My Background in Metaphysical Thinking

In trying to delineate my metaphysical/religious thinking it might be useful to myself, and any one else interested, to try to trace the development of my thinking on those matters of ultimate concern.

Early Years

I remember being brought to the Episcopal church as a child, but I don't remember much about it. I think I was brought to church from the time I was about four until sometime during elementary school, when I guess my parents got tired of going.

I think I remember one or the other, or both of my parents telling me that they agreed with the moral teachings of the church, but they were not so sure about the rest. I remember one time as a young child being preached to by my Southern Baptist great aunt and quickly being disabused of that "wisdom" by my Dad.

My parents are not particularly religious in any conventional sense. I guess I would say that my mother is an agnostic who leans toward atheism. My Dad has always been more inclined towards spiritual searching, and I remember listening to Science of Mind broadcasts with him on Sundays for a while. Later he was influenced by eastern religious thinking.

Anyway, from church and the general culture around me, I must have been absorbing a lot of Christian as well as Scientific materialist ideas. My parents ideas were a bit nebulous and they never forced them on me, so I guess I had to do a lot of figuring on my own. I should thank them now for allowing me to grow up with a fearless mind capable of thinking freely on such issues. I pity those who grew up in fundamentalist households and have had their hearts so filled with fear that they can't think straight. "Fear: the mind killer."

Teenage Rebellion

I do remember at a some point, probably when I was about thirteen, perhaps at my Grandma's request, trying to do some Bible reading on my own. I remember being really turned off by a lot of stuff in the Old Testament. I felt that any God who would order people to slay whole other groups of people, a God of genocide, could not be the same loving God that I had learned about in church. I also thought that a lot of what Jesus said seemed not to jibe with what I learned in church.

I came away with a great love for Jesus' teaching, as I understood it, especially his emphasis on love, his anti authoritarianism and hatred of the hypocrisy of the establishment. After all, it was the early seventies, and I, a child of the sixties, had been greatly influenced by the anti-establishment sentiments of the day.

I loved the Beatles and their message of loving rebellion. All I had to do was look at a picture of Jesus with his long hair and I would think, "Yeah, man, a real hippy after my own heart." I couldn't really believe all the stuff about his virgin birth and resurrection and all, though I was and remain to a very slight degree open-minded on the subject, but anyway Jesus was a hero in my book.

The thing I couldn't understand was why my Grandparent's generation, which went to church a lot more than mine did, could have been so in favor of Vietnam, so racist, so nationalistic, so anti everything that Jesus stood for in my heart.

Getting back to the Beatles, I suppose I got my first injections of Eastern philosophy through them. I got the album Sergeant Pepper for my tenth birthday, and I was immediately attracted to the Indian sound of Harrison's Within You and Without You. I guess it was a few years later before I came to also appreciate the words, but they are wonderful. Harrison was my favorite Beatle, and when I was about thirteen I got his solo Album, All Things Must Pass, which furthered my initiation into a kind of eclectic religious thinking. On My Sweet Lord he sang to Krishna, but in another song he called Lord Jesus. I used to look at his picture on the cover and wonder if he could be Jesus.

When I was fifteen, my father had our whole family initiated into Transcendental Meditation, and although it isn't a religious system per se, there was a certain amount of indoctrination into Hindu cosmological thinking. I was doing well with my meditation and had my best school years ever in ninth and tenth grades, but soon after that, my initiation into pot smoking put an end to my meditation.

Anyway, my Beatles/Jesus faith began to erode through my high school years as I become more and more indoctrinated into scientific materialism and as the optimism of the sixties generation began to erode into the materialism of the late seventies and eighties. I guess also, as I became more aware of the atrocities of human history, even genocide and slavery in "the land and of the free and the home of the brave", I began to feel that no good and loving God could ever have created such a miserable world. I turned in my late teens from being an agnostic leaning towards belief into a hardened atheist/ materialist, though I did still get some sort of spiritual solace from Taoist ideas which I was introduced to in high school social studies class.

Atheism's Phyrric Victory

Then one day, when I was maybe twenty, I proclaimed my absolute certainty of the non existence of God to my friend Leonard. To my surprise, he replied: "Bruce I thought you were a smart person. How can an intelligent guy like you be so closed minded?"

Well, those words really struck me, and I went home and I pondered on the subject. I thought to myself, "Well, if there is a God, what could he be? How could he create a world like this?" I still couldn't accept the traditional Christian idea of God who created humans with certain desires, then cursed them for following them, then sent his son to die as a ransom for our sins, and left it up to the Church to spread the word, etc. I thought, "Man, I could think of a better plan than that."

