Introduction
When I was 15, I came across Paul Brunton’s Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga. That book made a mess of my head and nipped what many thought was a promising career as a geologist in the tender bud. The book was my introduction to a wholly different way of understanding what it was to be human. It took me 18 months to read because I repeatedly and compulsively fell asleep after reading a paragraph.
This book mattered to me because I had been plagued ‘strange’ experiences since I was a child.
Normally I don’t talk spirituality with friends or family. It’s so often a fraught thing that can trigger strong emotions. I am personally cool with people believing what makes them feel good.
But recently, over a coffee, a friend, talking about his recent health scare, confessed he had been contemplating the end of his physical life. So, we chatted. I am firmly of the view that reincarnation is the norm. He did too. He had spent a few years in Nepal in his restless youth and was introduced to Buddhism. I had known him 15 years and this hadn’t come up. But he said, “it’s not about beliefs. It’s about attitude.”
That’s so true in so many ways. But what we believe can shape our attitudes. I have just finished John Fugelsang’s Separation of Church and Hate in which he makes a point that Christians who think themselves ‘saved’ by their belief can behave in ways utterly contrary to Christ’s teachings – and can do so in ways that are cruel and harmful.
Buddhism is around 2,500 years old. Christianity’s foundational Jewish texts go back at least as long. These days we are awash with research into human behaviour – or at least we would be if we engaged with it. To be fair there is so much it can be overwhelming. In addition, there’s also an abundance of very competent research into such as OOBEs, NDEs and reincarnation.
So, it is a great time to revisit the idea of being human. Can we blend old and new ideas in a productive way?
How can we know?
We each bring our own experiences and reasons to any question. I can speak only to my own. So, what I assert below is said confidently not because I think I am right in any objective sense but because I satisfy my own needs. Hence, I tell my background story not to convince the reader but to enable some appreciation of my reasoning.
I accept reincarnation not because I have direct conscious knowledge of it but because it is embedded as a truth in multiple sources of thought that I am familiar with and deeply respect. It is supported by credible contemporary scholarship.
One thing that allows me to accept reincarnation is my direct experience of an OOBE. It has happened only once. I had woken up an intense thirst and headed off to the kitchen for some water. On the way I paused by a window that was well out of sight of my bed. I saw the moon shining through the mulberry tree right outside my flat and wished I had a better camera than my basic instamatic so I could capture the scene. Then I headed off to the kitchen where I tried to get some water. But my hand went through the glass. I decided I was just so half asleep I wasn’t coordinated, so I decided to drink from the tap. But my hand went through the tap as well. Then suddenly I thought, “I must be out of my body.” The instant I had that thought I was back in my bed and very wide awake. I got out of bed and rushed to the window. The scene was exactly as I had seen a minute before. I went to the kitchen. The glass was where I recalled it. I got my drink of water this time.
I also had an indirect experience as well. I was at my girlfriend’s place. We were sleeping when she shook me awake in an agitated state. She told me that she had again gotten out of her body and was floating up near the ceiling and freaking out. She said I had been talking to her calmly, telling her to chill and slowly come back to her body, which she did. Then I told her that she had woken me from a dream in which I was standing in a desolate landscape. Before me was a multistory structure made entirely from scaffolding. On the top was a crane which was lowering body in a very fragile state and on a stretcher. The target was 2 semi-trailer trucks parked very closely side by side. Even in the dream I had remarked to myself about how ridiculously soft the trucks’ suspension was.
Suddenly the scene shifted and my girlfriend was lying on the ground. Her daughter was nearby, as was a very much older man I had never seen before. He told me to go away at the instant I was woken.
This experience was evidentiary for important reasons. There was a precise relationship between my girlfriend’s OOBE and my dream. And we were sleeping on 2 single Dunlopillo beds pushed together – matching the trucks in my dream right down to the very soft suspension.
My girlfriend had had several involuntary OOBEs before I met her and she had been deeply worried about her health. She had visited several specialists with no indication of any health issue. Then she read Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body. This is a seminal book on OOBEs. I read it before my OOBE experience.
I have read all of Monroe’s books as well as other authors associated with the Monroe Institute – which has been around since 1971. To my mind OOBEs are not controversial to people who have inquired into the theme.
Non-physical intelligences
My experiences of forms of what some might call ‘para-normal’ phenomena have endured since early childhood. I recently finished fiddling with a 32-page account of them. I began writing it in 2011 and struggled to compile it. I rewrote it in 2023 and then abandoned it.
A constant theme in my account is my experience of a compelling intentionality and intelligence directly impinging upon my life. This has been a confronting, challenging and disturbing thing for me. I could make no sense of it at all until 2002 when I finally, mercifully, came across the idea of animism in a kind of dictionary of mythology and the like. As I read the entry on animism things started to make sense to me. There was a non-material kind of ecosystem of spirits. I could live with that.
This metaphysical ecology seems to be universal among humans. But it seems also to be what Christianity sought to suppress in favour of its starkly depopulated notions of what it was okay to believe, know and experience.
The early materialists of Western civilisation rejected Christianity and, because that was all they knew, rejected the metaphysical entirely.
As science became the powerful methodology it is today it eliminated any reference to the spiritual and metaphysical. It has been asserted that this is for want of evidence. But that’s not strictly true. If you don’t go looking for something you won’t find evidence of it, and what’s the point of looking for something you ‘know’ doesn’t exist? An honest history of science will demonstrate that not only are there many scientists who comfortable with the metaphysical, but it also sometimes comes looking for them. That’s my experience exactly.
