Jack Preston King
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

Which is fine, but do remember that this is only an interpretation. And if it works for you, that’s good. But there really is no way for you to know with certainty that this is a correct interpretation, any more than you can really know that your ordinary, everyday experience of life is taking place anywhere other than in your brain. Maybe there’s a physical world that corresponds to the sensory replica in your brain, maybe there’s not. You can’t verify it, because that would require stepping outside of your own brain, which you can’t do. So the practical thing we all do in life is behave as if the physical world is really out there. We take it on faith. You’re doing the same thing when you take it on faith​ that spiritual experiences ARE NOT real and existing things in the outside world. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Our culture teaches us from grade school that only the ordinary is real. We are trained to disregard or own extraordinary experiences. In cultures that don’t teach this, people openly experience spiritual reality. That brings us back to shamans, where this thread started.

You asked me to explain my personal take. I’ve had quite a few direct spiritual experiences, and I have found that by treating the reality they reveal as real and existing, my experience of that reality grows and deepens over time. I can’t prove any of this is “real” any more than you could prove it isn’t real, or could prove the physical world is not a phantasm of the imagination. I wouldn’t be too quick to decide wide awake daytime beta consciousness is the only human brain state able or needed to perceive the whole of reality. Thousands of years of human shamanic experience would argue otherwise.

Jack Preston King

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Author, poet, philosopher. JackPrestonKing.com. Facebook.com/authorjackprestonking. Twitter.com/JackPrestonKing

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