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<\/a>My family\u2019s faith traditions were heavily influenced by the teachings and beliefs of my maternal grandfather, Earnest Butterfield, a third-generation Methodist minister who preached for most of his career in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. We attended church weekly. We shared a blessing over every suppertime meal. I was taught to pray every night before I went to sleep, and more, to bring all of my troubles to God\u2014to talk to Him as a friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I loved church and enjoyed an exultant sense of closeness to God. I whole-heartedly accepted Christ as my Savior and regularly searched my heart for sins, trying to become more godly, to wrestle into submission my obvious flaws\u2014my quickness to anger, my tendency to trap myself within certain resentments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My understanding of the Christian faith was, of course, lacking in nuance and depth. As a child, I didn\u2019t have the complex and complicated imprint of life\u2019s experiences that we draw on to truly connect with Scripture, to grasp the emotional and spiritual tension behind what may be, otherwise, only a couple lines of text. A 10-year-old can\u2019t really understand how gutted Job was when he learned his family was obliterated, or why David wanted, urgently, for Uriah to be out of the picture so he could sleep with Bathsheba, or why Peter leapt out of the fishing boat and swam to shore when he realized he and his companions were speaking to the risen Christ\u2014the One he had, such a short time ago, denied, and from whom he thought therefore that he was parted forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, even writing a couple lines about that last story is enough to make tears come to my eyes. As a child, it hardly registered at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My own denial of the Lord wasn\u2019t so much a sharp break as a gradual drifting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Ultimately the fault is my own, of course. I am smart, but I can be undisciplined. (I\u2019m being gentle on myself.) If I see something that excites my interest, I\u2019m likely to run to it. This is why I\u2019m never reading just one book, but always a half-dozen or more at the same time. It\u2019s why, instead of a single major \u201cproject\u201d in my life I am always working (and yes, usually imperfectly) on several. [Thank goodness my husband tolerates this!]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately, the fallen world obliged by offering up a nice smorgasbord of temptations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Holding the form of religion but denying the power of it… (2 Timothy 3:5)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
One, sadly, was served up by my own church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a teenager I read Scripture regularly, favoring the New Testament and within the NT almost exclusively the books of the Apostles and Acts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I began to stumble (!) in my faith because of passages like Luke 17:5\u2014or, more precisely, the discrepancy between passages like Luke 17:5 and what I saw in our church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jesus had said, as plainly as anything could be said, that his followers should be able to perform incredible miracles. In the Books of Acts, his Apostles did perform miracles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So why weren\u2019t the people in my church doing anything miraculous?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over a period of time (many years) I began to reason that the answer to this question had to be one of three things. Either my church was a failed institution. Or the Bible was flawed\/incomplete. Or the Bible was simply a collection of myths and half-remembered stories and sayings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dropping church came first. When I left home for college, I stopped attending church regularly. I still loved my faith\u2019s hymns and ritual, and appreciated the good-heartedness of Methodist parishioners (I swear I can, to this day, pick out a Methodist in a crowd!) but I no longer believed the Methodist church had anything to teach me. It seemed oddly lifeless at its core.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a>My separation from my childhood faith was exacerbated when my Grandpa Butterfield passed. The loss wrecked me. I\u2019d wake up in the night, sobbing in my bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Much of my grief was personal, of course. One of the legs supporting my childhood world had been kicked out. Any young person would feel that sort of loss very deeply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I also knew, deeply, that I\u2019d lost a lifeline to my faith. I\u2019d been taking my questions about the church to my Grandpa, asking him to help me answer them. As long as he could hear my questions and still love me and accept me, I felt okay. I wasn\u2019t straying too far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How was I to keep my feet on the path without his love to guide me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And they cast out many demons… (Mark 6:13)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
