The False and Conflicting
Experiences of Mankind

All of these 'unlikely' phenomenon have extreme believers who have experienced personal and real events that confirm or caused their belief. It is not possible to tell them, most the time, that these things are not true because no matter how much logic or argument you give, you cannot negate the experiences they have had. Some of the believers are clearly psychotic

R D laing Self And Others

and are dealt with by psychiatrists in due course however the majority of believers and experiencers of the above items are normal people. And it feels like psychosis to deny what you know is real: Therefore the experiencers of these events cannot dis-believe them unless they see a clear mechanism by which their minds have been tricked₁.

Depending on what you believe, you will make different conclusions about the nature of what other people believe. Those who experiences Gods, Spirits and Demons will say that UFOs are demons. Those that experience UFOs however, will say that Gods are intelligent aliens who have appeared like Gods to us through their power. "Any science, sufficiently advanced, seems like magic"₂.

What the contradictory believers are saying to each other is: We believe that we have a better understanding of your experience than you do. Or rather, like all people: We are not capable of not believing in our own experiences, and since your experiences are different we think your experiences are not true ones! We think we are interpreting the things you've seen more objectively than you...

Clearly the range of Human experience gives rise to many contradictions. Not all experiences can be entirely true. We know that the evident facts are sometimes not quite so factual. We have all experienced things that actually did not happen. We have dreamt, tripped, imagined and forgotten things leading us to conclusions and sternly felt beliefs in things that are not real.

We experienced the world as flat... so sure everyone was of this, that those who thought otherwise were declared insane! How sure we were of such a belief that we could declare other people insane for disbelieving... yet how wrong everyone was! Proof by consensus is no proof at all, a non-working proof. We do not have any consistent or absolute way of approaching what we consider true, however we are capable of telling with certainty when something is false. The Earth is not flat, the Northern Lights are not spiritual in basis, neither are rainbows, the stars or the sun and the moon. Earthquakes are not gods moving underneath the Earth, nor can volcanoes or the weather (probably) be influenced by spirit or totem worship. We are not sure if science has "disproved" souls or God, but it certainly seem less likely that they exist than they used to.

	Culture

Anthropologists find that the particular elements experienced by people change over time and from culture to culture the elements are experienced differently. With UFOology, different decades and countries have sighted completely different UFOs. A period of time in the UK saw that UFO reportings were generally furry/fuzzy aliens. Modern UFO reports are "grays", thin child-like bodies with enlarged eyes and heads. Different countries report different types of aliens, due to culture. As culture changes, so does the phenomenon. What does that say about the phenomenon?

Such large scale change over time casts doubt on the basis of the experience and has been presented (especially in the case of UFOs) as evidence that the phenomenon is self-generated, not real, a function of a the aspirations and expectations of the experiencer. To the experiencer, all such arguments are meaningless as they have experienced it and it feels "insane" to them to doubt their own experiences.

However, doubt them we do. Many Christians very much doubt peoples' experiences of reincarnation. The previous lives that are felt and experienced are similar to the modes of experience of the Christian God: it is something that they can be completely sure about due to personal experience. Claims are made that as the belief has occurred for thousands of years so it must be a true and valid experience.

But any grounds that the Christian gives for discounting the experience of continual reincarnation is also grounds for dismissing the experience of God. Indeed, any grounds for dismissing the experience of alien abduction (which can sometimes have a profound effect on a persons' life) is also grounds for dismissing the experience of God. In short, we are saying: Your experience is fake.

It is not doubted that people do have fake experiences. Insane asylums are full of people who experience a different reality to us. We judge them as insane because we know that what they say they experience is not true. We understand that some people's stern and life-altering belief in conspiracy theories are actually based on error.

Those who believe that people are out to get them look hard for signs that this is true! Then, they find them. Through their want to find what they believe exists, they actually experience what they believe exists. Pure projection.

Projection of inner states into the outside world also explains the culture-dependent nature of supernatural and UFO experiences. It cannot be true that when aliens visit the Earth, all the furry ones visited England in the 1950s, and all the grays visited America in the 1990s... no, such facts are attributable to projection of what we expect aliens to be like.

Expectations change over time... and we find that as they change so do the experiences!

These experiences are like memes. A cultures' esoteric memes influence even those who logically don't believe in the meme, so that subconsciously they have the forms in their mind of what aliens look like, so if one day there is something they can't explain it is these forms that present themselves.

