Experiences actually happen. Some are profound, some astonishing, fantastic, divine or heavenly. Some are hellish and agonizing. We have to remain aware that when we have experiences, particularly unexpected experiences, we will habitually go looking through familiar cultural lexicons in an effort to discover ‘what’ the experience was. This can be a dangerous mistake when it comes to unusual experiences for a wide variety of reasons. One of the most formidable of these is the most common: thereafter we are prone to take (and defend) the description we select as the actual and absolute identity of the event described.
If, for example, one takes an artifact from the language of religion, i.e. ‘Heaven’, and predicates this with a phrase from the language of science in a clumsy and provocative fashion, i.e. ‘Proof of’… well this comprises a grave and shameful confabulation of experience with description; that is to say, the author has come to believe that the experience and the description -=are the same=-. Having lost the ability to separate these, such a person has lost their mind.
This is not cause for publication or public parade, yet it is often these specific individuals who feel most compelled to celebrate their confusion in high theatrics. There may be claims of actually wanting to ‘comfort’ a desperately hopeful and impressionable public, but comforting them with confusion or lies is … just wrong. Being a scientist makes this a lot more wrong, because it is like a police officer shoplifting while talking up the value of his own proximity.
Parading about in public with an absurd description on the merit of your scientific credentials, this does not really have any effect on the fact that the crucial and necessary distinction between demonstrable events and descriptions of inner experience has been very obviously lost, destroyed, compromised, or otherwise rendered catastrophically disfunctional.
This may have benefits, but they will not be rational. It does a grave disservice to everyone involved, but is perhaps most catastrophic in its effects upon those most directly involved in promoting or accepting this kind of behavior as insight.
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