During this same period, I was also considering the possibility that teachings from other \u201cspiritual\u201d traditions might help me answer my questions about the Bible. If my Methodist church wasn\u2019t performing miracles, well, maybe it was because they were missing some piece of truth that I could find elsewhere. Maybe other traditions could help me patch over the rents that were appearing in my faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I won\u2019t go into detail all of the options I weighed as this part of my journey. Suffice to say, first, that I found it unappealing to delve too far into any of the other major religions. Trading the traditions and liturgy and ritual of Christianity for those of Buddhism or Judaism or Sufism seemed like a dead end. What I didn\u2019t want was to change costumes. I wanted to experience a living faith\u2014I wanted to experience a faith that literally overcomes the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, I built a library that includes a fair number of books that explore \u201cthe spiritual\u201d from a more secular, 21st<\/sup> Century perspective, or secular with a healthy dose of mysticism. Many would be considered New Thought and New Age writers. Others proposed quantum phenomena as an explanation for \u201cmiracles.\u201d I also own several books by Carl Jung and a handful of his acolytes (e.g. James Hillman, Robert Johnson), owing to my sense that the answer to my questions has something to do with the greater psyche\u2014the more hidden parts of the human mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I encountered and read quite a few books that I would classify as more clearly \u201coccult literature,\u201d but for what it\u2019s worth (I have my theories!) I haven\u2019t typically kept that kind of book around for very long. It\u2019s not that I woke up one day and think, \u201cyou know, I shouldn\u2019t read these.\u201d However, every time I culled my library to make room for new books or because I was moving, I inevitably decided the occult books were not something I wanted to keep. They seemed like a side road. Or maybe slightly \u201coff\u201d for some reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the years passed, the third possible answer to my question about my faith also began to take form: the possibility that the Bible was no more than a cultural and literary relic. Perhaps there was no God. Perhaps the world is a material place and when we die, poof, we\u2019re gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the reason my church functioned primarily as an institution of social and emotional support, versus a demonstration of the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit, was because the Holy Spirit doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the reason that none of the other spiritual books I read seemed to offer any fool-proof answers to my questions was because they are also false teachings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember a lecture in one college course that I took. Although I don\u2019t recall the course or the professor\u2019s name, I can still picture a fuzzy image of her standing at the front of the classroom as she told us that scholars believed Jesus was not a historic figure, but a composite of multiple itinerate preachers who lived in Palestine in Roman times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was shocked. Could this be true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I met other people who were staunch materialists. I encountered (who can avoid them?) books and articles by people who argued that we live in a material world, that all \u201creligion\u201d and \u201cspiritualism\u201d is superstition that must be discarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I began to accept some aspects of what I\u2019d call the classical materialist model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all aspects. It remained self-evident to me that not all phenomena can be explained by Newtonian physics. Miracles happen. There\u2019s plenty of evidence for them. People experience miraculous healings, for example. There\u2019s plenty of evidence for paranormal phenomena. People see UFOs, ghosts. I\u2019ve had an experience of the paranormal myself, and it was as \u201creal\u201d as any object in the room with me as I type, right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Any honest description of reality has to accommodate paranormal phenomena as real, albeit elusive, probably conditional, and with a strongly subjective aspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what shaped up, for me, was something like this: perhaps we live in a universe that is governed solely by physical laws: largely Newtonian but also quantum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Newtonian physics explains everyday, macro phenomena. Quantum physics explains \u201cmiracles\u201d and paranormal phenomena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within this worldview, miracles (and for that matter, mystical experiences) are not evidence of an objective God. They are, instead, weird, passing fluctuations in the fabric of material reality. They can be induced by people of faith but also by secular practitioners. They are not particularly predictable or controllable (which is why many people reject that they are possible at all, given that we believe that repeatable experiments are the sole way to measure objective reality).