Confessions of a “Seeker”

I realize that writing about “spirituality” is not the best thing to do if you want to be taken seriously. People suspect you of being a little soft in the head, the kind of person that spends too much time at New Age Expos talking about crystals, auras and the power of intention.

However, as I enter mid-life, I no longer care. It is now or never to come to grips with who I am. I can no longer hide in the closet nursing my shameful passion for all things “woo woo”. Its time for me to take seriously what I love best.

So voila, I am officially coming out as a “seeker”. What I am seeking, I’m not exactly sure, but that is the point. I seek that greater mystery, which unspoken, unseen, and unknown, I have always sensed.

I have spent years, I admit, in fruitless pursuit of smoking gun evidence of the divine. Steeped in the scientific materialist paradigm since grade school, I wanted to make a leap of faith, not in a religion or any particular doctrine, but simply in a higher transcendent reality beyond our three-dimensional experience.

Looking for proof, I devoured all the books on religious history, new age physics, neuro-theology, parapsychology, Jungian psychology, esoteric alchemy, alternative history, entheonology, geomancy, conspiracy theories, and the ancient traditions of enlightenment, I could get my hands on.

I spent hours listening to the kind of talk radio that debates whether 2012 will be the apocalypse or hearken the next evolution of man. I studied chakra yoga, transcendental meditation, energy healing, attended spiritualist congregations and sweat lodges – even met my totem animals and spirit guides.

None of it brought me any closer to the light.

The trouble wasn’t a lack of paradigm shattering evidence for a greater transcendent reality. It was me. I just couldn’t make the conversion to full time believer – in any of it. Skepticism was like a reflex, a conditioned mode of seeing I couldn’t fully dispel. I hung back like a doubting Thomas, waiting for God knows what to prove there really was a Santa Claus.

If I couldn’t make that total leap of faith – in something else out there – I fell back to believing in the world of sticks, stones, the cold, hard facts of mechanistic existence. You are born, you die, there is nothing else out there. The real question I struggled to resolve was this – how much evidence is necessary – exactly – to believe? And what piece of evidence could I possibly discover or fail to discover, that would support or contradict, any of it?

This is the paradox. Because it all comes down to the proverbial glass doesn’t it. Is it half empty or half full? Evidence exists for both sides.

On the one side is a Newtonian universe of solid matter and predictable laws and on the other is a quantum realm in which matter dissolves, time and space can bend, where ‘b’ doesn’t always follow ‘a’, and the miraculous is a possibility that can happen at any time.

My need to believe in one or the other did not change the facts. Both are necessary for a true description of reality. Yet I wanted to believe in one or the other, I couldn’t conceive otherwise. Limited possibilities or unlimited possibility? True reality couldn’t be both.

Could it?

Apparently quantum computers operate precisely on this principle. Since electrons can be in multiple places at the same time, quantum computers operate beyond the binary capabilities of ordinary computers. According to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics an electron can spin up or down in the definite states of 0 or 1 – but it can also exist in “quantum combinations” of the states 0 and 1, referred to as superposition states, whereby the electron is in two states at once. In this third state,  the electron is spinning up and down – simultaneously. 

Physicists have also created superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs. In this gizmo, an electrical current travels both clockwise and anticlockwise around a superconducting circuit at the same time.

In other words, the glass is not either/or, it is indeed, both half empty and half full.

In fact, ever since we postulated that Erwin Schrödinger’s Cat, was both alive and dead – we’ve suspected that true reality is defined by a greater, holistic third state,  limited by neither possibility or impossibility, by here or there, by past or present or matter or spirit.

Like a flatlander confronting the impossible possibility of vertical dimensions – I realized it was time for me to look up, waaay up.

While my mind continually seeks to sort perceptions into dualities, I understand they are not the whole truth. In short, I no longer seek transcendence (evidence of a higher reality “out there” ) but to understand immanence (the divine in the material) – right here and right now.