There is talk about a God spot in the brain, and areas which, while stimulated, provoke feelings of a "sensed presence" or of "being one with the universe".
This begs a philosophical question - do we want religion for how it feels like ? For its phenomenology? Does religion come with a type of aesthetic ideals about how one should feel about one's world, self and others? Does it come necessarily as a phenomenological search for meaning, protection or integration in a beautiful structure (i.e. an ideal society in which the others behave to you and you to them according to a moral code)?
And if it does, could we really blame it? Isn't love and all the odes to it the search for a particular phenomenological locus, isn't the search for our vocation the search for the things that provoke in us the phenomenological taste of passion and devotion, of work that is poignant, that we suit and suits us?
In the end, it's all about how we feel about things. The rewards that can be administered to us (and we do search for them) are many times internal - phenomenological flavours of doing the right thing, of reaching that type of being in control or in pure flow or elated or devoted or transcendental or *add your own* feeling.
But don't get me wrong, this is no simple or self-indulgent matter, as trying to make one's self feel right about something might be the hardest thing one ever attempts. Depending on what our exigencies and expectations are about, on what we think we should feel when we have the things that we want, when our life is going the right way, we might actually set ourselves up for quite a complicated challenge.
Trying to create the circumstances that fit one's phenomenological desires is a long process that oscillates between trying to make one's life fit one's phenomenological tastes, and refining those tastes through further exposure to art/ideas or bringing those tastes "down to earth" through further exposure to real life and we can really expect of it. They are also those people that ignore what they actually want but they don't count in here, as they are not playing.
How real are our goals to us, our phenomenological needs? Are they our creation? Are they important enough for us to strive to get them? Or are they just an aesthetic way of looking at the world - of what the world (mostly internal) could be like? Is asking that from the reality of life wasting resources that could be directed to more realistic needs?
Someone who has seen relatively accomplished and well off people suffering from depression or schizophrenia can attest to the fact that we are not that much without our phenomenology. So we do need to take care of it, understand it, as it is intrinsic to having a personality. Having a personality means having a view on the world, preferences and all sorts of fancy ideas about how things feel like and how we would like them to feel like. But is that enough to solicit (of ourselves) a life of endeavour in trying to please one's phenomenological particular aesthetic sense?
People get lost in their own phenomenology all the time, and it's not always cause they are not taking care of it, but sometimes its because they build up entire cathedrals of phenomenological expectation. And let's face it, not everybody is a Gaudi to afford the internal or external resources to build those cathedrals (which is not what positivist mass-market will have you think, as supposedly you are to believe that you can have, build or be anything you like according to that phenomenological flavour, something just as absurd as thinking you have endless resources, but let's face it, very tasty). Therefore it's probably wise to regularly revise how big and fanciful of a cathedral you do have resources to build. It's also wise to remember that we do build our phenomenological preferences out of bits and pieces that we pick up from the outside, as well as things that we process internally. So one doesn't need to be insulted while discovering that a particular piece that one thought quite intimate is present in a neighbour(that we don't particularly like)'s construction, not should one feel very lonely for discovering one has different pieces than one's friends have.
After all, we live in times in which is very trendy to be an individual, a personally constructed and opted for Self (giving quite a different flavour to the concept of "a self-made man" - but we live in a different phenomenological time than the one in which that concept was first mentioned, proof of that being the fact that some might have frowned upon the gender choice in the above concept).
As this search for phenomenological flavours is trendy and in the spotlight, on a par with being aware of what one's search is all about, maybe you should ask yourself today: why am doing the things that I'm doing - what is it that I am trying to feel? And maybe even more: are my phenomenological expectations healthy for me?
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