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And there was one \u201cmiracle\u201d I could not accept any longer as tenable: the notion of somehow surviving physical death. What objective evidence is there of such a thing? None that could not be described in terms of tricks of the mind\u2014or, at most, a temporary \u201cimprint\u201d in the quantum (energetic) fabric of reality that lingers for a while after a physical body dies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So (my thinking went) there is no life after death, and there is no higher meaning. The human brain is an unfortunate accident, a cruel cosmic joke that emerged, sadly, from a particular evolutionary equation: as we evolved from apes and (perhaps because our vocalizations reached a certain level of complexity) humans became capable of abstract thought. This allowed us to mentally formulate avatars that represent our own personal selves, i.e. we gained the capacity of self-awareness. That capacity however damned us (pun intended) to also recognize our mortality, and in turn this (naturally) makes us all stark, raving mad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike the gazelle, which lives in perfect, ignorant contentment until the moment it glimpses the movement of the lion, we anticipate our deaths\u2014consciously or not\u2014every moment of our lives. We are in constant dread of it. We cannot escape it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, we cope. We either delude ourselves into believing this isn\u2019t true (i.e. accept some religious belief, whether Christianity, reincarnation, or similar). Or we hate ourselves and hate and fear our fate to the point of self-destruction (grimly taking down others with us as we go, in some cases) or we opt to ignore. Bury the truth in sensation, pleasure. Party like it\u2019s 1999. Grab madly for all the toys. Or, more recent option: invest our wealth into technology that we hope against hope will enable us to experience a bioengineered immortality. Brain uploaded into a computer, indeed. What fun that would be. Put a clause in your will that whatever evil subsidiaries Facebook spawns won\u2019t have the right to alter your code, hahahahahaha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grim stuff. But this is the world we live in, isn\u2019t it. We live in this world, many of us, whether we confront it on those terms or not. No wonder we\u2019ve descended into a fetid soup of collective despair and nihilism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It took me a long time to get to this, I will say that. I suppose it was my childhood foundation in faith that enabled me to drag my feet for so many years\u2014decades. After all, I could still remember feeling Something that I believed, at the time, was God. It took a very long time for me to finally accept that that Something was a trick of the mind. It wasn\u2019t objectively real. It was induced by a combination of belief, intent, attitude, and conditioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ve ever considered the nature of reality in terms of the philosophies of idealism versus materialism, you might pick up on something that I managed to do, with the conclusion I\u2019d reached. I\u2019d threaded an interesting needle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In simple terms, idealism posits that reality is consciousness. Materialism posits that reality is physical matter\u2014dead billiard balls. Belief in miracles throws materialism into question, so by definition I never became a materialist in the classical, dead-billiard-ball sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, I ultimately accepted what I guess you could call quantum materialism. Peer down deeply into the stuff of which billiard balls are made, and things get weird. Observation of phenomena seems to be inexplicably interwoven with behavior of phenomena. Particles are also waves, and can affect each other across space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The human brain, I concluded, is in part a device that directs, tunes, and focuses subjective \u201creality\u201d in ways governed by the laws of quantum physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This doesn\u2019t prove there\u2019s a God. It\u2019s a function of awareness itself, and as I referenced above, for whatever reason humans have a level of awareness that is different from that of other earthly life forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we sometimes see cryptids or Fatima or ghosts. We sometimes seem able to \u201cmanifest\u201d lovers or money or new jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a function of awareness, which is in turn a function of the human brain\/body. When the brain\/body dies, that particular lens-of-awareness might flicker a bit, but ultimately it shuts off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And you\u2019d think that would be it. I\u2019d arrived at my conclusion, after literally decades of consideration, study, reading, contemplation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t a happy conclusion. I\u2019d arrived at something very dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Acknowledging that life ends with physical death is a nasty thing to have to live with. That was the personal burden I now carried. It weighed on me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The other nasty piece, of course, is that without God\u2014i.e., without some supreme, overarching cause or reason for our existence\u2014there can be no real morality. Within this model, morality, like everything else, becomes a human construct and therefore inherently flimsy and subject to negotiation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I should note that in this, again, the church of my childhood bears some responsibility, in that many of its leaders demonstrate by their actions and dictums that moral law can be negotiated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s also no accident, however, that so-called \u201cmoral relativism\u201d goes hand in hand with the materialist worldview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem of evil is therefore not, fundamentally, a problem at all. It\u2019s more accurately described as simply an aspect of \u201cwhat is.