Vedanta

Then I had an idea. I imagined God all alone before creation. I imagined how lonely it would be, and I thought perhaps God created the world and hid himself in it. I thought perhaps God is in all of us experiencing our lives.

I went and told this idea to my Dad, and he said it sounded like what the Hindu Vedantists taught. A little while later, when I was feeling kind of depressed, he gave me a copy of Alan Watts' The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, which presents that Vedantist teaching, similar to what many mystic sects believe, sometimes called the Perennial Philosophy. That is, as it says in the Upanishads, "Thou art that", Brahma (God) and Atman (the human soul) are one. Then I found a wonderful tome in my Community College library, Rambles in Vedanta. I was sold, my life once again had meaning.

It now seemed clear to me also that Jesus was teaching Vedantism and had been misunderstood, and the Church had twisted his message all out of shape.

Vedantism also provided an explanation for me of a strange experience I had. To explain that experience requires a little background:

Possible Psychic Experience

I had always heard tales from my Aunt Valerie about how she was psychic. Well, I never gave them much credence because she was a little odd. She had never married and lived with a menagerie of animals which she always talked about as if they were human beings. Furthermore, I had been a materialist, and there had been no room in my philosophy for the possibility of psychic phenomenon.

Well, I lived with my Aunt for about a year, when I was twenty or so. One evening we were watching TV, and something came over my Aunt; she looked as if in a trance, and she said, "I see something. I see a long white car, and I see you unloading instruments, musical instruments. Bruce, I think someone is coming to the house to play music with you. I see something else. I see a person lying in bed surrounded by people..."

At that point a couple of ideas flashed through my mind. I thought, "It sounds like a hospital, or a funeral." A chill ran down my spine, and I immediately said, "Stop! I don't want to hear anymore!" After all, the first thing she saw had to do with me, and if I was going to be hospitalized or die, I didn't want to know about it.

I tried to put it out of my mind, but a couple of months later my Grandpa, Aunt Val's father, got sick. When I went to see him at the hospital and saw him surrounded by family, I couldn't help but think of my Aunt's, shall I say, premonition. Also a month or so later at my Grandpa's funeral, again I thought of that.

But what about the long white car? Well, I thought, "Perhaps that was the ambulance that came to bring Grandpa to the hospital, and perhaps the instruments were medical instruments and not musical ones." Of course I also considered the idea that it might all have been a coincidence.

About a year later, however, as I was leaving a party, I saw my friend Rick's car, a white station wagon, and I remembered that he came to my Aunt's house once and brought his electric guitar and amp. Wah! In fact all of what my Aunt had seen that night seemed to have come to pass. A coincidence, perhaps, but...

According to Vedantist theory, our central consciousness is one with God's eternal mind. We don't realize that because our attention is always attached to the objects of our senses and the thoughts in our brains. However, it is possible at times for various possible reasons, for data from the all encompassing over mind to enter one's individual consciousness. The over mind is beyond time and space, and therefore even information of future events can be accessed.

Spiritual and Intellectual Searching

Partly in seeking understanding of my experience with my Aunt, I took philosophy and comparative religion courses at community college. I remember my paper for Intro to Philosophy II : I wrote a paper on Idealism vs. Materialism, showing how logical positivism, the epistemology of materialism, which denies the validity of metaphysics and psychic phenomenon, is self contradictory.

From my study in philosophy, I came away with two important ideas. The first I had already thought of myself; that is, "I think therefore I am." The second idea is that of Immanuel Kant on the impossibility of knowing reality, "the thing itself"; that all we can know is how reality appears to our senses and mind.

From my comparative religion study, most of which was done outside of class, I took away two big ideas: the similarity of established religions in basic ethical teachings and the similarity in experience among the mystical sects of the great religions.

A Shattering Experience and Short Lived Christian Conversion

A short time after the experience with my Aunt, something happened that shook me even more: I was a witness to a beating death. I was really freaked out. I guess I had always known that life was fragile, but to have seen with my own eyes how it could be so easily taken just blew my mind. "That's not right", I thought; "There must be something more than this." I got out my Bible and started to read. Now, though, I thought, "I never believed in precognition, but it's real. Why couldn't resurrection and other miraculous sorts of things be real, too?" That was the beginning of a fairly short lived "Christian" period.

