How spiritual are you? What's the source of your spirituality?

Tagged:

I imagine I’m like most people in that I try to fit most of the events in my life into a larger narrative. The difference between me and most is that while most people share spiritual ideas and then use those ideas when constructing their spiritual identity, I instead construct my own ideas.

There’s this New Age idea of the Higher Self. It’s kind of an iteration on the idea of a soul, while a soul lacks agency, the Higher Self is very interested in watching you grow. When I was younger I would contact the Higher Self through meditation and later through a technique called muscle testing.

Eventually I came to understand both the meditation and the muscle testing in terms of neurobiology. Humans actually have two brains, a left brain and a right brain. These brains mostly act independently of each other, but communicate through a neural superhighway called the corpus callosum. I’m fairly certain that what’s actually happening when I muscle test, when I meditate, is I change, briefly, the way the two brains communicate. The left brain is the conscious mind, and what happens in the right is mostly unknown to us.

I believe that the vast majority of what we term ‘spiritual’ is really us trying to build a better relationship with this other part of us. Our other brain can cause us to really screw up our lives.

That said, I still think in terms of ‘something bigger’, and I’ve been developing my own understanding of what that world looks like for many, many years. I suspect the world outside the one we exist in is just absolutely mind-bogglingly huge, way more to wrap one brain around. It mostly hides from us while we’re here, as we’re only here for a very short period of time and ‘it’ wants us to focus on this world so we don’t get too distracted.

It’s all basically just a bunch of ideas I toss around in my head for fun. The cool thing about it is that my life basically affords me the opportunity to spend all my time musing endlessly about it.