\u201d We use our marvelous mind-brains to manifest what we call \u201cgood\u201d or what we call \u201cevil\u201d but in the end, we are each of us snuffed out and turned back to dust\u2014and over time it doesn\u2019t seem like anything fundamentally changes. What\u2019s the difference, after all, between the Nazis exterminating Jews and the Chinese exterminating Uyghurs? We\u2019re still doing, today, the thing that supposedly horrified us a hundred years ago, and not many people seem to mind it very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s just one example. Every murder, betrayal, rape\u2014so many of the horrifically cruel things humans do to each other today\u2014are nothing but sad replays of what we\u2019ve been doing to each other since the beginning of recorded history. And why? To my model, it was because, within the quantum-materialist framework, there are no real consequences to evil. It\u2019s just a phenomenon. It\u2019s like a spider capturing an insect in a web, only a little more complex because unlike spiders and flies we are self-aware and aware of our mortality, and therefore the spider is complicit in its act of cruelty\u2014and the entangled fly knows in advance that its personal it-ness is about to be horribly extinguished. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I first encountered \u201cphilosophy\u201d as a thing in college. I took a couple of philosophy electives. I was a dutiful student. I did the reading and wrote the papers, and to this day I still draw on some of what I learned back then, although more in the sense of general frameworks rather than specific arguments, particularly when it comes to the 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> Century philosophers. I\u2019m sure this is due to my intellectual deficiencies, but to me, much of the more recent philosophy that I read (tried to read) struck me as\u2014apologies for this\u2014word games. \u201cThis idea is so terribly complicated that it can only be described by incomprehensible sentences.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not so much that I wouldn\u2019t be able to follow what Philosopher Guy was trying to say, if I tried hard enough. I didn\u2019t have the patience to invest the time. We\u2019re all going to die. I don\u2019t know how much time I have. Just get to the point and tell me if there is a God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I grasped enough, however, to understand that one of the arguments against idealism is the seeming \u201csolidity\u201d of physical matter. Although miracles suggest that, under certain circumstances, physical matter can be manipulated by non-physical forces (meaning, in this context, Newtonian forces like gravity, heat, etc.) the plain fact is that, most of the time, no such relationship can be demonstrated. At the macro level, Newtonian forces appear to reign supreme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014?James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson<\/em> <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Johnson had a point. If idealism is true, it should be demonstrably true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So why can\u2019t I pass my foot through a rock, if the rock is Mind? If the rock is Thought?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, here comes the big plot twist in my story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I found the book \u201cMeaning in Absurdity\u201d by philosophical idealist Bernardo Kastrup<\/a> [affiliate link].<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kastrup\u2019s jumping-off place for this book, interestingly enough, is paranormal phenomena\u2014precisely the kind of seemingly unexplainable events that I have personally accepted can, at times, become physically manifest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And his defense of idealism includes something I hadn\u2019t considered carefully enough: a heck of a lot of what\u2019s going on is, quite possibly, both invisible and inaccessible to our egos\u2014that is, to our waking minds\/everyday awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recall that Jung is one of the thinkers with whom I am familiar. Turns out Kastrup thinks highly of Jung\u2019s work and finds it useful for solving the problem of Johnson\u2019s rock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kastrup uses an analogy. Our waking minds are akin to the top of a partially submerged range of mountains; they are the tips, the bits we can see above the surface of the ocean; they appear to us as islands. But below the water, supporting the islands and giving rise to them, are enormous masses of\u2026something\u2014and, within the idealist model, that \u201csomething\u201d is also consciousness, although a form of consciousness that we, from our waking minds, can\u2019t directly access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This something supporting each island is also connected with the something that gives rise to every other island nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mountain tops (the islands) are our egos. The \u201csomething\u201d below each of our egos is our personal unconscious minds, which at some, even lower point merge into what Jung called the collective unconscious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obviously, to buy into this this analogy you have to believe that \u201cthe unconscious\u201d is real and in many respects larger\/more significant than waking awareness. I accept that this is true, although I don\u2019t plan to try to defend that here. Suffice to say, to my thinking, what we experience as dreams, myths, archetypes, unconscious drives, etc., are energetic patterns