 Can a logical person find a logical way
to be spiritual and believe in the possibility of a Higher Power? a way that it might all just possibly work Nobody I know "Knows" what's going on (at least, as far as I know - you know?). Lot's of people have told me that they "Know," but... I don't know. How can they know they "Know"? But I do know that there are some possible ways that it all might make sense -- you know? |
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a garble of logical sets of ideas & possible, plausible maybes (not gospel, not Truth, not prophetic) just mental health mind-games/perspectives (just plausible, possible, maybe-they're-trues) intended for those who would like to believe (who would like to grab on to some logic) that hardship and loss can be loving and kind (and that life might be full of great purpose) this article is NOT for anyone who is already comfortable with spiritual beliefs THIS IS ONLY FOR THOSE INDIVIDUALS WHO FIND SPIRITUALITY ILLOGICAL & DIFFICULT TO ACCEPT |
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| so what if there is a way that it all might just work? (is it worth it to know such a maybe?) |
Having a sense that there's a possible Purpose to life & possibly a Higher Power can fend off helplessness & hopelessness & soften great loss.
Having a sense that there's a Purpose to life and possibly a Higher Power watching over things can be very, very comforting during those frequently experienced times when it seems life is overwhelmingly more than you can hope to control -- at those times of helplessnes and out of control-ness.
Life is a lot of quite challenging stuff. There are all sorts of nightmares and stresses. It can feel very stressful to feel all alone and can feel even worse to feel there's a God that should have kept bad things from happening. But when spiritual beliefs don't promise freedom from hurt in this life, experiencing hurt doesn't demoralize as well as hurt. And deciding that hurt and struggle may bring wisdom and strength and may build a person through hardship can make hurting and struggle seem much less intense. A belief that the tough stuff has meaning makes struggle and pain much less hurtfull. When dealing with struggle or dealing with pain, a person need not feel he's been left all alone and he need not feel punished or fogotten. He can find sollace in the expression about pain bringing gain.
| why would it be so hard to conceive? (who then made God? how could it all be?) |
It is difficult, uncomfortable and sometimes impossible to conceptualize, see or be aware of something you've never experienced.
From birth on, the experiences of life are virtually entirely of things that have a beginning and an end and that seem to be consistently bound to one single dimension of experience. This makes it very difficult to conceptualize the possibility of something without a beginning or an end. This makes it difficult to conceptualize the possibility of alternative dimensions of existence.
Experiments in the latter part of the last century showed that animals raised for the first six weeks or so in environments where there was a complete absense of certain types of visual stimuli (diagnal lines or square angles for example) would not be able to see those stimuli (diagnal lines, square angles, etc.) later in their life. The type of visual stimuli would thereafter remain virtually invisible to the animals through the rest of their life.
This is why it may be difficult to accept some of the concepts involved in the idea of spirituality. The fact is, though, that we do have to accept some of these concepts when we think in terms of space and time. Space, for example, goes on forever without an end. If it went to an end, then something would have to be there on the other side. And that something would have to have an end somewhere. Or there is no end. Time offers the same conceptual dilema. What happened before time began? Or has it been going forever without a beginning and without a potential end?
Actually, current scientific thinking is that there was a beginning to time and that there may, in fact be an end. Quantum physics suggests that time may, in fact, be an artifact of our consciousnesses and not be real at all.
These are very difficult concepts to wrap one's mind around because they are not part of our experience as we develop and live our day to day lives. Our day to day experiences afford us a familiarity with certain concepts and concepts not part of the day to day experience are very difficult to conceive.
The difficulty we experience in trying to conceptualize certain things, though, does not mean they could not exist.
There is a difference between something being difficult to conceptualize and something being illogical. Just because it is difficult to conceptualize something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist or is impossible. It may just be difficult to imagine. People have said to me that it is difficult to imagine the possibility of being a mental entity or spirit and surviving past the death of the body. But everything -- the stars, the planets, life, consciousness, etc. -- just happening is also difficult to imagine.
