| Re: With all the erudition of a drunken 15 year old......
My personal belief is that it is foolish to build your belief system on instincts. If you have an instinctual belief about something, then fair play, you are entitled to it but, personally, I don't think this is useful at all.
Neither do I buy the 'Ancient Wisdom' argument, most of this 'wisdom' is spurious, ill-defined, vague, ad-hoc and contradictory. Take, for example, the many isolated cultures who still have shamans who make strange preparations from plants, imbibe them and thereafter are able to enter the 'spirit world' where they can 'become one with true reality', 'merge with nature', 'communicate with Gaia' or other such nonsense. What is actually happening is that they have taken a psychotropic drug, we know a lot about these kinds of drugs and they work, inter alia, by interfering with the normal operations of a chemical called 5-hydroxytryptamine in the brain. This greatly alters the way your brain collects and assigns importance to sensory information leading to fantastic hallucinations and massive alterations of perception. No spirit world. No becoming one with anything. No 'magic plants'. Just some molecules of an alkaloid chemical which fucks around with your neurochemistry. Fascinating, but not magic.
Yet, and it's a big YET, there are STILL intelligent people who have access to excellent education who still believe that the shamans are 'contacting spirits', 'becoming one with nature' etc etc"!!! Ask these people WHY they believe it, what their REASONING is and the answer is invariably "Oh, I just do" or "It just seems right". You can't justify beliefs because they 'seem' right!
Incidentally, what are the things you've experienced which you mentioned but didn't elaborate on which led you to your beliefs? | 
