Seeking a spiritual ‘reality’
You’re not a religious man but you do like going into cathedrals. St. Patrick’s in New York. Notre-Dame in Paris (before the fire).
You and your wife visited Notre-Dame on a trip to Paris years ago. She, being Catholic, felt closer to God, You, being nothing, felt closer to Something.
When you and your wife went into St. Patrick’s she prayed for her dying father. You gave thanks to a World War II paratrooper who jumped out of planes and helped save the world. And for giving you your wife.
When you lose your closest companion of thirty years you feel like half your life has been shot away. You are maimed. You need help. You don’t find it in the material world so you take the train into the City and go into St. Pat’s to feel closer to your wife.
You don’t know where she is, maybe nowhere, but if there is a spiritual ‘reality,’ then inside that cathedral is a good place to find it.
So, religion has its place. But you don’t need it to believe in a life after this one.
The afterlife, if it exists, is a metaphysical, supernatural ‘fact,’ not a product of religious teachings which may be mostly, certainly partly, mythical and fictional.
In other words, it’s possible to cut through the bull and go straight to the ‘mind’ of the matter, an awareness beyond objective experience.
Words like God and heaven and soul become irrelevant. What is the soul anyway? — but the mind — ah-hah! — now there’s something. The mind, or more precisely, the brain, is a masterpiece, a miracle of creation, and not necessarily God’s creation. What is God? — an illusion, delusion, a fervent hope, an unanswered prayer?
Religion is like politics — too many different ideologies preaching, yelling, fighting among themselves to be heard and obeyed, or else — or else what? — eternal damnation? To hell with that. Religion confuses, it screws with your head, it rattles on about God and Jesus Christ and soul and heaven and adoration and Glory be to God blah blah blah.
Too much noise, man. You don’t need it to belief that there is — that there may be — a dimension, sensation, phenomenon, an as-yet undiscovered wavelength, an otherworldly life after this lousy one.
I know loss as well as anyone is able, and I miss them every-day and still (quietly) commemorate their birthdays, passing, etc. but life is the real miracle, and it may be the only one we get. Lousy? Maybe. But I love each day I am above ground, and if I could go on living, even in this grungy little apartment, forever, I surely would. But, as that will not be the case, I will still wake up each morning and say, Alright! and then I make some tea.
George, you’re right of course. I’ve written too many posts about the people I’ve lost and turned this blog into an embarrassing confessional. I’m tempted to erase it all. In any case, yeah, you waking up every morning in your “grungy apartment” and making tea, and me waking up every morning in my hovel and making coffee, that’s all that counts.