Spirituality And Reality

There are many people who think that people with spiritual attitudes are not living in reality. This is wrong – dead wrong. Reality is far more complex than these people consider it to be. There are many things that are real that they do not believe to be real.

If their definition of reality is what can be discerned through physical senses, that is putting the cart before the horse. Senses exist to discern reality and not the other way around. For that matter we do not see ultraviolet or infrared radiation. That does not mean that it is not real.

Many people of similar attitudes believe that the people advocating for telepathy and suchlike are practicing “pseudoscience.” They define it as making extraordinary claims in absense of evidence. What actually happened was that some in-good-faith scientists had spiritual experiences and wanted to prove them. The academia reacted with a gimmick: That an extraordinary claim requires an extraordinary level of proof. This lead them to throw away much valid research. So some of these people left the academia and continued their research elsewhere. And when they came up with their findings and communicated them to the public, the academia fought back, including by claiming their work to be pseudoscience.

Now I see nothing extraordinary at all about something that the majority of humanity believes in. A far more extraordinary – as well as far more arrogant – claim is that the majority of humanity are fools and lunatics, and that the only people who are not fools and lunatics are people who do not believe in such things. So the academia decided to take a dishonest path; the people who had had spiritual experiences then split off to do their research elsewhere; and when that research was communicated, the academia responded by calling it pseudoscience.

One argument that I encountered is that such things happen only to those who believe in them. This is putting the cart before the horse. Most people who believe in such things do so because they have had such experiences. They did not start out believing in them. I for one started out as an atheist. However I have had many experiences with less than a billionth chance of happening whose only possible explanations are spiritual, and I do not care for one moment if me saying this will get me labeled a lunatic. Mental illness is when something exists in your head and nowhere else. When it corresponds with events elsewhere, it is not mental illness. It is reality.

Now I wish I could say that I would like other people to have the kinds of experiences that I have had. However I do not. Many of my experiences are scary. I would not want others to experience some of what I have been experiencing. I would not want others to have some of the concerns that I have. Not all of what is out there is good; and, in my experience, what actually is good is also very demanding.

So people who believe things such as what I've stated above simply have an incomplete view of reality. There is far more to reality than what they believe. And it is of crucial importance for the well-being of the world that such things be noted, as without them people overlook essential information and make very bad mistakes.