When I listen to music: some times it’s just music, but sometimes I’m transported.

When I play music - it’s often humdrum and workmanlike, but sometimes it’s qualitatively different.

My family and I have been awed by the Alhambra Palace in Granada (my son - 8 at the time - was floored by the intricate carvings, as was I).

I can recreate the sense of wonder and awe I felt whenever I look at video or photographs of that visit, but I certainly recognize the difference in my perception of how I felt about those carvings prior to my visit, and after. Seeing and touching and smelling the ‘real thing’ was intense and visceral, versus the purely intellectual ‘amazement’ I had previously felt.

For almost everything, the most ‘transcendental’ experiences have relied on the engagement of many senses simultaneously - or at least the suppression of distractions.

One thing is clear to me, however. I’ve never felt the presence of god, only grandeur and wonder.

The grandeur of the natural universe is enhanced by my limited understanding of the forces and timescales involved. Looking at the grand canyon and seeing (and touching where possible) the banded strata is mind numbing. I feel really small just thinking about it.

The greatest works of human endeavor make me intensely proud that our species is capable of reaching such heights of creativity and beauty and emotion, and simultaneously saddened that we so very often settle for our least efforts.

Like the Grand Canyon: Until you’ve been there and experienced it, it is just a pretty picture. Same for the Venus de Milo, or a properly lit Van Ghogh, or artfully conducted Mozart. MP3’s aren’t the same as a living performance. Stained glass in the morning light cannot be conveyed on an LCD screen.

But I can bike over to the St. Louis Art Museum and see an original Rembrandt for free. So I’m not sure whether this response supports or refutes your contention.

I realized that I felt exactly—exactly—the same feelings I’d felt toward god when in the grip of great music or in the presence of great art. It is, in any of its manifestations, a human thing that takes us out of ourselves and shows us what the universe can mean, and there are many ways to tap into that. There was a time when for the vast majority of people the Church was the only place to go to find that.

That last sentence is a really excellent observation. Indeed, for essentially all of human history before the 20th century — i.e., before the invention of public museums and artificially amplified music — the *only* place where most people (i.e., commoners…non-nobility) could hear great music or see great art was inside a church. Perhaps people (say, at any time between the years 400 and 1500) went to church, were swept away by the art and music, and concluded that since the only place where they had transcendent feelings was inside a church, then god must dwell there, too. Maybe art and music are the cornerstones of what we see today as organized religion. And now that great art and music are as close as any wired computer, perhaps people no longer need a church to feel they are in touch with the divine.

Heinlein had little use for charlatans and he presumably had first-hand knowledge of Hubbard’s charlatanry.

From Lazarus Long: ” The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man.

But it’s lovely work if you can stomach it.”

If I’d thought about the details - I would have realized that Haldeman was way too young to be party to that party (!). methinks a typo, then confusion turned Harrison into Haldeman.

It also makes a lot of sense that Campbell would be front and center - given his power and influence in the first half of the century.

re farmer: I always liked the Riverworld series - lots of ‘layers’ that poked fun at almost every sacred cow around.

I know several of these people and something of the bet. Haldeman, however, was not involved—he was a late comer to SF. Hubbard had withdrawn by then. The bet was at a party with Heinlein, Sprague deCamp, Pohl, Harry Harrison, and John W. Campbell. Hubbard claimed that he was tired of getting .03 cents a word and would make real money if he started a religion.

Campbell, as editor of Astounding Magazine, was the mule who carried Hubbard’s water by publishing a series of articles about Dianetics. He estranged a number of his writers—Asimov in particular—over it, but because he believed Hubbard had “cured” his sinusitus through these principles, he was gung-ho—an unusual lapse for the usually hyperskeptical Campbell. (A.E. Van Vogt stopped writing fiction for a dozen years to be a proselyte for Hubbard, doing enormous damage to his own career.)

Scientology has been the basis for any number of SF novels since the Fifties—Saberhagen’s Berserker series was among the first; Phil Farmer’s whole Riverworld series is one long Scientologist joke.

The “testing” they do is a stripped down form of the Thematic Aperception Test, which can give a skilled administrator keys to a person’s entire psyche, with subsequent abilities to push buttons.

The absurdities of Scientology have their equal in Mormonism, among others, and it has always amazed me that people can swallow that shit. But if you sugar coat a turd and bake it right, you’ll find someone to declare it a delicacy.

I remember as a student in Edinburgh participating in the ‘Dianetics’ testing — they offered a free lunch!

I was never a potential ‘convert’, since I was a long time reader of SF/fantasy, and had read about the ‘bet’ that resulted in Scientology.

During an SF convention, someone mentioned that any science fiction writer worth his/her salt should be able to create a religion that people would follow en masse. Much drunken raving ensued, the upshot of which was that if L. Ron hadn’t made one million dollars within ten years, he’d pay ‘X’* $10. In fact it only took around three years.

* This was a drinking session, so the details of who made the bet are misty - Joe Haldeman, Fred Pohl, Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov have all been mentioned. Haldeman and Pohl are the front runners (due to their close drinking buddy relationship with Hubbard)