Actually, I didn't start going to church, but I started reading the Bible, and I started calling myself a Christian. However, I was still pretty sure that most of the Churches had the whole thing wrong. I thought about joining some contemplative sect, but most were aligned with the Catholic church, and I couldn't accept allegiance to the Pope. I thought about preaching my own interpretation, but knew I was not ready for that. Finally, I discovered the Quakers, a sect which seemed to me to have gotten the message right. I went to a few meetings.

I thought about studying philosophy, but... I thought, "Hey, you say you believe such and such, but can you really live your belief?" I decided that I should study soil science and join the Peace Corps to go and help my less fortunate brethren. That would be living my belief. I decided to go to New Mexico State University to study soil science. I was 25 years old.

I made a lot of music tapes to bring with me and I emphasized songs with spiritual, or at least positive messages. I went to New Mexico saying, "I will be like a Saint." Well, my sainthood didn't last long.

"The spirit is willing, but..."

My first semester was not so bad: I went to Quaker meetings every Sunday and spent most weekends studying. I had never really kicked my pot smoking habit though, and I'm sure that didn't help my studies any. Furthermore, I started meeting lots more women. I was a fellow, who for a 25 year old American male, had a paucity of sexual experience, and I fell in love repeatedly. For whatever reason, perhaps because I was always looking for a serious relationship and not casual sex, nothing worked out, and I became increasingly sexually frustrated and depressed. I became a regular on the party scene, partly to meet women, and those late, late Saturday nights put an end to my Quaker meetings.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my spiritual focus and became very confused, torn between a spiritual heart, a mind that found it hard to believe, and the demands of the flesh. I did, however have a couple of pretty interesting, seemingly psychic experiences while in New Mexico, The Land of Enchantment. The first took place during my first semester there, while I was still relatively spiritually focused.

More Possible Psychic Experiences

I woke up one morning to my friend Billy knocking on my dorm room door. I answered the door and he told me he had something in his room he wanted me to see. I followed him to his room and he showed me a box on his bed. He said, "I found this stuck in a net on the football field. What should I do with it." He opened the box, and in it I saw a baby owl. At that instant I was reminded of a dream I had had that night. In the dream I had seen three owls in a tree. Two adult owls were sitting in the upper branches and below was a baby owl. I remember being attracted to the cute baby owl and talking to it. I was quite freaked out and told Billy about my dream.

Actually I have considered the possibility, that Billy had been in my dorm room earlier telling my roommate about the owl he found, although as far as I know, he was not. But what about the two adult owls?

A few days later, I and some friends came back in the wee hours of the AM from a Pink Floyd laser light show at the planetarium in El Paso. We were playing hackeysack by my dorm room and I looked over at a small bridge which went across a man-made pond and I saw two adult owls sitting on the railing. I walked over, getting quite close to them before they flew away. A coincidence? Maybe, but...

The second experience happened about a year later while I was living in a back room at the Quaker meeting house. I had a dream. In my dream I was driving through the Catskill mountains with my friend Steve. It was pouring rain, and we came to a bridge, a wooden bridge, the river was so flooded that water was flowing across the surface of the bridge. Despite the danger I decided to cross, and we made it safely to the other side. Then I saw a road leading up the hillside and quickly drove up to avoid the flood. A couple living in a house at the top of the hill came out of the house and we all watched as the valley filled with flood waters.

That morning I woke up and turned on NPR as usual. As I was still lying there, they reported that that night there had been a freak, heavy rain in the Catskills; I believe it was eight inches in just a couple of hours or so. The Schoharie creek had flash flooded and a wall of water had come down the valley and washed out the NY thruway bridge over the creek. A couple of people had been killed when they drove their cars into the swollen creek.

A dream of a flood in the Catskills and a dangerous situation involving a bridge, and the same situation in reality, the same night. A coincidence? Perhaps, but...

Well, this only brings me up to about ten years ago, but since that time I haven't done much studying or spiritual practice, so...

The Search Continues

Anyway, on the hand, I am influenced by a kind of mysticism born of some possible psychic experiences and earlier influence from various religions, and on the other, a skepticism born of indoctrination into scientific materialist thinking. My skepticism is also reinforced by a distrust of institutionalized religion, which looked at from an historical perspective can be seen to have been an instrument of repression throughout history, especially Christianity.

I am still trying to synthesize these two opposing forces within myself, and my work on this website is part of that process. I am willing to take the leap of faith and believe in something beyond the physical plane, but I don't want to be taken in by an institutionalized religion. So, I am developing a personal faith, and I want to share it with others who might be interested.

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