There are many things that don't fit easily into the imagination. It is also difficult to imagine space going on forever -- and it is difficult to imagine how it could not. Difficulty in conceiving how space could either go on forever or how it could not, though, does not mean space does not exist. When you find out what atoms and molecules really are and what they are made of, it is difficult to understand why things don't just mesh together or fall through things. Nobody can actually clearly understand how atoms and molecules work to hold us on the planet but not inside the planet. But here we are on top, not deep inside.
Some things defy the imagination. Others defy logic. Believing in the possibility of the spiritual and the possibility of an afterlife does not necessarily require dumbing down. Though it does seem difficult to fit all the assertions about spirituality and God together with logic and science, it is possible to logically and scientifically connect at least the possibility of some of them.
| how can a person believe unseen stuff (why can't what I see be just enough?) |
It is not necessarily a conflict of reason to accept the possibility of spirituality. Nor does one have to accept less proof of spirituality than other things in life. However, it might take an acceptance of a hard, cold, seldom spoken of fact of life -- that seeing and touching is not, in fact, actual proof of anything but thought.
This can be a uncomfortable point of the logic to note in all this. But the fact is that saying that you prefer to have the same amount of proof of spirituality as you have that you have hands and arms does not, in fact, rule out spirituality. The actual fact is that if you are fairly certain you have hands and arms, this is actually only a firmly held belief. There is no way to actually prove that you do. You may perceive that you do. But you have no actual proof that your perceptions are true.
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Further -- and also disquieting to many -- is the fact that psychologically, when one has a firm belief, he or she will find that he or she experiences (perceives) all sorts of evidence confirming that belief. This can be seen as aside from the problem of proving "reality" or as an additional problem with proving reality -- or it can even be seen as possibly actually further supporting the possibility of it all being just a dream.
You see this happening again and again if you pay attention. If you have a belief, you see evidence. When your belief falters, you see evidence that the belief was not sound. If you decide you do believe, after all, you will see more evidence. That's how so many people can seem so sure of things that other people think are completely dumb -- when you believe something strongly, you are again and again confronted with evidence. If you believe something a little, you will find yourself noticing a little evidence.
Mostly we don't need to confront this too often. But the most basic piece of reality is that reality is largely, if not almost entirely, subjective -- based on what one believes. Reality is just not an objective "thing" -- even though many people choose to believe that it is and never waver in that belief.
Even if we take our bodies for granted, we are somewhere inside, relying on sensors that are interpreted by organizations of cells that do processing and that processed information is edited and enhanced, morphed and manipulated before we are ever "conscious" of it. The bare naked fact is that -- as DesCartes noted in the 1700's -- there is actually no way to verify that what is perceived by one individual is what is perceived by another. In fact, there is actually no way to verify that there actually is anyone else. People basically simply decide to accept what seems to be happening and when clashes occur they work them out and forget about it. (This all boiled down to DesCartes saying that since he could feel himself thinking, he could be certain he was not the figment of someone else's imagination but he could not tell if he had hands or arms or if everyone else was real or a figment of his imagination.)
I am not making this argument to frighten or weird out anyone. I am simply pointing out that, in spite of the fact that some things seem quite certain, nothing is certain except that fact that you exist.
This is quite nicely demonstrated in the movie, "The Matrix." As Neo is on the verge of being "unplugged" from a system that is feeding a constructed reality into his mind, Morpheus asks, "Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real... What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?"
It is not just an interesting philosophical thought that reality is subjective. This is hard science -- not just from psychology but from physics as well. Reality is unverifiable and is largely subjective at the very least. And much of the world is much weirder than we ever notice -- this includes light, time, space and what we generally think of as material and solid.
It was the late 1800's that Freud began astonishing the world with his case histories of people with altered realities. Just a few years later, in the early 1900's, Einstein came out with his observations and in the 1930's Heisenberg came out with his -- both saying that space and time are very, very different than every day experience seems to suggest. And since then in spite of the weirdness of both, they have been again and again proved and expanded.
