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OK, we know that AS has some serious problems in that regard.

Lets cut through your word games.

As mentioned above, by "self" you claimed you meant the ego. Not knowing what full definition of self and ego you are using, according to Freud, the ego "The ego is the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Conscious awareness resides in the ego..

So by suggesting that all a person need to do is abandon their "self", you are suggestion they abandon their intellect. More modern definitions of self specifically identify it with cognition and "all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge, attention, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision making..."

So once again, all your fancy argument for a spiritual realm amounts to nothing more then a call to abandon reason and appeal to faith.

If there was a sign above the entrance to your "spiritual world" what would it say, "Abandon reason all who enter here"?

"Self" is that part of you which is concerned only with you.

THAT is what you abandon.

You are making this more difficult than it need be.

You claim we can observe the effects of the Spiritual Realm?

Great. If it really affects this world we should be able to test for it in a meaningful, repeatable way. The religious Templeton groups funded several "prayer studies", real scientific double blind studies where some patients are prayed for, and other are not. Those who received prayers did have better medical outcomes then those who did not receive prayers. This does not help your case that the existence of the spiritual realm can be proven through prayer.

Now lets contrast that with gravity. I just picked up my hunting knife and let go, and it fell to the table. I picked it up and did it again, and the same thing happened. So not only was I able to demonstrate the existence of gravity, and the results were repeatable. Furthermore, you can test this yourself and see if the same thing happens for you!

Anyone can demonstrate gravity. The same cannot be said for your alleged spiritual realm.

Gravity works on the outside of a man.

Prayer works on the inside of him.

Anyone who practices prayer could tell you in advance that there is no experiment that can prove its efficacy.

Except for the "experiment" I've suggested you perform yourself.

That's not what you said earlier. You absolutely called for the abandonment of the intellect:

That is the same as the effects not existing at all.

O K.... Let me try again. Giving up your reasoning ability is not too LARGE an answer... it's too SMALL an answer.

There is more to you than your intellect, but your intellect is what you hold dearest. That "more", the container of the intellect, is what must be abandoned. The whole nine yards, so to speak.

Everything that makes you special, or different from others is what must be offered up.

What you receive in return is a cleaned up version of yourself. Your reasoning ability is enhanced because it is not so contaminated with selfish thoughts and ideas.

Nope. The effects are real, but not quantifiable, so they are of no use to science.

Curdog, accepting you are not special does not require any "special" connection to a spiritual realm. Again, Secular philosophers have been dealing with this question for over 2500 years, and the Romans had an entire school of philosophy build around this concept called Stoicism.

As for accepting that you are not special, that's actually a common occurrence during a conversation process. Religious people are often made to feel special because "they were with God before they were born", or they "have a special relationship with God, who listens to and answers their prayers", or they are lead to believe they are one of the 144k select who will join God during the end of days while everyone else is destined for hell. It is the realization that none of this is true that leads to them understand these fictions are false, and we are all just ordinary humans, each born of a blank slate.

So once again, perhaps we've reached a similar practical destination, we've just traveled different paths.

It they are real, they could be measured, if not directly, in directly.

It IS measured...... this way:

After establishing communication with his Creator, a person's "thought life" bears little resemblance to the one he had before.

That change will be reflected in his interactions with his fellows, but the actual change takes place inside his mind.

In a sense that may be more understandable to science , he changes from "incomplete" to "complete".

You experienced a similar change when you fell in love with your wife, but a few orders of magnitude smaller.

I have to pack for my hunting trip.

Except we can measure the effects of marriage. As an example Married people tend to live longer then those who stay single. We find no similar types of positive correlations for people who pray to a personal god. We do find negative correlations in terms of higher teen pregnancy rates, lower incomes, and higher rates of imprisonment, but nothing that would support your hypothesis that the effects are measurable, and improve peoples lives.

Good luck on your hunting trip.