“Religious experiences tend to conform closely to cultural and religious expectations. Village girls in Portugal have visions of the Virgin Mary - not of the Indian goddess Kali. Native Americans on their vision quest see visions of North American animals not of African ones. Thus it would seem that religious experiences, no matter how intense and all-consuming, are subject to constraint by the cultural and religious norms of the person to whom they occur. Another way of looking at this is to say that there can be no such thing as a pure experience. An experience always happens to a person, and that person already has an interpretive framework through which he or she views the world. Thus, experience and interpretation always combine and interpenetrate.”

"The Phenomenon of Religion" by Momen, 1999 p114. Book Review

God
How has the experience of God changed over time? Originally, Gods were more like "spirits", low-scale pre-philosophy beings that inhabited rocks, stones, places, the stars above and the seasons. These emotional projections were our only method of understanding how these complex things worked. When they behaved strangely, we found that we experienced them as living things! Not surprisingly we found them to have human emotions... at some point psychologists realized that we were just projecting our own inner states on to the world when we claim that beings that are not ourselves share the same emotions. The empathy of an unscientific mind leads to this misunderstanding of the nature of things.

God as we know before the Hellenisation of Western religion was not the all-good, all-knowing being that the Christians and Muslims and Jews know today. God was frequently angry, frequently changed its mind, was very much human... the more primitive gods are more human and less ideal than modern gods.

As mankind matured, so did our gods. Our concepts became bolder as our knowledge became wider. Animism was replaced by henotheism and polytheism... grander Gods that were more idealistic and more conceptualized. And less Human. As we matured, our knowledge of the world led us away from certain types of experience.

In far Eastern countries God was not so much experienced. Instead the experiences were of enlightenment, oneness, transcendental knowledge. Yet in other parts of the world, such memes were rare! These are the memes that cause experience. Without the idea of something in our culture, that something is very rarely experienced. (Although it sometimes is, by the mystics and radical thinkers).

	Argument from consensus

It is a difficult position for a nonbeliever. He has to say to those who have experienced alien abduction: I do not believe that your experience is real. We are denying what is sometimes quite a complex and involved experience! Something which, even, has occurred multiple times on the same person. Which always amounts to an insult, to something like "oh, and I think you're deluded and plain wrong". But the position is logical nonetheless. The most illogical position is where a person admits some non-real experiences but denies others. For example the believer in Reincarnation who denies that Telekinesis is possible. Or the believer in Clairvoyance who denies that God exists. Because in addition to believing in untenable experiences they have become inconsistent.

Druids experience the power of the Earth, they experience the power of leylines and know their affects.

A powerful teacher can convince people anything. Convince them to the point that they begin to experience what the teacher teaches! Cultural memes are the same. What the memes of the West interpret as: Experience of God, the memes of the East inform people is: Experience of nirvana. Both are very different ideas, the basis of both is emotional and instinctive projection of the self. But their interpretation is facilitated through local culture.

The experience is twisted through our psyches according to our knowledge of the world.

	Expectations

Our expectations are not merely top-of-the-head guesses. Expectations set up mental processes that effect the very way that we interpret the world around us. Our instincts and culture provide us with expectations

Instinct
Human Beings brains' are pattern-recognition machines. We learnt to look for danger-signs above all else, things that are important to us. So, we feel we are being looked at in the dark, we continuously mistake ordinary objects for Human beings or animals looking at us. We have to look at these things to double check what they are! We look around the room with a feeling that we are being watched... because these are instincts that kept us alive in the jungle.

Slight sounds and movements are instinctively felt to be important, significant, and need investigation... especially in our own homes. And this is how it is in nature. Fear of spiders and snakes come from the same source: A heightened alertness to potential danger. Even when what we think we saw wasn't actually what we thought it was we are unnerved and excited. Above all we recognize: Being hunted, being watched. Our brain is set to auto-alert on these, over-sensitive.

How much more jumpy are some of us after watching a good horror movie? After a killer-suspense film? How much more concerned are we about a slightly open doorway after we've been sat with dangerous thoughts on our minds, on the edge of our seats! The more stressed we are, the more we have on our minds, the more our minds create things to be afraid of. The horror of our own minds, tormenting us with ancient instinct in the modern world!

