After a pretty long dry spell in my spiritual life, which over the past many years has mostly consisted only of poring over tedious arguments for and against various spiritual worldviews, I began to wonder if maybe the climate has been friendlier to any other Skeptiko listeners out there. Have any of you been getting a good drenching?
At one time I found the simple intellectual engagement with psi research to be, in itself, pretty satisfying - but not so much anymore. In fact, the more I've become intellectually convinced of the reality of a spiritual dimension to existence, the more existentially dispirited I've become for lack of any meaningful personal engagement with it. Don't get me wrong - I've given it a shot. I've got a gazillion books on everything from New Age meditations to ritual magic(k) grimoires. Hemi-Sync. Holosync. Mindmachines. Medium readings. Reiki healings. Aura photos. Ongoing failures to spark a lucid dream or an OBE. Desperate prayers to beings on every level within the hierarchy of Heaven for consolation and guidance. Not a drop. The aridity within which my soul currently finds itself seems to be interminable. I'm getting to the point where it actually hurts to read any sort of spiritually related books or listen to any spiritually related podcasts because there is so much certitude and conviction in the hearts and guts of the authors while, for me, well... crickets.
Do we have any spiritual Babe Ruth's here in our community? Is there anyone making successful headway in their pilgrimage toward Knowing? For lack of a church community to turn to (being that a maverick spirituality has no roof under which to shelter itself) I thought I'd make a post on this matter and hopefully spark some discussion.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Philemon,
I had a similar feeling a while back and to be honest its a continual thing with me, getting to a point of stagnation that is. My understanding is that we all can reach a point of stagnation, and it's somewhat like a crossroad but one road goes forward in personal growth and the other road goes sideways (or of course we can always go backwards too). We can stay on the sideways road for a very long time I reckon. We tend to stay there because it often feels that moving in some direction is progress but at a certain point, it just doesn't feel right. Well that's been my experience anyway.
For me, it happened strongly a few years back. I felt that I've just been looking at the same old material only said in various different ways and even though I felt like I'd learnt so much, I was still caught up in many of the same old dramas with people and with myself that preoccupied me since a teenager. I often wondered, why after having a variety of "supernatural" experiences and reading quite widely on spiritual literature would I be still caught up in the same old inconsequential problems. An analogy that comes to mind when I read in the book "A path with a heart" where the author having spent many years in a Buddhist monastery comes back to the "real world" and finds himself in some waiting room in an urban setting. While there, a group of young girls start sniggering at his funny monkish appearance, which brings up a wave of negative feelings about himself that he hadn't experienced in a long time. So even after accomplishing amazing mind-over-body techniques that would allow him to sustain his meditation non-stop for many hours on a cold hard floor, on that particular aspect of his self worth, nothing profound seemed really accomplished. So if he did move on that issue, it probably wasn't forward much though perhaps a great deal sideways.
In my opinion, I feel it comes down to facing those personal issues, perhaps the more mundane and off-putting they are, the more likely they're crucial to really moving forward. Getting immersed in esoteric, spiritual, parapsychological content etc. etc. can after a while turn into just exercising our intellect, while compromising pretty much everything else, as well as real growth. It can also be a good way to avoid facing the crucial personal hurdles, not unlike any other addiction really.
In terms of moving forward, I've come to see that real growth in myself isn't measured by what I know, isn't measured by what I can do even, it's measured by how I treat myself and treat others. Do I treat myself with kindness and compassion? Do I treat others with the same kindness and compassion? Is my kindness and compassion forced or is it from my heart? Another word for kindness and compassion is simply - love. So, is my condition more loving than before, the same or is it less? I feel that's what best indicates growth, at least that's what's felt the most real for me.
