Playing in Possibility (Step Two to Spiritual Freedom)

Back in January, I wrote about embracing uncertainty and sitting with the discomfort of deconstructing my worldview. It was a terrifying but important part of leaving the cult. At the time, I knew that “The Freedom of Uncertainty” was what I would consider the first step to true spiritual freedom, but it wasn’t the last step. I hinted at the next step towards the end of that post.

“I began to play with ideas, trying them on like clothes, seeing how they fit. I allowed myself to start exploring and creating my own spirituality, choosing what made sense to me rather than what I was too scared to reject. Suddenly the journey to find what I believed was a wondrous, fascinating, and exhilarating journey, rather than one of terror and pain.”

Play.

I know I’ve written about it several times already, but it seems the more I look at it, the more I feel its importance. But how can I codify this idea of play into a meaningful philosophy? I don’t know if I can, but I’m going to give it a playful shot.

To start I want to look at two fields in which ideas are treasured, science and philosophy.

I find many people worship science as the concrete body of knowledge upon which they can rely. By worship, I don’t mean they think of it as a god. I mean they treat it like a god—with the same rigid certainty that other religions treat their religious texts.

In reality, science is far from certain. Every published study contains a discussion section at the end which should list weaknesses, ways in which the hypothesis could still be wrong, and areas that need additional research, even if the overwhelming evidence of the study was in support of the hypothesis. Of course, when news stories cover a popular scientific or psychological study, they try to leave that part out. They try to make it sound like the results were “proven.”

In science, nothing is proven; it is merely supported. One of the first things I learned in my research methods class is that scientific knowledge is only as good as what we think we know. Every hypothesis can be torn down by a single new discovery.

Now, before people get angry with me for denying science, I’m not.

I love science, but what I love about science is that it isn’t about knowledge. It’s about exploring the unknown and testing the known.

To some extent, I want to say by testing the known because one of the strengths of science is building off of evidence. But I left the “and” there because the other great strength of science is that it constantly tests itself. It takes imagination to look at an experiment and see what can be built off of the results, but it takes even more imagination to look at an experiment and envisage how many other ways the results can be explained. Scientific “knowledge” is constantly in flux, changing as technology improves and understanding deepens.

It’s a beautiful dance between imagination and experience.

Science pushes the boundaries of the world to see what we can do. It’s a form of physically playing with possibility, but just because something is impossible for science in this moment doesn’t mean it’s impossible. That’s where philosophy comes in.

Philosophy and science always seemed at odds to me. I actually hated philosophy passionately when I was getting my undergrad degree in psychology. Philosophy doesn’t have to demonstrate validity or accuracy. As long as the philosopher can coherently connect her/his line of reasoning, it’s a valid philosophy. It seemed like such a scam compared to the rigorous experimental method that science and psychology had to go through to get a hypothesis or theory widely accepted.

I don’t know when my opinion of philosophy officially changed, but at some point I realized that without philosophy we wouldn’t have science. Before we can get down to testing anything, we have to first imagine something. Ironically, what I find most frustrating about philosophy is also its greatest asset—the ability to consider an idea and follow a line of thinking without regard to whether it’s true.

Every discovery starts with a “what if” question. As I pointed out above, science is limited to our current understanding and abilities, but there is so much more out there right now that science can’t even begin to touch—and scientists know it.

So does that mean that what science cannot test and verify doesn’t exist? One philosophy might say so. 😉

But we would be in sad shape indeed if we limited our exploration of ideas to only what we can physically play with. Not only would philosophy be out (along with all the yummy philosophical ideas that exercise our brain’s understanding of reality), but so would certain kinds of math and science.

Two seemingly opposing bodies of “knowledge,” but together they encapsulate the essence of play.

David Eagleman has this fantastic TEDtalk on Possibilianism. He describes how the universe is full of  infinite possibilities in the unknown, and he encourages people to embrace them. When I watch the video, I get excited that there’s a man who knows how to embrace uncertainty and play with possibility (there’s a man who’s faced down his fears).

But he contradicts himself! He says that possibilianism doesn’t mean people can believe in ESP because, as far as science has shown, there’s no evidence for it.

I agree with him partially. We do need to work with our worldview to incorporate the evidence that we have surrounding us.

But the part that ESP isn’t a possibility is only true insofar as our technology and understanding work today. Given a good imagination, someone could still formulate a worldview in which ESP is a valid possibility without contradicting the evidence that we currently have. The only way in which ESP is definitely impossible is in the way that we have imagined it to function in the past.

I can imagine some are rolling their eyes and thinking, “Oh, great. Pseudoscientist over here who believes in ESP.”

But that’s oversimplifying it!

I don’t believe in ESP, per se. I believe in the possibility for a valid worldview to exist in which ESP fits.

Eagleman does a brilliant job of showing how science and philosophy can play, but I think there needs to be another layer to this idea of playing with possibility—that of being comfortable with relativism and multiple layers of truth. This is actually very much present in philosophy, but we forget about it when we step into the arena of “knowledge,” which is really just another human construct like time.

