Skeptic Spirit

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.

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.

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.

I will now admit to something that I have previously been too embarrassed to write about…

I keep a Magick Journal. There are two reasons as to why I have kept this to myself, mainly that from a skeptical point of view it is extremely fluffy, but also because even though I have it, and have an intention of putting stuff into it, I’ve never actually used it properly. So, basically I was ashamed both of my intentions and of not acting upon them. 

There is an aspect of contradiction in this, and so I decided to go in depth with that, and EUREKA! I found out why!

Magick is the unknown link between the action and its result. It must be so, because if there was a kind of science between me doing my ritual and the result I supposedly get out of it, it could not be classified as magick. And indeed, great many of my magical approaches have later been debunked as not magick, because I found an explanation to the phenomenon. 

As a skeptic, I am bound to search for rational explanations, and so every time I find it, I must redefine what I assumed to be magick. This means, that very, very few of my attempts of doing magick actually reach my ‘magick journal’, and I used to see this as something of a failure on my part. 

But fact is, that every time I have attempted to do magick, I’ve become just a bit wiser. I have learned something either about the approach, the consequences, my own perception, human nature and what have you not… And I use this knowledge to build upon, initiating another iteration of a magick approach, which too may result in wisdom rather than filling a page in a journal.

I need my blissfully ignorant attempts of doing magick. I need them, because they make me reach out for something specifically unreachable, and they give me something to evaluate. Rather than dismissively saying: “This would not be possible”, I can make an attempt, see what comes out of it and evaluate why it became possible or why it failed.  After all, saying: “This would not be possible” is not a skeptical approach. It involves just as much ignorance as my attempts of doing magick!

But at the end it would leave me with nothing to evaluate and nothing to make me wiser.

I have written about my view upon manipulation before in which I express that it is an innate part of our language and communication. Like my son the other day, who was angry at my daughter and so while yelling at her called her “JESS!!”, where as 10 minutes later he wanted to persuade her into playing G.I. Joe with him; “Jeeeeesieeee?” 

Some people also use it consciously, and some people try to do it on both levels but fail, and therefore they are not considered manipulative. An example of that would be a colleague making up an excuse for not having done his job for that day. Everybody know it is an excuse, but the real mechanism behind is in fact an attempt of manipulation, just badly executed.

The intention was:

“I want you to perceive me as someone who is not lazy/stupid/indifferent, so I will try to make you believe that I did care about the job, but I was unfortunately prevented from doing it or bringing it to work” 

The reason it failed was because he wasn’t skilled enough to serve that message the right way. The excuse was poorly served, it didn’t push the right buttons on the perception of others, so it did not actually manipulate them. But it was an act of manipulation nevertheless. I have come to realize, that only the average manipulators become judged as manipulative. The bad ones will not be taken seriously, and the good ones have learned how to transform their self image to the point where they become the manipulation they convey. 

The very best will make a point of acting as if they have become manipulated themselves.

I do not see manipulation as any more of a bad thing than talking is. In fact I believe it is a necessary skill to have in a modern society, where communication is a vital element of the social survival. I know the opinions are high and strong felt about this subject, but I have a feeling that people confuse matters.

I guess we have all encountered the unpleasant feeling of having been persuaded into doing something which we later found out wasn’t ‘right’. But was the persuasion an act of manipulation? The answer should be obvious, but as you may guess, I am about to say: “No, it wasn’t!”

It was not manipulation, it was calculation! 

Before christmas I was out looking for a new phone. I had decided upon buying one without a subscription. I went into a teleshop, where I was met by a salesperson, who was very unpleasant to talk to (or rather be talked to). Even before I went in I knew that there would be attempts of persuading me into buying a phone with subscription, so I was prepared. But still, the encounter with this guy was highly unpleasant, not because he was trying to manipulate me, but because the amount of information he gave was calculated in a way, that had I listened to him, I would have bought into it.

He was both manipulative and calculative. The manipulation had to do with his way of conveying the message. The ‘sales speech’ flowing out of his mouth, the emphasis on certain words, the body language, the eye contact… Even the uniform he was wearing. It is an attempt of manipulation, but it is still transparent. I can decide, if I want to be manipulated. I always have that option.

The problem was, that he was calculating with the information he wanted to give me. In this case it was the advantage and the disadvantage of buying a phone without subscription. He did not attempt to inform me properly, instead he conveyed the amount of information he had, as if it was the complete amount of information available. He was calculating on the fact that had he told me the full amount of information, it would lead me to choose differently from what he would want me to choose. 

In this case I had my own very good (perhaps not obvious) reasons to choose a non-subscription phone. So I was able to walk away from there without paying for something I wasn’t looking for. So, no harm was done. 

Manipulation takes a sender and a willing receiver. A politician, who I am not a fan of, can manipulate great many people, but not me. I cannot be manipulated, unless I (subconsciously) decide to do so. 