that have some sort of reality on the quantum or wave level of reality. And this stuff, considered as a whole, is huge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you don\u2019t agree\u2014if you believe your dreams are random, a byproduct of the biological processes of the brain, rather like automobile exhaust as a byproduct of running a car engine, then this won\u2019t make sense to you. But you also won\u2019t be able to explain miracles :)<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other hand, if you can accept that there\u2019s a whole lot of \u201creality\u201d that is inaccessible to us (from the standpoint of our waking awareness) then consider what Kastrup proposes: the solidity of physical reality arises from a kind of agreement we make at an unconscious level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Collectively, but on a level of consciousness that is undetectable and inaccessible to our waking minds, we have accepted that \u201creality\u201d should follow certain \u201crules.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Think of it as patterns of waveforms that lock into place because of entrainment<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Johnson hurt his foot when he kicked his rock because human beings\u2019 minds have collectively generated, on an unconscious level, a thoughtform that defines physical objects as stationary and impenetrable. If you kick a big rock, you won\u2019t have enough kinetic energy to move it. So instead the kick\u2019s energy will be absorbed by the tissues of your body which will crush and damage them. Ouch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Miracles happen, on the other hand, because some peoples\u2019 minds have entrained on a different set of rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We break into subsets. We have subsets of people who accept that miracles happen and subsets who do not. We have subsets who ponder UFOs and are fascinated by them, who \u201cwant to believe;\u201d these subsets generate waveforms that give UFOs substance and physically-perceivable qualities, while other subsets firmly ignore anything to do with lights in the sky and think UFOs are nonsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not to say that you\u2019ll experience only<\/em> the reality accepted by the group of people with whom you most closely identify (although it increases the likelihood). On the contrary, if enough people believe in miracles, miracles can \u201cbreak out\u201d in the experience of non-believers as well. Sometimes the \u201cevidence\u201d will even be so dramatic and compelling that the non-believer will be unable to rationalize it away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n George P. Hansen\u2019s book, The Trickster and the Paranormal<\/a>, proposes a model that helps explain how paranormal phenomena break through and emerge into consensus reality. He suggests that the phenomena is strongly associated with weak points in structures, including structures of the psyche, time periods (e.g. the transition from child to adult that we experience as adolescence), society, or even geography. (There\u2019s a reason meetings with the devil are associated with crossroads.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n This makes a lot of sense to me. It explains why the paranormal is so arbitrary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More broadly, quantum materialism also gives us a model for understanding why it\u2019s so tricky to really grasp the \u201ctrue\u201d nature of reality\u2014because reality is a funhouse mirror that reflects Mind back to Mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It may help to play with this concept to understand what I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider that, at one time, huge numbers of people believed the Earth was flat. They believed (sincerely and unquestioningly) some version of \u201cthis place was created by God\/the gods as a huge dollop of earth floating on a huger pool of water.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider the possibility that if a time-traveler from today, fully equipped with modern measuring devices and technology, was able to go back to that epoch, he might be unable to detect a curvature in the surface of the Earth. He\u2019d find a flat Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seems impossible to believe, right? So maybe go at it this way: maybe our collective, unconscious beliefs function like a fun-house mirror. They don\u2019t change what is, but they bend the appearance of what is. So, when a large enough subset of people conceive the Earth as flat, our round Earth becomes flattened in terms of what we can perceive with our senses (which includes the readings put out by our measuring devices, which are after all only extensions of our senses; eight inches of curvature per mile means no curvature if our senses tell us that eight inches of curvature per mile is the same as zero inches of curvature per mile) (yes, this suggests that in this alternate reality math as we know it doesn\u2019t exist. Maybe there\u2019s a reason ancient peoples didn\u2019t scrawl mathematical equations under their cave drawings, and it wasn\u2019t because they were dumb?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a junior high science unit on the eye, I used to brain-tease myself by wondering whether the world as I perceived it could be upside down\u2014perfectly inverted vertically\u2014from how other people perceive it. How could I know? I point \u201cup\u201d and say up, and they point to their \u201cup\u201d and nod in agreement. To me, their \u201cup\u201d looks the same as my \u201cup,\u201d and vice versa. But to another person, the image of \u201cup\u201d might actually be what I would call an image of \u201cdown.