Quote Originally Posted by Runeword View Post
Yeah SilverWolf but the part that worries me a lot is that there is so many prophecies and visions and dreams throughout history in so many cultures but how much of it could be for example; a guy has his first lucid dream and he is completely blown away by it, believing with certainty that he has just had a vision or received some godlike knowledge by being able to communicate with some character in the dream (or another world he most likely will think) with full clarity, when in reality that's all it really was, just a lucid dream that means virtually nothing. Like I said in my original post, I am not a total nonbeliever by any means but I have been pondering a lot just how much of the info we have throughout history about these "visions" etc are nothing more than a person experiencing a lucid dream or other elevated state and taking it too much to heart.
Our dreams, prophecies, and visions are all miracles. Life is a miracle. Language and culturally validated meaning is the issue here because our definitions are inadequate to the felt presence of immediate experience. The world is made of language. We can say that world is composed of tiny packets of matter squealing along empty space at close to the speed of light and subject to a certain set of interlocking scientific laws. Or we can say that the world is made of tiny little demons performing calisthenic exercises each one the size of the cross-section of an ant's eyebrow. Or we can say we are the sons and daughters of the Great Anaconda God who stepped out of his canoe at the 1st waterfall etc. But noticed what you get each time is words. The world is composed of description. Who knows what dreams really are, you know?

An example I like about language is: A baby lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room through an open window. The baby is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement, sound, and attention is just wonderful. It's an instantaneous miracle when placed against the dull background of the wallpaper in the nursery and so forth. But then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, "It's a bird baby, bird. Bird." And this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile and places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum. And from now on the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And by the time a child is 7 or 8 no light shines through because every aspect of reality has been tiled over with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits, and confines it within cultural expectation.

Language is POWERFUL and can be dangerous to direct experience and intuition about reality.