HEALED BY EVIDENCE

I am not one who believes easily.I am highly sceptical.Trust does not come easily.

My heavily Christian background left me an atheist for some time. However, atheism did not sit comfortably with me. Christian people often say that my unbelief is the result of my childhood abuse and of meeting bad Christians. It never occurs to them that my unbelief is quite simply because I think the Christian story is ridiculous, without foundation, a pernicious lie created to keep people acquiescent to those who sought power. It’s story of redemption is not original. It is also nonsensical and no matter how it is explained away the whole idea is not compatible with a God of unconditional love.

So how did I come to the position of not being an atheist?

Quite simply, I discovered that my sensing of beings beyond the physical was not a symptom of mental illness. I came to understand that my vivid childhood imagination was not responsible for my experiences and certainly were not the work of Demons!

The certainty that I could not die, that I could not escape myself, came about as a result of me being in a coma. When I recovered, far from being happy and euphoric (because it was this incident that showed me that life continues after the death of the physical body), I was furious and terrified.

Fast forward.

Most of what I believe today I believe because of direct experience and evidence. The main concept of spirit teaching is that thought is all important. That our lives depend on entirely upon that which we believe. When I first became aware of this I thought it was absolute nonsense. How could my suffering possibly be to do with anything that I think or believe? What is more, how could I stop suffering just by changing my belief?

Today I am in no doubt that this is true. No, I do not believe in magical thinking. I do not believe that I can make myself rich, prevent myself ageing, cure all my physical ills, by believing in a fantasy.

I do know for sure that I can change the way that I experience life, react to life, and feel, according to what I believe. Much of my life was miserable and painful because of just one belief that I held deeply ingrained in myself that I was unaware of: I was a bad defective person which is why I had been abused.

Since the experience I had back in the 70s during the coma, I have slowly grown. Gradually many of my extreme symptoms of mental and emotional distress began to fall away. My periods of mania became less manic, less often, and of shorter duration. The same is true of the depression I suffered. My OCD behaviours, my eating disorder, my self harming all lessened. It was a very slow and painful process.

Gradually my beliefs changed. Firstly, I came to believe that people could be genuinely kind to me without wishing anything in return. I came to believe, and this is most important, that I could change. I came to understand that the beliefs I had been indoctrinated with were just ideas, not Truth. I came to understand that nobody on this earth knows what Absolute Truth is. I came to understand that as a human being I could not know what Absolute Truth is. I came to understand that all I had and all others had is the meanings that they had created. (It is not possible for a human being to be objective as we filter everything through our brains and our meaning creations.)

I came to understand that I did not have to accept the meanings that others created! Following on from that I came to understand that many of the meanings I had accepted and / or created myself could be changed.

This is how my life changed. I changed from the miserable wretch that I was to the happy content person I am today. Throughout all of this process, I have been guided by others, by reading, and by messages through genuine and accurate mediums. Those who helped me the most were NOT those who told me what to think!

Thus that which I believe today has been shown to be true, as far as I am able to understand, to my satisfaction. From the very beginning spirit told me that I was loved and that what I thought and believed was what was important. Through their evidence and steadfastness, I slowly came to my present position. I do not have fixed ideas or beliefs or try not to. One must always keep the door open.

Three years ago, I went through what I can only call my “dark night of the soul”.This was the most painful period of my life. It was also the most healing period of my life. During that time, spirit never let me down, and they kept repeating the same message over and over and over again through various different mediums in various different places (churches and halls) and in various different ways. Until finally I got it.

I finally came to understand that I was still holding the belief that was holding me back. That belief was that despite me understanding that the sexual and physical and emotional abuse of me was wrong, I still believed that the people who did this to me did this because of who I am.

Spirit showed me that this was wrong. In a moment of absolute anguish, when I was on my knees in my bedroom begging to either be released or taken, it suddenly came to me that I had never been at fault. That the problem had lain with those who abused me. It was not anything about me that made them abuse me. It was about them. With that I released the pain at the very core of me. I will never forget that pain no matter how long I live. (I now also understand why healing is necessarily slow. I think that had the four several months long “dark nights of the soul” happen all at once I would either be insane or my body would have given out. Grief is physically very painful.)

My beliefs today are evidence-based.I have no time for religion.I am much more inclined towards science though I am obviously aware that the idea that consciousness survives physical death, and precognition, are two ideas that many, though not all, scientists reject. I therefore view everything that I read and watch to do with physics and science in general through the lens of knowing this. I understand completely that for many to accept this would mean having to completely reassess the meanings they have created. I know how difficult that is.

Posted by Knitman