Reconciling the Weird and the Normal
Photo by Claudia Ramírez on Unsplash
I believe in weird things.
I usually don’t tell people that when we first meet. Normal people don’t believe in past lives. They don’t practice Tarot or Reiki. They look askance at mentions of astrology as an influence on our personalities.
This is a spiritual blog — the name Soul to World tells you that. I could casually throw my beliefs around and assume that the right audience would keep reading and others would leave. But I want to explain where I’m coming from because I also value science and evidence. I just don’t think science has an exclusivity on truth.
The Appeal of Spirituality
The appeal of spirituality is straightforward — it is our search for meaning. Spirituality attempts to answer the question of why we are here, whereas science can only tell us how and what. These questions may not matter to some people, and that is okay. But for some people, there comes a time when the pursuit of material things makes no sense, and a “normal” life of having a stable job and raising a family sounds unappealing. The question of why becomes the next pursuit — to understand what more there is.
Astrology has helped me understand myself in deeper ways that no psychological personality test ever has. Tarot can be used as a tool to tap into one’s subconscious and understand feelings and patterns under the surface. Past lives explain why there are certain people we meet who can seem immediately familiar and comfortable.
There are beautiful and amazing experiences I never would have had if I avoided anything “woo-woo” and not entirely “normal.” “Normal” is actually just what has been commonly accepted as true, what has worked before, what is comfortable. The word “weird” refers to what is unusual, different, new. If we didn’t have people doing weird things, we would have no innovation, no art, no evolution. There is no conflict between the “normal” and the “weird” if we understand that “weird” is another word for the creativity that is a natural part of who we are.
Not All Beliefs Are Worth Believing
That being said, not everything weird is worth believing. I don’t believe something just because some teacher said it – teachers can be wrong, too. They are human just like the rest of us with their own blind spots, and sometimes they are simply really good self-promoters. At best, a poor teacher can waste our time and money. At worst, they can be abusive emotionally or physically and lead us down the wrong path for years.
Over the years, I’ve become kind of a spiritual pragmatist. I understand that our brains tend to seek explanations and to connect the dots, but at the same time it can often be wrong in the explanations it comes up with. With that in mind, I try to hold beliefs lightly and regard them as theories that require validation through experience and observation. We often have a natural sense of what is true or not. Truths often help shed light on situations that we’ve struggled to explain before.
We can often validate a teaching by looking at its effects. Does it help us accept our humanness and promote emotional healing and evolution, or does it teach us escape our humanness by focusing on “transcendence” or the pursuit of spiritual stimulation? Does it teach us compassion for ourselves and other people or does it teach us to feel better than other people? Does it increase love in our lives or does it increase fear, shame, and division within and without?
Truly beneficial spirituality doesn’t conveniently give pat answers but encourages and empowers us to be better people and make better choices. That is the test of any belief system or ideology – whether they empower or disempower, and whether they united or divide. Disempowering and divisive belief systems are usually designed to control people, even as they may have seeds of truth at their core.
What This Blog Is About
All of this is to explain that some or many of the things I write here may not have scientific basis. I may also be coming to inaccurate conclusions about some of my observations that I will need to update over time. Though you might be wondering why I bother pointing this out since there are so many people writing stuff on the Internet that have no scientific basis anyway.
There are enough people in the world claiming things based on little evidence and incomplete information, and I don't want to be one of them. I prefer what I write to be helpful as much as possible. Having explored metaphysics for almost twenty years, I’ve come across enough wild claims and ideas that are more harmful than helpful. I try to look for the common ground between different beliefs, because the seeds of truth lie in the commonalities rather than the stories that people make up to make sense of them. I prefer the truth whenever possible, not beliefs that sound good and make me feel better about myself.
Welcome to this strange and fascinating journey.
