A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to…7 March 2024

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

Richard Dawkins

It is not the Faith that is the disease but the way a person responds to it. In other words, the cause of the mental illness already lies within the person and not in the Faith, just as a gun does not kill someone until a person decides to pull the trigger.

I feel calm, except for an occasional agitation, and enjoy smiling my way through life, except for momentary moments of sorrow. Well, that is a statement that probably sits at odds with pretty much everything that is happening around us on our beautiful planet, Earth. I remember saying in 2016 (the year of our daughter’s death, Trump and Brexit—not all bad but all shocking events) that it feels like I have slipped into an alternative reality. Many times in the years since it does seem to have been made clearer to me, and now just feels true. Even the probable event of its happening seems obvious now. Watching live on our TV with our friend Graham and brother Greg I remember the existential shock I experienced as a plane fly into the World Trade Centre in 2001, and then the collapse of the buildings. The overwhelming message that came through to me was that ‘the world has changed forever’. Ironically my husband had been telling me for a decade at least that his instincts were telling him that 2001 was going to be a big year for us. His thinking was that this is when all that we worked for as a family was going to come to fruition. Since then we have come to view his ‘insight’ as having a different meaning all together. He has had a more recent obsession over the last 8 years and it is the figure of 27,000. Nothing so far is coming to mind around this one!

But how can a shift into an actual parallel reality happen? In recent years, that is to say, since 2019, I have come to understand how that may work, and it is based within both science and spirit. Everyone must be aware of the latest physics with its luminaries talking about the theory of a multiverse, while in the realm of spirit we have philosophy from the earliest times tell us that all is connected in the Consciousness of One, and as time goes on this seems more and more likely. How did they do that…I say of the early Greek philosophers. Even Einstein saw the woo hoo quality of quantum physics with special attention to quantum entanglement: “I cannot seriously believe [in quantum mechanics] because the theory is incompatible with the requirement that physics should represent reality in space and time without spooky action at a distance…”. Well, today we know that there is no more likely theory out there besides quantum physics.

Still in the vein of spirit, and on researching for this piece, I came upon this clip on YouTube of Richard Dawkins being interviewed by a rather intelligent journalist for a change. I can’t believe this is the revered (used ironically) top dog Atheist, looked up to by so many of our intelligentsia and the rest of their class, and how easy it was for someone like me to hear our personal and less rational were his reasons for believing that there probably was an ‘intelligent designer’ but there was no way that that might by God. His words, as he reads from his book, and so oft quoted, may sound impressively intelligent and accurate, but none fit with my understanding of The First Testament—too long to get into here! I was left wondering who hurt this man so deeply.

We all believe our common sense is working hard to tell us that the world works this way or that way, and some of us even claim to see a logic in what our common sense is telling us. And now a number of us are saying or thinking, “It feels like we are all living in a weird combination of different worlds, or at least in an alternative reality.”  Since 2020, the year of perfect vision, it has also become clear to me that in order to maintain family and old friendship bonds many of us have had to learn to leave out a number of talking points because to differ on them could be fatal to said bonds. And so it emerged that I/we could continue to reach through the ether from ‘different world views’ and continue to hold a space together. But so I am learning that I don’t need to reveal Truth because I cannot be sure either. I have finally learnt that Truth reveals itself. The other evening in a short clip I heard Adyashanti, a Zen Buddhist, trying to explain how one can live on a single planet but in seemingly different worlds or realities. He said that there is only one way to understand how this is so. That even though there is truly and simply one Reality, the way in which we are able to come together is by having our individual ‘unrealities ‘(Hindus call it the Illusionary Reality or Maya) that each chooses to live in and by.

I, like most people, believe there are Truths, and here I am not referring to scientific truths because they only exist until a new truth replaces a defunct truth, and nor do they inevitably improve our human story. As we discover Truths, as opposed to opinions, for ourselves there can be little doubt that they have the effect of improving our experience of life. This said, it seems clear to me these days that the only way to enhance life and allow it to thrive can be learnt from a vantage point of the front seat on The Cloud of Unknowing. And the only way to sit comfortably for any length of time is cloaked in humility. One soon gives up the idea that there are no mysteries and that magic is impossible, and acknowledges that Man most likely does not reign supreme. It is a hard path to stay on, our egos don’t like it much, and nor do we want to be found believing that the naked Emperor is wearing garments made of the finest materials when actually in reality he is naked.  I can’t help feeling that if we make the effort and trust our intuition more, in the words of Charles Eisenstein, we can ‘make the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’. My intuition tells me that nothing beautiful will emerge from our current dystopian and world wanting of kindness and integrity. We need to learn that hope of a rebirth will only emerge once we stop all stop the killing of our fellow Men in the name of war, righteous or not. That is on the collective level as the individual level is much more personal. The Law makes no distinction between whether our laws say when it is legal and when it is not. Love our neighbour as we love ourselves. And if there was ever an example of what this means, Jesus gave us many both in his actions and in his parables.