“Experiments confirm that people easily misperceive random events as confirming their beliefs. (Crocker, 1981; Jennings & others, 1982; Trolier & Hamilton, 1986). If we believe a correlation exists, we notice and remember confirming instances. If we believe that premonitions correlate with events, we notice and remember the joint occurence of the premonition and the event's later occurence. We seldom notice or remember all the times unusual events do not coincide. If, after we think about a friend, the friend calls us, we notice and remember the coincidence. We don't notice all the times we think of a friend without any ensuing call, or receive a call from a friend about whom we've not been thinking.

People see not only what they expect, but correlations they want to see.

This intense human desire to find order, even in random events, leads us to seek reasons for unusual happenings or mystifying mood fluctuations. By attributing events to a cause, we order our worlds and make things seem more predictable and controllable. Again, this tendency is normally adaptive but occasionally leads us astray.”

"Social Psychology" by David Myers, p114

Cognitive Psychology: Top-Down Processes Effect Our Interpretation of Events

“Towards the end of the 1970s, theorists argued that virtually all cognitive activity consists of interactive bottom-up and top-down processes occurring at the same time. Perception and remembering might seem to be exceptions, because perception obviously depends heavily on the precise stimuli presented (and thus on bottom-up processing), and remembering depends crucially on stored information (and thus on top-down processing). However perception is also much affected by the perceiver's expectations about to-be-presented stimuli, and remembering depends far more on the exact nature of the environmental cues provided to facilitate recollection than was thought at one time.”

"Cognitive Psychology" by Eysenck and Keane, p2

It is not just random events, confusing correlations or data processing where our expectations cause us to have certain experiences inplace of others. Our mental thoughts on what we want to see, and what we expect to see, can influence the very objects that we see before us, overriding what is real and replacing it with what we expect, or merging the two together. After citing some experiments and examples of where this happens, Eysenck and Keane report on a particularly colourful demonstration of it:

“Another illustration of the possible pitfalls involved in relying too heavily on expectations or hypotheses comes in a classic study by Bruner, Postman, and Rodrigues (1951). Their subjects expected to see conventional playing cards, but some of the cards used were incongruous (e.g. black hearts). When these incongruous cards were presented briefly, subjects sometimes reported seeing brown or purple hearts. Here we have an almost literal blending of stimulus information (bottom-up processing) and stored information (top-down processing).”

"Cognitive Psychology" by Eysenck and Keane, p75

Sleep apnea
Such instincts are not limited to on-the-spot alertness though. They pervade our interpretation of events. Sleep apnea and night terrors and many other medically-understood phenomenon are misunderstood by us in light of our expectations. Waking up, unable to move, panicked, feeling like you are being "pushed" on to the bed, feeling scared... this event is interpreted by us according to our expectations as we have no other way of explaining them without understanding the biological cause. UFO abductees think they have been marked out for an experiment, spiritualists think something is trying to possess them, God-believers think a Demon is tormenting them, witch-conspiracy believers think they are being attacked by a witch and those who believe in simple ghosts have even reported that they thought a ghost was trying to rape them.

The experience of a normal medical event can become very extreme and radical, according to our fears and the memes that society provides us with, and then the expectation has self-generated an experience to back itself up! To give itself evidence! When the only evidence is that the person is letting on, to us, what memes they have been influenced by.

Fairies
Children who expect to see fairies... who sometimes go out to look for them like they would try to catch Santa Claus, sometimes they find fairies! They are sure of it! That something they caught a glimpse of must have been a fairy! When they turn to it to look at it and it disappears this is even more evidence for them that it was indeed a fairy! Their expectations self-verify, their experience of fairies is a self-generated, but wrong, interpretation of what they thought they saw.

God
People receive all kinds of messages from God(s). One person divines that a particular thing is wrong, whereas another is told it is correct... one person experiences an angry God, another experience an all-loving God who cannot possibly be angry. There have been many precise and detailed accounts of what God has told people... but that some of these things contradict each other leads us to the conclusion that these experiences are not all true.