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s no way to know. We are each capable of navigating the world perfectly well thanks to the internal consistency of our perceptions. But my \u201cred\u201d could be your \u201cblue,\u201d too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or\u2014here\u2019s one that\u2019ll get some people riled up good\u2014suppose the 2020 election was both stolen and completely above board? Suppose there are two subsets of people, each of which literally cannot perceive the evidence which is overwhelmingly obvious to the other?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This sort of game\u2014brain tease\u2014is ultimately pointless if you\u2019re a materialist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a materialist, you believe there is an objectively real and inviolate and solid world out there. We humans might delude ourselves or hallucinate or lie, but it\u2019s there and can be measured and validated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But if it\u2019s all mind, ultimate, objective \u201creality\u201d is not a collection of solid things that exist independently of mind. Those things are mind<\/em>\u2014or, maybe better a better way to phrase it is: they are mind-stuff. Meaning: not \u201cmind\u201d in the same sense as the thoughts and ideas and impressions that I, sitting here at my computer, perceive flitting about my own head. The internal \u201cmind\u201d that I can personally perceive from the vantage point of my waking consciousness is insubstantial, weak, impermanent, and exerts very little influence on anything outside of \u201cme.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, my waking \u201cmind\u201d might be more like a crude antenna that picks up snatches of \u201csignals\u201d emitted by a greater reality and tries to assemble them into something my ego considers intelligible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mind-stuff, on the other hand, is categorically different because it is generated not by \u201cme,\u201d but by something greater than \u201cme\u201d that involves\u2014minimally\u2014many, many other people (and almost certainly other types of beings as well).<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ve stuck with me so far, hopefully you\u2019ll agree that at the least, this model is a plausible alternative to materialism (or dualism) in the classic sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s also possible that you\u2019ll think: well, so now you\u2019re just re-defining matter. You\u2019re calling it \u201cmind-stuff.\u201d But if it behaves like matter, is measurable like matter, is solid like matter\u2014then it\u2019s still matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To which I respond: but if matter is really mind-stuff, then that explains miracles, because under certain circumstances mind-stuff does follow different laws than those described by Newtonian physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if the mind-stuff emerges out of some sort of en masse, collective act of the unconscious, then we have a reasonable explanation for why miracles don\u2019t happen constantly, on an everyday basis. So many of us neither believe in them nor expect them, and our convictions on this subject are strong ones. Our educational system, after all, indoctrinates us in \u201cthe scientific method\u201d from a young age, on a global basis. There is also tremendous societal pressure to reject \u201csuperstition.\u201d Many relatively powerful people, including academics, sneer at and ridicule the whole nothing of religious faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But suppose we accept the idealist model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What do we actually do with this information? Is this just more word games? Are we, in the end, merely playing with the definitions of terms?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would argue that no, there\u2019s more to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I\u2019m right\u2014if \u201cthe rules\u201d are set by unconscious consensus, and if different subsets of people can adopt slightly different versions of \u201cthe rules\u201d\u2014then it stands to reason that you should associate with people who believe in things that will do you the most good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Example. If you have cancer and want to survive it, maybe consider not relying entirely on the help of a medical facility where you\u2019ll be surrounded by people who believe that your case and status correlate with a 90% chance you\u2019ll soon be dead. You might be better off seeking out some faith healers. You might be best off seeking out faith healers who have witnessed miraculous cancer healings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And what happens if we apply that logic more broadly? Say, to the state of one\u2019s entire life, inner and outer, and the state of the world in general?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where are you going to go?