Einstein's realizations about relativity and the subsequent science of quantum physics have shown that somehow a huge part of the reality of things has to do with the person that sees them and the perspective from which that person is seeing.
This is almost too weird to be able to find any quick way to describe, but there is powerful evidence in physics -- scientific evidence upon which cell phones, television, atomic bombs and computers are based on -- that though it seems there is an enormous world and a universe out there, reality is quite very weird. (If you have heard of the "Big Bang," for example, this is a very strongly supported scientific theory that most people hear about in school. What most people miss in hearing of this, though, is that the sum total of all the mass of all the planets, suns, stars, galaxies, universes, asteroids, space dust... everything everywhere -- could be crunched into a tiny nugget called a "singularity" that is tinier than an atom -- too small to see. That's all the real material mass in the whole, entire Everything.)
This isn't some silly science fiction or philosophical stuff. This is actual science. There is simply no way to verify how much of your experience is imagined and how much is based on actual things happening. And what seems verifiable is really based on some very weird, not usually experienced stuff.
What we actually know, then, scientifically, makes all sorts of things very, very possible (though unKnown) -- including the spiritual. And it makes beliefs about God exactly as provable as beliefs about having hands and arms.
And what may actually be suggested by the current state of modern science -- at least psychology and physics -- and the emphasis on consciousness as an element of reality -- is that if it is true that God created Man in His own image, that image may have been that of a Mind or a Consciousness, not necessarily a body.
| the idea that bad will only happen to the bad (this defies any logic and makes life much more sad) |
One of the most difficult ideas that people often seem to profess is that this life is intended to be nice, fun and easy and that bad things only happen when God wants to punish -- that unless God is mad, nothing goes bad.
Life is terribly stressful and often quite tough. These are especially troubling times where even the most affluent societies struggle with homelessness, poverty, job stress, financial stress, divorce, crime, loss and constant changes. Though, certainly, it is practical to cut out bad behaviors whether things go badly or not -- and though, certainly, bad behaviors do bring on negative consequences -- but often bad things happen when there is nothing bad that's been done. People slip and are forever after in wheelchairs, people are let go from jobs that they did properly because of cutbacks unrelated to their behaviors. Birth defects happen to children and in families that do everything right. hurricanes happen no matter what things are done.
It makes no sense that life is intended to be a whiz-bang -- you need only look around to see that adversity and challenge is spread across all types of lifestyles, behaviors and beliefs. Does it make any sense that God only wants happiness but then people seem to earn lots of wrath? (Little two year old children, for example, burned with boiling water by mom to teach them a lesson or torn from their mother and drowned in a flood -- they somehow earned this from God?)
The belief that good behavior earns safe passage from God -- no hurricanes, no accidents, no asteroids, no economic down turns -- can seem soothing as long as nothing bad happens. But when crap hits the fan, this belief causes terrible demoralization and anger at the unfairness of God or at one's self.
| could the crap & distress have some possible Purpose? (might it actually, possibly have any meaning?) |
It is interesting to note that adversity and distress are actually essential for fun and good times just like up has no meaning without down.
Some of the most emotionally and psychologically damaged people I see as a psychologist are those who have been sheltered from hurt and from want. Though certainly there are many forms of organic brain damage and dysfunction that can cause all manner of struggle and hurt, and though there are many ways that children can be hobbled and disabled emotionally and personality-wise by hostile, uncaring parents and others, it is striking how damaging it is for children to be raised in environments where the caretakers make every effort to assure that no hurt or want is experienced. Kids raised in this way are angry and depressed, unable to appreciate anything because nothing ever seems of value and are fundamentally certain that they cannot handle life themselves and that someone -- anyone -- is responsible to provide for them instantly whatever they may want. They feel entitled to anything and everything and appreciate nothing.
