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Chapter Six against anyone who perceived a higher reality, including great saints and mystics of all kinds. In such cases, a connection between sexual life and religious emotions is often drawn; conversion is a “crisis of puberty”; devotion is just the parental instinct of self-sacrifice run amok; the search for meaning to it all is merely a hysterical starvation for a more earthly object of affection, and so on. All of these are tactics of discrediting states of mind that produce nonlinear shifts in the psychic landscape. St. Paul had an epileptic seizure on the Road to Damascus, Saint Teresa was a hysteric, George Fox suffered a disordered colon, Carlyle had an ulcer. Those who are looking for a materialist explanation for everything will find all sorts of disordered glandular functions, and voila! All spiritual verities will be successfully disposed of and skepticism and the Blind Watchmaker will reign supreme! The problem with these reductionist explanations is this: even if it is true that St. Paul had epilepsy, and that is the “materialistic account” of his vision on the road to Damascus, does that then negate the spiritual significance of the event? Because, in point of fact, every single “spiritual condition” - positive or negative - probably does have an We would also like to note that the hard-core skeptic is as likely to be skeptical because he suffers liver disease as the born again Christian is likely to be converted because his ulcer drives him to seek relief. The evil magician can have a dirty colon and the psychic vampire can have false teeth. In short, raptures and rants can be equally represented by organic conditions. And if this is taken as the model of verity, then none of our ideas, our thoughts, feelings, scientific doctrines, beliefs or disbeliefs, have any value at all. If such an idea is the theory upon which we are to evaluate our reality, then we must theorize that EVERY idea emanates from the state of the body of the originator. That is to say: what is sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander. As I continued my examination of the standard religions as well as the many and varied New Age teachings, I saw these systems being used as the very means of propagating memes. I could see individuals with no extensive knowledge of historical metaphysics being fooled by a belief in the “benefits” of alien abduction. We repeatedly see terms describing “light” or related phenomena. This tends to make the describing “light” or related phenomena. This tends to make the percipients regard the experience as “good”. Gurdjieff was right: mankind is asleep and one of the conditions of this sleep is the absence of an active “BS meter”. expression in physiology.