The novelty of Finn’s perspective on the God Experience & Related work

Finn’s procedural model of the God experience—structured as the reversible confinement sequence am → I am → I am this and grounded in survival-driven cognition—has no exact precedent, though partial analogues appear in both classical Vedānta and modern cognitive science. His additional claim—that the God experience is not extraordinary but the most ordinary and ubiquitous of all experiences—further distinguishes his position from both mystical and academic treatments.

1. Classical Advaita and Neo-Vedānta Sources

In Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta (8th c. CE), Brahman is described as sat-cit-ānanda—Being-Consciousness-Bliss—an ontological absolute beyond empirical change. Later Advaitins (e.g., Vidyāraṇya, Śrīharṣa) elaborated the experiential identity of self and Brahman as a rare, salvific insight.
Twentieth-century neo-Advaitins, such as Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, re-centred this teaching on direct awareness of “I am,” prior to attributes or identifications. Their formulations anticipate Finn’s primary and secondary God experiences but retain a metaphysical and devotional orientation. None explicitly interpret the “I am” state (real presence) as a universal operational constant—a survival-linked system reboot available to every conscious organism at every moment.

2. Phenomenology of the Common Experience of Being

Finn departs radically from both Advaita and Western mysticism by observing that the so-called God experience is not an esoteric attainment but the base phenomenological condition of personal existence during waking consciousness.
Each morning, upon emerging from sleep or unconsciousness, the emergent system instantaneously registers am—the minimal awareness of being alive. This event recurs universally, billions of times each day across the species, yet because of its perfect sameness and absence of contrast, it goes almost entirely unnoticed.
Finn thus inverts the traditional valuation: the God experience is the commonest, not the rarest, of all experiences—a continuous background operation rather than an exceptional revelation. In short, the God experience grounds all experiences. Comparable ideas appear fleetingly in Husserl’s “pure consciousness of immanence”, Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit, and Sartre’s pre-reflective cogito, but none link this invariance of being to the mechanics of survival and attention coherence as Finn does.

3. Non-Traditional Critiques of Bliss and Salvation

U.G. Krishnamurti (1987) repudiated the concept of bliss as metaphysical fiction, portraying “enlightenment” as merely the cessation of psychological striving. His demystification of affect anticipates Finn’s interpretation of ānanda as a contingent feedback signal generated by procedural coherence. However, Krishnamurti offers no systematic account of the recurrence and universality of the God experience as Finn provides.

4. Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

In analytic and cognitive-scientific contexts, Thomas Metzinger (Being No One, 2003) and Shaun Gallagher & Dan Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind, 2008) describe a minimal phenomenal self that maintains experiential continuity. Evan Thompson and Jennifer Windt (2015–2020) investigate dreamless-sleep awareness, suggesting a baseline “lucid nothingness.” Finn’s primary ‘am’ corresponds closely to this minimal-self event, but he redefines it as the system’s status-check at restart—a survival imperative rather than a passive background state.

5. Predictive-Processing and Active-Inference Models

Contemporary neuroscience frames consciousness as recursive self-modelling for the minimisation of surprise or prediction error (Karl Friston, 2010 ff.; Limanowski, Deane, Parr). These models describe a continuously updating organism-environment loop but rarely connect it to lived phenomenology. Finn’s notion that attention bandwidth determines the purity of the God experience provides an experiential correlate to this computational principle.

6. The Druid Finn’s Novel Contribution

No previous author integrates:

1. The triadic and reversible confinement sequence am / I am / I am this as a procedural structure of consciousness;

2. The identification of affect (ānanda) as contextual reinforcement feedback, not an intrinsic property of being;

3. The claim that the God experience is the universal baseline of waking consciousness, recurring at every restart of awareness; and

4. A naturalised explanation of intensity or “purity” as a function of undivided attention bandwidth.

Finn’s synthesis thus uniquely unites ancient phenomenology, cognitive recursion, and survival-driven systems theory into a procedural monism in which the divine is not a transcendence but the continuous act of being aware that one is.

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