There’s a far more complex reality here. Evidence of the metaphysical is in abundance. This has been accepted by groups and societies which have operated in our culture as secret, or at least discrete, communities of interest to avoid brutal persecution from the institutional Christian Church.
Organized institutional Christianity and materialism have both been highly motivated to suppress non-conforming thought. It has been very much the case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
But both these suppressing influences have been weakening steadily in the past 3 decades. Interest in alternative and suppressed ideas and experiences has been growing and formal research in universities has been steadily changing the way we can understand what it is to be human.
Fakes and frauds?
Opponents of what the animistic perspective still insist that forms of heresy, fraud and incompetence prevail. This isn’t so. Yes, there are frauds and incompetents and others whose sanity might be justly questioned. But this applies to science, religion and indeed any domain of human endeavor as well. Efforts to throw a smokescreen over the validity and value non-conforming thought are growing weaker by the year now.
However, this doesn’t mean that all fans of the animistic/metaphysical perspective are intellectually disciplined, psychologically healthy or well-informed. Sceptical caution is necessary as a constant state of mind.
Advocates and opponents can be genuine inquirers or dogmatic apologists who sincerely believe they are warriors in a zero-sum game as virtuous defenders of truth against deluded dupes and agents of evil.
But what about God?
This is an immensely messy subject. Sound scholarship is showing the Christian God is derived from a polytheistic belief system. All such systems have supreme deities, and the politics of whose god is highest isn’t unknown. This kind of selective monotheism is a natural response to political and cultural pressures.
The simplest summation of more balanced ideas is that there is one universal unifying consciousness which mystics see as ‘The One’. It is in all things and all beings. But it is also beyond description, measure or knowing. Within that supreme unity there are gods and other spirits which vary in scale from the great down to the very tiny. This constitutes a complex ecosystem in which communities of spirits who may or may not have been human interact with us.
I have heard this perspective interpreted as –‘God is in us, so we are gods.’ But this evades the bit about God being in everything. The Greek philosopher Thales is said to have declared that, everything is full of gods. We must be careful about assuming inferred meanings are valid. God is in my coffee mug, so my coffee mug is a god? I don’t think so.
Clearly, in the absence of a complex idea a Christian might insist that any such evidence of ‘spirits’ can only be God, Jesus or the Devil. Any materialist will insist it is error, hallucination or chance.
On a personal level I can make no definitive claims. I am comfortable with the idea of ‘The One’ and an ecosystem and a hierarchy of consciousnesses that could be described as gods, archangels and angels – by whatever language/tradition we care to use.
I have been able to create a theoretical model based on my experiences and research. I think there is a far more complex metaphysical domain than we can yet know and that it is populated by the non-organic aspect of humans and other intelligent agents. There seems to be a community of agents who engage with humans in ways that are both helpful and harmful. Just because they are non-material doesn’t make them good. There is risk to our wellbeing in both physical and non-physical realms.
As a culture, we are a long way from knowing what’s what with any precision, and access to such information is scattered. Some will claim to have a definitive answer – and may sincerely believe that to be so. While I think that’s unlikely as a rule, some do have useful theories that can work well for now. Of course, others are liars and frauds as well. Some project their delusions and egos with an air of great authority. I am not discounting that there those who do know, those who do tend not to write books or make videos or podcasts.
It is said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. In this context the price of what is true is eternal scepticism. By that I don’t mean being sceptical in the often mis-used sense of denying something, but employing doubt in a rational and disciplined manner. This also includes listening to one’s intuition and being able to distinguish between genuine intuition, fancy and bias.
What we choose to believe is dependent on our psychological needs. I try to be rational and disciplined in my approach, but I know I am serving my psychological needs, not some objective truth standard. I think reality is way too complex for that. The best I can say is that I try to have a healthy relationship with ‘truth’. The extent to which I succeed is not something I can say.
So, what is human?
This is my sense. Human is the complexity of our biological nature and the complexity of our metaphysical nature combined. We do have an enduring metaphysical element which can leave and return to our organic body while it is alive and persists after it dies.
We use the terms humane, humanism, humanity and humanitarian in an imprecise way. But we intend to denote our organic primate being and nature and a mysterious undefined pluselement – something that is ‘better’ than our animal nature. Materialists have only the language of evolution to assert that human is just ‘more evolved’ than our primate ancestors. Christians think in terms of a soul in want of redemption. Either way it’s about improving on what was there in the beginning. For me evolution applies to organic and inorganic states of being. We grow from experience and I am content with idea that there is a ‘moral’ component to that – but one built into nature rather than as a theological dogma.
Conclusion
We must maintain a sense of balance and appreciate that advances in science and scholarship plus great changes in our cultural values create opportunities for us to revisit our sense of being human. It’s a terribly messy field strewn with ideas that are old hat, fragmented, half baked, deranged, poorly formed, inspirational and insightful.
Institutional Christianity and materialism have created dogmas that induce a lazy expectation that convenient truths can be delivered to our mental doors ready to be believed. No critical effort required.
But in many respects, we are in a golden age of inquiry. Far from new insights being packaged and served up conveniently, what we have is an abundant garden full of fresh produce from which we can pick what we like and prepare it in a way that meets our intellectual, psychological and spiritual needs.
We are responsible for what we believe, how we think and how we act. We also have plenty of lives to get good at owning that responsibility.
Bon appetite!