Skeptic Spirit

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Take care of yourself.

Not because nobody else will, but because nobody else can tell you exactly what you need. If you are going through rough times right now, you may get well meant advice saying: “You’ll get through this!” But this voice must come from you, deep inside. Hearing the words is not the same as feeling them, and you must feel them.

You have the strength to carry on, when you allow yourself to feel it.

Perhaps reality is the sum of our illusions?

For a long, long time I’ve been trying to focus on seeing things ‘as they are’, getting behind my own perception of things in order to get to some kind of ‘truth’. But right now I’m not so sure if I’m going about it the right way. Which, by the way, is a bit of a paradox, since this insecurity is leaving me to use the very same method I am questioning, in order to get an answer…

What I’m thinking is, perhaps there is no such thing as ‘reality’. Absolute truth is subjective, or at least, my perception of ‘absolute truth’ is that it is subjective, but I don’t really know, if it is out there. Something tells me, that if there weren’t some form of true reality, then there would be nothing at all. I’m not talking about the fact that the sun goes up every day (although it doesn’t, but that’s besides the point), but the fact that there is such a thing as communication and social constructions. We all conform to some kind of reality, that we are able to understand without having it explained. 

Sometimes someone comes up and changes the form of reality that we know. Someone alters the way we communicate, or the way we dress or the way by which we deal with authority. Someone sees an alternative to the reality that the rest know and changes things. Which means that there is a new reality, which means it was perhaps just a collective illusion after all. And so is the new reality.

I guess, reality is the sum of collective illusions. So, if this is ‘a truth’, then how do I go about seeing things as they are? Do I conform my own reality to fit it to other peoples? I would have to change religious view 30 times a day, which seems kind of absurd, really. But it might be the way to go in order to see things as they also are. How could I decide not to, why should I have patent on reality? By excluding religion from my path, I am doing so by the force of my own perception, which have faith in science. But it is still just a perception.

The other way to go about it is to mutually exclude anything that contradicts something else. Atheists and religious people would never agree on the god-issue, so I would need to exclude both in order to find something closer to reality. But how could they both be wrong? Well, they could, but then some other spiritual path would be ready to offer an answer, which I then would also have to exclude. Anyway I could possibly turn, I would have to exclude it, simply because I had found it. This is getting way too fluffy for me…

The third way is to question the need for seeing things ‘as they are’, to question my questioning of my perception. The answer to that is fairly simple (compared to the other choices I perceive myself to have). I don’t want to be fooled by my perception or my lack of self awareness. I don’t want to fool myself.

I don’t really care if the rest of society can trick me into conforming to some sets of rules, I have already made up my mind, that some rules are worth following, simply because I don’t want to choose the consequences of not following them. When I follow the rules and refrain from killing someone, it is not because I want to follow the rules. I don’t see social constructions as fixed, I see them as changeable guidelines, because I have seen them be changed by individuals.

I don’t want to fool myself, but I am doing so minute by minute. If I had the possibility for opening the door to my inner self, I would lock it and “forget” where I put the key. I don’t want my illusions to vaporize. Perhaps my spirit is nurtured by my own illusions? I think, the spirit, soul, sense of self, lives through the things we can imagine, the things we dream about, the things we want to feel. My illusions are my reality, and my spirit shines through it. Without some kind of illusion, I would not be… I would simply follow. So, fooling myself may be the fool that I am.

So perhaps my quest isn’t about seeing things as they are, but about creating the types of illusions, that I want my spirit to live out?

The things I tell myself about me are the things my spirit has to work with. If social constructions are changeable guidelines, then what I tell myself is what puts me where I am within the construction. The charming speaker and the shy chubby guy in the back of the room are telling themselves different things, which their spirits have to work with. If they switched inner voices, they might shift positions too.

Seeing things ‘as they are’ must be changed into: Seeing things as I want them to be.

A long time ago I wrote the post The Non-Empath Entrapment in which I claimed that thinking you can feel other peoples emotions will make you actually feel other peoples emotions. At the time it was based mostly on assumptions and observations, and the reason I bring it up again is that I have something to support and add to it.

Today I bought a book on self hypnosis, and today I finished it. I had completely forgotten how great it feels to read something in my own language for once. This post is not about hypnosis, but it is about the subconscious mind and how it works, and it strikes me as being quite relevant to anyone, empaths in particular.

In essence, the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious mind can be resembled to a Google search. Just as google, the subconscious mind contains all sorts of information, knowledge, skills, experiences, values and so on. There is a huge archive to tap into!

The conscious mind is the google search bar, and whatever we type in is whatever we focus on as we type. It will allow us to gain access to the archive. The first 10 pages are the most relevant, at least that is the perception, and in time we have learned that specific values added to the search will get us more specific results.

