The Spirit Realm, or One Completely Random Post

Feel free to skip this long blathery post, which is unlikely to make much sense. Lately more thoughts of a philosophical or metaphysical bent than are usual have popped into my head. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. One is that I re-established contact a few months ago with a friend of mine from college, who told me about his faith (paganism) and also told me a lot of his thoughts on Christianity and the Christian God (nothing like a new perspective!). Another is our own search for a new church after we left behind one that we really liked as part of our big move. Another, of course, is just the unavoidable desperate headscratching that one is forced to engage in when paying any attention whatsoever to the big news stories of the day (war, another war, genocide, child soldiers, starvation, the missing Baby Suri). Lately, the news reports about psilocybin experiments, that left test subjects feeling as though they had gone through a profound mystical and religious experience, have caught my attention (and someone’s blog that mentioned this also caught my eye, but more on that later). Throughout all these things, I start to wonder if there is something in people, and specifically in me, since I have no way of knowing how these things feel to other people, that inhibits spirituality and connectedness. For the sake of this post, I am tying these concepts together, but it could be connectedness to God, if God is specifically your thing, or connectedness to the great life force, or to the universe, whatever. In my ramblings, here, spirituality is what enables the connectedness, and I am wondering what it is that either makes it more difficult to find the connectedness, or turns one away from it altogether. In a class a few years ago we read Brian Swimme’s book The Sacred Heart of the Cosmos. Swimme proposes that consumerism is the current cosmology, the thing that gives meaning and purpose to our lives, and that in place of that, we should be watching the sunset with our kids and explaining to them that we are rolling away from the sun, not that it’s setting, but we’ll see it again when we roll back around, and that we are fortunate little semi-sentient whiffs in a vast creation that is given by the great generosity at the heart of the universe. I loved reading this book, despite my clumsy summation. It does seem important to try to instill in the youngster the importance of following the credo of generosity inspired by creation, whoever we believe is responsible for it. But for me, there is definitely something in the way a lot, and if I were the same believer I was as a child, I would know it was the devil, or original sin, keeping me from God. I don’t know what it is, now- laziness? Inertia? Consumerism? Still original sin?

On a slightly different tack (but related in the sense that it is in this same misty realm of thought), my sad habit of clicking “next blog” over and over, after I catch up with the affairs of my blogging compatriots, led me to this blog, which had posted its first and only entry just that day. It caught my eye initially because the writer was talking about those psilocybin experiments, and it had only been a few days since I heard the NPR report about these tests (I couldn’t find that story on the NPR site, but here’s something similar on CNN. The experiment was so interesting to me, because it made me wonder if there is some part of the brain that is in charge of the spiritual and the mystical and the whole connectedness thing, and whether we have been slowly losing access to it. Anyway, the writer of this blog posed vaguely similar questions, which was cool, but also declared that his work was in investigating claims by children that they had had a previous life. Wha…? It sounds like some kooky stuff, except that he is not a “researcher,” he’s a real Researcher, at the University of Virginia. I know, being connected to a university isn’t any kind of guarantee that you’re not a complete kookoo pants, but it does offer a check on the work that you do, to some extent, and a legitimization (he admits in his blog that his work is “out there”). Anyway, why was this so intriguing to me? Because in all my recent musings, I felt like one manifestation of this spiritual “blockage” that may or may not be prevalent in society (rather than solely within myself) is that while lots of people may be out there thinking about these things, it seems like it’s unusual for people to be talking about them, and it’s difficult for me to write even a quarter of the way to the things that go on in my head. Yet here was a man whose JOB it was to investigate claims made by children that they had been someone else before. Thereby, you know, making the discussion of souls or life force or at any rate, human beings separate from the body they ride around in for a time, into a genuine study. Neat!

Silly blog reader that I am, I asked the guy whether he thought it was possible to try to wire up a kid right, so that they could connect more easily to that part of their brain, or whatever it was, that would give them a greater sense of connectedness and unity throughout life. This sounds like a crazy question now- it was spur of the moment. But he responded that it seemed like the thing to do was to raise the kid with an openness to spirituality. I put it on my list, but I sure wouldn’t mind more help with this one.