>Your comment is one way to interpret this writing. It is highly pessimistic and reads like you lack comprehension skills... I say this as an English major.

Thank you for beginning your response with an unnecessary, meaningless personal attack. I've been on the receiving end of a rather surprising amount of hostility and overly condescending comments after I posted mine; which I find pretty ironic, given that it's coming from people who purport to be enlightened, which in large part is supposed to make one's mind more or less immune to all-too-human emotional attachment to schools of thought and tribalistic thinking. The irony is palpable.

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>I suggest you reread it or dive deeper into Alan Watts or Carl Sagan, both of which are mentioned in the writing. They each have wonderful outlooks on life and the human experience.

I have actually listened to a fair bit of those guys' material; and although they don't really belong in the same category, they did share this poetic view about the cosmos and reality in some ways, but their metaphysical convictions actually differed greatly, as Carl Sagan was an atheist, naturalist, scientist and Alan Watts was effectively a Buddhist; and in a hypothetical debate where the two get to the nitty-gritty of their respective philosophies, I'm sure they would end up disagreeing with one another strenuously on a fair amount of crucial points, but nonetheless, I do appreciate both.

But once again, regardless of the aesthetic qualities of these ideas and these "spiritual" experiences, I happen to believe they are highly dubious and not to be relied upon for discerning the nature of consciousness or whatever.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I've yet to be presented with a clear argument, or anything for that matter that isn't just another way of saying "You just don't understand it you lowly stupid peasant! You lack the capacity to even begin to fathom the sheer profundity in all of this!"; which I would say is indicative of a superiority complex more than anything.

>That means, you are observing something without the added distortions of the mind.

That is an unfounded assumption. There's no reason to suppose that. Why couldn't such an "observation" be the result of yet another distortion that actually evokes the feeling that there are no distortions?

Sounds like a more plausible hypothesis to me, given the profound susceptibility of the human mind to error at every level of cognition.

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>You can either learn to appreciate such experiences as being glimpses of unfiltered truth

Once again, you've failed to substantiate why such experiences are "glimpses of unfiltered truth", and that thus remains a mere claim and nothing more.

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>You'll shed tears if you ever end up having such an experience.

Sure, I might very well end up having a similar experience at some point, one that I would describe as life-changing, and might ultimately be compelled to conclude that they are in fact informative of some deeper reality, but that won't mean anything either, I'm just another person, with the same mental and intellectual deficits that plague everyone else.

There are people, on this planet, right at this moment, who are having what they would describe as profound spiritual experiences which are actually suggestive of mutually-exclusive worldviews.

Someone right now is likely talking to Jesus (or so they imagine), or Muhammad, or Mahdi if they happen to be a Shia Muslim say. I've actually met some of these people firsthand and they are 100% convinced of what they saw, and what they think what they saw meant, yet as a matter of pure logic, at least some of these people have to be experiencing some form of delusion, they can't all be right.

Therefore, you can't look at this phenomenon (of spiritual experience) that manifests itself in radically different ways, and lazily conclude that whatever an individual instance seems to suggest on the surface must be true because it simply felt profound, or that you ended up crying because of how intense it was.

Why is that so-called "epiphany" presumed to be the canonical, authoritative experience, somehow informative of some deep truth as opposed to merely a momentary illusion?

Why is it assumed to be any more "valid" than the ordinary kind of conscious experience?

Sure, the former is rarer, and it's often accompanied by a sense of awe and profundity, but none of that gives any credence to it, really.

Yes, and but doesn't make the universe conscious.

Why is that distinction so hard to understand?

It's like saying cars move, and cars are part of the city, so the city is moving. No, despite the poetic value of that claim, it's simply absurd.