Calculation takes a sender and an unknowing receiver. There is a great amount of concealed information, and although I always have the liberty of thinking: “There might be more to this story than what I hear…”, the exact information withhold from me prevents me from choosing according to my own interest. Instead I will be given the information sufficient enough for me to choose what the calculator wishes for me to choose. In the above example, by not telling me about the disadvantage of a subscription phone in terms of a high price on e.g. conversations, he could steer my choice in his direction.

Calculation is dangerous, especially when it is emerged with decent manipulation. The calculation is the big sinner, the one that takes control over other peoples mind and spirit. It takes little skills! Unlike manipulation you don’t need to possess any particular psychological insight to calculate what information you want to give another person to make them choose as you please.

There is a good thing about this though. We all manipulate all of the time, both consciously and subconsciously. Even if you oppose to the thought, you cannot choose not to manipulate – it is simply not possible. But you can choose not to calculate. You can choose to give people all the information they need in order to make the right choices, hence giving them the freedom of spirit.

In fact, withholding information is something which takes a conscious effort, and you may end up making life more complicated for yourself. It all comes down to Return of Investment. Being relatively honest and fair makes life rather easy.

The moon has a peculiar effect on me. There are moments when I wonder if I am about to loose my mind, and there are moments of clarity. I don’t know which one of those moments this is. Rationally, the full moon probably shouldn’t have any effect on my state of mind, but I can live with admitting to a placebo effect, for what it’s worth. 

I have lived with these shifts of doubt and certainty for quite some time now, and they still remain a puzzle to me. I am sure, they bare much similarity to any form of religion, in which the believer holds on to a sense of comfort, even though science has taken its justification away long ago. 

Truth is, I am only puzzled, when I look at one moment through the mindset of  the other. I am only puzzled, when I am certain. I only ask myself the difficult questions, when I am prepared to answer them.

The problem is, that I can answer the question tonight. And tomorrow I will choose not to believe in it, because I need to believe in something less painful.

I’d wish I could have my full moon dilemmas all of the time.

I hate to realize how much I am fooling myself.

I believe, I have a spirit. Not sure if it is simply a matter of hormones or some psychological factors, but whatever I might formally call it, I believe it to be there. Tonight, I would like to touch the area of “things I do, while thinking about how much I want to not do them”. It is not limited to bad habits, it could just as easily be about saying the wrong thing or not doing what I really felt like doing at that moment. Allowing specific people to cross the line or withdrawing too much in relation to others.

What I do and what the deeper spirit of me wants me to do are two different things. One clear example of this is my nasty habit of smoking. The spirit of me doesn’t want to be addicted to a deadly habit, and thrives much better during the times when I am off the cigarettes.

So, somehow I am able to not let myself act upon the wishes of my inner spirit. I hear the words, but I don’t listen. This means, the spirit of me has absolutely no authority in my life. It is more like a guide speaking in the back: “If you please look to your right, you will see the ‘you’ you could be, if you wanted to make a spiritual choice! You would make me feel much better!” 

But then who/what is in control of my actions if not my spirit?

Thoughts, feelings, learned behavior and scattered perceptions can path the way to a very unspiritual life. Still fighting this. Somehow these mechanisms become the force of the habit, the “Why bother?!” statements, that I never really consciously think about. I still react to them emotionally, but my feelings aren’t my spirit. On the other hand, if my thoughts and feelings do not correspond with the needs of my spirit, I just won’t feel it. 

It is as if my spirit is a ball at the center of a maze. And only by aligning my thoughts and feelings from the center to the outer line, I will be able to lead my spirit all the way through. If my thoughts don’t match my feelings, or my feelings or actions do not correspond with my spirit, the maze will turn itself, and the spirit will be captured at the center, unable to find its way out.

My spirit has a lot more influence on my actions than I want to believe though. It is the essence of me, and when it comes through I feel the essence of life. I can keep it locked down for some time, but the minute I give it some power, it wants to take over and tell me about all the other things I need to change in my life.

When I smoke, my spirit doesn’t come through, that’s for sure. And in many other cases where I withdraw and lock my spirit down in the center, I loose the essence of life, basically. I withdraw on the inside, because what I am experiencing is something my spirit doesn’t want to accept. My spirit denies me.

When I don’t smoke, I get overwhelmed. I see things much clearer and often too clearly. Other things my spirit wont accept. It becomes overwhelming, because not only do I need to continue not smoking, I also need to remember to eat (I eat heathy, when I do eat!), and then there is all the clutter in boxes and drawers. There are projects to finish, decisions to make… Tuff stuff that I need to deal with. All this becomes clear, because I am listening to the spirit inside. And once it gets in charge of things, it is SO critical! 

So, I get to the point very quickly, where I close my eyes to the sun. It is too much! 

And yet I am sitting here thinking, I really should listen to my spirit. I really should! Because even though it is demanding, it is simply because I don’t live the way I really want to live. I am close, though. Far closer than I’ve ever been before. So the essence of me isn’t out to criticize me – it is merely trying to tell me that which would make me the most satisfied with living. 

