And your pleas, from-total inexperience aka Ignorance demands the same response as to any closed-minded plea-to-Ignorance (as assistant to an untenable position) I wot.
Damn.. where's the boilerplate for That one?
I've thought a lot about the plight of there being millions who 'exist' at this minimal level of human consciousness. many of them not nearly so civilized as you are. But similarly handicapped.

(The very idea that, 'the rational mind' (implicitly via some symbolic-logic by G. Boole), completely dis-connected from the emotionally-experienced mind..
Can Reason about inescapably-complex human matters--betrays a mindset (pretty much like crazy describes, further down the line.)
You are tuning-out possibilities, possible experiences you have never had, apparently by association with stereotypes of 'persons who indulge in' that sort of 'thing'/fantasy?/illusion? (as you may tag, attach a label to matter(s) you know only hearsay about.)

First error: attempting to Prove a Negative, not via 'experience of its absence under Condition A' nor of other aspects of collecting anecdotal information as, collectively==data to be analyzed: but via switching to your view of "what is/must-be! rational 'thought'".

Complication: 'Rational' (remember that the same root brings us a pejorative? rationalization.)
In deciding to describe your attitude towards new information as 'rational', dismissing other mixed-in aspects of our minds: emotional- instinctive- primitive- aka reptile remnants? so do you imply that you understand how your various mind sub-parts operate, deem that you can separate-out the intellectual-mind from the others: rely solely upon its function, and call that, 'being rational'.

(The trouble I have with arguments not-even-wrong, is that it almost demands that one trots out an indication of just How?-wrong an expressed POV is in terms of the significant Points elided, dismissed or just not comprehended: in such presentations.) Alas, that boilerplate is tl;dr for these little forays into interstellar what-if?s--on a coffee-break span.. [and is misplaced, to boot.]


A 'rational opinion' you have, you say? while attempting to Prove a Negative and, as Dick Feynman put it..
People think because they know the name of something--not just physics, btw--that they 'understand it'.
Yeah.. Quantum Chromodynamics kinda just rolls off the tongue, 2-3-3- stanzas; mellifluous, even?

As synchronicity Happens-that-way:
Was yesterday just listening to a (maybe biophysicist, didn't catch his creds), npr; a discussion of the paucity of 'our' comprehension of the human brain,
(let alone the word-concept of mind.) So far are 'we' from … … any guesstimates as could begin to lead to some 'electronic simulation'
(the sub-topic) he said ~ "we haven't a Clue" aka We don't know Shit aka …
Nobody in any science professes to 'Understand' even what Consciousness IS! qe fucking-d

Concluding, this scientist-person ticked off a few other areas under the We Don't Know Shit rubric;
We know-not how even these sub-domains 'work' and, he concluded.. nary a clue as to how next to proceed. Ex:
Brute-force electronic-circuit emulating of the measured/visible connections of neurons in a WORM's brain:
produced no WORM-like responses whatsoever. The gadget revealed Nothing useful.

(Bet you haven't even read The Doors of Perception) http://en.wikipedia....ors_of_Perception
Or maybe think Huxley was from Berkeley in the '60s? And that's just a starter.. of a huge topic.
As another scribe put it, Do I contradict myself? very-well then, I contradict myself; I contain multitudes..
Centuries earlier another scribe put it, ..there are more things between Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.
(William James has some words on 'inner experience' and the difficulty in 'sharing'. As do a few hundred authors who have never flown-into your narrow radar-beam.)

And none-of-the-above is remotely close enough in our comprehension: to even begin plausible guesstimates of How our, say, 'several-brains' (or several brain-modules) re. intellect, emotion, instinct, [fight/flight] … and maybe even capabilities of occasional prescience? ... interact with each other, process __??__ and return something like an overall consensus on some Problem being mulled, whether in Emergency mode or relaxed contemplation. Etc.

Your [Certainty] [box] is your horizon, especially given your ignorance of [how much we Are "ignorant of", officially!]

As to, "mystical experiences" with strong religio-centric notions …
A) This thread isn't about the quite distinct/separate history of corporate 'religions', their gestation, political entanglements, wars and Certainties in All Things. Insecure people with lazy-minds, little knowledge of their world or of history can be seduced readily into (all sorts of contradictory concepts in a package.)
B) Anything never experienced nor investigated can seem mystical. It's a blurry-word signifying (like Freedom) whatever a one wants it to.
C) 'Sacred', removed from religious liturgies, can simply be interpreted as: the opposite of profane and may mean, manifestly-Significant (amidst the thousands of experiences as Aren't.)

Methinks there are many things of which you wot-not. You inhabit a Puritan-spawned milieu: one dedicated to partitioning ALL thought/action/deed into Two categories: [Permissible for discussion] [Not Permitted]
But (and most unusually) you had the experience of another culture, at a malleable and un-censored age, and during those years before hardening of the imagination-arteries occurs.
(You also noted some aspects, aspirations..? of that culture which--despite its co-option by ordinary-grade thugs--you deemed laudable if.. maybe.. not attainable in this or any zeitgeist extant.)

