ImpromptuEnlightenment

I was thinking about this today, and I realized I know about a lot of weird stuff.

 

Not necessarily enough to teach a university course on all of it, but enough that I can sit here and start naming things: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, ancient Egypt, Norse mythology, Druid traditions, paganism, Indigenous spiritual traditions, astrology, astronomy, numerology, metaphysics, reincarnation, manifestation, Human Design, the laws of the universe, the Bible, the Torah, the Quran. Then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, the Book of Enoch, the Watchers, the Nephilim, Lucifer, the Templars, the Masons, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones. Past lives. Extraterrestrials. Galactic beings. Reptilians. The pyramids. Ancient civilizations. Secret societies. Mystery schools. Runes. Earth-centered spirituality. Mother Earth. Science. Quantum physics.

 

And apparently we’re moving into the Age of Aquarius.

 

It’s a lot.

 

The strange thing is that if you spend enough time poking around in any of it, eventually things begin to overlap. Stories that sound remarkably similar show up in different religions and spiritual traditions. Ancient cultures separated by enormous distances tell stories that seem strangely familiar. Floods. Giants. Beings coming from the heavens. Gods having children with humans. Death and resurrection. Underworlds and heavens. Sacred numbers. Stars that mean something. The sun and the moon. Solstices and equinoxes. The changing seasons. Sacred places. Fire. The earth itself. Humans trying to understand where we came from, what we’re doing here and what happens when we die.

 

Of course, similarity doesn’t automatically mean common origin. People traveled. Stories traveled. Cultures traded with one another. And people wrote from within their own frame of reference. We can only describe something with the language and understanding we have available to us at the time. Then someone else comes along and reads it from within their frame of reference, and someone else translates it from within theirs. As we discover more, we understand things differently, and sometimes we go back and interpret what was written before through what we know now. And sometimes human beings may simply have looked at the same sky, experienced the same storms, buried the people they loved, watched babies being born and asked the same questions. I don’t know.

 

That’s part of the problem.

 

I don’t know.

 

And neither, apparently, have human beings for thousands and thousands of years, because we have been writing explanations ever since we figured out how to write.

 

Even the things we think we know become complicated when you start pulling on them. Take the Bible. Which Bible? Which books? Which translation? Which manuscript? Which interpretation? Literal? Metaphorical? Historical? Spiritual? There are supposed to be layers of meaning within scripture, and people have been arguing over those layers for centuries. Then we find older manuscripts and libraries and texts that didn’t make it into the Bible, and now we have another pile of information to consider. Even as a historical text, the Bible is interesting because archaeology and other historical evidence have supported some of the people, places and events described within it, while other events remain disputed, unsupported or impossible to establish in the same way.

 

And language itself is slippery. I can read something written in English in the 1920s or 1940s and come across words, expressions and ways of speaking that people simply don’t use anymore. We don’t even use language the same way within a hundred years of our own time. So what happens when we’re reading something written thousands of years ago in a language nobody speaks anymore, translated through another language and another culture and another century before it finally lands in English on my kitchen table?

 

Then somebody tells me what it definitely means.

 

Definitely?

 

That’s where I start getting uncomfortable.

 

Because I can follow almost any rabbit hole far enough that eventually something doesn’t make sense. Then another rabbit hole seems to explain the part that didn’t make sense in the first one. Except now something in the second rabbit hole contradicts something that made perfect sense in the first one. So I go looking again.

 

Pretty soon I have reincarnation from over here, metaphysics from over there, a little Christianity, something from Buddhism, something somebody translated from ancient Egypt, something science has demonstrated, something science hasn’t demonstrated but is investigating, something I personally experienced and cannot explain, something somebody else personally experienced and swears is true, and something I heard on a podcast at two o’clock in the morning.

 

At what point does spirituality become fractured?

 

Not wrong. Not bad. Fractured.

 

Because if I build my understanding of existence by taking one piece from every system I encounter, am I actually discovering something, or am I building something that can never contradict me because every time it does, I can borrow another explanation from somewhere else?

 

I don’t know that either.

 

And maybe that’s the more interesting question.

 

I don’t think curiosity requires belief. I can be fascinated by the Book of Enoch without deciding the Watchers were extraterrestrials. I can wonder about reincarnation without knowing exactly what reincarnates or where it goes. I can find something meaningful in Buddhism without becoming Buddhist. I can look at astrology and astronomy and understand that they ask very different questions about the same sky.

 

Maybe the difficulty begins when we think everything we encounter requires a verdict.

 

True.

 

False.

 

Believe.

 

Don’t believe.

 

Choose a side.

 

Maybe some things can simply remain interesting.

 

Some things have evidence behind them. Some are historical records of what people believed. Some are interpretations of those records. Some are metaphors. Some are personal experiences. Some are possibilities. Some are stories humans have carried for thousands of years because something in the story continues to matter to us. And some may be complete malarkey.

 

The trouble is figuring out which is which.

 

I don’t think I want a spirituality built like a smorgasbord, where I wander around taking whatever appeals to me and leave behind whatever doesn’t. That seems too easy. But I also don’t think I want to choose one rabbit hole and decide everything outside of it must therefore be wrong.

 

Maybe there is another way of standing in all of this.

 

Not choosing what I like.

 

Not believing everything that fascinates me.

 

Not dismissing everything I can’t prove.

 

Just examining what I’ve encountered and being willing to leave some things unfinished.

 

I can say, this seems true to me.

 

I can say, there is evidence for this.

 

I can say, this happened to me and I don’t know what it was.

 

I can say, this is a beautiful explanation, but I don’t know whether it’s literally true.

 

I can say, people have believed this for thousands of years, which makes it interesting but doesn’t necessarily make it factual.

 

And I can say, I don’t know.

 

But even that gets blurry after a while. When I start peeling back all the layers of all the different things something could be, it kind of blows a fuse in my brain. How many explanations can I hold at the same time? How many layers can I peel back before I can’t remember which rabbit hole I started in?

 

So then what do I do? Do I just come back to myself? And what does that mean? Do I trust what I’ve experienced? What I’ve observed? What feels true to me? And if something feels true to me, does that make it true? People have been absolutely certain about things that turned out not to be true at all.

 

And suddenly there’s another rabbit hole.

 

Because perhaps human beings simply don’t have enough information to explain existence yet. We are attempting to understand consciousness, God, death, birth, time, the universe, whatever existed before the universe, whether anything exists beyond it, whether we’ve lived before, whether we’ll live again and whether there is anything else out there looking back at us.

 

That’s a hell of an assignment.

 

Maybe we’re not failing because we haven’t figured it out.

 

Maybe this is what being human looks like.

 

We look up.

 

We look back.

 

We dig things out of the ground.

 

We translate what somebody wrote three thousand years ago.

 

We build telescopes and microscopes and particle accelerators.

 

We pray.

 

We calculate.

 

We experiment.

 

We tell stories.

 

We have experiences we cannot explain.

 

We argue about what all of it means.

 

And then somebody discovers something new and we start all over again.

 

Maybe the question isn’t, “What am I supposed to believe?”

 

Maybe the question is, “How do I remain curious without needing everything I encounter to become something I believe?”

 

© Rev. Tina M. Adkins