This is where true spiritual freedom comes together. It’s one thing to be willing to test your beliefs and figure out if they “work” in the real world. That’s important–necessary even. It’s even better to consider the value of a belief whether or not it ends up being true. But when you combine the willingness to play with ideas with the recognition that truth comes in many shades, then you truly have infinite possibilities. You can find exactly what works for you and appreciate the level of truth that it represents to you without feeling the need to deny evidence or prove that everyone else needs to believe the same.

Transformative Magic: Embracing my Dark Side

In a previous post, I gave a sneak peak into some of the things I would talk about, including one on how “negative emotions are good.” I’ve had requests from several people for more on that, so I thought now, with the approach of Samhain, would be a good time to approach this topic.

We live in a culture where certain emotions are viewed anywhere from simply “negative” to downright “wrong” or “sinful.” No matter where you go, the general consensus is that these emotions need to be resisted, “released” (one of my favorites of the coercive terms because it sounds so innocent. Right up there with “forgive” or “just get over it”), or not even felt if you’re a “good person.” The taboo on emotions is especially strong surrounding sadness for men and anger for women, but it’s pretty safe to say that, in general, “negative emotions” just aren’t considered good or healthy to experience.

But what if we have it all wrong?

A little fairy once told me, “Changing your perspective gives you the power to change your world.” And as many pagans and witches know, the highest magic comes not with transforming the world around you but with transforming your thoughts.

So let’s try some transformative magic.

It’s easy to recognize how a world of continuous darkness would be bad. Life would die because life cannot function without light. It’s easy to see how a world of continuous rainfall would be bad. I’ve seen the floods and destruction that come with a few too many days of rain. But I rarely question the destruction that would surely follow a world that was always sunny. There are times where there is too much sun; it’s called a drought. But I never think about droughts when thinking about excesses of something!

Growing up, I remember hearing preachers disdain the philosophy that “life’s purpose is happiness.” In their minds, such a wasted life was a life spent pursuing happiness. And as much as I would disagree with the reasons for that statement, I find that I actually agree with the statement itself.

Pursuing happiness is a pursuit doomed to failure.

Does that mean I don’t have the right to be happy? Should I be miserable, as those preachers seemed to want?

No, I think I have every right, even a destiny, to be happy! But I am coming to see life’s purpose as wholeness, not happiness. And there’s a big difference. While wholeness certainly involves happiness, it also involves the ability to feel sadness. While wholeness involves peace, it also involves the ability to feel anger or fear.

They’ve been labeled “negative emotions.” They’re portrayed as something I shouldn’t have, something to avoid, something I must drive out when I feel them. But imagine if you could not feel sadness or anger or fear? I’ve thought of these emotions as out of place, but that’s only because I didn’t recognize their purpose. Something would be terribly wrong with me if I could not feel anger when I saw a child abused. Something would be terribly wrong with me if I could not feel fear when I got too close to danger. Something would be terribly wrong with me if I could not feel sadness when I lost a loved one, or guilt when I hurt someone.

Without them, I would die just as surely as I would die without hope or joy or courage.

A tree requires both sunlight and darkness. Its branches reach for the sky while its roots tunnel into the ground. If the roots are not cared for or fed, if they’re cut off, the top of the tree will quickly die as well. In the same way, I have a shadow side, a side that is buried away from view, that isn’t fun to look at, that doesn’t feel good, that has the potential to make others and myself uncomfortable. But if I don’t embrace that side of myself and accept it as part of myself, I doom it to rot and fester until it destroys that bright side of me too.

Wholeness isn’t about cutting myself off from the shadow side of life. It’s about recognizing the purpose for that shadow side—the purpose for those emotions and experiences—and melding it together with the light side into a single whole. I have so much duality in me. I have light and darkness, reason and intuition, “femininity” and “masculinity”. Heck, my life card is the Sun and my Spirit card is Death. You can’t get much more dual than that. And the amazing thing is, each side, each facet, has a freaking purpose! They all work together to create me! And just as I’ve given up so many other things with fundamentalism, I’ve also given up the idea that there is anything inherently in me that is wrong.

Which means my emotions, by themselves, can’t be wrong.

None of them.

So what is it that makes these shadow emotions seem “bad”? Outside of a general inability to tolerate discomfort and do messy soul work, I think we’ve mistaken the emotions themselves for specific scripts surrounding them. It’s a kind of confirmation bias. When we think of anger, we think of when someone became violent in their anger. We don’t remember the times that anger was constructive or creative or protective. Once you get to the point where you associate the emotion itself with the negative behavior, then you get so busy fighting the emotion that there’s no chance to fight the script that you’ve adopted about it.

As part of my spiritual practice, I’m learning to become comfortable with my dark side. I’m throwing away the scripts I’ve been taught and searching for a new, transformative perspective about the shadow emotions. I’ve come to appreciate this time of year, when the Goddess traditionally takes a journey down into the underworld for a few months until spring, because it reminds me that I also need underworld journeys, as tough as they are. It’s not easy to sit with an emotion. It’s much easier to go back to my scripts. But sitting in discomfort is essential to my emotional transformation as much as it is to my spiritual transformation. The ability to sit with uncertainty and discomfort is, I think, one of the key aspects to true freedom.

And as I take this journey, I smile to myself because I recognize what I never could have from within Christiantiy—that Jesus, too, got angry, felt grief and despair, and considered bailing out from fear.