Mass hysteria
Suggestion and paranoia alone can cause apparent epidemics, especially amongst school children and amongst populaces where stress factors are high. For example, in a school in Shelkovsk, Chechnya. "Symptoms included convulsions, nausea and breathing difficulties. The illness spread to neighbouring schools. Local doctors suspected mass poisoning, but when a delegation of medics arrived from Moscow, they attributed it to mass hysteria" _[6]. Symptoms are real and fall in line with what the patients expect to suffer from. "Mass hysteria, or medically unexplained epidemic illness, has been documented since medieval times. Simon Wessely, a director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research at King's College London, says such outbreaks tend to reflect a society's beliefs". Importantly, Dr Wessely states that the most effective way to stop the epidemic and stop the symptoms is to explain that rumour and suggestion are causing them. It is easy to imagine an anti-rumour spreading and curing the epidemic. Once this has happened, "symtoms vanish within days" _[6].

Expectations not only inform the way in which we interpret our experiences, but they can also causes experiences, even ones as real as the symptoms of disease.

Summary:

• People easily misperceive random events as evidence that backs up their beliefs
• We attribute causes to events based on our beliefs
• Physiological causes can lay behind profound supernatural experiences
• Our perception of reality is distorted by our expectations and beliefs
• Our experiences are not objective, but are informed by our mindset

	Memory is Actively Interpreted

After extensive studies into memory recall, psychologists have concluded and explained many times that our memories of events are active interpretations of the past. Our recall of the past is effected by our present expectations, knowledge and state of mind.

“Bartlett concluded that interpretation plays a large and largely unrecognized role in the remembering of stories and past events. [...] Rather than human memory being computer-like, with the output matching the input, Bartlett and Hunter believe that we process information in an active attempt to understand it. Memory is an 'imaginative reconstruction' of experience (Bartlett, 1932)."”

"Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour" by Richard Gross, p303

Studies by Elizabeth Loftus on leading questions has shown that our memories of even quite recent events is skewed by the way we think about them or are asked about them; such studies have become prodigal for police interview methods and in particular for cases of child abuse where forceful questions can 'lead' a child into 'recalling' events in the way that the adult is implying they occured. We have all experienced the guilty feeling that, after arguing with a friend, we have perhaps reconstructed past events into how we wanted them to have occured, rather than how our friend saw them.

	Abstract Man

“Abstract thought allows us to take things to extremes. We can feel love for people who we have never seen based on their personality and communication alone. The communication medium is irrelevant. Due to our increasing capacity for empathy, we feel that others love us in return and feel we are in touch with their emotions. This is based on the feelings we have towards them, based on our own abstract thought and these are all in turn all based on our assumptions on the relationship between what is real and what is abstract.

It is possible to create an abstract personality, based on abstract thought processes, like politics and religion, but based around a concept or idea. Frequently, the conclusion we feel when we do this is that we are looking at God himself.

Our need for unconditional love, our abstract philosophical minds and the way our very emotions and world view are led by our abstract representations of what we think is real can conspire to create in our minds an abstract source of love. Something we want and need since youth, and something that can frequently be lacking. The all-loving abstract god, the all-knowing and all-powerful being that we create in our minds matches all of those abstract ideas we attribute with our parents while young.”

"Abstract Mankind" by Vexen Crabtree (2002)

Such want and expectation, especially combined with the popular cultural memes of God-belief do lead to experiences of 'God'. That this occurs is not a valid argument against the possible existence of God, but surely places much of the belief in God on the same plane as belief in conspiracy theories, and even the experience of God, an emotional well, as the same as the emotional psychosis of the experiencer of conspiracy theories.

"The Varieties of Religious Experience" William James, 1901-2

“It is not only the ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of implacable appeal. [...] The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for [a transcendentalist], but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant and just. [...]

I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are. [...] Probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief”

"Varieties of religious experience, the" by William James p71 & p87
[Review of The Varieties of Religious Experience]

It is very much clear to some psychologists that the meaning and emotional abstractions that we make, due to our biochemical makeup's and history (culminating as our phenotype), diffuse the world with meaning that is just as real as the cold concrete data our mere senses provide us with. Our assumptions and humanity make us experience meaningfulness and presences where reality itself doesn't.

Importantly, and this is something that I will definitely testify to, William James notes that mere logic is often much less convincing to people who have had wild experiences without knowing what causes them. Logical argument will not work because their experience is real to them - if logic says it isn't real, there is probably something wrong with the logic. In my understanding, revealing the potential valid causes of the experience and explaining the biochemistry or psychology of it can have two affects:

• Patronize them (unfortunately)
• Make them realize their experience has ordinary causes

It's a fine line trying to balance between the two, but when people have experienced irroncilably different versions of reality it can put a strain on their social relations!

