Hallucinations

[Orange Crow]

Sometimes when I dream while waking up, my thoughts literally become like a movie when it is like this, I can think of anything I want to and it seems like it is real, though I subconsciously know I am dreaming, so I am partially in control of the dream.

Want.

 

[redblue22]

does hallucination by definition mean that the experience is in no way real?

 

[SnowyMacie]

Hallucinations are real, in a sense. If you are hallucinating, your occipital and/or temporal lobe will light up just like you are actually seeing and/or hearing something. To your brain, it's as real as real as what you are seeing and hearing right now. Obviously, it's something your brain has perceived on it's own to be there with no basis in reality of what it is actually there.

 

[redblue22]

TX- if one hears a vocal hallucination, then it is "something" or a brain-state, etc. in that sense, it is really something. ok. but to be a hallucination it cannot be caused by a friend's voice, the tv, spirits, God, etc.

 

[Messy]

1 person might hallucinate. But can 500 people hallucinate at the same time? In total Jesus might have appeared to more than 500 people after his resurrection.

Lot of muslims hallucinating then these days all of a sudden.
CBN TV - Visions of Jesus Stir Muslim Hearts

 

[Orange Crow]

Lot of muslims hallucinating then these days all of a sudden.
CBN TV - Visions of Jesus Stir Muslim Hearts

I just heard about this today in a service. Interesting.

 

[radhead]

They won't all see her at the same time...and if you interviewed them, the experiences will be different. What you are describing is psycho-suggestive situations anyway, not hallucinations. I assume you are taking about things like seeing Jesus' image in the toast...which what they are looking at is real and external to the mind...but how they chose to process it is done by suggesting an idea. Or maybe like the "purple horse" that we had living wild at my childhood summer camp...a lot of us claimed to have seen it but nobody really did or believed they did. I know I convinced a few girls to believe me...yes, I wanted to see it...and yes, I knew it didn't exist...and yes, a few times I almost convinced my self i could see it...but that was not a hallucination but rather wishful thinking and if my life depended on it, I'd have admitted that it was probably only wishful thinking. But the people who saw Jesus were willing to die (and some did) rather than recant their stories of seeing him. Even people who have "real" hallucinations won't defend them to the death because they have some awareness that it isn't quite real even when it feels very real to them.

It is your option to not believe it because you think God doesn't seem real enough to you. However, I choose to believe that they saw something external to them because it was real enough to change their lives in a very dramatic way. I say the evidence points to a real and tangible resurrected Jesus and nothing that even remotely points to some mass hallucination...that does not make scientific sense any more than you trying to make sense of a resurrected Son. So you are left with no science...only blind faith no matter which way you choose to believe.

How do you even know you are interpreting the Bible correctly? What if "seeing Jesus" is a symbol for the spirit inside of each of us? The Christ in ourselves and each other. What if it is the same way the Job "saw" the Lord at the end of the book?

If I relate it to my own experience (feeling abandoned) it makes sense to me. If Jesus' followers felt left behind they could have had an hallucination. And their trauma would have been much greater than my own experience as a child.

 

[radhead]

does hallucination by definition mean that the experience is in no way real?

It really depends. If it is inspired by a drug, it could all be imagination.

But if it is a vision based on the truth of God, I would say that at least in some way it is real. Maybe more than just understanding.

 

[blackribbon]

It really depends. If it is inspired by a drug, it could all be imagination.

But if it is a vision based on the truth of God, I would say that at least in some way it is real. Maybe more than just understanding.

Have you even read the accountings of the resurrection from the Bible? It might be worth opening the book for. The first two women to see him went to the tomb expecting to find a dead body...they weren't expecting or looking for a resurrected man. They held an actually conversation with Him on the walk home where they did not expect to find him but were rather all worked up wondering what had happened to his body.... (and again...two people can not have the same hallucination because it is an internal stimuli not something that can be shared between two people).

Then you get to John 20: 24-29
Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”



This was definitely a physical REAL experience ....he looked and touched Christ...and saw and spoke with Christ. He was not looking for a resurrected experience because he didn't believe it could happen.



There are many other similar experiences where Jesus gave many people an opportunity to actually prove his tangible existance.. this was not a figment of one person's imagination nor a mass drug induced experience.


Here is a commentary on the accounting in Luke if you would like to read more. https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/commentaries/IVP-NT/Luke/Resurrection-Jesus


This was either a real God experience or the Bible is a made up book of fairy tales. We each get to make that decision for ourselves...but either science nor history will give us any positive answers so it is a FAITH question...and how you decide to believe is a religious decision. Atheism is as much a religion of blind faith as Christianity is.
There is no way to believe part of the Bible and not believe the rest because the Bible itself claims to be the Word of God...so either it is and everything is true or it is not, and we have to assume that we can't trust that anything is true. It really is that simple.

 

[Nanopants]

It really depends. If it is inspired by a drug, it could all be imagination.

