provided by a human author--whether or not this author perceived himself to have received revelation from the "Holy Ghost" under the auspices of Elohim. You just bought the farm they gave to you, trusting in your own omniscience with regard to the interpretation of your own spiritual epiphany, because there in no way that your infallible human brain could have applied the terms given to you incorrectly. Nor could you have misinterpreted your experience. You are incapable of misinterpreting your experience.

As I said my post, you can think what you want to think. I think what I want to. We will see at some future date.

Pardon me, but you seem as arrogant as to your surety of your "rightness" as you accuse LDS. Hmmmmm.

[Dr. Sunstoned]

Unfortunately, this scenario has happened and will continue to happen until people refuse to allow others to define and delimit their personal ecstacies. So much can be gained from a peak experience if one is not hamstringed in their choices of what the experience means, or worse where the experience originates. Your freedom to interpret your own experience outside of a matrix of memes, designed to capture your allegiance, is something every person should avail themselves of. By keeping your own counsel with regard to your experiences, you become free to interpret them and to reinterpret them as guided by your own muse.

Moroni can only corner the market on your experiences if you let him. Don't let him or anyone place limits on the myriad meanings available to a purely personal interpretation of the mystery.

This is as good an example of Boomeresque, New Agist self absorption and epistemological solipsism As I've seen in a long time. The implication, that each individual can go within himself to find his or here individual, autonomous spiritual experiences, and that each of these will be valid and true for that individual, is, of course, true, if one accepts the idea that each individual spiritual experience is, in some manner "true" in a radically individualistic manner such that each individual can prescribe that experience for himself; that human beings are not bound together by a shared capacity to engage the eternal in a way that would unite each of them in a shared vision of truth and meaning.

I'm not saying that individual spiitual experiences are not unique and ideosyncratic, but that they fall on a continuum predicated upon the way the universe actually is.

The atomistic, radical subjectivist alternative presented here is, of course, whatever else it may be, an attempt to circumvent the disciplines of the Gospel that become incumbent upon individuals who access the authoritative channels of revelation and communion with deity. Such encounters, if they are allowed to move the individual toward further truth, inevitably move the individual toward the same truths encountered by others who have gained access to those same channels of revelation and inspiration.

Truth, to be a coherent concept, must be one; it must be immune from atomization and differentiation. The Schizophrenic's reality is real to him, but few would take this to mean "real" in any existential sense. If Gospel truths are actually "true", then they are a part of the cosmos; they are an existential reality accessible by all through essentially the same means.

Alternative spiritual realities exist, but the question at that point, from a Gospel standpoint, is only their legitimacy, not their reality.

[Guest]

amantha, you have seriously misrepresented Maslow's concept of "peak experience." There was no provision for visions or visitaitons. Maslow particularly did not include religious experiences in his theory.

A peak experience is a sudden feeling of happiness and heightened control over the emotions, a sense of awareness. [So that is all that a peak experience is and nothing more--thanks for clarifying.]Awe and wonder (which have nothing to do with spiritual epiphanies) are common expressions of the feelings associated with a peak experience. There is a sense of understanding that unifies the persons's cognititons.

There was no provision in the peak experience for revelation, visions, or visitations(, although there were such provisions in the writings of William James, which I chose to ignore--see quote below).

Peak experiences could include Spiritual or religious experiences. But as all collies are dogs, but not all dogs are collies, there are spiritual and religious experiences OUTSIDE the Maslow theory.

Here's what Maslow said was inside his theory:

The very beginning, the intrinsic core, the essence, the universal nucleus of every known high religion (unless Confucianism is also called a religion) has been the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer. The high religions call themselves revealed religions and each of them tends to rest its validity, its function, and its right to exist on the codification and the communication of this original mystic experience or revelation from the lonely prophet to the mass of human beings in general.
But it has recently begun to appear that these "revelations" or mystical illuminations can be subsumed under the head of the "peak-experiences"[1] or "ecstasies" or "transcendent" experiences which are now being eagerly investigated by many psychologists. That is to say, it is very likely, indeed almost certain, that these older reports, phrased in terms of supernatural revelation, were, in fact, perfectly natural, human peak-experiences of the kind that can easily be examined today, which, however, were phrased in terms of whatever conceptual, cultural, and linguistic framework the particular seer had available in his time (Laski).
In a word, we can study today what happened in the past and was then explainable in supernatural terms only. By so doing, we are enabled to examine religion in all its facets and in all its meanings in a way that makes it a part of science rather than something outside and exclusive of it.
Also this kind of study leads us to another very plausible hypothesis: to the extent that all mystical or peak-experiences are the same in their essence and have always been the same, all religions are the same in their essence and always have been the same. They should, therefore, come to agree in principle on teaching that which is common to all of them, i.e., whatever it is that peak-experiences teach in common (whatever is different about these illuminations can fairly be taken to be localisms both in time and space, and are, therefore, peripheral, expendable, not essential). This something common, this something which is left over after we peel away all the localisms, all the accidents of particular languages or particular philosophies, all the ethnocentric phrasings, all those elements which are not common, we may call the "core-religious experience" or the "transcendent experience." [from ISBN:0140194878, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences by Abraham H. Maslow ©1964 by Kappa Delta Pi and ©1970 (preface) The Viking Press. Published by Penguin Books Limited ISBN 0 14 00.4262 8]

Why can there be competing "spiritual experiences?" Because there is God and Satan.

I realize that this sets up the dilemma. I can say I have a revelation from God, and you can say it came from Satan(I could say that, but why would I? Satan is some other dude's idea and I don't buy it). This is where we will see in the next life.

Bolded changes are mine.

[_Coggins7]

Why can there be competing "spiritual experiences?" Because there is God and Satan.

This is the crux of the matter. Competing spiritual experiences exist because the universe is complex and full of competing powers, forces, and influences. The trick is to find the correct "channel" at some point along the spectrum, or bandwidth, of possible experiences.