Not what you believe, but who you are...

For many years I was convinced that I needed to be able to believe things which I either didn't believe or didn't know with my heart.  I like the philosophy of Christianity although I do not like what the churches have done with it.  I always believed that it didn't matter what rituals you went through, if you didn't believe with your heart that what you were saying/praying/singing was true, then it was pointless to be singing or praying or repeating the part of the service.

I tried really hard to suspend my disbelief and believe it was possible to perform miracles or that making your body go through a process would be enough to get you to heaven... but then I came to the Quaker meeting house and started to read Quaker literature, and began to believe that it was not necessary to make an effort to believe things that didn't speak to me or seem real to me.  It is possible to believe what you believe, try to live it, and forget all those things that do not speak to you and do not become part of who you are.

There are several stories which speak to me quite deeply.  The first is disliked by a lot of Quakers because it isn't known if the story is a true one or not.  It seems that William Penn, the Quaker who founded parts of America and had a hand in devising the documents that are so important to the US, was a bit of a dandy in his youth, and liked to wear extravagant clothing, including, in those days, a sword.  He went to George Fox, the acknowledged leader of the Quaker movement, and was troubled by the fact that the peace witness meant that he would need to stop wearing the sword.

It is said that George Fox told him to wear it as long as he could.  The meaning of that statement was that as long as William Penn thought it was right to wear a sword he should do that, but the moment that he believed it was the wrong thing to do, then of course he had to stop.  No-one was making him stop, no one was telling him it was wrong, but he had to follow the leadings of his own internal light to decide what was right for him to do.

I love the story.  It may or may not be based on an actual exchange between William Penn and George Fox, but it seems to me that it demonstrates very well the distinction between being instructed that this or that is allowed or disallowed by one's religion, and being free to decide for oneself where the rights and wrongs lie.

Near death experiences

I first came across the near-death experience in Raymond Moody's book, Life After Life, which was first published in 1976.  Recently the media have talked about "Near-death experiences" in connection with people who have narrowly missed being killed.   The original meaning is that someone has died for a short while, has had a mystical experience in connection with their death and have then returned to tell their stories.

There are an increasing number of these stories because medical progress has meant that many people are revived after dying for a short while.  What people report after a near-death experience seems to have some common threads although each experience is different.

Some people have returned to write books about their experiences and others have embarked on speaking tours.  Some charge for the knowledge they have gained during their experience and others do not.  Some claim to have gained insight into what happens for all of us, and others merely teach what they learned about themselves.

There is an increasing amount of information about near-death experiences which are now the subject of many youtube videos, ted talks and websites.

I will list or embed a selection here.

Sons and Daughters of God

I don't know how old I was, but I can remember sitting cross-legged on the polished wooden floor at school listening to the curate from the local church. He was talking about Jesus and emphasized that Jesus was a son of God, as though that was something special. I remember being quite cross and muttering that we are all sons and daughters of God, and so it was the state for all of us. I don't know why I was so convinced - maybe someone had told me this or maybe it was simply something I had absorbed from going to both a Catholic church with my father and the Church of England church with my school. But this was one of those things I simply knew with a heart-knowing, not something I was intellectually convinced of in my head.

When you have experienced the difference between knowing something intellectually and being persuaded of it, and knowing something with your heart, you have a powerful tool at your disposal. It's the difference between knowing that you should love or be loved by your parents and actually feeling that you are. No amount of intellectualizing will persuade you that you are, if you feel that you aren't. No amount of argument will persuade you that you aren't if you feel that you are. You simply know with your heart.

 I have sought after wisdom all my life, and although I like to be comforable and able to afford nice things, books and wisdom have been far more important to me than riches in the material world. I want to understand how thing work, why they should be one way rather than another, how things fit together. I find the modern idea of science one-dimensional and dissatisfying. While finding six impossible things for breakfast on the one hand (quantum effects, the fact that observation changes the results of scientific experiments) scientists today seem to be rabidly anti-spiritual - anything that can't be seen, touched, subjected to a double-blind experiment, is under suspicion because science can't prove it exists. Personal experience, even if repeatedly experienced by hundreds of people, is dismissed as "anecdotal" amd rejected as though that means it didn't happen.

Some scientists reject ideas as impossible before any experimentation can begin and thus refuse to look at things they are not able to open their minds to look at, like telepathy, mediumship, channelling, and regard anyone who has an open mind to them as a gullible idiot. But who can use a double-blind experiment to show me love?

I am happy to state that my mind is open to the wisdom I can find - new light, wherever I may find it. My life as a Quaker has shown me that people may be insane or obsessed with things I don't believe but it is still possible to be led to some personal truth by them, or find some kernel of truth in their words. The only way to spot it is to learn to listen openly and non-judgmentally. I've recently become aware that I should be writing about my experiences and beliefs, not in an attempt to persuade anyone that what I believe is what they should believe, but in the hope that for the right people, my experiences may light the path for them in some way.