Effect of Personal Experience on Bias.

Have you detailed these experiences. I'm curious if you'd be willing to share, regardless of whether the experiences are paranormal or not.

I've mentioned a couple of them, either here or at Skeptiko.

One was posted here not so long ago, I had an experience where i felt myself reduced to point-sized in a vast blackness. The notions of how large I was, and how large was the region in which I found myself are not measurable in terms of inches or metres. It was more to do with the experiencing. How else could one feel but humble in such a scenario?

Another related to an OBE which was probably posted somewhere on Skeptiko. I had an experience of being relocated from my little bedroom to somewhere in interstellar space. This wasn't darkness, all the stars and galaxies were shining. But there was a sense of vastness, unfathomable vastness. If we consider someone like an astronaut on a craft going into orbit around the moon, they have reported some profound experiences. However, they were inside a craft, and had had years or months of preparation. To be somewhere much further away, naked without any spacecraft, completely unexpectedly to make that journey evoked many feelings. One of them was humility. There were other feelings, perhaps indescribable. It was a positive thing, for which I am grateful.

[note: there was no drug or abnormal physical state involved in either of the above, just ordinary everyday life. ]

But there remain some things which will perhaps never be told to anyone, relating to physical illness and life circumstances. Those remain personal, but have meaning for me. Maybe this outweighs the ones I mentioned above, by some distance.

I don’t really see why you should. 

Sometimes I don't say clearly what I'm thinking. I was perhaps reflecting on the somewhat quiet state of this forum at present. I'd prefer to blend into a crowd.

I have not had any profound personal experiences in my life, ones that really blew me away, but if I had, I’m wondering if they might have affected my ego, and if so, how?

I’d be interested on your thoughts on this.




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I would expect that having a strong spiritually transformative experience like a really deep NDE would, because it is a glimpse of the true nature of the soul and spiritual reality and how much greater these are than the ego and personality, would tend to diminish the ego and its hold on the personality. My observation of NDEers is that this is sometimes the case, but not always. Sometimes an overweening ego is just too strong and deeply ingrained a characteristic of the personality for it to let go much. In the latter type of person, having had the STE is used as evidence of exceptional personal quality to further bolster the ego.