But if it is a vision based on the truth of God, I would say that at least in some way it is real. Maybe more than just understanding.

Have you ever read any collection of theories of paranoid people under the influence? In my experience, they don't make any cohesive sense at all.

Granted, Paul outright admits that not everyone can understand scripture, but works from several different authors can be compared to show that they are cohesively talking about some kind of a shared, universal experience among them that probably helped to inspire them to write what they did. Being one of the authors, Solomon commented on this, describing the collected sayings as being given by "one Shepherd" (Ecc 12:11).

 

[KitKatMatt]

Blind post.

I've had many hallucinations before. None caused by drugs or medication, and none were religious in nature.

Most of my hallucinations are associated with sleep paralysis. I see small unidentified animals running around, hear them breathing in my ear, and more than once felt them sitting on my chest (which is a commonly reported thing for this kind of hallucination). They scare me to death, but thankfully I have stopped having them once I changed my sleep schedule.

At least one hallucination involved me waking up while sick, and seeing/hearing my aunt and uncle walk through the hall. They were carrying a kitten and told me it was hurt, and they were going to fix it in the garage and if I wanted to come. I said no but then after a few minutes I got up and went to the door that leads into the garage. Everything was dark and empty out there, and I got scared and realized that must have not really happened. I was really little at the time.

 

[redblue22]

kitkat, fascinating.

 

[blackribbon]

Hallucination are the brain responding to non-existent (or internal stimuli). There is no physical truth to what they are seeing or hearing (with auditory hallucinations being the most common form). They are a major symptom of schizophrenia or schizoeffective disorder. People having them feel like the images or the voices are very real and it has to be a very difficult illness to live with.

Delusions are when a person does have an outside stimuli but the person perceives it as being different than it is in reality. This would be the traumatized soldier who mistakes his spouse for an enemy soldier attacking him. It is also like someone who takes drugs and "sees" colors when he is listening to music. The stimulus is real (the music) but how the brain perceives and processes the stimulus is distorted.

A person can suffer from both...or each separately.

 

[Niels]

I'd visit a doctor ASAP.

The only time I've hallucinated happened when I was about 4 years old. Everything I looked at appeared to be covered with photo-realistic eyes. Looking back at me, blinking etc. Even my own hands. It only lasted one night, but it was disturbing to say the least. Although I was later told that it was just a fever, I suspect that I may have licked a stamp laced with LSD or something.

 

[Nobadee]

When I was in the military I often suffered from sleep deprivation; the result was hallucinations that seemed so real, that I almost opened fire on them several times.

 

[CCHIPSS]

"500" sounds to me like a symbolic number.

He also appeared to "the 12." Another symbolic number. And that was separate from the apostles he mentioned.

Remember that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians long before any of the gospels had been written. I don't think we can trust what the gospels have to say, at least not literally.

Paul said there was more than 500 people at the same time who saw Jesus. So it was actually more than 500.

 

[CCHIPSS]

Maybe not 500, but two of my friends may have hallucinated the same thing at the same time.

It was our freshman year of college, and we had just gotten back from somewhere at like 2 am, so we went to bed. Their room was set up where one of their beds was at the front left corner of the room, his head at the other end of the bed from the front, and the other bed was at the back left corner, his head in the corner. Anyway, they go to bed and talk for a few minutes and suddenly they hear a voice say "BRAINWASH" in this like creepy announcer voice coming from the space in between there two beds. One of my friends is like "Dude, did you just hear that?" and the other replies "Wait, you heard that too. What the heck?". They ended up sleeping in my room that night, and we spent all of the next trying to figure out how that happened (the room was right next to the staircase), but there is no way it came from the staircase. To this day, we have no idea what happened.

I have never heard something creepy. But I have seen things that are creepy. So I do believe in the spirit realm, and I do believe weird things happen. But they are all demons and not ghosts.

 

[redblue22]

I wonder how beliefs about the mind might affect this question. For example, some think the mind and brain are the same thing. I wonder how many Christians deal with concepts: soul, spirit, mind, heart.

 

[KitKatMatt]

It is also like someone who takes drugs and "sees" colors when he is listening to music.

I "see" (and taste, and feel, and smell) colors often in response to music and other stimuli. Without drugs, of course

It's called synesthesia, and is both interesting and very annoying. For example, when a family member was a child, his voice made me see a blinding white light and I couldn't stand being around him because I wouldn't be able to see when he talked. It made me really sad because he liked hanging out with me. When he got older his voice changed and that went away entirely, and I explained to him why I always acted weird. He finds it interesting and brings it up a lot!

 

[bhsmte]

1 person might hallucinate. But can 500 people hallucinate at the same time? In total Jesus might have appeared to more than 500 people after his resurrection.

500 witnesses would be significant, if the source that wrote the story down, had historical credibility.

Bottom line, anyone can write anything in a story.