	Materialists

As a materialist text this essay is testimony to its own premise... that expectation begets experience. I do not experience any of the spiritual or other worldly phenomenon listed on this page. Everything I experience is put through the mind of a scientist materialist, and the result is that I experience none of these things because I instinctively do not expect them. Instead, my mind automatically constructs materialistic views of events. When I predict someone's movements I have no expectation of being able to see the future, I instinctively without a thought consider it testimony to the fantastic and wonderful workings of our intelligent minds. I have studied deja-vu as part of a cognitive psychology course and deja-vu, for me, is therefore interpreted materialistically without a second thought! But many people (especially historically, not so much in the modern world where the subconscious is given more credit) have interpreted this event to be spiritual or significant.

As a materialist (like a theist, or a conspiracy theorist) I am left with the task of analysing other people's experiences despite the fact that they contradict my own. As a result, I believe whole heartedly in the materialistic and deconstructionalist arguments given in this text... this is my only way of explaining these beliefs away! Likewise, the conspiracy theorist has to explain why I don't experience his fear of people trying to remove him from his position in the world. His argument is that the conspirators are very good at what they do, and have tricked me! And most people! His experience of my lack of experience even becomes 'evidence' to him that his version of the truth is the correct one. Our expectations continuously generate self-affirming evidence which to the believer appears as if irrefutable as they form part of their own experience of the world.

So from my point of view this page is a dismissal of all points of view that are not mine... I am, like all other people, in a position that is quite absurd! For there is no escape from such subjectivism, and that is the bane of all psychiatry and science and is why it is far, far easier to disprove anything that it is to prove anything!

	Phsyiological causes of strange experiences

If our biochemical brains and physiology sometimes go haywire, as indeed they do and we know they do, but we are not aware of a dysfunction, we are apt to misinterpret the events. So, our expectations, culture and abstract thinking all conspire to present to us a false experience. Some medical conditions can cause these to be recurring and frequent occurences. Through studying these science has come to understand such experiences as out of body experiences, possession, night time terrors, and through more simple biological knowledge have understood the Inkubus and Sukkubus, and many other superstitious beliefs. Physical problems with the eyes can cause wild effects such as seeing blood run up walls, dust storms, clouds, and haloes that are not really there (Catania 2007₇). Isolated fits and seizues can cause bizarre effects such as lights, feelings, smells, auras and déjá vu that can be mild and subtle₈.

Sleep Paralysis

“Sleep paralysis, or more properly, sleep paralysis with hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations have been singled out as a particularly likely source of beliefs concerning not only alien abductions, but all manner of beliefs in alternative realities and otherworldly creatures. Sleep paralysis is a condition in which someone, most often lying in a supine position, about to drop of to sleep, or just upon waking from sleep realizes that s/he is unable to move, or speak, or cry out. This may last a few seconds or several moments, occasionally longer. People frequently report feeling a "presence" that is often described as malevolent, threatening, or evil. An intense sense of dread and terror is very common. The presence is likely to be vaguely felt or sensed just out of sight but thought to be watching or monitoring, often with intense interest, sometimes standing by, or sitting on, the bed. On some occasions the presence may attack, strangling and exerting crushing pressure on the chest. People also report auditory, visual, proprioceptive, and tactile hallucinations, as well as floating sensations and out-of-body experiences (Hufford, 1982). These various sensory experiences have been referred to collectively as hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences (HHEs). People frequently try, unsuccessfully, to cry out. After seconds or minutes one feels suddenly released from the paralysis, but may be left with a lingering anxiety. Extreme effort to move may even produce phantom movements in which there is proprioceptive feedback of movement that conflicts with visual disconfirmation of any movement of the limb. People may also report severe pain in the limbs when trying to move them. [...] A few people may have very elaborate experiences almost nightly (or many times in a night) for years. Aside from many of the very disturbing features of the experience itself (described in succeeding sections) the phenomenon is quite benign.”

"Sleep Paralysis and associated hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences"

There are many other physiological causes of strange experiences of course, and recent experiments and investigations have allowed exciting results to shed light on the inner working of the Human brain. In particular, a series of experiments have resulted in a deeper understanding of why people experience the idea of god, and these I have put on a separate page: "Why do people experience god?" by Vexen Crabtree.