As example, if you where to remember your 10th birthday, you would have to dig into the archive of your childhood memories. Not only that, you would perhaps also need to dig into a specific period connected to the birthday in order to distinguish that particular one from the rest. There might even have to be specific feelings attached to that particular birthday which will help you recall the memory.

When I just now tried to recall my own 10th birthday – in the spirit of testing my own example, my first value to search for this memory was that I was particularly disappointed with that one, that was my strongest lead to go for. Because it was my first “round” birthday 10 years, wow, and my parents were going through a divorce at the time and had forgotten about it completely. The sense of disappointment lead me to the archive of “Malene disappointed. Movie clip of Malene receiving gift from dad as he enters door. Malene remembering dad’s expression of barely having made it to the store. New folder: Close-up image of gift not having been wrapped in.”

The point is, you type in something, and your subconscious mind offers you a number of hits for you to go through. The subconscious mind doesn’t distinguish right from wrong, it cannot think for itself. If you type in “Black Horse” in a google search, you will get a great variety of results, not just a bunch of articles on black horses or that specific restaurant you were looking for.

Why is this important?

It isn’t, I’m just showing off here. My point to all of this is the following. 

Your subconscious mind is no better than google, when it comes to figuring out what you really want to focus on. If you on google type in: “Don’t search for red balls!” Can you guess the results you will get? It will not not be red balls. If I tell you to NOT think of a red ball, you will not not think of a red ball. Because your subconsciousness will respond to the words “red ball”, it will not respond to the “not”. In relation to what we focus on, the subconsciousness is simply an archive of information that cannot think for itself.

So, what happens when you tell yourself: “I cannot control my empath ability!”

Your subconscious mind will do all it can to provide you with anything related to your conscious focus. You are focusing on your lack of control, and it will provide you with all your past memories and experiences where you were in lack of control. If it could, it would counter argue your statement and tell you: “Sure you can control it! Think about this time, and that experience where you have been in control of it, or of something else.”

Your subconsciousness doesn’t do that! It will give you exactly what you focus on, so you need to focus on what you want it to give you! In this case: “I have experience of having had control of my empath ability. I have memories of being at peace with myself and my surroundings”

Empath, non-empath, non-empath thinking he/she is an empath… We all need to be aware of what we type into the search bar of consciousness.

I am well aware that this is a provocative statement, and that I have some explaining to do before actually making my point. I hope we’ll reach the end of this post together. If I google spirituality it will give me various results, from christian churches to web shops, courses and books, articles about tarot cards, angels and astrology. So, spirituality has many forms, apparently.

When I talk about spirituality, I talk about the essence of being. The soul, the spirit, the energy I feel when there is nothing to hold it back. My spiritual life is the challenge of creating the best conditions for my spirit to shine through, and that is not easy because there are many things to hold it back, often stuff inside my mind or heart or body, which is inconsistent with what I most deeply desire.

An example of things that are holding me back is obviously my smoking addiction. Because both mentally, emotionally and physically I know it is not healthy for me, and yet I ignore this awareness in order to smoke. So, there’s an inconsistency going on there about 15 times a day, and that’s just when I react upon it.

Religion is an inconsistency too. But perhaps less obvious, as it is strongly connected to spirituality where ever you look. We are of course free to accept or reject any part of any religion. Even the most fundamentalistic christians choose not to believe in Moses’ law of death penalty even if they do accept the 10 commandments, although that too was written by Moses. So, as such this doesn’t limit the believer’s spirituality.

But when you look at the world through a certain coloured glass, you will see everything in a certain coloured light. When you interpret what you see, you will see that colour, which means you will not see something different. Your mind is slightly (or severely) limited from any other colour of light. When you look upon your self with a certain coloured glass, you won’t see the real you. The wise reader will then ask:

But we all look upon ourselves with a certain coloured glass! Why lash out on religions?

It is true. We all have assumptions and perceptions of ourselves which does not correspond with “the actual self” and they are equally limiting. There is just one difference. 

When you seek to live an independent spiritual life, you will seek to alter your perception of self, and you will try to follow up on the assumptions you have in order to get more self-aware. You will learn, change, learn, acknowledge, learn… The point is to continue digging into these false images and illusions in order to get to the real stuff, the center of you.

But when you look upon your world and yourself through religious eyes, you have obligated yourself to stick to that religion. A lesbian looking at her sexuality with religious glasses will not see the beauty of her being; she will see the sin. A lesbian looking at her sexuality with open eyes will see her own assumptions from a more clear perspective, and she will not let herself be guided in a particular direction from an outside source.

