Our Minds Paint Our Pictures of God

"The [mystical] visions are not ends in themselves but means to an ineffable religious experience that exceeds normal concepts. They will be conditioned by the particular religious tradition of the mystic. A Jewish visionary will see visions of the seven heavens because his religious imagination is stocked with these particular symbols. Buddhists see various images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas; Christians visualize the Virgin Mary [or Jesus]. It is a mistake for the visionary to see these mental apparitions as objective or as anything more than a symbol of transcendence."

Original Sin and Nonduality

I had a conversation on Facebook the other day about original sin and its relationship to non-duality. I thought it was a great discussion, and I thought I'd share it again here.

SciShow Psych Video on Near-Death Experiences

The SciShow Psych channel on YouTube published a video about near-death experiences, below. I've mentioned near-death experiences a couple times before in relationship to mysticism and visionary experience. They are very much related, it seems to me.

Our Loss of Mystical Consciousness

God wants to speak to us. God yearns for it, and many of us yearn for it too. God wants us to know Him ourselves, in our Selves. This is the very definition of Eternal Life (John 17:3). But we must do our part. We must get out of our own way. We must surrender and submit our egos, our egoic mind, in order to allow God to speak to us. The Prophet Joseph Smith seems to have known how to do this, but we seem to have lost this ability today, even the kinds of practices that lead to it.