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What ideology are you going to associate with? What family of believers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n As soon as my thought process got to that question, I knew the answer. I knew it was Christianity. I knew I had to go back to Christ. More: I knew I had to go back and pick up where I had dropped Christ, and then I had to follow Him more completely and more deeply than I had as a child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This realization took shape as I dealt with a terrible loss I suffered within a few months in 2020 and early 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both my parents died. First my father<\/a>, after a month alone in a hospital bed on a ventilator. I found myself on my knees as he slowly failed, trying to figure out how to pray for him, because I had nothing else but prayer to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At first, I prayed that he be spared. Toward the end, I could only pray to God to be merciful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was close to my father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m aware I was lucky to have him in my life for so long\u2014sixty years. But the shock of suddenly losing him. There are no words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it became clear that my mother<\/a> was following him, something quite different happened: I suddenly began to appreciate how much I owed my childhood faith in God to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By His grace I was able to thank her for that before she passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was after her death that I tentatively began to fumble my way back home. Not intellectually. Not by dint of philosophical reasoning. I had already internalized the philosophical piece. I had already found an intellectual basis for rejecting classical materialism\u2014and therefore accepting that there is more to life than the material, there is a Mystery beyond human\/ego understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what I did instead was invite Christ back into my heart. I began seeking God\u2019s felt presence, that I knew as a child but had lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Something else also served as a very important factor in this decision to return to Christ: as we\u2019re all aware, during that same period (2020, 2021, today) the outside world began experiencing a bit of tumult. To put it mildly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s become so clear that \u201cmaterialism\u201d is an utterly failed model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201csolutions\u201d proposed within by people who operate within a materialist ideology bear a terrible fruit. It\u2019s no longer debatable.<\/p>\n\n\n Technology\u2014and by that I also include biotechnology\u2014has been almost universally tainted by greed and\/or the desire to control, which leads inevitably to suffering and death. Period. It\u2019s not debatable. The bad tree bears bad fruit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can\u2019t encourage covetousness and not expect resentment and social divisiveness. It\u2019s not debatable. There\u2019s a reason the Bible enjoins us not to covet. And what have we done? We\u2019ve corrupted the fundamental concept of charity (an act of voluntarily sharing with the needy) with something we literally call \u201centitlements:\u201d I am owed that which my neighbor has acquired. And we are surprised when the fruits we reap from these teachings are bitter?<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can\u2019t give people enormous material power, in a culture that accepts if not celebrates immorality (lying, cheating, \u201cbeating the system\u201d) and expect them to use that power wisely and justly and for the good of all. They\u2019ll use it for their own good and to buy loyalty, every. single. time. They\u2019ll become cruel and paranoid and corrupt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You can\u2019t absolve people of any sense that evil acts will be punished and not expect them to commit even more evil acts, more brazenly and more frequently. And here we are, the blood spilling daily on our streets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What better way to make sense of any of this than Scripture?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is Satan a real being? Do we really need to answer that question, when hellish, demonic imagery is suddenly more and more acceptable for use in public events (concerts, political speeches)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s all mind-stuff, remember? Evil exists. That\u2019s not debatable. Look around you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Give a face to evil and there\u2019s your Satan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what team are our rulers playing for, when they frame an angry speech in dark, hellish colors?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ever heard of a \u201ctell\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The point is not so much that our rulers are corrupt (although they are) as that I look at the world and ask myself: what team am I playing for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I know the answer. And it\u2019s not the team that surrounds itself with demonic imagery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a time when I believed that if you were going to be a Christian\u2014a true, believing Christian, not a lip service Christian\u2014you had to break at least a couple of the springs in the workings of your intellect. This is a religion, after all, that somehow claims to reinterpret the humiliation, torture, and death of God Himself as\u2026redemptive? It\u2019s absurd. You take the worst possible thing that could happen to the Savior of humanity, and you claim that the entire thing was not only okay but somehow a necessary step in your ultimate salvation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s unbelievable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a religion that asks believers to believe the unbelievable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I understood that some very smart people