So, it all comes down to that perception. I’ve felt it to be a judgmental perfectionist spirit, but in reality, it is my perception that has been screwed up. My thoughts, feelings, learned behavior and habit of thinking leads me to perceive the advice from my spirit the wrong way. 

Tonight is the night of listening, but maybe I should listen tomorrow as well?

There seem to be a thick line drawn between spirituality and skepticism, as if the two perspectives just can’t be connected into one way of living. I fear, I might be categorized as either “not truly spiritual” or “not a serious skeptic”. Not that I usually care about how people want to label me, but in relation to my blog, I actually want to be taken just a bit seriously… Most of the time.

So, how can the skeptical mentality work together with the spiritual view of life without compromising either of them? 

It all comes down to essence. Actually, the only reason it may seem complicated is because the essence got overlooked in the urge for spiritual experiences and handheld proofs. Because, what is the essence of spirituality? 

The way I see it (and you may assume that anything written here is the way I see it), spirituality is as simple as finding and expanding your spirit. It really has nothing to do with aura readings, chakras, crystals, tarot cards or anything else you can buy. These are all substitutes designed to fill out the gap between your personality and your spirit. 

I have been through all of them, though. Even the pendants and the ‘Celtic Book of the Dead’, which I still find enlightening although I do not give it divine credit. The problem isn’t that these things exists, but that believers stop searching, when the substitute is adequately fulfilling on an emotional state.

The spirit is located somewhere beneath the thoughts and feelings. I usually use the term feeling of self rather than spirit, but I am convinced that it is the same thing. It is a state of mind, where the essence of ‘you’ shines through all of your emotions and thoughts, it is the essence of being.

To me, being spiritual is about finding this essence and letting it shine through as much as possible. If I should set a goal for this, it would be to live through this essence every moment of every hour every day. So I have a long way to go, and yet I am enjoying every step I take.

There is an equally deluded perception about skepticism. People thing it is about what can or cannot be proven, to the point where they’ve stopped asking the right questions. They are trying to solve emotional puzzles with math, so to speak, completely ignoring the fact that we are humans, not human mechanisms. 

Being a skeptic is about asking myself the right, difficult questions. In a year, I may have proven myself wrong on everything I’ve written this far. Not because I was dumb to begin with, but because I asked myself questions I had to answer. I have a passion for knowledge about me. 

I have a passion for self awareness. And what better way of living is there for me, than to be a spiritual skeptic?

What is ‘truth’ really? What is the essence of ‘truth’?

The question has been haunting my mind since yesterday, when I read this excellent blog post, and I am sure it will continue to do so for the rest of my life. Kind of annoying to think about, when you think about it…

I was walking down the busy streets of Copenhagen with my kids today, when we came across a girl blowing soap bubbles. I love soap bubbles, and so does my kids, only we have very contradicting ways of appreciating them. I admire the perfect beauty of it. I love the way it moves, I love the shape, I love the splitting of light it reveals as the sun hits its surface. I’d wish I could grasp them and take them home with me, but part of the beauty is the fact that I can’t.

My kids love to smash them!

In my mind, still tied up in the truth question, these soap bubbles became small perfect entities of truth, and the concept of ‘truth’ became a bubble. A bubble contains a lot of truths, some obvious, some hidden, most are shared with the next 50 bubbles made from the same soap water. And yet there is something unique about this one truth, this one bubble. I know, that it is unique, but I cannot tell the exact truth of it. I can choose which truth I want the most to know. If I want to know the weight of it, I have to capture it in a specific way. If I want to know what kind of air there is in it, I need to choose a different approach. Either way, if I want to understand a part of the truth about the bubble, I will have to destroy the essence of the truth.

Whenever a truth is expressed or shared, it changes reality. That is the deal with truths. When my kids smashed those 50 bubbles, they gained knowledge, and the air was filled with particles of soap water. When people become consciously aware of something truthful, it changes the reality. It doesn’t matter how much or little, the knowledge shared alters something somewhere.

There was a time, when the knowledge of fire was considered occult, a hidden or secret truth. When the truth was expressed, shared, grasped, it changed reality. But it also changed the truth. What was the essence of the truth in creating fire? We will never know, because the truth was shared, so the essence got lost in the process.

The world today functions in such a way, that we want a lot of truths. We want to desecrate plants, animals, dead bodies, because we gain knowledge about other plants in that family, other animals, other species, humans in general, we get smarter, we change reality. But even though the desecrated plant provides us with one kind of truth, it will not reveal everything. We cannot know the whole truth about the plant, no matter how much we choose to split it up. We cannot know the essence.

Sometimes we need to just lay down the knife. Sometimes we need to stop analyzing and sometimes we need to shut up. A truth expressed looses its essence, and sometimes the essence is all the truth that matters.