I Believe In Almost Nothing

“Embracing, here comes the belief,” painting by Le Liu,

How many planets has your soul traversed? How many life times? What percentage of you is human? What percentage extraterrestrial? All important questions!

Yesterday, I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, Our Paranormal Afterlife, hosted by a charming Brit named Simon Bown, whose mission statement is to “investigate evidence that demonstrates survival of human consciousness after death.”

Bown is a licensed hypnotherapist who specializes in past-life regressions. If you haven’t looked into the idea of past lives/reincarnation, I would encourage you to at least look at the literature before dismissing it as hooey.

As strange as it is for a Western mind to wrap itself around, there’s voluminous anecdotal and professional field work to explore, most famously conducted by Dr. Ian Stevenson, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Department of Perceptual Studies.

In his decades of work, Stevenson never concluded that either past lives or reincarnation are “real,” but as one of his successors, the recently retired Dr. Jim Tucker wrote in a 2008 article for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, “he considered reincarnation to be the best explanation for the stronger cases that he had investigated.”

All of that to say that I’m open to these ideas based on the evidence as I understand it.

Yesterday’s episode of the podcast featured a woman named Dr. Linda Backman, a past-life regression therapist who specializes in working with “interplanetary souls,” the term she used to describe those souls who spend most of their incarnations away from Earth with only the occasional drop-in for an earthly life.

What struck me most about the interview wasn’t the bizarre subject matter. It was her surety that what she was saying was true. Backman also claims contact with four different ET individuals.

Listen to the interview: Backman is obviously an intelligent, well-spoken professional woman saying, presumably, one batshit crazy thing after another. Yet it’s impossible for me to dismiss her out of hand because so much of what she said resonates with claims I’ve heard others like make. There’s also a level of sincerity and deep conviction that puzzles me because I’ve never had a coherent set of beliefs.

Which suuuuuucks.

I was talking to Martha about this at lunch today (apple, fig, walnut, honey, and burrata on grilled sourdough – fabulous); I’m deeply envious of people with faith. I don’t just mean religious faith. I mean any faith.

And here I will reference Jungian psychologist and Dick Tracy villain, Jordan Peterson, who has very publicly wrestled with his own system of beliefs. “What do you mean by believe?” he asked an audience, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘believe’… is what you believe what you say or what you act out?”

What does it mean to act as if we believe, for example, in God? Upon what foundation do we rest our beliefs? In the case of Dr. Brockman, it’s telepathic communication with a host of aliens and communication with entities she calls “archangels.” I imagine she rests her own belief on the work she does, but does belief shape our works or do our works shape our beliefs?

Martha told me that she understands faith better than me because she was raised in the faith tradition of Catholicism. She said that when you get introduced to the world of sacrament at a young age, you accept it the same way you accept pedestrian explanations of everyday occurrences. In this way, the divinity of Jesus Christ is no more or less explicable than magnetism.

How does one cross the Rubicon from “open to idea” to “believes idea.” As Western children of The Enlightenment, we’re taught to rest our beliefs on, again, evidence. But we’re told to exclude certain kinds of evidence from our beliefs. Anecdotal. Non-repeatable. How do we measure what we gained from the scientific method versus what we lost?

Because I feel like The Enlightenment may have granted us our modern world, but it did so at the cost of our deep humanity. By which I mean the mystery at the heart of the human experience. Look around: we live in an increasingly cold technological world and it’s getting colder all the time. One of the reasons I think AI scares people is they sense their own humanity dripping through our fingers when we type prompts onto our computer monitors.

Here is what I believe: I believe that there’s something utterly mysterious about this world and about humanity in general. Something feels incomplete. As a result, many (most?) of us are forever seeking answers. Perhaps this is nothing more than an evolutionary quirk. After all, the person trying to scratch an itch is going to be a hell of lot more resourceful than the person at peace. I believe that mystery is more beautiful than certainty.

Beyond that, I have no faith. Which is different than saying I am faithless. I’m open to the idea of faith, but I have yet to cross that Rubicon. I’d be curious to know how you all understand the nature of faith and belief. For me, this has been a lifelong struggle. One that only grows the older I get.

I have one other belief with which I will conclude. I believe that we are blind to the true nature of reality. A simple way to understand what I mean by this is to look at the electromagnetic spectrum. Our human eyes only perceive a tiny amount of what surrounds us. The gamma rays and microwaves and x-rays that permeate everything. That’s how I think about reality in general. As if there’s a “reality spectrum,” of which we can only directly perceive some percentage.

As I started writing this piece, I got interrupted by a call from my buddy. We got into a long conversation which wasn’t about this stuff but ended up touching on a bit. He said something to me which resonated, so I’ll close by sharing it. He said, “We’re all here to celebrate the illusion with love.”

I believe in that.