I remember having this rather abstract conversation with myself around that same time. I said to myself something like if the universe is simply an illusion, why can't I shift this illusion right now to one that's more favourable? Then being the know-it-all I was, I rebutted myself that perhaps this IS the most favourable illusion right now and part of my learning is actually coming to this realisation. I then re-rebutted myself again - that maybe I use those ideas to evade the fact that I really can't shift this illusion or holographic reality to something else and that I'm just deluding myself to avoid my incapacity and my unverifiable theories. Then I thought to myself that the incapacity is also just an illusion because the conditions of my present reality outside of myself that I experienced at each moment may very well be created by me which means I have had that capacity all along and this is precisely the reality I created. It went on and on and on like that for a while....
So that's a lot of movement sideways I'd say!
The thing is after all this philosophical pondering, I still felt I was missing something. I mean all the spiritual, uplifting, mind boggling experiences, content and material I'd received over my life to that point, didn't seem to shift me at the core. I might have got very good at convincing myself otherwise but truthfully I knew I was just kidding myself!
Throughout my life, most of the good books I came across would just literally fall into my lap and that happened again around this time. As I sat on an empty train seat I saw next to me the book: "What's so amazing about grace?" So a true believer in the power of synchronicity, I got to digesting it straightaway. What struck me at the time was the Christian concept of grace and forgiveness was actually one of the unique qualities of this Christian God that I had grown quite indifferent to over the years. I mean my concept of God wasn't so rigid I felt, my concept of God could cater for all religions and spiritual concepts, it was all-encompassing and empty at the same time, beyond duality, present and distant, inside me and outside me, being and non-being all at once. However there was something about this forgiveness and grace thing I wasn't shaking off. Of course it makes sense that forgiveness was a powerful tool to cut the cycles of suffering we humans excel at. Yet in terms of a God, there was something more palpable about forgiveness and grace coming from a personal God, an external-to-me being extending out this gift to me and everyone else. It's sort of hard to explain, but it planted a seed in me back then. Or maybe it was more like an opening to feeling a little bit of what this grace from God could be.
So did I become a born-again Christian you might be thinking? No, much much worse!
A friend of mine who I regarded highly from in a regular meet-up group interested in all things to do with raising consciousness and awareness, told me she had met Jesus and Mary. Not in an NDE or OOBE mind you, in the flesh!
"Emm Hmm... righto" I say to myself... She's either temporarily lost it or she's completely lost it was my thinking. As a good friend, I felt it was my duty to debunk these clearly fraudulent, likely deluded or certainly responsible for deluding others kind of people. I'd go through their material, listen to their stuff, apply logic and insight and come back to her showing these folks for what they really were. I was like a knight on a quest to save the distressed damsel on a my own battleground. I fancied my chances, so I certainly couldn't pass on that opportunity!
I developed a simple model to help me with such matters too, especially debunking spiritual "gurus", which I ranked myself quite good at. I called it "coherence" - basically I'd take the message and determine how well it aligned to a whole lot of other factors. For example - what the guru would say before and afterwards, what their body language and appearance shows, what their general feel is like, the directness and clarity of their words, how they deal with complex subjects so everyone understands, how grounded they are in this reality but how open they are to realities beyond... all that and more. I wanted to know how coherent these gurus were to themselves but importantly to what I expected from a real-deal spiritual developed subject. I know... a lot of arrogance there. Funny thing is, I never had that personal reflection back then.
So the verdict? Well not good (depending on your POV)... I didn't save the damsel, in fact perhaps the damsel didn't require my saving after-all.
Some of the Jesus and Mary stuff is found here in small chunks, if of interest: divinetruthfaq on YouTube
Anyhow the reason for that rather long-winded account was that I felt in a really stuck place back then, and coming across this material and being open enough to consider it, helped me personally shift my reality. BTW I still have no real proof for the claim of them being Jesus and Mary, I've also read plenty of convincing evidence to show that a historical Jesus is a myth created out of the Roman and Jewish religious figures, such as Julius Caesar (another JC), so who really knows? Perhaps it may be an interesting one to put through a scientific say OOBE or medium testing verification?