But the vast majority of people are a part of the nominal world of physical phenomena, accepting it for what it appears to be.
I know I have trouble getting past that, too. I sense and experience reality and the world just as everyone else does, but I have that requisite doubt that what I'm perceiving isn't all there is to it and I have to attack that doubt head-on to try to figure out what my truth is about it.
So I read. My current reads are spread amongst libraries and bookstores.
Alice Sebold's (author of "The Lovely Bones") "Lucky" is a current read. It's her autobiographical account in which she writes in painful and gruesome detail about how she was raped, beaten and degraded as a first year college student and the ensuing events that led to her rapist's arrest and conviction.
Mind you, personally "rape" is my most hated word in the English language. I don't know why, it always has been. In any catalog of "worsts" in the human experience, rape has always been an item that I've found particularly egregious and disgusting.
I'm not sure how it ties into my inquiry. Perhaps it's the subjective intensity by which we feel the human experience in the worst way possible. Similar to my fascination of high altitude climbers and their sick obsession with a basically suicidal sport. And I'm not criticizing it. I thoroughly understand it and am intrigued by it.
I now regard Alice Sebold as one of my life heroes. I don't know why. Maybe in a similar way as I consider Stevie Ray Vaughan as one of my guitar heroes even though I don't think of myself as a guitarist in any way. Her bravery in handling the aftermath of her rape stands for itself, but she didn't get through it unscathed.
She graduated from college, endured the rape and alienation by one of her closest friends and confidantes, and subsequently went through hard times of falling apart that I'll never know. And most disturbing in "Lucky" is her description and realization of having post-traumatic stress disorder.
I self-diagnose and know how I consider my feelings about myself and my experience, but when they match up perfectly with someone who genuinely has PTSD, it just makes me realize what a wuss I am. What trauma have I experienced? None. I'm no survivor of anything.
Still, discovering Alice Sebold's personal story and realizing the type of psyche from which a twisted and disturbing, yet lovely, work like "The Lovely Bones" can emerge made me feel somewhat connected. When you experience that kind of trauma, you no longer live in the same world that most everyone else seems to.
I'm also reading "Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, which is about scientifically accepted phenomena of things that are completely beyond human subjective experience, such as quantum mechanics and cosmological space-time theory and sub-atomic entanglement.
A lot of weird shit is described in what science is finding about the nature of reality, but what strikes me is about the effort to describe reality using our limited observational ability. As human beings, as biological products of the universe, our perception and observational ability is a product of evolution on this planet. i.e., for this perceptional reality.
As humans, we arrogantly believe we can understand the big picture, the whole enchilada. But really all we can really understand is what is observationally perceivable, and our perceptions are limited (granted human nature strives beyond our limitations to boldly probe natures of reality we weren't biologically meant to understand).
A very simple example is that we only perceive electromagnetic radiation in a limited range – mostly visible light. We need instruments to perceive electromagnetic radiation beyond that limited range. Our limit is natural. Perceiving what we call visible light is a product of evolution. We don't need to see ultraviolet or infrared electromagnetic radiation to survive.
On other worlds and other environments, it might benefit other biological creatures to perceive in those other ranges, and perhaps what we perceive as plainly visible in visible light, is imperceptible to them.
We have sound perception, but the sound spectrum is greater than what our facilities are equipped for. But we hear according to what is beneficial to us. Smell, touch, taste? These are just tools that make our environment navigable. But change the environment, and the tools will change, as will the general perception of reality.
The whole of reality is actually the entire range of everything, beyond our senses and include senses that we haven't even developed because of our limited environment on this planet, and we have no idea what those are!
Could there conceivably be an environment or a world where what we categorize or even deride as spiritual perceptions are requisite to survive? For us on this planet, the question ends right there. I don't think we can even conceive of it.
And, of course, death is foremost among my readings; meditations on death and the biological beings that we are, destined to die.
One book I've been reading in the bookstores is How We Die by Sherwin Nuland. Another is The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead by David Shields. Straight shooters of books about our biological reality.
How We Die is written by an M.D., a cardiologist like my brother and uncle, and his book is more about the biological process of dying. Describing what is happening to and in our bodies when we experience external forces that are bringing our lives to an end in various ways.
The Thing About Life is more philosophical and uses general scientifically observed facts and data about aging and the life cycle for readers to think about the life and aging process, which always culminates in death.
Lastly, I mentioned the book Reading Judas before, but it disappeared from the bookstore shelves before I finished it. Well, it reappeared.
Its relevance to my inquiry is that one of the issues that had disparate views and divided the early Jesus movement was sacrifice and death under the reality back then of Roman persecution; namely torture and eventual execution, either by crucifiction or games at the Coliseum.
They were pondering and meditating on death in a very deep and real way, because just by being followers of Jesus they were under threat of Roman horrors. The meaning of Jesus's death was a central concern among them.
One side promoted being martyrs and encouraged followers to bravely and willingly meet their end as sacrifices. Mind you, if you read the book, it shouldn't be lost that this attitude is the exact same attitude that current day Muslim extremists and militants hold. I can imagine those early Christians who held this view yelling, "Allahhu akbar" as they were condemned!
The argument in Reading Judas is that the opposing side, the side that was suppressed for 1700 years, was that this attitude was completely counter the teachings of Jesus. Thinking oneself as a willing sacrifice was primitive and vulgar. Jesus preached love and rebelled against the Roman Empire by refusing the practice of sacrifice.
And it won't happen, but it theoretically makes logical sense that Christians could use the Gospel of Judas to argue against Muslim suicide bombers, saying that's not what Islam is about. It won't happen because the Gospel of Judas is not canon, and it would be hypocritical because the attitude of Muslim suicide bombers is not much different from the early Christians martyrs who are canon.
And to wrap this all up, after trying to gain perspective on scientific observation despite our observational limits, which is a result of evolution, I have to admit that spirituality is also beyond our biological observational limits.
We don't need spirituality to survive, evolutionarily speaking. So what am I doing? What are we doing? Perhaps basically the same as cosmologists and astrophysicists – trying to describe reality.
What seriously disappointed me about Reading Judas was the authors' final stance that the Christian canon need not be challenged to be revised because the (Nicene) canon has been counseling and inspiring Christians for 1700 years.
This thoroughly goes against what they uncovered in their analysis that if the teaching and preaching of the canon is about a wrong God, it should be challenged. If Christians are being counseled or inspired by a doctrine counter to what Jesus taught, it should be challenged. They just roll over to the status quo.
WordsCharactersReading time
