Fear blocks us from experiencing reality deeper than physical world

By David McElroy · September 4, 2017

I know things that I should have no way of knowing. I always have.

This is something I rarely admit to others, because I’ve been taught not to trust what I know. We live in an age when bright people learn that the only things to trust are reason and science. We learn that if something can’t be proven, it must not be true.

And yet — I know things. I’m scared to trust them, but I know things.

Science and reason have brought us amazing things. I have no desire to toss them aside. But I also know that I have knowledge and wisdom which come from somewhere else. I admit this with fear of what you’ll think of me, because I know materialists scoff at such irrational thinking. They see it as magical thinking. But something inside you knows the Truth.

I know their reasoning. I get it. I know their arguments. I’ve even learned to feel a sense of shame about admitting what I know is true. But in my heart — in the depths of my private mind — I know things that I have no rational way of knowing.

I can’t make a rational argument about this. I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m just confessing something I know to be true, even if it violates the bedrock principles of a materialist modern mindset.

You know the way you can wake up remembering a dream you were just having? (Some of us do this. I’m told some people never remember their dreams.) When I first awaken from a dream, it can seem so clear that I can’t imagine I will forget it. But by a few minutes later, the details are getting fuzzy. By later in the day, I might recall only that I vaguely remember dreaming about something. And the more I consciously think about it — trying to remember — the more the dream fades. And then it’s lost entirely.

What if we have intuitive knowledge in much the same way? What if we have natural access to knowledge and truth and wisdom which fade and become inaccessible as our conscious brains take over and bring us into fully rational mode?

The pioneering psychiatrist Carl Jung believed there was something he called a “collective unconscious” that we all tap into. What if we’re born with the ability to access such a thing and then our rational minds learn to focus on what is supported by physical evidence? What if we learn to ignore this collective unconscious — or whatever it is? (I’m not necessarily hung up on his term. It’s just a useful starting point.)

Things happen to me that I don’t understand. When I allow my mind to unfocus the rational part, the intuitive part comes into focus just a bit more clearly. But when I experience fear, my rational self rushes to take back control — and the intuitive pictures slips out of focus and become a blurry mess which no longer makes sense.

As I sit here in the early morning hours of Monday, Sept. 4, 2017, something about my heart or mind is more open than usual. I’m not feeling the fear and shame which are so prone to drive me back into blindness. My intuitive eyes are slightly more open — and some blurry shapes and colorful lights are coming into focus.

I’m seeing something ahead of me and it’s like lights and shapes that I can barely make out. It’s faces and places and love and death and creation — the jumbled mass of things we call life. But something about it feels as though I could see it clearly if I could just focus this lens.

I see faces. I see places. Homes. Emotions. Children who aren’t born. I feel the face of God. I feel the future and the past coming together in one swirling field of probability.

What is reality? I’m not going to try to define it here, but my best understanding of quantum physics says that physical reality is a field of probabilities. It’s a field of energetic particles blinking into and out of existence. (I don’t want to get into physics which is over my head despite years of study — which would embarrass me — but some tantalizing clues about this are in an episode of Radiolab from about five years ago. Listen to it. Please do.)

My gut tells me that what I somehow see — somehow have access to — is a bit like those fields of probabilistic particles. My intuition says I’m seeing bits and pieces of what might be. What should be.

I know things, but I have trouble trusting what I know. I’m scared and I listen to my fears. When I listen to my fears, I act and believe in ways that turn me away from what should be. If I had believed what I know to be true — over the last decade or so, at least — I would have done different things. My life would be different today.

I would have believed my intuition and acted on things instead of trusting my fear-based reasoning — and I wouldn’t have lost beautiful opportunities which won’t come to me again.

I love reason and I love science, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something beyond what science understands. That doesn’t mean that reason can yet help me fathom what I somehow know. But it does mean that my inability to let those two things live together drags me to a place of losing the things I most want and need.

I don’t know whether I’m talking here to myself or to someone else. Or nobody. I really don’t. I just know that there is something in front of me right now — a vision of things which should be — that is partially visible, partly in focus, and I need to reach out and touch it.

I know it’s real. I know it’s true. And I know that too much material reasoning and too much fear will chase it away once more.

It’s as though I’m in the middle of a waking dream at this moment. I’m seeing something — not quite clearly, but enough to see dimly — and I’m desperately trying to get something down before it slips away. Because I need to experience this. I need to share it.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything. It doesn’t matter to me whether you believe what I’m saying. All I know is that I’m either right to believe there’s truth we can access beyond the material world or else I’m crazy. I’m confident that this isn’t insanity, but how would I know for sure?

There is some field of knowledge or wisdom or energy — or something which I can’t name or explain — which is responsible for what I’m vaguely feeling. I know it’s there.

I know it’s Truth.

If I could learn to set aside fear and doubt and shame, I could live in that Truth and have a different life. You could, too. I’m certain of that. (Have you ever noticed in the Gospels how strongly Jesus contrasted faith and fear? Without going into theology, I’ve come to believe those are opposites — and they’re key to the miracles of Jesus. And they’re key to why hardly any of us experience miracles today.)

Yes, some people would assume I’m just crazy. But I know better. If you’ve experienced a taste of this for yourself, you’ll know better, too. Once you’ve tasted just a little bit of this in your own heart and mind, you can’t deny there’s something else — and you’ll know it’s more powerful than anything else in human experience.

And now I’ll go to sleep — and wake up in the morning back in the rational world where I so often forget this Truth exists.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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