Revolutionary conversion to a new theory or world-model involves structural transformation of concept networks and hierarchies, increased explanatory coherence, concept recombination, and rational mechanisms of paradigm conversion (Thagard 1992). The dissociative cognitive state loosens the mind’s associative binding, enabling deep revision of the interconnections between mental constructs. Religion and myth are about dissociative-state experience, self-control cybernetics, and metaphorical description of these. In intense primary religious experiencing, the mental model of self and world undergoes a standard, pre-configured expansion and transformation. The religiously transformed mental model takes into account the representational nature of experience, the experience of embeddedness in timeless unity, and the limited and dependent nature of self-control agency. This religious mental-model transformation is assisted by metaphors that describe these experiential insights in a pictorial form that is easy for the mind to retain. Like the egoic cognitive structure, the transcendent mental model is an innate, pre-configured structure that is discovered and revealed, like the adolescent discovers the innate ability to climax. The ability to mystically climax is inbuilt, as is the mental model that is revealed, although the useful metaphors and systematic explanation that are necessary to retain the revealed mental structure must be a product of human effort. ... Ego death leaves one’s initial, youthful “lie” behind. The “lie” is the confused mental worldmodel which assumes that oneself is the ultimate creator of one’s thoughts, actions, future, and movements of the will. The goal of testing control in the altered state is not to act out the loss of control in any way, but rather, to gain fundamental self-knowledge and correction of self-frustrating error and confusion. The goal of putting control to the test is to understand the nature and limits of control across time by exploring ideas of loss of control and transcendent restabilization of control. The promise of increased power over oneself leads to realizing the logical impossibility of that mode of power, but produces instead a viable alternate conception, of secondary-level, reflected power. The vexing attempt to gain properly functioning self-control while holding a confused model of self-control ceases. The misleading sensation that the time-voyaging continuant agent is the originator of its power of will is recognized as a conventional misperception and mental oversimplification. ... In Gnosticism, the completed initiate belongs to the Immovable Race and is able to stand stably in the face of overwhelming, autonomy-undermining controllership that emanates from the hidden, primary control-level. Insights about the limitations of personal control-power result in a wounding of pride, but the mind is otherwise unharmed, and made more durable (or “imperishable”). A personal control system becomes compatible with transcendence, or becomes “divinely approved”, when it repudiates the assumption that it can depend on its own internal power to save itself during a control-limit violation. egodeath/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 13:41:35 +0000
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