Ask yourself, the next time you have a really, really good day, if it is not the recollection of really bad days that is an integral part of the goodness of the good day. Ask yourself if you believe it is possible to have a good time if you have never experience a bad one? Could anyone appreciate having a home more than someone who had been homeless for years? Could anyone appreciate a job that hadn't been jobless for years? Who would appreciate his a new car more, a young man who has struggled for years to buy a new $16,000 car or a young man who is given his fourth $100,000 car?
The German philosopher, Nietzsche, said that the things that don't kill us make us strong. Though it might better be said that they make us either stronger or weaker, it is a fact of life that adversity -- pain, struggle, suffering and challenge -- can make a person more resilient, compassionate, smarter, tougher, cooler and way more interesting as a friend, a companion or a self.
Though there is often a part of our brain that becomes quite anxious and sensitive to certain situations after pain and trouble, these are the things that make us who we are and that promote toughness, strength, ability, compassion and all the other positive attributes that we value. No pain, no gain.
So might that be what life is about in the larger sense, too? Might it be a favor to experience hurt and loss and intense distress? (Now, please note I am not intending to make light of anyone's loss or hurt here, but to suggest the possible meaning and benefit of such things in this frequently horror-filled life.)
If there is an afterlife after life -- and if the afterlife is free from bad times and distress -- it would be quite logical for this life to be very, very distressful. Pain, distress, starvation and loss for a mere few score years in this life would make it possible to experience incredible relief, exquisite appreciation and boundless joy through eternity.
If there is an afterlife and if it is the case that it is all fun and happiness and whatever you want when you want it -- as some, including the New Age channeling "beings" have suggested -- might it be possible that this life is intended for hard times, wanting, loss and distress?
Logically, just as being granted every wish and whim during childhood could make a person angry, anxious and depressed as an adult, it might actually be quite cruel to be given a passage through this life that was easy, stressfree and characterized by abundance.
For example, if there is a loving God, would He/She/It want to spoil people or enhance their lives? If, for example, a person can have all the pizza he or she wants in the afterlife and God wanted to assure that he or she could enjoy pizza to the max throughout eternity. Would the optimal experience in this life, then, be to have plenty to eat? Or might it be more optimal to spend seventy or eighty years on the verge of starvation and then finally die of starvation?
And what if God were to want to be loving and kind to two people in love or a mother and child? Would it be an ugliness to have one lose the other to death and then feel that loss very acutely for years thereafter -- wishing and wishing that things could be changed -- so when the survivor then died he or she could be greeted by the lost loved one? Would that not be a more delicious experience of connection -- a warmness and depth of connection that could be felt for eternity?
In the context of eternity, having an 87 year long life of torture, starvation, loneliness and trauma would be less actual time invested in pain relative to eternity than we spend in this lifetime getting one flu shot.
And after a lifetime of torture, starvation, loneliness and trauma one could for the rest of eternity appreciate everything more than anyone who in this lifetime had a good time.
| the practical value of thoughts such as these (the practical application of logic and such) |
Assuming there may be a purpose to life and a purpose to all its distress can give comfort in times when there is no other hope and there is precisely as much evidence to support this as not.
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Doing all that you can do to effect and control your life and experience and then assuming that all the rest is up to whatever higher powers there are can make life seem much more manageable and far less hopeless and helpless.
Assuming there is a spiritual side to life and a purpose for all the things we go through does not mean that one should stand outside in a hurricane and expect God to protect. It makes more sense to assume that if there is a Purpose and a Higher Power, that you are expected to use the tools you are given the best you can -- and that you are given all the tools and power you need to achieve as much control over your life as you are intended to have.
Assuming that there is value to adversity does not mean that you should open yourself up to any more adversity than you have to. It makes better sense to try to avoid adversity to the extent that you are given the inclination and ability to do so.
If you assume that there is an afterlife and a Purpose to life and it turns out there is none, it is not likely that you will ever notice that you were wrong. Upon death you will either find out you were right or you will not be finding out anything ever again.