November 01, 2006, 12:22 p.m.
One day when I was perhaps fourteen years of age, I very seriously sat on the ornate, room-sized oriental rug of my mother’s bedroom and asked her about the meaning of life.
“So you really think there’s a greater meaning, a bigger purpose?” I began. This had been an ongoing discussion. I had been pondering and discussing the existence of God in the back of algebra classrooms at school, backstage during play rehearsals, at home with my Mom, and riding the bus to school in the mornings.
She paused. “I believe we are sent here to learn certain lessons, that that is our purpose.”
I contemplated the rug upon which I sat, the huge, thick, royal blue covering. I couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t lain on the floor of her room, dotted with dragons and ancient symbols. I stroked it absentmindedly, wanting to believe her. There was a part of me that longed to believe, so much that it was actually a physical pull.
“But you really think,” I said, my Western scientific mind ridiculing the entire concept, “I mean you actually believe that God exists?”
In arguments at school, I had gone back and forth with people on the concept of God, whether it was just a figment of human imagination or whether it was a reality, in whatever form that took. I had talked extensively with one boy in particular, who had a strong belief in God but was not obnoxiously religious about it: I respected him. After a particularly frustrating exchange for him he turned to me and said, “When you watch the sun set, I mean a really gorgeous one with all the colors and everything, when you see beauty condensed like that, how can you not believe in God?” I thought that was silly. “How can you believe there is a God because the sunset is pretty? How is that convincing to you? To me, everything points to that God is just something humans made up.” “What if it’s not something they made up?” he said, “What if it’s something they figured out?”
“Yes,” said my mother slowly. “I believe there is meaning in the universe. Perhaps not distilled in a man sitting on a cloud in the sky, but I do believe there is meaning.”
“So you actually, deep down, believe in God and don’t just think that you’re making it up just to make yourself feel better?” I asked.
She could hear the accusation in my voice, the skepticism and the disrespect. But she was not offended, nor even ruffled. After a moment, simply and with dignity, she gave me her answer: “Yes. I do.”
Ten years later, I believe every word she said.
This is the story of how I found God. Once upon a time, I went to a neighboring town called Tigre with Emily, my current flatmate. The trainride was an hour long, so I bought a magazine. And one of the articles was an interview with Brian Weiss, an American psychiatrist who does past life therapy, also known as regression therapy - something I had never heard of before. One article was enough for me to know I wanted to know more. This Miami-based ex-head of the Pyschiatry Department at Yale Medical School claimed to use hypnosis to transport people into past lives, and in this way they were often able to cure themselves of physical and emotional symptoms. Those who had asthma or other respiratory illnesses had often died in fires; those with claustrophobia or other phobias with no traumatic experience in the current life could often trace their fears to a past life, where they really had drowned or been stifled or suffocated to death. People were not only able to trace physical symptoms, but also able to discover the reasons for troubled relationships in this life, whether with a brother, son, daughter, or wife. I was intrigued.
I have now read five of Weiss’ books and I am convinced that what he says is true: based on his descriptions of his clinical experiences, I believe that we each have a soul that goes through lifetime after lifetime on this planet, with the purpose of learning certain lessons and progressing on a spiritual path. Sometimes we are successful and learn important lessons, and sometimes we fail. Sometimes, we fail spectacularly – Hitler and Pol Pot come to mind. I primarily believe this because I simply don’t believe that thousands of Weiss’ and other practitioners’ patients are making it all up. Besides convincing physical evidence (i.e. recalling a past life as a Civil War solider and then verifying the name and place of death in records, or even visiting one’s own gravestone), as a Communications major versed in statistics I simply don’t believe that this quantity of people is fabricating this level of detail. This, coupled with the fact that people get completely better (physical and emotional symptoms literally disappear, something I know to be extraordinary in the practice of psychology), plus an intuitive sensation I have that this makes sense, were enough to completely shift my worldview. I believe without a doubt that we all have souls that reincarnate, a concept I had previously completely and utterly rejected.
My main problem with the concept of reincarnation, before I read more about it, was that there are currently 6.5 billion human beings on the planet – but there didn’t used to be. So what, I thought, are souls just created? And what happens when the sun explodes and this part of the universe is destroyed? Are the souls then destroyed? According to Weiss and others, the answer is that there are many planes and levels of existence, and many ‘schools.’ Earth is a school where souls learn lessons. But it is not the only one. There are many ‘places’, whether they be other levels of consciousness, or other physical schools (planets), in which to learn lessons. I do not claim to have the entire universe worked out after reading these books, but I do know that I now feel more complete, more connected, and more informed. It always seemed to me that there was something missing in the Western conception of everything, especially with the concept that humans were ‘it’ – not only were we alone in the universe but we were the pinnacle of evolution ... I could never quite put my finger on it, it was just a feeling that there was something else.
