Luhrmann describes the utility of the physiological phenomena of absorption in religious practices, by religious practitioners:
"He [the absorbed person] lives within his imagination more, whether that be simple mindfulness or elaborate fantasy, and he feels that the experience happens to him, that he is a bystander to his own awareness, more himself than ever before, or perhaps absent, but in any case different (Tellegen and Atkinson 1974; Davidson and Davidson 1980; Luhrmann 2005)... And as the absorption grows deeper, people often experience more imagery and more sensory phenomena, sometimes with near- hallucinatory vividness (Fromm and Katz 1990). The techniques which encourage absorption are the techniques of intense, focused prayer... (Luhrmann, p. 5)
As Marlene points out, there is an overlap in defining characteristics between schizophrenia and all-inclusive absorption of intense prayer. This overlap engenders an interesting question - that is, whether God, the notion of God, of divine entity that is supra-human and stands as the ultimate in the hierarchy of beings, is an immanent notion, a notion that derives from within the human subject. Further, that God and man are, rather than being composed of distinct substances, composed of single universal substances - and in that sense immanent. (This notion is different from the idea of transference [I think] that we as human beings extrapolate our condition to image an higher being).In relation to schizophrenia and prayer, the action becomes not an act of externalization, of communicating (of information exchange) with an external, supra, conception, of something transcendent - in rhetorical terms, as a dialogue - but rather, as information exchange within the manifold layers of the self - in rhetorical terms, as a monologue. Prayer: not as a dialogue, but as a monologue.
(The science fiction writer Philip K Dick writes of this notion of immanent God [to some extent] in his essay "Man, Android, and Machine")
"He [the absorbed person] lives within his imagination more, whether that be simple mindfulness or elaborate fantasy, and he feels that the experience happens to him, that he is a bystander to his own awareness, more himself than ever before, or perhaps absent, but in any case different (Tellegen and Atkinson 1974; Davidson and Davidson 1980; Luhrmann 2005)... And as the absorption grows deeper, people often experience more imagery and more sensory phenomena, sometimes with near- hallucinatory vividness (Fromm and Katz 1990). The techniques which encourage absorption are the techniques of intense, focused prayer... (Luhrmann, p. 5)
As Marlene points out, there is an overlap in defining characteristics between schizophrenia and all-inclusive absorption of intense prayer. This overlap engenders an interesting question - that is, whether God, the notion of God, of divine entity that is supra-human and stands as the ultimate in the hierarchy of beings, is an immanent notion, a notion that derives from within the human subject. Further, that God and man are, rather than being composed of distinct substances, composed of single universal substances - and in that sense immanent. (This notion is different from the idea of transference [I think] that we as human beings extrapolate our condition to image an higher being).In relation to schizophrenia and prayer, the action becomes not an act of externalization, of communicating (of information exchange) with an external, supra, conception, of something transcendent - in rhetorical terms, as a dialogue - but rather, as information exchange within the manifold layers of the self - in rhetorical terms, as a monologue. Prayer: not as a dialogue, but as a monologue.
(The science fiction writer Philip K Dick writes of this notion of immanent God [to some extent] in his essay "Man, Android, and Machine")
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