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The Reluctant Sceptic
I once met a woman who believed that she'd been a priestess in ancient Egypt. She was prone to vivid flash-backs, in one of which she had seen a pharaoh sitting in judgement with his crown askew. The specificity and oddness of the skewed crown convinced her that the vision was true. She also believed that her lover from that time was with her still as a spirit guide- and she had accordingly set up a psychic consultancy in their two names.
I knew another woman who remembered many past lives- in all of which she had committed suicide (she described one of them vividly). She believed that this time round she would break the jinx and escape from the cycle of reincarnation. She also believed that she had been appointed as a "guardian" of the human race. Exactly what this implied was left a little vague but it made her a person of considerable importance on the inner planes.
Thousands, millions, of our friends and neighbours hold similar beliefs. There are the Otherkin, for instance, who believe that they are really fairy-folk. There are the alien abductees.
I don't mock. I am sincerely interested. I am even a little jealous. I like to hang out with such people and hear their stories. But I'm always left wondering what there was in their experiences that makes them so sure.
I have been an occultist, I have done inner planes work, I have had glimpses in dreams of what might just have been earlier lives, but I have never allowed myself to be convinced by any of it. The imagination is a powerful force and as a writer I have some insight into how it works (and tricks us). I know enough about ancient Egypt to construct a very convincing romance about it (full of odd and specific images) but I never mistake the happy accidents of story-telling for authentic memories.
So are these dwellers in other realities less sceptical than I am, or have their mental adventures- dreams, memories, imaginings- really been of a different order?
I leave the question open. I'm a Fortean. I think the accepted account of "reality" is itself a fiction (a group hallucination perhaps) and full of holes. And I like the idea that we live in a multiverse in which realities - many, many different realities- co-exist and interpenetrate. But before I commit to an outlandish theory I require evidence- and I'm not getting any. I haven't even ever seen a ghost (and I would so like to.) Sometimes (given the circles I move in) it seems like everyone has been given evidence but me.
I knew another woman who remembered many past lives- in all of which she had committed suicide (she described one of them vividly). She believed that this time round she would break the jinx and escape from the cycle of reincarnation. She also believed that she had been appointed as a "guardian" of the human race. Exactly what this implied was left a little vague but it made her a person of considerable importance on the inner planes.
Thousands, millions, of our friends and neighbours hold similar beliefs. There are the Otherkin, for instance, who believe that they are really fairy-folk. There are the alien abductees.
I don't mock. I am sincerely interested. I am even a little jealous. I like to hang out with such people and hear their stories. But I'm always left wondering what there was in their experiences that makes them so sure.
I have been an occultist, I have done inner planes work, I have had glimpses in dreams of what might just have been earlier lives, but I have never allowed myself to be convinced by any of it. The imagination is a powerful force and as a writer I have some insight into how it works (and tricks us). I know enough about ancient Egypt to construct a very convincing romance about it (full of odd and specific images) but I never mistake the happy accidents of story-telling for authentic memories.
So are these dwellers in other realities less sceptical than I am, or have their mental adventures- dreams, memories, imaginings- really been of a different order?
I leave the question open. I'm a Fortean. I think the accepted account of "reality" is itself a fiction (a group hallucination perhaps) and full of holes. And I like the idea that we live in a multiverse in which realities - many, many different realities- co-exist and interpenetrate. But before I commit to an outlandish theory I require evidence- and I'm not getting any. I haven't even ever seen a ghost (and I would so like to.) Sometimes (given the circles I move in) it seems like everyone has been given evidence but me.
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I read somewhere that our personalities are all like pearls that are strung onto our Self, which is the string, but I'm beginning to think that when we die our personalities go back to God, which is Everything. Our personalities cropped out for a moment in order for God (Whatever God is) to experience this realm through us uniquely. We follow the DNA rules, we follow the rules of science, and then we die.
I would like to think that there is a loving God who sees me as his daughter, but I wonder if it is that personal. Having grown up praying, I still have the habit, and I still hope that Something personal cares about me and my little life. I can't help it.
My mother says that when her mother was dying she felt her father's presence all around the house. Shortly after Grandmother died, his presence left. I've wondered about this: if we DO all go back into the soup stock, then what crops out as ghosts or "presences" in our houses? Because my own sister, most reliable and stable, has experienced some uncanny stuff in a house she once lived in.
I have intensely wanted to believe the story of Jesus and His "I've prepared a place for you," etc., but it's very hard not to think that his words were distorted by editors and even by his followers to keep the early Christians in the flock. Or that Jesus himself was guessing.
Still, I've been to a psychic who was very correct in a cold reading--named my husband, the number of my children--all kinds of stuff he couldn't have known. Where'd he get all that? I just sat there quietly while he got all this out of the ether.
And I've had those experiences, too. When I was about 14, a boy came up to me in the yard and said his dog was missing. He handed me a phone number (no name) and asked me to call if I saw his dog. I went into the house, got some orange juice, and sat down to read. I idly picked up the Lubbock phone book (a big city, so the book was very thick) and wondered (without great interest--rather dreamily) how long it would take to find the number on the piece of paper. I opened the phone book, looked down, and there it was! Honest.
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I have, however, had experiences similar to yours with the telephone book. They're what make me a Fortean. When I was a curate in South Manchester we had an entirely unexplained "rain of coins " in the churchyard. For about a week we were picking up small change in a area about two foot square. You'd go over the ground and gather up everything in sight and then go back half an hour later and there'd be more. I believe such happenings are actually quite common.
But what do they mean?
Most reported cases of reincarnation can be shot down, but there remain a few that are hard to dismiss. There was an American woman who remembered an earlier life in Ireland and went in search of her "children". She found them- all by now old men- and was able to tell them so much obscure personal stuff that they came to accept her as their mother. I once came across a very small boy who seemed to remember a life as a German tank commander in WWII. He had vivid memories of people throwing Molotov cocktails and the tank crashing into a wall. Mind you my information here is second-hand. I knew the kid, but the story was told me by his mother who was not altogether a reliable witness. (Shrugs theatrically.) So who knows?
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if i had a point in posting this comment, i think i've lost it. my grandfather died on the day of the feast of shiva. hindus believe that those who die on this day escape the cycle of rebirth because shiva grants them enlightenment. priests had told my grandmother twenty years earlier that they had read the charts and that her husband would achieve enlightenment. even if it's true, i don't know that there's any meaning to be taken from it-- there's nothing one can do to influence these events, beyond living a good life.
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I haven't read Patanjali; thanks for the tip.
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I hold the the paradox that all things are.
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"All things are"- that's good too. The fantasy that she was a priestess in ancient Egypt is a reality insofar as it utterly governs and shapes that woman's life- which makes it a pretty hefty reality when you come to think about it.
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If I can find it would you like me to send you a copy?
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