The Reluctant Sceptic

[poliphilo]

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.

Comments

[archyena.livejournal.com]

This is similar to the problems I encounter with spirituality, I cannot have faith in it. I feel it is a sign you know too much, you can think of a million other things it could be from delusion to outright lies and as such cannot commit without real evidence. I know people who are heavily into meditation and the like who get surprised that I can out-meditate them and out-Zen them because I'm just not spiritual enough, I suppose. Over time I've come to believe that the fact that I am not all that spiritual combined with my apparent mastery of their "spiritual arts" may just prove there's not a thing to it at all.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've devoted most of my adult life to spirituality- 35 years or more- and I'm as baffled now as I ever was. Time and again I've set off down a path and just as I thought I was getting somewhere (as in Through the Looking Glass) it would give a shake and a twist and land me right back where I began.

[geodesus-christ.livejournal.com]

I also love the idea of multiple realities, especially the notion that with every decision you make, your current life line or whatever it is splits into however many options you might have had, and then along each of those life lines exists the reality where you made that respective decision. Everytime I'm driving on the freeway thinking about this almost gives me a panic attack... trying to visualize my flaming wrecks of a car in multiple positions along the side of the road.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I've given up on reincarnation, because I think it can't be that simple. While I'd like to think our personalities survive, it seems unlikely to be so straightforward--i.e., last life a nervous nun, this life a nervous divorced mother, next life a nervous piano teacher (because I practiced hard in this life).

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.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's a scary thought. My mind shys away from exploring it too intimately. Yeah, definitely not something to be thinking about while driving on the freeway!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ailz is always sensing presences and seeing things "out of the corner of her eye", but I'm about as psychic as a house-brick. I don't know what it is. I've sought out "paranormal" experiences, but maybe my inbuilt scepticism acts as spook-repellent.

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?

[ibid.livejournal.com]

My lectuere is fond of quoting one Stephan Miller 'reality is a [not THE name which is interesting] namegiven to the fantasies we trust.

I hold the the paradox that all things are.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I like that line of Miller's (who he?). I shall try to commit it to memory.

"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.

[four-thorns.livejournal.com]

reincarnates aren't supposed to remember their past lives, so there's really no way of proving it. you might be interested in reading the yoga sutras of patanjali (but find a good translation- i recommend christopher isherwood). i find the hindu take on our world very interesting. patanjali says that those who follow the path to enlightenment gain special powers along the way, but those who undertake the path with the goal of gaining these powers become ghosts instead.

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.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've always thought the pursuit of powers for their own sake was wrong. Not morally wrong exactly- but kinda missing the point.

I haven't read Patanjali; thanks for the tip.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

One of the fasinating things about the social sciences are that they make no pretence about the objective facts that science believes it is covering (I was recently in a discussion trying to persuade people that science is a religion, none of their arguments swayed me at all!) the social is what counts as it so often is!

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Oh Miller was a professor of 'Ludology', the study of the ridiculous!

If I can find it would you like me to send you a copy?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Oh yes please!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I know nothing about the social sciences. I thought they would be dull, but you make them sound a whole lot of fun.