How to choose?

Some years ago now I decided as a good sceptic (in the old fashioned philosophical sense) that, as we can never ever really KNOW whether there is any God or underlying absolute, or if we have souls, or whether our mind is just a product of our brain, or whether there is an afterlife etc. etc., in the end we all have to choose what to believe, or simply hang around in an intellectual vacuum. This is not to say that we cannot revisit and revise these beliefs but, moment to moment, this is what we live our lives by, what Fowler would call our ‘faith’, and as it seems to me more rational that the brain/material world arose from the world of mind, and because I have seen things that cannot easily be explained by a materialist perspective, I chose to believe that there is more to the universe than what exists in the material world.

Having said that, a lot of what I would have once, long ago, accorded to the actions of something not of the material world, but something ‘out there’, perhaps divinely inspired, I now accord to the unconscious, particularly the sub-conscious – that which links us to animals, insects, and amoebae. I believe that this sub-conscious can be used purposefully when we divert our conscious attention away from a problem so that the unconscious can get at it (while we’re ‘not looking’) and sort it into perspective for us. Some forms of meditation specifically help with this detachment, and/or ‘attention away’ activity. I also believe that it is positive thinking in the present tense that sets up cognitive dissonance in the mind that the unconscious has to deal with, hopefully by helping to bring about the circumstances where our actual situation no longer contradicts our positive affirmations.

I am also very taken with the idea of Assagioli’s ‘supra-conscious’ – that part of our unconscious which links us to something beyond our ordinary everyday selves, perhaps being the leading edge of the unconscious (the part of us from which new poetry, music, altruism, inspired and heroic acts emerge); and also Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, backed up by the work of the Cambridge biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, because if these phenomena exist, various other specific mysteries would be explained. I feel that the possibility of the supra-conscious existing, and the collective unconscious existing, (represented by ‘angelic’ inspiration, archetypes, synchronicities) is strong enough to find out what we seem to know so far, and see how we can use that to help us or, at least, prevent ourselves from missing possible opportunities. For example, I have never been let down by the process of turning a problem over to some sort of unseen force that will come up with the answer, or ‘show’ me a constructive attitude towards the problem. This is very much like the second step of the ‘12 Step Programme’: “We came to believe in a higher power (i.e. more suited to dealing with this problem than our everyday conscious selves) and turned over our problem to that power”.

I would like to believe in Guardian Angels and Boddhisatvas. I do believe there are forces which help one avoid life-threatening situations – rather like the angels in the German film ‘Wings of Desire’, even though I do now have difficulty imagining such forces in human form (other than my own, acting from my deepest supra-conscious). While ‘Guardian Angels’ don’t always seem to be present/ in active mode, and we do get hurt and injured, I do think there’s a lot in the belief that without ‘Guardian Angels’ no human being would make it beyond the age of 5 years old, such are the inherent dangers of being alive.

And now we are back to the problem of evil, which isn’t a problem if you don’t believe in one omniscient, omnipotent, good God, like Buddhists and Hindus and Taoists don’t. In fact the first tenet of Buddhism is that Life is Suffering. The German 18th century philosopher Schopenhauer, who had come to the same conclusion, was very pleased to learn this. Schopenhauer, and Buddhism, prefigure the later existentialists like Camus, with their belief that, irrespective of there being something other than the material world (and Schopenhauer and the Buddha certainly believed that there is), it is all random and meaningless, and we have to work hard to make our own meaning.

I am a panentheist, meaning that I believe the material world is just one expression of the absolute/primal cause/underlying reality- God for short, but that God is much more than that. I tend to believe, with the Kabbalists, that the material universe is one of many aspects of the one, and came about out of a Universe of Mind. (With Wilber, this seems to me eminently more sensible than mind evolving out of matter, that humans are merely ‘frisky dust’). I also believe that many people have experienced union with the origin of all universes, and realised that day to day we are living an illusion of separateness. In essence we are all aspects of God. We are all included. In a very brief moment of enlightenment myself I saw that, though all came into being as an act of will, the basic building material is something I can only describe as ‘love’; but this is a force of such strength and fierceness, one could never be exposed to its full indiscriminate force and come out sane.

Illusion or not, it is still a very difficult life, and I speak as one that lives in the 21st century in the West. When I see the chaos and cruelties going on around the world, the natural catastrophes and the people created ones, seeing the pain of others, living with the constant fear that something awful might happen to my loved ones, I can understand the drive to either lose oneself in addictions that numb or detract from the pain and fear, or believe in the messages from western religions that there is a good omnipotent God who cares about me, and that a fairer, ideal life awaits me in heaven if I follow the rules laid down. The temptations to do either I think are particularly strong in serotonin deficient people like myself. The less resilient one is, the harder it is to bear. The more intellectual one is, the harder it is to be at all convinced by the good God of western religions. Nor can any sensible person take their moral guidance from the Bible, Koran or Torah anymore, with its homophobia, racism and sexism from an earlier, less fair and less enlightened age.

I’ve heard it said that, in the greater scheme of things, this ‘veil of tears’ will be nothing but a faint memory, an unpleasant experience of separation and despair necessary to fulfil an urge by the spirit- of- becoming within the Universe (also a manifestation of God of course, what I think Wilber calls ‘Eros’) to evolve in every possible form and essence. I would like to imagine that I volunteered willingly to be part of that experiment. I would like to imagine that I will experience a continuation of consciousness beyond death, not with this personality (which has changed several time over one life time already, and which it seems sensible to believe would be discarded on death with the body) and perhaps even as a realisation that I have been several people at once.

Having read what I’ve written so far, my husband, who regularly worries about the prospect of annihilation, which he reckons is there in the background of everyone’s psyche (-he’s never had a major depressive episode-) asked me if I didn’t think it was possible that scientists would one day create a machine, physical and material in every aspect, that was so complex it would attain self-consciousness, thus suggesting that that’s all we are...

How do others deal with this constant underlying suspicion?