[inavalan]

Originally Posted by Altair

It's not relevant here what my view on the afterlife is. The point you raise is a drastic one, and it is side tracking. This is about a relationship between mental health issues, deprivation, and 'spirituality'. It's about traditions that may seek to deliberately create circumstances that lead to decline in health, which happens to induce hallucination, which' content then gets touted as spiritual growth or insight. We can observe similar results among people who are in the same circumstances without deliberately creating them.

People with eating disorders such as anorexia may describe their light-headedness as ''raising vibrations'', others may view loss of period as a ''spiritual cleanse'', or may view tooth decay as a ''detoxing effect''. Do you condone and judge hunger, malnourishment, and sleep deprivation as valid strategies for spiritual growth? Do you think anorexia, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders are signs of 'spirituality'?

Ok

This is about a relationship between mental health issues, deprivation, and 'spirituality'

I believe that everybody can have spiritual experiences (I mean can establish connections with their inner source of knowledge and guidance, no matter their religious beliefs).

To achieve that, one has to get in a light to moderate trance (every physical and psychic activity has an optimum trance level). Trance is a focus of awareness on the consciousness continuum. Full awareness of the physical is trance level 0%, and complete lack of awareness of the physical is trance level 100%.

Both the trance and the contact are intermediated by subconscious.

Historically, people achieved trance through all kind of techniques (including rituals) without knowing how and why they work, or when they work. Those chance techniques were transmitted to others more or less distorted, with very low odds of success, usually.

All those ascetic, deprivation, mutilation, pain inducing, and such techniques used to induce spiritual experiences intend to put the practitioner into the appropriate level of trance. Some of those techniques, occasionally, do that.

We all experience whatever we believe. That is why a true truth seeker has to leave aside all their beliefs, biases, expectations when they access their inner knowledge source.

That is also why the overwhelming number of people never get a glimpse of the wider reality, even though some of them believe they did / do.

There are mentally ill people who don't know that they are. There are also mentally ill people that have many followers that believe in them.

I wouldn't say that there is any connection between mental illness and true spirituality. So, I believe that those that use methods like those you criticized in your posts, are unfortunate fools.