quote:
It's not about lying. It's about things like self-deception, wishful thinking, selective memory, communal reinforcement, and other common, widespread, perfectly natural human thought biases.
I don't know if it's as harsh as all that.
From the first-hand accounts I've heard, fervent prayer seems to be a similar state to intense meditation, or drug-induced hallucination. There's a certain clarity of mind and intense awareness the human body is able to achieve all on its own, (with or without outside stimulus) and the feeling that God is non-verbally (or even verbally) answering a prayer isn't all that outrageous a claim.
The best descriptions I've seen come from books on Chaos Magic, which basically revolves around tapping the subconcious in a concious way (for want of a better phrase off the top of my head.) The way it reccomends achieving the state at first is by attempting to think during either a moment of orgasm, or during intense pain. (And they reccomend orgasm over pain, since pain sucks and orgasms are nice.)
But it's perfectly feasible to me that Mike and Buz are able to achieve this state by throwing their minds up to a being named God. (This might be inching toward a topic all its own.)
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