Our ignorance of most species is gargantuan (especially--of our own, so far.) Reactionaries want to erase back to the caves, Repos want to freeze (privileges) and ancient superstitions. Conservatives can never answer, 'what do you mean to conserve?--actually?
[I'm sure I asked Beep that one ... exactly [n+1] times.] Nary-ever a response. (Didn't expect one, actually.)
Shall we freeze all 'risky explorations' in that [Not Permitted] box, for the next 240 years, too? (although likely.. 10-15 more years of stasis will render this whole discussion moot.)


Carrion … no need to sacrifice any living-thing, though.

We have stumbled well-into meta- Territory aka epistemology http://faculty.educa...-cziko/wm/06.html
Play? or Resign if your comfort-level got?/gets exceeded.

Here, later, you acknowledge your own experience of emotional-states via music, {meditation? inner-spawned chemicals? or outer-added ones??} facilitating..? maybe even permitting-at-all?? solutions to what you thought/still-think? were purely-intellectual, self-assigned Problems.

Simultaneously you hold-in-'mind(s!)' the contradiction that, having experienced the strait-jacket of the mechanistic-logic of intellect--verily having failed to solve {some problem,}
You conclude that (in your mind) it's too-dangerous--if not stupid-by-your-lights even to acknowledge that:
What crazy was talking about (much of which obv. went Zooom, too) and I chimed-in on, from my experience and lore--was no mere dilettante 'recreational'-employment lark:
employing our mentations to pursue experiments in an area acknowledged to be impoverished/filled with as much wrongth?/dumbth? ... as was Physics pre-Boltzmann ET AL.

(How generous of you to forthrightly tolerate our gawd-given Right ..to act stupid; your empathy is, surely well-validated:
you know the exact dictionary definition of the word. What more might a one need than that?)

Sorry that, my view of your insight-module is: of someone smugly content to hold strong opinions about matters you have not even logically investigated, never mind.. attempted to Reason about.
You're fun to agree-with/argue-with on a number of topics; alas, on My jury, I'd have to go for a peremptory challenge:
on grounds that "candidate's response to circumstantial evidence is seen to be prejudiced by casual 'opinions' untested by experiment/yet taken for some sort of personal-Certainty."

(Recall the thread on poor *Boltzmann?) His arguments were dismissed ["with-prejudice", goes that court-phrase] by the near-consensus then,
of entrenched beliefs about.. er PHYSICS'--its Main-Principles (like say, "atoms" and such?)

* Oh. and. more recently: Hawking's presentation upon (what next==soon came to be called Hawking-radiation in black holes/Singularities..
was momentarily met with dumbfounded ridicule-like noises, within that gaggle of fully-credentialed scientists™ er, fellow club members?
Welcome to the club. ;^>


Carrion.. we're all just composed of those atom-things, 99.999999%-of-which volume is
[just chock-full-of *Dark-energy and Dark-matter--which are the same 'thing' and maybe even tiny-Universes] ..but-we-call-it, 'empty-space'. Still.

* Dark: euphemism (like an MD's, 'non-specific vaginitis') for, We don't know Shit about that 'empty-space' Either.

almost becoming er, sarcastically?-so

Heh.. Grad HS at 15.5; IQ--one of those silly high-enough-numbers.. twice, maybe 3x.
(A Princess(!)--fiancé of a physicist administered one of those: her ~vocation. Heh.)
Never remotely tempted near alcoholic dependency==depressant; pot, only quite rarely (a couple Wowie grades--as a verification)
--largely depresses Inquisitiveness, at least in this sack-ful of chem-bio--soups.

Ditto, hardly-any (of the demon-ƒearing category), though some pure Owsley was one of those. No epiphany there, but Interesting.

My Other experiments re the esoteric, pretty-much trumped the above re. 'enlightenment' efforts.
(Though the entire Coca-leaf, as chewed by the locals--has more Interesting, thought-provoking substances
than ever have been separated-out, let alone honestly-Investigated.) How Puritan-Murican-to-a-Tee, that fact.
So, seems I'm an outlier, even amidst this test-collection of just-such.

Guess I'm just fuckin-Lucky to be, still, shufflin around, given the hugely-scary nature of these experiences
(not-to-mention Vincent Black Shadows or steering-around a light aircraft.. as amused friend disparaged my efforts to create er, sinusoidal-depeleneration in-the-sky. Ooooh: wavicles!)

Seems that one person's scary-Bugaboo is another's raison d'etre.. or in some cases.. even salvation-from? ... a tribe or Nation of primitives and scaredy-cats of all stripes.

Now.. if there Be such things as, The Bardos.. in some 'next'.. ... maybe a One gets to pick One's next nano-universe to Play In. I no words.