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--- thoughts:spirituality:egodeath [2021/04/25 20:10] – Owen Mellema
+++ thoughts:spirituality:egodeath [2021/04/26 02:42] (current) – [Conclusion] Owen Mellema
@@ Line 52: / Line 52: @@
 Passion is an intense emotional experience. It consistently produces this "Camp High". But how does it do it? The last year that I went, 2019, I tried to get to the bottom of this. I made several observations, which I divide into three categories: Purposeful, Atmospheric, and Contextual.
-  * Purposeful: Things that are done with the express purpose of invoking spiritual thought which may lead to the sensation.
+  * **Purposeful**: Things that are done with the express purpose of invoking spiritual thought which may lead to the sensation.
-    * Making it personal. Although the people running these events can't address the specific circumstances in the audience's life, they can address common archetypes. For example, pain. Pain is something everyone experiences, but is, at the same time, deeply personal. Most people don't know how to deal with pain or to confront pain, and so acknowledging pain can instantly put an individual into a state of self-reflection, which is already an abnormal state of consciousness.
+    * **Making it personal**. Although the people running these events can't address the specific circumstances in the audience's life, they can address common archetypes. For example, pain. Pain is something everyone experiences, but is, at the same time, deeply personal. Most people don't know how to deal with pain or to confront pain, and so acknowledging pain can instantly put an individual into a state of self-reflection, which is already an abnormal state of consciousness.
-    * Epiphany. There are many sermons at Passion, and most of them share the same structure. First, the speaker presents a problem. Next, the speaker alludes to a solution, and provides textual (biblical) support for it. Finally, the speaker reveals the solution, tying up an hour-long talk into one powerful gut-punch of realization.
+    * **Epiphany**. There are many sermons at Passion, and most of them share the same structure. First, the speaker presents a problem. Next, the speaker alludes to a solution, and provides textual (biblical) support for it. Finally, the speaker reveals the solution, tying up an hour-long talk into one powerful gut-punch of realization.
-  * Atmospheric: Things that do not purposefully contribute to the spiritual experience, but may cause an altered state of consciousness.
+  * **Atmospheric**: Things that do not purposefully contribute to the spiritual experience, but may cause an altered state of consciousness.
+    * **Repetition**. A lot of the music is very repetitive. I don't mean this in a disparaging way, I mean it in a literal way. The singers will sing the same verse 10-15 times. If the individual is singing along, it can be easy to stop thinking about what is being sung and get swept away in the repetition.
+    * **Other People**. There are thousands of people in the room, all of whom are experiencing the same thing you are. This may heighten the experience, as the brain attempts to mimic what is going on in the other people.
+    * **Darkness**. When singing, the room is dark. All attention is focused on the stage. The body and self fades away in the dark.
+    * **Funky lighting**. The lights are always all over the place, doing crazy light shows, etc. This may cause the individual to become disoriented.
+  * **Contextual**: Things that the organizers have no control over, but still may effect the audience's mind.
+    * **Exhaustion**. Passion is a three day experience. As such, for two of those days, those who travel from out of town must stay in a hotel. Being college students, there is a good chance that at the hotel they will have below average sleep. Additionally, each session is many hours long, with a lot of standing.
+    * **Dehydration**. On trips, it can be easy to forget to drink water. Dehydration has been known to impair critical thinking.
+    * **Expectation**. Probably most importantly, the individual may expect to have the feeling, which may cause it to be so.
+===== Conclusion =====
+The experiences can be a good thing. They can be cathartic, and have the effect of giving a person new direction. In my list of potential causes, I mentioned that self-reflection is a possible cause. That is a good thing. It allows people to think about their problems from a different perspective.
+On the other hand, what about people that don't feel those things? If we adopt a spiritualistic view of these experiences, that must mean that they are being left out by the spirit. Are they just a bad person? Or are they just the sort of person that is less emotional?
+Additionally, can you actually achieve enlightenment from experiences that are localized entirely in the self? Richard King says this about mysticism and psychedelics:
+> The privatisation of mysticism – that is, the increasing tendency to locate the mystical in the psychological realm of personal experiences – serves to exclude it from political issues as social justice. Mysticism thus becomes seen as a personal matter of cultivating inner states of tranquility and equanimity, which, rather than seeking to transform the world, serve to accommodate the individual to the status quo through the alleviation of anxiety and stress.
+If we apply this critique to Christianity, we see that the good work of helping the poor, spreading the gospel, etc could be interrupted by a chasing after these states of alleged enlightenment. However, a good rebuttal could be made from [[wp>psychological egoism]], that if we accept the fact that all ethical acts are selfish to some degree, prioritizing inner states makes a lot of sense, because those inner states could lead to more ethical actions.