So at first I went down the path of trying to believe in God just to believe in it; I tried to be existentialist, to create my own meaning, but frankly, it just didn’t work. I couldn’t bring myself to believe in something outside of myself, something greater, without some kind of ‘proof.’ Yet I always knew intuitively that there was something else going on: I felt it. I felt it because the curve of my face was the same as the curve of a dolphin’s fin, because the beauty of the moon as it rose over my islands was a physical sensation in my heart, because I cried during the line “Who I am is numbered in each grain of sand.” But the dominance of my left-brain, the Cult of Rationality, a.k.a. Western culture I was born into had drilled into me from the time I was very small that feelings aren’t facts. Just because you feel something to be true (that everything is connected and that there is some kind of uniting force), doesn’t make it true: there must be physical proof. Fortunately, Weiss provided that proof for me, and it has literally opened up the universe to me.
I am not stupid, irrational, or gullible. I am not delusional, nor are my new beliefs merely wishful thinking. I do not believe what I now believe just to make myself feel better. I believe it because as a scientist, I was presented with convincing new data, new information, and I chose to incorporate it. To a certain extent all Western-educated people are scientists in that we worship Science as the explanation of everything. And scientists recognize new information and accept it once it has been proved in a manner we accept. It is, in fact, unscientific to deny it merely because it doesn’t fit into the previous paradigm. Galileo was considered a dangerous heretic for demonstrating that our part of the universe is heliocentric. People used to believe – truly believe – that the Earth was flat, and those who claimed otherwise were ridiculed. Science at its highest, purest, and best form, is an art that constantly reinvents itself. As new concepts, theories, and evidence are presented, views change – it is at its essence a flexible discipline that always allows for new concepts to replace the old, outdated, or incomplete ones. Those who reject evidence out of hand merely because it doesn’t agree with all that has come before are twisting and distorting real science, not contributing to it.
So I am smart, capable, reasonable, and thoughtful, and I now 100% believe in reincarnation and souls, concepts I used to deride. I have accepted that I was ignorant before, and am now more informed. But more than that, I am happier. I feel more connected, more full of awe, more alive. I simultaneously feel more powerful and more humble; I feel that my life has a purpose and a direction. I feel more responsible for myself and my actions, and I feel more taken care of. I feel better about the ultimate meaning of justice and less dismayed that people like Ken Lay can just die and ‘escape’ punishment – they don’t, actually, escape punishment because eventually, they are forced to take responsibility for their choices, just not necessarily in this life. The ultimate point is that for me, my vision of the world has expanded and become, in a word, better.
One final note: I am not presenting all of this to convince anyone. I am not trying to change anyone’s views, although for anyone interested in reading more about this phenomenon I recommend Weiss’ book Many Lives, Many Masters. Rather, I am documenting my journey, because I know that as an old woman, I will want a record of this giant leap in understanding that I took in my twenty-fourth year. I will want to remember when I saw with my own eyes that the universe is a complex, intricate, and far more vast and incredible than I had envisioned, and that I am a part of it, that I am eternal and connected. This was also just an attempt at trying to tell you, those who are important to me, about the step that I have taken that has changed my entire way of thinking and being, and I didn’t know how else to begin. The world has become an infinitely more complex, fascinating, miraculous and above all, meaning-filled place, and I wanted to share.
Moral of the story:
What the swami tell the hot-dog vendor?
“Make me one with everything.”
***
Language spot:
From EssayEdge (to me, describing his essay):
"Dear Sir,
The number of words required is 500 or less. However, although I have tried my best to simplify and compress the meat, the total is still tragically over the requirement."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day - neoteric: recent in origin; new.
***
Quotes:
"Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it." - Lou Holtz
"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them." - Bill Vaughan
"Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
"I owe nothing to Women's Lib." - Margaret Thatcher
"A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.”
“An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.” - Fred Allen
***
Courtesy of Nicole, and because I (supposedly) study political science here:
POLITICAL SCIENCE:
DEMOCRATIC
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.
REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?
SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.
COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.
CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.
AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows.
You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.
FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.
JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them worldwide.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.
GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.
ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.
RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.
TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which is two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.
IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.
POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.
BELGIAN CORPORATION
You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.
FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.
CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegal.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.
***
Coolest news headline I've read lately:
Flippered Robot Mimics Sea Creatures
***
Interesting factoid:
The first female president (or prime minister) was Suhbaataryn Yanjmaa. She was elected president of Mongolia in 1953. Since then, according to this page from Florida International University, there have been dozens of female heads of state. Some of the more notable include Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain, Edith Cresson of France, and Corazon Aquino of the Philippines.
As of today, the following women are serving as either presidents, prime ministers, or chancellors:
• Michelle Bachelet of Chile
• Helen Clark of New Zealand
• Luisa Diogo of Mozambique
• Tarja Halonen of Finland
• Myeong Sook Han of South Korea
• Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia
• Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines
• Mary McAleese of Ireland
• Angela Merkel of Germany
• Portia Simpson-Miller of Jamaica
• Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia
• Khaleda Zia of Bangladesh