This is important. Because if being spiritual means to allow your spirit to shine through, to be honest about your self and your perception, you cannot allow this process to be controlled by a belief system telling you how to view yourself, your actions or your feelings. If you do so, you will ignore the inner voice. If this inner voice tells you the same as your belief system would, then you haven’t really lost anything in a religious context either. 

But then again… I’m heading for a cigarette the minute I’ve posted this. The spiritual living is not easy.

He walks around in a garden of rotten grass and black trees calling it life. Deep down his soul is craving for something to move him, but leaving this garden would be much too intimidating… Oh dear, what have they done to him!

He invites the woman to join him in the garden, and for some time it seems almost as if there is hope, that life itself is not dead in his world. Then she starts asking questions about the grass and the trees, the intoxicating, addictive air she must breathe. And he tells her, that everything is the way it should be. She accepts his reality for some time. She starts viewing his world as one above the laws of nature, one she must learn more about.

When she comes home from a day in his garden, her head is heavy and confused. She knows where she has been, but all the evidence she has are a pair of dusty shoes and a low from the high. She desperately wants him to feel joy. So the next time she meets him, she brings a flower and plants it in the ground, hoping it will be accepted. But nothing seems to grow in the land of rotten grass. It turns brown, then black, then forgotten.

There is one tree though. She knows not what kind of tree it is, and it is mostly black, but some few leafs have shown – something is growing. It keeps her sane it keeps her from truly accepting his world as held above nature. Because if this one tree can have green leafs, surely the rules of nature still apply on some level. It also keeps her sad. Sad that this world of his could be full of life but isn’t, sad that she cannot ignore it. 

The moment she realizes there is little life but her own in his world, that any seeds planted are planted in vein, she becomes as vital to him as the flower she planted. He thinks of her, if he accidentally trips over her weeping body, but his mind is set on new women to bring in new flowers. They, too, will wither, but for a moment there they will look good.

The woman is not the victim. None of the women he invites to his garden are victims. As soon as they remember the rules of nature and leave the garden for good, they will feel joy again, stronger than ever before. He won’t. 

When I left his world for the last time, I took with me a branch of the growing tree. I put it in a glass of water and now it has roots. I still don’t know what kind of tree it is, what it will become, but it has life. When the roots are strong enough I will plant it, nurture it, see it grow into something by the rules of nature and from the essence of life.

I will watch my tree grow, I will keep talking and give a smile to the girls with dusty shoes.

So, my 7-year-old daughter has decided she believes in God and Jesus. I am, obviously, an atheist and I firmly believe that faith is something that should not be exposed to children. Let them become adults, before they make decisions of the spiritually altering kind. But of course, christianity is a part of the danish culture, and so my children are naturally exposed to it and especially around christmas and other “significant” holidays.

Above all I believe in choice and enlightenment. And when my daughter comes to me and asks me about God and Jesus, I feel obligated to teach her, because my own personal (lack of) beliefs should be mine alone. So I talk to her about it from the honest perspective of a non-believer, which she knows. I present it as great stories, fairy tails, rather than facts, and I try to emphasize the moral by using everyday examples. My daughter asks interesting questions, and even if this ends up being more than just a child’s faith, I am not worried about her. She has a very logical take on life, and in many ways I can tell that she fits the stories into what she already knows, rather than trying to transform what she knows into following the story.

This, to me, is a precious way of thinking. She can believe in whatever she wants, as long as it doesn’t overrule what she knows to be true. And yes, that is indoctrination on my part, it really is. But as a mother, it is my responsibility to give my children the tools to survive physically as well as mentally and spiritually. It is not my job to teach them what to believe in, what to eat, what to wear, what to say… I decide a great deal of this for them right now, but ultimately this is all decisions for them to make on their own. What I can give them is the ability to make “informed” decisions. Decisions that are based on what they know to be true, rather than what they would wish could come true.

As example, the time will come when my daughter will want to wear promiscuous clothing, hopefully not in another 9 years or so, but the time will come! I cannot then decide for her, that she should wear this neat dress with flowers and ribbons, if she really just wants to wear that miniskirt and latex tank top that matches the piercing and the torn apart stockings. I can only hope, that she will be aware of the signals she sends by putting on that outfit, and that she herself perhaps will find a nice balance. Teaching her to pay attention to what she knows to be true rather than what she would want to be true could make the difference.

There is a spiritual lesson in letting go of something, anything really, but some things are easier to let go off than others. Like my addiction to nicotine, or rather, my thought that a cigarette is closely connected to a break, and since I can’t go through the day without breaks, I can’t go through the day without cigarettes. (and I especially can’t have a break if all I can think about is the cigarette that I can’t smoke)

I guess letting go is a choice. You can drop your favorite vase on the floor so many times you’ll eventually have to shape it with glue and dust, and it may all be accidents. But the choice of gluing it together means there is also a choice of not letting go, even if it would be the spiritually healthy thing to do.

