I a spiritual person, of sorts

I think maybe I'm kinda spiritual.  I can feel awe at all sorts of things and have learned to meditate into a self-hypnotic state, and really like most religious music and well-written non-dogmatic sermons.  I can also get into various rituals so that they have a limited reality to me.  Finally, for the most part religions don't bother me, although I must admit I like the philosophy and attitudes of Buddhists more than others, and I see no point in worrying about what others believe or don't believe.

Still, I have to say I'm an atheist.  I don't have any God or gods, and think they are human inventions.  The one exception might be the Tao, but that really isn't a god anyway.  I don't deny or reject God or anything of that sort, it is just that from what I know of history and science I see no reason to think He exists.

Where my mysticism or spirituality comes from is inside -- the wonder of "me-ness," that there is a something "there" thinking and experiencing the world, for which I can see no possible physical approach -- no causative mechanism.  In other words, there are aspects of my existence, and I presume everyone else's, that leave me speechless, uncomprehending,  bewildered, awestruck.  The immense if not infinite size of the universe and all those stars out there are nothing in terms of awe inspiration compared to the fact of personal existence and experience.  (I experience the world via qualia -- sensations, emotions, that I know have chemicals bubbling around in my skull associated with them, but how?).

That I don't know doesn't mean I have to invent God to explain it.  That is no explanation, just a cop-out. 

I suspect there are aspects of existence that are beyond us -- totally beyond us -- and the mystery of our mental existence is largely one of these.  Of course how the brain works will, over time, be worked out in detail, but we still won't know how it does what it does, if it is the brain doing it and not just being used.  The only thing I can figure is that there is a self-perpetuating process (chain of thought) that dies and is reborn from moment to moment much as an electromagnetic wave perpetuates in space.  It dies when I am asleep and is reborn when I awaken, and it constantly changes as I learn and have experiences and make decisions.

Distinguishing Reality, Illusion, and Delusion

We live our lives in a huge illusion, but we presume there is a reality "out there" which generates the illusion we experience.

For example, the sky is not blue.  The atmosphere scatters certain wavelengths of sunlight more than others, with the net result that what enters our eyes when we look skyward are wavelengths that causes our brain to generate a certain experience that our mind in English calls "blue."  In other words, colors are an illusion of the brain generated by the fact that when we look at things, whatever wavelengths of light they reflect (or in a few cases generate) are made by the brain into experiences (or color "qualia") for our mind.

I sometimes hear voices that aren't there (usually when half-asleep) that disturb me, but I long ago realized that if they are not there, then they are not there and it is something generated in the brain, no matter how "real" they sound.  Sounds are not real.  The brain generates sound qualia just as it generates color qualia, and in both cases, although they usually have some relationship to the reality of the external world, they don't always.

The difference, of course, is that the sounds of Bach in the background are illusions while voices I may hear from phantoms are delusions.  The Bach comes from sound waves from the speakers in my room from the CD I'm playing (an illusion generated by another illusion generated by another) while voices in the head no doubt have some source in my normal mental chatter that gets mistaken as incoming sound, but it has no external source and so is not illusion but delusion.

Illusions have something "real" under them, delusions do not.