had somehow became believers. But it seemed to me that they must have done so by breaking something in their minds, or perhaps eliding something in their thinking, the poor dears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But if reality is not dead billiard balls but mind-stuff, then the rationality\u2014the irrationality\u2014of the thing isn\u2019t what matters. The unbelievability of it doesn\u2019t matter, because it\u2019s not supposed to follow the same set of rules that govern the normal, everyday world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What matters is exactly what believers say matters. We have this book, the Bible. It is brimming with wisdom that we need to take very, very seriously. And in it, a man named Jesus says He is the son of God, and that we are to love Him and to follow His commandments, that we might gain eternal life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is \u201ceternal life\u201d? I have no idea. But again, for which team do I wish to play?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this book also tells us that in His name we should be ministering to others. We should be performing miracles. We should be healing, and casting out demons, and prophesying. And we should love the Lord more than we love anything else, including our own lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It says many other things as well. Those are only some of the things it says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its heart is a mystery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mystery is the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So maybe, strictly speaking, I was right. Maybe believers do need to break their brains a little bit before they can \u201cget there.\u201d But maybe it\u2019s because becoming a believer requires a shift from an \u201cold,\u201d rational reality into a different one, where God once walked the Earth as a man, where God initiated His disciples to teach the rest of us how to become a different kind of being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have a long way to go. I spent many years wandering my dead ends. I\u2019ve broken many things along the way and squandered more opportunities than I care to count (knowing full well that more than likely I will be brought to account for them); sadly, I\u2019ve sinned even more\u2014by a lot\u2014than I\u2019ve squandered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m patching things back together, a little at a time. I read and study Scripture every day, I am finding pastors online whose words are helping me. I\u2019m praying regularly again. I\u2019m fumbling for the right words to find my way to the Lord\u2019s forgiveness and to bring Him as close to me as He wishes to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I know I need to find a church but I haven\u2019t figured out how. I\u2019m pretty certain it will be non-denominational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m trying to figure out what work the Lord would like me to do with whatever time I have left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019ll finish the last novel of my Marion Flarey books. It\u2019s mostly written. I want to bring her story to its conclusion. But after that, I see my writing going in a different direction. Not sure what it will be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One last thing.<\/p>\n\n\n I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that for some reason I never kept the truly occult books in my possession for very long, and I suspected I knew why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s the rest of that story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having been raised in an household of observant Christians, and doted on as well by two sets of Christian grandparents, I know that I was prayed for on a daily basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s not a doubt in my mind that I am alive and in one piece, today, because of the protections placed over me by those prayers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So pray for the ones you love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pray for the young ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You won\u2019t be with them forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the words you whisper to the Lord today just might be\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An apology I\u2019ve had false starts on this piece several times over the past year or so, but it seems important, so here we go again. I was raised a Christian, and in a good, solid, Protestant tradition. My family\u2019s … Continue reading Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? (Isaiah 29:16)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What is crooked cannot be made straight… (Ecclesiastes 1:15)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
That man does not live by bread alone… (Deuteronomy 8:3)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
He who trusts in his own mind is a fool (Proverbs 28:26)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Have you seen the gates of deep darkness? (Job 38:17)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Behold, I am small account; what shall I answer thee? (Job 40:4)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
For God is with the generation of the righteous… (Psalms 14:5)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
For men will be lovers of self (2 Timothy 3:2)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>I believe; help my unbelief! (Mark 9:24)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. (Isaiah 8:12)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>