Re: Revelation, Insight, Waking Dream, Hallucination

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open about yours). You brought up a point about "alien abduction experiences"
in your argument for revelation as an internal experience. Here's my personal
reflection on the subject:

I had similar, what I might call "recurrent nightmares" along that
theme during my childhood. Some of them seemed VERY real I might add. It
was not until I was in my late teens that the nightmares ceased entirely.
Reflecting back on those nightmares, I can clasify them as "internalizations
to the subconscious" of "external (and emic) real-world experiences." These
RL experiences chose to manifest themselves as "nightmares" as a coping
mechanism to deal with both extreme mental and physical abuse that occurred
throughout my childhood. It was not until I was older and could rationalize
about the nightmares and their meaning(s) in context, that the said dreams
quite literally "died." I, like D. Read, do *not* subscribe to the belief
of revelation as something "external" of the mind channeling into one's brain
from the universe afar. This seems to me to be preposterous and nonsensical,
at least within the current scientific bounds of our reality. I'll leave
such "external" beliefs to the New Agers down in Sedona/ Verde Valley. I see
hallucinations, revelations, "God-like experiences" as the culmination of
data reorganization within the brain. Whether drug-induced or not, such
experiences may result from chemical alterations or imblances within the brain,
causing a reorganization of stored data in a "different pattern." The # of
resultant patterns may very well be infinite. Imagine, if you will, for lack
of a better example, an artist (painter). This painter has a set number of
colors he begins his work with--say the primary colors. These are the facts,
the data that are stored in the brain. Once the painter mixes these colors
from his palette and applies them to the canvas, an "infinite" number of
colors (including shades and hues) may result, and hence an infinite number
of final pieces of artwork (a beach scene, a spring mountain valley, etc).
The colors (or facts) are trivial to what the final outcome of their
combination becomes (the revelation). That is why revelation appears to be
such a grandiose experience--the final product is worth much more than the
sum of its parts.

Brad M. Biglow
Graduate Student
Northern Arizona University

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