I tell myself there’s a lot I can’t let go off, that there are some things too special, too precious, for me to throw out, even if they are beyond repair. It is not the object I hold dear. It is the thought that I can still hold the object, that it still belongs to me. It is also the fear, that I might change, if I let go. It’s like the object, whatever it is, takes up space inside, and the moment I let go, my whole body and spirit will collapse from the replaced nothingness.

Thoughts are much harder to let go of, because I am not accustomed with thinking about nothing. But that is exactly what meditation is all about, entering a nothingness. Welcoming it and embracing the clarity and sense of reality.

Nothing is something too!

And it leaves room for something else, something new, something whole. Something I did not think of looking for, because my broken vase was there, occupying me with ‘something’.

So, tonight I will pick up my old habit of meditating. I haven’t done it in a couple of years, because I was too busy with not letting go. And who knows, it might even replace the cigarettes eventually…

I just had an interesting light read a couple of minutes ago on the Deren Brown blog about how Copernicus has now been reburied as a hero, only 500 years after his death. Great, that the church no longer condemns the fact that earth travels around the sun and not the other way around – you’ve come a long way people!

But it is not a “church” problem, it’s a “human mind” problem. What the church did 500 years ago is no different from what we all do all of the time – even skeptics! We disregard what we know to be true, because we have the ability to believe in another ‘truth’. Or rather, we are incapable of check our brains before taking off on a magic-fantastic journey. It seems as if we only use our brains to seek validation of what we already have decided upon being correct – and mostly just so that we can convince others, that they too must see how correct we really are.

We, as humans, are a bit pathetic. Even I, who decide to read Deren Brown. I tell myself, that it is inspiring for me in my own strings of thought. But really I just want to read about someone else who has had success with the thoughts that I want to have success with. Where is the inspiration? Where are the perspectives, that I could not see? They are not there, because I prefer not to know about them.

I stumbled across another blog, written by a superior of a catholic monastery. I haven’t read much into it, but it is very well written and also very down to earth. See, THIS is what I should be challenging myself on! This is the type of inspiration I should seek, and I should take it with open eyes. I should dig into it and have a real taste of the opinions and reasons, rather than find supportive views of what I already thought I knew.

If my own ‘truths’ are worth anything, they will tolerate being put on a shelf for some time, while their counter arguments are being felt deeply. Just for the hell of it.

It feels almost surreal to address you dear readers directly, I feel a bit arrogant by doing so, not really knowing ‘why’ you follow my blog… But this is kind of important.

For a very, very long time I have wanted to write a book, that could connect as many of my blogged out interests and perspectives. Up until now I just couldn’t link things together the right way, as an overall thesis that is. But I believe I have found what I was looking for, and without revealing too much this thesis is the core reason as to why I can’t blog about it. Well… If the thesis is valid, of course. (I guess little of this makes sense…)

The issue right now is, that I won’t be blogging much in the future, because I am already involved in other projects as well as having a demanding study, being a single mother and bla bla bla. I don’t have time for everything.

That is not to say that the blog is dead! Only that those of you who check in regularly to see if something new has come up may do so in vane. So, in order not to disappoint you too often in the future, I recommend you signing up for the RSS feed instead.

I thank you all for great feedback and interest!!

It is my motivation for writing!

She noticed me, I noticed. That’s how it started. She laid out strings and started spinning, simple patterns made me curious, eager to find out what it could become. The more I looked, the more advanced she made it and soon I couldn’t take my eyes from it. It wasn’t pretty, but it was amazingly complex. And I felt flattered by the thought of her doing all this just because I was looking. I went home.

Early next day I returned to the web. Tiny drops of water had caught the morning sun, I was spell bound. Such beauty it contained all of a sudden. I kept looking until the water started evaporating and before the web again was naked. Then I went home.

For a long time I did so, only watched while it bore beauty. Eventually I forgot why I left so soon, I started seeing it as something I had to do. I started thinking, that if I didn’t have to go, I could enjoy this sight forever. I dreamt that I could touch the web and perhaps it would feel as enchanting as it looked.

One day she took my hand and guided me gently into the centre of her creation. Just like that. I knew I couldn’t stay, I reminded myself of this. I left every day as before, but I longed to stay just a bit longer.

The last morning the web was indescribably lovely. I crawled to the centre and took it all in. I stayed. I stayed till the sun had dried everything I loved away. I stayed and forced myself to see the web for what it really was.

Then I went home.