Mixing it up

In the comments to Testimony, the following was feedback from Karen.

And for me, someone who was raised Catholic, I find it amazing that you would find Jesus as a source of comfort or relief from what my religion considers a "pagan" sort of spirituality...

...Basically, Catholics are taught that psychic spirituality is bad and exploration in to that world is a form of false worship. You have found a way to mesh Jesus with the psychic portion of yourself - or Jesus has found a way to do that through you.

Food for thought, that. Because after I gave up on Buddhism, the next stop on my seeker's journey was the wild and whacky world of New Age spiritualism. The practices and theories I explored included everything from traditional paganism to idea that aliens have been pivotal in human evolution and are watching us even now.

(For the record, I was never a convert to the alien theory. However, it did make for some very interesting reading.)

I gravitated towards New Age people and books because they were the only resource I had to help me define and describe the psychic experiences that sometimes took over my life. Before New Age gave me a language to describe these occurrences, I felt like I imagine Helen Keller might have felt before her teacher taught her to communicate. I kept bumping up against these inscrutable experiences and emotions, which sometimes felt good, but more often bruised me, and I had no idea what they were, or how to cope with them. New Age at least got me started along the path to understanding.

I enrolled in a school for "psychospiritual development". I started out with just a couple of evening courses: meditation 101, and energy healing. I soon signed on for a whole raft of courses, including a 2-year part-time psychotherapy course.

Freaky things happened at that school. One thing I learned is that if you focus on psychic experiences, if you go looking for them and invite them, they will happen more often. I could give a dozen examples, but this one stands out:

We did an exercise in which the class was split into two halves. Half the students put on blindfolds. The blindfolded students each sat down in a chair facing another, empty chair. The other half of the class was asked to wander the room until a signal from the teacher, and then they each sat in the closest empty chair, in an approximation of random partner selection.

Only the blindfolded people were to speak in this exercise. The sighted partner was to give their hand to the blindfolded partner, and then the blind partner was to attempt a verbal description of the sighted person's life, based only on the psychic impressions they got from that person's hand. This was on the 6th evening of the course, so none of us knew each other very well, and even if we had, it's surprising how hard it is to identify someone from just their hand if you haven't been studying everyone's hands ahead of time.

I was blindfolded first. I got a random hand to hold, and literally had no idea who was sitting across from me. I couldn't even determine the gender. I felt like an idiot. I was supposed to say something. So I just let my mind wander and started talking. I described a house that I saw in my mind's eye. It was pretty specific. A living room with big windows and a skylight, with a pass-through opening onto a kitchen. There was no ceiling per se - both rooms opened up to a peaked roof made of wooden beams. The kitchen had sliding glass doors opening onto a wooden deck and then a forest behind that. (Keep in mind that most people in the class were from Toronto. No forests here! I figured I must just be daydreaming.)

I kept on going, blah blah, describing a dog, a spouse, hobbies. At one point I felt the hand start to shake slightly. The minutes ticked by. I was like, damn, this is foolish! I'm making an ass of myself. Finally the teacher said we could stop and take the blindfolds off.

I finally laid eyes on my grinning partner, a 30-something woman. I asked her how I did, and asked her why I had felt her hand shaking. Her reply:

"I was laughing because you were so bang-on that it was ridiculous. It's like you've been to my house. You also described my marriage and my dog. The only thing that you didn't get exactly right was that I don't knit - I do embroidery." She lived outside the city, which I hadn't known, and drove over an hour to get to the school each week. We re-hashed the reading, and she confirmed almost every detail that had come out of my mouth. I was completely unnerved by this result, but there it was.

I learned a lot about myself at that school. The interpersonal skills I got from the psychotherapy course come in handy just about every day of my life. And it was good to be able to discuss my psychic happenings with people who could relate. But I never felt that it was enough, in and of itself, to make that all-important connection to a truly loving and supportive higher power.

There were times when we created rituals, bringing symbolic objects from our lives and acting out the gestures of letting go, or accepting, or opening to new possibilities. We also invited in the spirit of this or the goddess of that, asking for help or guidance. I gave these things an honest effort, as much as I've ever given to anything. And while I did feel that I received some otherworldly guidance now and then, I never attained that feeling of being contained and filled by love that I so longed for.

What I've come to believe is that while clairvoyance and God are both roughly categorized as "spiritual" in the sense that both are intangibles, obviously there are many magnitudes of difference between the two. If God is a diamond, psychic experiences are clay. In my experience, Jesus and ESP are not mutually exclusive, nor necessarily working at cross purposes.

Phenomena of the human energy field and beyond are just one little step up from the material world. I'm betting that someday we'll be able to measure these fields, and they will become as un-mysterious as magnetic forces and gravity. In themselves, these phenomena do not constitute a complete spiritual picture. Every seeker must go further, to find whatever key fits the lock on their soul. Some people may be able to make a connection with the Powers That Be through Wicca or Druid practices, but not I.

For whatever odd reasons which may or may not ever be revealed to me, Jesus is my key.

And that is my clumsy attempt at articulating how this confusing mess of concepts all fits together in my head. It's not an airtight construction, and is ever flexible to accommodate new information and experiences as they arrive. If I get any more epiphanies, I promise I'll let you know.