Call It Sleep

A  religious snake oil salesman in the US, Roy Masters (where religion has always been privatised unlike in the UK which has a national state religion going back centuries) was preaching on the radio and he said hypnosis cannot help people because they are hypnotised already and in this hypnoidal state bad things beset them.This idea that the human race is asleep has biblical corroboration  and support as Christ himself said 'asleep ye come in to the world,asleep ye go out'.

So what is this sleep that is referred to by religious people which view is broadly held by most religions albeit expressed in different language,the Buddhist for instance talk of lowered states of consciousness and proffer meditation techniques to raise it to a state of blissful consciousness,an at oneness etc.The religious snake oil salesman above mentioned preaches a similar thing attempting to meld East and West in a hybrid admixture and he refers to this state of at oneness as At.onement.

The rational mind knows only two states of consciousness: asleep and awake apart from altered states of consciousness induced by drugs which impair cognition but this is not in the ordinary human experience but rather in the realms of medical and social pathology.

To posit some higher state of consciousness achieved by connecting with an omnipotent supernatural entity from another dimension beyond human senses through which humans can achieve awakeness is to the rational mind bizarre, fantastic and absurd.

For people to take refuge in such an abject delusion is not a guarantee of human happiness and health but rather a  hopeless craven abdication of the mind and an abandonment of any possibility of human efficacy and happiness. To quote Thomas Paine, 'the sleep of reason brings forth monsters'.That is the only sleep guaranteed those who sell their soul to faith.