Start From Beginning
Energy
The smoke in the room is clearing as the ceiling fan gets to work, and Dre is trying her best to explain something to us. Something about how everything is energy. And how this energy determines our health and, on a larger scale, the health of our world. How circumstances that appear to us as life-and-death struggles are no more than the ebb and flow of negative and positive energies manifesting themselves as material outcomes.
I am having a hard time following exactly what she is saying. She seems to be shifting her usage of the word energy at will between literal and figurative meanings, sometimes using it to describe a metaphorical influence over events and actions (sort of "negative thoughts produce negative energy which cause negative consequences" kind of statements), and sometimes to describe what sounds like physical energy, like electricity or magnetism.
Among the stacks of books laying around are titles concerning shamanism and various treatments of mystical and esoteric traditions from around the world. These combined with the Buddhist and Hindu wall hangings and her daily yoga ritual are my first indications that she is a spiritual seeker. This conversation is the first time she has really tried to explain her views, and although I feel like I am catching the gist of what she is saying, the specifics largely elude me. It seems like she is saying we are cogs in a much larger machine than we imagine, but what the function or purpose of that machine might be remains unclear to me.
If you open yourself to the higher purpose, she says, it can make use of you for the betterment of the whole world.
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Later in the week she will reveal that she is studying Native traditions with the goal of one day becoming a shaman. And that she decided to take on guests in her home when she did at the urging of her psychic advisor. I try my best to respect her beliefs but I think I may have transgressed during a conversation where she was explaining that disease is caused by an unhealthy orientation to the world, or is sometimes the result of some greater lesson that our spirit needs to learn by being sick.
I balk at this a little, explaining that while I think mental attitude and physical health are closely related, I also believe that things like bacteria and cancer cells are real. If people get Alzheimer's because their mental attitudes are stunted, as she seems to be saying, I point out that it seems a pretty big coincidence that people who live near aluminum smelters are so much more likely to have stunted mental attitudes. Doesn't your view amount to blaming the victim, I ask?
Then she relates her views to her mother's death from cancer and I realize what extremely thin ice I am skating on, and I do my best to back-pedal out of the conversation. As always, it is much harder to extract one's foot from one's mouth after the fact than to simply not stick it in there in the first place. If there is a lesson that my spirit needs to learn in this incarnation, it is apparently this one, because I seem to need to discover it the hard way again and again.
Our situation sums up my relationship to mysticism pretty well; I tend to be highly skeptical about psychic advisors and anybody who claims to have supernatural insights, but the fact is that the three of us have Dre's psychic advisor to thank for our current living situation, which is about the best possible billeting scenario one could hope for. So there you have it. Maybe one doesn't have to believe in the mystic ways of of the great machine to have it work wonders on one's behalf. And maybe it's just my fate to not believe in destiny.
Still when it comes to matthers of faith, I can't help but remember this sage piece of advice, gleaned from the 1977 Ray Harryhausen spectacular Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger:
"Trust in Allah. But tie up your camel."
Which is probably where Ronald Reagan got his, "trust, but verify" sound bite vis-a-vis Soviet nuclear arms reductions.
Healthy skepticism seems to me to be a much more rational and realistic way to view the world. Sure, there are plenty of things we can't explain -- right now -- but that doesn't mean we'll never know the answers to certain questions.
On the other hand, some questions are so big (i.e. "Is there a God?"), that they are essentially unknowable. The rationalist admits that there is no way to answer such a question' but also understands that lack of evidence to prove in the affirmative tends to point toward an answer nevertheless.
Spiritual seekers, as you call them are looking for answers to BIG QUESTIONS, and that's fine, but I take issue with them when they ignore such obvious things like the fact that we KNOW what causes certain diseases, and it has nothing to do with "an unhealthy orientation toward the world", because, as you say it completely flies in the face of known evidence.
Posted by: KING COMTE I at August 8, 2004 06:03 PM