Truth beyond physical world is hard for a skeptical man to see

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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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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