I’m grateful for the responses I received to last week’s blog/newsletter, Of Waves and Wonderings. In particular, I’d like to share (with his permission) an exchange of correspondence with a reader in the US.
Hi Roz,
I wanted to let you know how meaningful I found this week’s and last week’s newsletter. Thank you so much for sharing. They arrived in my inbox at the perfect time.
As I’ve come to terms with the trauma in my childhood due to religion, I’ve decided that I don’t believe in God. But I do believe that we are all connected by an unknowable energy – the water you talk about. It’s the energy that delivered a card from my mom into my mailbox just hours after she passed. It’s the energy that inspired a friend to check in with me the day after she died, not knowing she was gone. And maybe another name for that energy is God. So maybe I believe in God after all.
When my Mom passed, she asked that a card with a favorite picture and quote be shared with everyone who knew her. The final paragraph of your newsletter reminded me of the quote.
Thank you for all the positive energy you bring to the world. 🙏🏻
E
Thanks so much for getting in touch, E. It makes me very happy to hear that these blog posts resonated. I feel that I haven’t been very brave in the past in talking about the deeper belief systems that guide my life and spark my curiosity, so it’s wonderful to get some confirmation that what I’m saying is interesting and relevant to at least some of my readers – in fact, the response has been very positive.
I was very moved by what you shared. My childhood was religious (both parents were Methodist preachers) but thankfully not traumatic. Nonetheless, for a long time I found the G-word very off-putting. Just like you, I’m finding that that maybe, way back when, G was the word used to represent that mystical energetic connection, long before the word got hijacked by ambitious and power-hungry humans.
Those serendipitous and synchronistic occurrences that you mention are, I think, a wink from Spirit/Universe/God/Whatever to let us know that there is something more to life than what we see. Maybe one day science will explain how everything is connected, but I rather hope not to be around when that happens – I think something important would be lost when we can explain the ineffable.
I think you might appreciate this, which a friend shared with me yesterday:
Creation said:
“I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it.
It is the realization that they create their own reality.”
The eagle said,
“Give it to me. I will take it to the moon.”
The Creator said, “No. One day they will go there and find it.”
The salmon said,
“I will bury it on the bottom of the ocean.”
The Creator said, “No. They will go there, too.”
The buffalo said, “I will bury it on the Great Plains.”
The Creator said, “They will cut into the skin of the earth and find it even there.”
Grandmother who lives in the breast of Mother Earth,
and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said
“Put it inside of them.”
And the Creator said, “It is done.”~
~creation story from the Hopi Nation, Arizona
Wishing you all best
Roz
And my thoughts following on from the above…
I continue to be fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works, and how that shapes our reality. As Beau Lotto posits, evolution has favoured creatures that have a useful view of reality, rather than an accurate one. So humans that are good at perceiving danger have an evolutionary advantage over those who are good at perceiving, say, beauty. The latter are in danger of being lost in appreciation of a lovely flower while the sharp-toothed tiger is bearing down on them, and thereby finding themselves abruptly removed from the gene pool.
Maybe, likewise, evolution has favoured those who focus on the external rather than the internal world, as the internal world is relatively unlikely to contain threats. There is a cultural aspect to this as well – in the west we tend to have a relatively practical, even prosaic view of what is possible. I recently heard of a Tibetan monk who was instructed by his master to open up a hole in the top of his skull, like a newborn’s fontanelle, purely through meditation.
He succeeded.
Most of us wouldn’t even believe it could be done, which would therefore become our reality.
We’re also limited by our perspective of time. As Rupert Ross suggests, we inevitably perceive things relative to a human lifespan. I’ve written before about deep time in the context of tectonic shifts (see Humans Today Gone Tomorrow), shifts that are imperceptible within an average 70-90 year human lifespan, but which are verifiably real. We think our universe is incomprehensibly old and huge, but what if even that is just one in a series of universes spanning back through time, or one of an infinite number of parallel universes existing at the same time. (Exploding head emoji.)
So, what to do with all this hypothesising about the infinite?
For now, I’d suggest that it’s simply to shake up our attachment to the realness of reality, to accept that it is more mind-boggling, more unknowable, more weird and wonderful, and who knows – maybe more fluid – than we have been raised to believe.
If there is truth in the idea that we create our own reality, both individually and collectively, then we would need to accept that right now we are creating a reality that is unsustainable and inequitable, and also that we can create a reality that is better in every conceivable way. There is nothing inevitable or unchangeable about either of these scenarios.
It’s up to us.
Believing that we create our own reality, even if only in a limited way, might sound like a tremendous responsibility, but is also tremendously empowering. It’s worth at least experimenting with the idea, acting “as if” it’s true, and seeing what happens.